Ever
12-16-2011, 03:01 PM
First I would just like to thank the people dedicating their own time and resources to making such a server. Many people who wanted something like this from sony for years and years basically gave up on the idea, and I'm sure a lot of my friends from the past unfortunately don't even know about the p99 site or what you've done with this pvp server. I wish I hadn't lost touch with so many of the people I've known in eq over the years, but such is life. I also wish I could have rallied more of my friends behind this thing in the formative phases, so you would have had more feedback from the purist community. But I got here a little late it seems, but not too late to still enjoy myself some I'm sure.
No matter what you do recreating classic EQ, you cannot please everyone. I recognize that, and this isn't a flame or a rant. It's simply a comparative evaluation of this server in lieu of my own personal experience of Rallos Zek that begin in March of 1999.
As one of the few people on the server that probably actually played the game prolifically in 1999 on Rallos Zek, I just wanted to offer my feedback on the state of the server in comparison to my original experience of EQ.
I was Ever the dark elf wizard of Rallos Zek. I led one of the first pk/pvp guilds in EQ--Darkenbane--for a while, and I've experienced every major expansion across 3 Sony pvp servers over the course of the last decade under many avatars various SZ/Zek players would also recognize, so I am intimately familiar with the game in all its stages of progression.
I've noticed people have been using the phrase "it's not classic" to justify their own positions, while ignoring the fact that a lot of things about this server are not classic. And that is fine, because classic had a lot of problems of its own. Here's my feedback as a sort of an objective "outsider" of your tight-knit community.
Rallos Zek '99: Project '99:
spells did full damage in pvp spells do 80% damage
pets did full damage in pvp pets do 50% damage
faction mobs assisted players faction mobs don't assist players
charm and fear effected players charm and fear don't effect players
could loot item off a player coin loot only
pvp within 4 level limits pvp within 4-8 level limits
huge server population limited server population (outside control)
Those are some pretty vast differences between RZ '99 and P '99. Classic EQ had lots of problems so in some instances you don't even want it to be "classic." Charm and fear are good examples--you really don't want these spells working in pvp. My friend Kerrygetz on RZ used to charm people, in one case I remember for like two hours, just to torture them. It was pure chaos. The charm/fear nerfs were some of the first pvp nerfs in classic EQ coincidentally. This is the only aspect of "classic EQ" where this nerf probably "ought" to be included as part of classic EQ--it was recognized and fixed pretty early on.
At some point spell damage in EQ was nerfed to 66%, and spells were not allowed to do more than 40% total of a players life, but these things didn't come for a while. Having spells land for 100% damage is devasting in EQ pvp. 80% is still pretty raw, but it's somewhat understandable because it's closer to the true value of spell damage in '99 than live eq servers are today. 100% would be purist, but 80% is a "reasonable" compromise. :)
Pet damage being nerfed to 50% didn't come for a while either. I'm not sure who pushed for a 50% reduction in pet damage, but it's not classic, and it obviously favors casters without pets such as wizards and druids, who probably pushed hard for this nerf. The fact that pets are so easily CC'd in classic using root, fear, mez, and so forth, makes me think that there was a bias in the feedback of a vocal minority--ie non pet classes asking for nerfs regardless of whether that particular issue was "classic" or not.
Faction burns were huge in pvp. People used faction to their advantage in almost every zone where it was possible. I don't even need to elaborate upon any argument that this is nothing like classic obviously. I'm sure a lot of "purists" were driven away by this missing element. I heard a rumor it's going to be implemented eventually. I'll give an example from Sony's Discord test server, where if you died in pvp you were wiped back to level 1. I had a pvp trio there that was the top pvp trio during the first three days of the server, and around level 22 our druid died because he went back to Rivervale and forgot to click off his damage shield. A ton of little level 1 halflings ran up and hit him next to a guard and he died and was wiped back to level 1. Rather than redo all that work to rebuild our trio, we pretty much quit the server at that point, but that's how classic EQ was.
