I believe the biggest problem with servers in general, and I am guilty of this as well, are they are opened to quickly to the public and the devs change there original vision in order to please this current player base.
My advice for any up and coming server devs is to create a great foundation, go with your original vision and create enough content to keep players busy for at least 6 months before you even think of opening. Once you think you are ready invite a few people in for closed beta testing, once you get those kinks worked out, do an open beta test, track everyones account that participated then do a clean wipe of the characters table's and give out beta rewards upon your official launch.
As long as you are up front with all of this people will not get bent out of shape for losing a character, they just need to know going in that it is going to happen.
Far as the single player/group argument, well you can null that easily if you just take the time to learn more advanced perl/lua scripting. Allot can be done via scripting to keep things challenging for a solo player without inflating stats, hp, ac, min dmg, max dmg etc etc. If you want examples id be glad to share some of my work, just pm me here and ill give you my skype info.
You can also script in auto scaling and different sub events based on player count with perl/lua. It isn't that difficult, just take the time to actually learn and lean on these guy s around here like natedog or kinglykrab. You can learn how to do allot of unique encounters if you just take the time to learn.
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