| Weekapaug |
09-06-2013 07:59 AM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vexenu
(Post 1102848)
I played on SZ as Spinfusor, Iksar Monk of <Da Bashin' Iggles>, and anyone who played on SZ during the classic era would most likely remember that name. I was the only Monk ranked on the PvP leaderboards for quite awhile and got most of those kills solo and in my 40s, without the help of an epic, Fungi or a T-staff. I say that not to brag (truly that would be a rather pathetic thing to brag about all these years later) but to simply establish that I have a pretty strong understanding of EQ PvP. I would prefer my ideas stand on their own merit rather than attempt to impress people with my EQ PvP e-credentials from over a decade ago, but since you doubt my bona fides, there you go.
And yes, as much as I enjoyed SZ I must admit the ruleset was deeply flawed. The server suffered due to the lack of team balance. The entire Good team was basically a running joke to the rest of the server, and Neutrals faced significant disadvantages to the power of the Evil team. As much fun as SZ was, it could have been better, and my hope is that any new server that attempted to resurrect SZ would make the small adjustments needed to improve SZ's rules.
And really, I'm not claiming my suggested ruleset is perfect. But I've certainly put a lot of thought into it. I didn't just pull it out of my ass one day. I didn't just decided to propose putting in an FV hammer because I thought it sounded cool, and that goes for the other changes I proposed as well. They are all there for one, simple reason: to attempt to create a more balanced distribution among the teams, measuring both by total team population and among the subset of hardcore, endgame focused players.
There is only one chance to launch a new PvP Teams server, so the devs have to get it right. Red 99 suffered an awful launch made worse by organized griefing, and the server never recovered. We're in a different environment now than we were when SZ was launched on live. Using the same formula from back in the day would produce different results today due to much greater player knowledge, free accounts, etc... In order to produce even something as good as classic SZ, you would therefore need some small degree of modifications. The vanilla ruleset would simply have its weaknesses exploited by griefers and powergamers, and the server would fail hard. I don't want to see that happen, because with a few simple tweaks, the SZ ruleset could be revived to produce an awesome server all these years later.
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Fair enough. I disagree about griefing, though...There's really nothing that can be done about it. If people want to grief, they will always find a way, and the more little tweaks you put in, the more they get abused by those people. History has shown this over and over. I direct you to the antics of Fansy the bard, for example. Besides being really funny at the time, that's the shining example of how the best way to offset griefing is to make everything as open as possible and let the players work it out....They changed the ruleset to allow PKing under 6 if they were outside of a newbie zone because Fansy demonstrated that even that one simple rule, intended to avoid griefing, can get abused. And they offset it with making pvp more open, not less. Training helps a lot as does no level limits on pvp. That's something SZ got spot on. In fact, I can't really imagine EQ pvp without training being allowed, personally. War is about using the environment to your advantage and, a lot of times, it's unavoidable anyway. But I digress...I wouldn't sweat the griefers as much as when this thing is released....As excited as people are about this server, myself included, if it comes before velious, it's going to lose pops once velious comes out because people will go back to blue for that. There's really no getting around that.
And you make a lot of assumptions about griefers and powergamers being one and the same. The whole point of teams is so the powergamers on your own team offset the griefers of the other team. Trying to clamp everything down with artificial level limits does very little to counter that and just means that the single griefer who wants to gank lowbies just has to bring another one with him to accomplish the same thing. It's EQ...There is very little in this game that can't be overcome by just bringing more people. All you do is potentially bore people who have the time or just want to level fast (and on these servers there are LOTS of those) so that they leave and find something else to do. Or just don't bother. While the griefers still grief. Again, for every well intended "fix" you put in, there is at least another unintended consequece that makes the whole thing even lamer and usually the fix does nothing to fix anything, just makes it worse. Not to mention, takes it even further away from real EQ, thus turning away a whole lot of people who might otherwise be into playing.
I was pondering this a bit more last night and it occurred to me that a lot of these problems go away if you just make it a straightup light vs dark 2 team ruleset. I prefer 3 teams, myself, as I'm sure most do, but if there was any problem with SZ that was, arguably, it. Evil will most likely be the most populated team, so not watering down the two opposing teams, which are basicly the same anyway, could go a long way to offsetting that. The only people that really effects are those who actually enjoy the challenge of playing the underdog goods.
Not my personal preference but, yeah, that's one simple, open, basic ruleset deviation from SZ that might go a long way towards offsetting the evil advantages. Maybe throw evil FFA in there as well. And you don't bastardize the entire game into something unrecognizable from real EQ in the process. |