Item loot. Let's face it. Item loot is EQ in '99. What I think happened here is most modern eq players are used to modern gaming that pushes for itemization, class balance, raiding (and not losing those loots after raiding!). Run-of-the-mill mmos. It's why almost all mmos are basically rehashed copies of each other these days. Classic EQ was way different than most mmos for this one reason alone. This isn't classic EQ. My guess is most people here didn't play in '99, so they wanted a rule system adopted that emulated their servers that came later--TZ, VZ, SZ and Zek. That's fine, but it's not classic at all. Item loot made the game WAY more intimidating and scary for everyone. Nothing was sacred. Nothing was safe. Item loot made the world very risky, but it also created its own form of alliances and labeling. All in all, it was one of the most exciting elements of classic EQ that reminded players a lot of UO. Modern MMOs want players to emphasize PVE and their stupid shiny item loots, but classic EQ was purely about pvp on a pvp server. If you wanted to keep your items in classic, you had to ally yourself with the right people and play very cautiously and carefully. There's no real sense of loss in EQ anymore, including this server. Losing a trivial amount of coin and some exp is not a big deal because at the end of the day everyone will be 50 anyway and bank tons of coin and will never be in danger of losing all the stuff they farm. You think playing a melee is tough enough as it is atm? You haven't experienced pain until you had a spiteful wizard take your best weapon off your corpse because you didn't bag it fast enough! Oh the days where dying players put their gear into their bags as fast as they could! Good stuff. '99 classic eq didn't give a rip if you wanted to be a melee or whether it was "balanced." That's part of why it was so great. If you couldn't hack it as a melee you could quit the game or roll a toon that could or work better on your alliances and learn to play more intelligently and cautiously, but the game was unforgiving. Item loot is a whole different ballgame and a whole different BEAST--and it's pure classic--sadly everyone has been afraid to touch it ever since because most eq players nowdays are PVE players first that pve so they can pvp. Back then our pvp was how we PVEd most the time :p
I also see the bias of later generation eq pvp players in the level limits on pvp. Again, not a big deal, but not classic. The 4 level limit encouraged players to fight players within their own level/spell rank ranges. Every EQ player knows that having spell ranks over another player gives a vast retarded advantage to that player. 8 level pvp ranges around 50 just encourages the strong to pick on the weak as often as they can, ie grief. Fine by me, but not classic. This level range reflects the bias of the feedback being received, not the pure classic spirit of the game. Eventually the end game players will all fight each other anyway. This level range only favored the people that knew they were going to power game and level up fastest so they could pick on weaker players as they tried to catch up. Again, not surprising, but not classic.
There's other things to consider too. Obviously we cannot recreate EQ nostalgia of 99 because the server populations were huge. But even more importantly, people were ignorant of the game. We spent months just hanging around lower levels pvping and interacting with players. We didn't know you were "supposed" to get end game first or fastest. In fact, the hardcore pvp players who rushed to end game mostly quit the game from boredom and lack of interaction or rerolled to go back to playing with the majority of the player base.
This ignorance of the game also meant players weren't as eager or capable of exploiting things to help them exp faster or pvp better.
Unfortunately what most beta testers that aren't payed salaries do is go into games and learn the exploits to use them, rather than turn them over to developers to be fixed. I won't elaborate more on this point, because it seems to be a real sore subject with everyone around here. This type of behavior has only intensified since EQ first came out, because people are drawing on vast databases of experience and knowledge now.
Our increased knowledge of the game has other consequences in the long term though. 99% of the player base didn't know about recharging items and Ivandyr's Hoop and things of this nature back in '99, so these items weren't horribly imbalanced.
However, these items are horribly imbalanced in modern EQ today given players knowledge of these items. Sony nerfed recharging items because players were exploiting their use in pvp AND pve. Some well known players from Sullon Zek (the server I was playing on around the time the nerf finally came) owned 30+ prayers of life and used them constantly in pvp and pve (never left home without them). These players became virtually unkillable. Yes, I was one of these people. Mark my words: Prayers of Life are currently the most valuable item on this server as long as they can be recharged. A wizard with 2 prayers of life (need min. of 2 to recharge) has insta cast heal clicks. He will always beat another wizard assuming he's awake and at the keyboard. These things are objectively overpowered and imbalanced. Wizards shouldn't have 5+ insta casts of cleric quality group heals in classic eq.
Of course, the people that actually plan on raiding the dragons and looting these items don't want to see them get nerfed, because "it wouldn't be classic," but the fact is a lot of things aren't classic, as we just proved. What they really want is overpowered advantages and exploits that even Sony recognized had to be removed from the game in the long run. It won't take long before players run around with prayers, golem wands, and ivandyr's hoops and are terrorizing each other. Plane of Hate wands are also insta cast, and with a little help from friends they can be recharged too I believe (lore so would require another player to assist them in this).
I have no personal stake in having these issues implemented/removed personally, because I have barely even begun to play on this server yet, but as a person who is somewhat expert in classic '99 eq, I just wanted to point out some inconsistencies in various arguments I've read on these forums and offer some constructive feedback incase a future pvp server is ever made again that really tries to capture classic eq pvp while avoiding the problems of temporary and long-term bugs/exploits that players in beta will never help the devs solve due to human nature.
I commend the work of the team that put this server together. We haven't had anything like it for a long time. I'd like to see another server made someday that even more closely emulates the real classic Everquest of Rallos Zek, and that can learn from the launching of this server. In a way no beta ever really weeds out the bugs because most the players are trying to learn the bugs to use them, not to help the developers out unfortunately. Such players should be punished imo, but that's a subject best left for flames and rants.
I'm sure this stuff take a lot of time and resources, so I won't hold my breath. I will probably even play on this server in the meantime, but here's my wishlist for a classic 99' server that emulates classic as approximately as possible, and also recognizes that certain exploits of the classic EQ had to be nerfed for the sake of pvp balance and server integrity:
1) spell damage--80% is probably a fine compromise. purists would say 100%
2) pet damage--100% as it originally was.
3) faction mobs assist players
4) item loot in pvp
5) 4 level range limit on pvp
6) remove item recharging
7) no bugs/exploits that can be used on launch for players to level faster with (and if any beta tester finds such a bug and exploits it to level when the server goes live state ahead of time that they will have their characters wiped even if they only used it to gain one extra level or w/e. they signed up to help the devs correct imbalances, not exploit them)
All in all, you guys did a great job and got a lot of things right. Thx for making this server for everyone.
No matter what you do recreating classic EQ, you cannot please everyone. I recognize that, and this isn't a flame or a rant. It's simply a comparative evaluation of this server in lieu of my own personal experience of Rallos Zek that begin in March of 1999.
As one of the few people on the server that probably actually played the game prolifically in 1999 on Rallos Zek, I just wanted to offer my feedback on the state of the server in comparison to my original experience of EQ.
I was Ever the dark elf wizard of Rallos Zek. I led one of the first pk/pvp guilds in EQ--Darkenbane--for a while, and I've experienced every major expansion across 3 Sony pvp servers over the course of the last decade under many avatars various SZ/Zek players would also recognize, so I am intimately familiar with the game in all its stages of progression.
I've noticed people have been using the phrase "it's not classic" to justify their own positions, while ignoring the fact that a lot of things about this server are not classic. And that is fine, because classic had a lot of problems of its own. Here's my feedback as a sort of an objective "outsider" of your tight-knit community.
Rallos Zek '99: Project '99:
spells did full damage in pvp spells do 80% damage
pets did full damage in pvp pets do 50% damage
faction mobs assisted players faction mobs don't assist players
charm and fear effected players charm and fear don't effect players
could loot item off a player coin loot only
pvp within 4 level limits pvp within 4-8 level limits
huge server population limited server population (outside control)
Those are some pretty vast differences between RZ '99 and P '99. Classic EQ had lots of problems so in some instances you don't even want it to be "classic." Charm and fear are good examples--you really don't want these spells working in pvp. My friend Kerrygetz on RZ used to charm people, in one case I remember for like two hours, just to torture them. It was pure chaos. The charm/fear nerfs were some of the first pvp nerfs in classic EQ coincidentally. This is the only aspect of "classic EQ" where this nerf probably "ought" to be included as part of classic EQ--it was recognized and fixed pretty early on.
At some point spell damage in EQ was nerfed to 66%, and spells were not allowed to do more than 40% total of a players life, but these things didn't come for a while. Having spells land for 100% damage is devasting in EQ pvp. 80% is still pretty raw, but it's somewhat understandable because it's closer to the true value of spell damage in '99 than live eq servers are today. 100% would be purist, but 80% is a "reasonable" compromise. :)
Pet damage being nerfed to 50% didn't come for a while either. I'm not sure who pushed for a 50% reduction in pet damage, but it's not classic, and it obviously favors casters without pets such as wizards and druids, who probably pushed hard for this nerf. The fact that pets are so easily CC'd in classic using root, fear, mez, and so forth, makes me think that there was a bias in the feedback of a vocal minority--ie non pet classes asking for nerfs regardless of whether that particular issue was "classic" or not.
Faction burns were huge in pvp. People used faction to their advantage in almost every zone where it was possible. I don't even need to elaborate upon any argument that this is nothing like classic obviously. I'm sure a lot of "purists" were driven away by this missing element. I heard a rumor it's going to be implemented eventually. I'll give an example from Sony's Discord test server, where if you died in pvp you were wiped back to level 1. I had a pvp trio there that was the top pvp trio during the first three days of the server, and around level 22 our druid died because he went back to Rivervale and forgot to click off his damage shield. A ton of little level 1 halflings ran up and hit him next to a guard and he died and was wiped back to level 1. Rather than redo all that work to rebuild our trio, we pretty much quit the server at that point, but that's how classic EQ was.
Item loot. Let's face it. Item loot is EQ in '99. What I think happened here is most modern eq players are used to modern gaming that pushes for itemization, class balance, raiding (and not losing those loots after raiding!). Run-of-the-mill mmos. It's why almost all mmos are basically rehashed copies of each other these days. Classic EQ was way different than most mmos for this one reason alone. This isn't classic EQ. My guess is most people here didn't play in '99, so they wanted a rule system adopted that emulated their servers that came later--TZ, VZ, SZ and Zek. That's fine, but it's not classic at all. Item loot made the game WAY more intimidating and scary for everyone. Nothing was sacred. Nothing was safe. Item loot made the world very risky, but it also created its own form of alliances and labeling. All in all, it was one of the most exciting elements of classic EQ that reminded players a lot of UO. Modern MMOs want players to emphasize PVE and their stupid shiny item loots, but classic EQ was purely about pvp on a pvp server. If you wanted to keep your items in classic, you had to ally yourself with the right people and play very cautiously and carefully. There's no real sense of loss in EQ anymore, including this server. Losing a trivial amount of coin and some exp is not a big deal because at the end of the day everyone will be 50 anyway and bank tons of coin and will never be in danger of losing all the stuff they farm. You think playing a melee is tough enough as it is atm? You haven't experienced pain until you had a spiteful wizard take your best weapon off your corpse because you didn't bag it fast enough! Oh the days where dying players put their gear into their bags as fast as they could! Good stuff. '99 classic eq didn't give a rip if you wanted to be a melee or whether it was "balanced." That's part of why it was so great. If you couldn't hack it as a melee you could quit the game or roll a toon that could or work better on your alliances and learn to play more intelligently and cautiously, but the game was unforgiving. Item loot is a whole different ballgame and a whole different BEAST--and it's pure classic--sadly everyone has been afraid to touch it ever since because most eq players nowdays are PVE players first that pve so they can pvp. Back then our pvp was how we PVEd most the time :p
I also see the bias of later generation eq pvp players in the level limits on pvp. Again, not a big deal, but not classic. The 4 level limit encouraged players to fight players within their own level/spell rank ranges. Every EQ player knows that having spell ranks over another player gives a vast retarded advantage to that player. 8 level pvp ranges around 50 just encourages the strong to pick on the weak as often as they can, ie grief. Fine by me, but not classic. This level range reflects the bias of the feedback being received, not the pure classic spirit of the game. Eventually the end game players will all fight each other anyway. This level range only favored the people that knew they were going to power game and level up fastest so they could pick on weaker players as they tried to catch up. Again, not surprising, but not classic.
There's other things to consider too. Obviously we cannot recreate EQ nostalgia of 99 because the server populations were huge. But even more importantly, people were ignorant of the game. We spent months just hanging around lower levels pvping and interacting with players. We didn't know you were "supposed" to get end game first or fastest. In fact, the hardcore pvp players who rushed to end game mostly quit the game from boredom and lack of interaction or rerolled to go back to playing with the majority of the player base.
This ignorance of the game also meant players weren't as eager or capable of exploiting things to help them exp faster or pvp better.
Unfortunately what most beta testers that aren't payed salaries do is go into games and learn the exploits to use them, rather than turn them over to developers to be fixed. I won't elaborate more on this point, because it seems to be a real sore subject with everyone around here. This type of behavior has only intensified since EQ first came out, because people are drawing on vast databases of experience and knowledge now.
Our increased knowledge of the game has other consequences in the long term though. 99% of the player base didn't know about recharging items and Ivandyr's Hoop and things of this nature back in '99, so these items weren't horribly imbalanced.
However, these items are horribly imbalanced in modern EQ today given players knowledge of these items. Sony nerfed recharging items because players were exploiting their use in pvp AND pve. Some well known players from Sullon Zek (the server I was playing on around the time the nerf finally came) owned 30+ prayers of life and used them constantly in pvp and pve (never left home without them). These players became virtually unkillable. Yes, I was one of these people. Mark my words: Prayers of Life are currently the most valuable item on this server as long as they can be recharged. A wizard with 2 prayers of life (need min. of 2 to recharge) has insta cast heal clicks. He will always beat another wizard assuming he's awake and at the keyboard. These things are objectively overpowered and imbalanced. Wizards shouldn't have 5+ insta casts of cleric quality group heals in classic eq.
Of course, the people that actually plan on raiding the dragons and looting these items don't want to see them get nerfed, because "it wouldn't be classic," but the fact is a lot of things aren't classic, as we just proved. What they really want is overpowered advantages and exploits that even Sony recognized had to be removed from the game in the long run. It won't take long before players run around with prayers, golem wands, and ivandyr's hoops and are terrorizing each other. Plane of Hate wands are also insta cast, and with a little help from friends they can be recharged too I believe (lore so would require another player to assist them in this).
I have no personal stake in having these issues implemented/removed personally, because I have barely even begun to play on this server yet, but as a person who is somewhat expert in classic '99 eq, I just wanted to point out some inconsistencies in various arguments I've read on these forums and offer some constructive feedback incase a future pvp server is ever made again that really tries to capture classic eq pvp while avoiding the problems of temporary and long-term bugs/exploits that players in beta will never help the devs solve due to human nature.
I commend the work of the team that put this server together. We haven't had anything like it for a long time. I'd like to see another server made someday that even more closely emulates the real classic Everquest of Rallos Zek, and that can learn from the launching of this server. In a way no beta ever really weeds out the bugs because most the players are trying to learn the bugs to use them, not to help the developers out unfortunately. Such players should be punished imo, but that's a subject best left for flames and rants.
I'm sure this stuff take a lot of time and resources, so I won't hold my breath. I will probably even play on this server in the meantime, but here's my wishlist for a classic 99' server that emulates classic as approximately as possible, and also recognizes that certain exploits of the classic EQ had to be nerfed for the sake of pvp balance and server integrity:
1) spell damage--80% is probably a fine compromise. purists would say 100%
2) pet damage--100% as it originally was.
3) faction mobs assist players
4) item loot in pvp
5) 4 level range limit on pvp
6) remove item recharging
7) no bugs/exploits that can be used on launch for players to level faster with (and if any beta tester finds such a bug and exploits it to level when the server goes live state ahead of time that they will have their characters wiped even if they only used it to gain one extra level or w/e. they signed up to help the devs correct imbalances, not exploit them)
All in all, you guys did a great job and got a lot of things right. Thx for making this server for everyone.