VZTZ is dead

Not to mentions it is infested with hackers, dupers, exploiters, etc.

I understand you are frustrated bros (your corrupt staff like voidd who supplies friend switch epic pieces and rules on their side continuously), but theres nothing anybody can do about it.

Enjoy fond memories of 2008.

This video was posted just a few hours ago on vztz forums.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD8XwYgIjPU

For those of you who don't know, he is using a Macroquest function that ignores the snare function client side and he is also speed hacking.

Typical vztz

The integrity of that server was gone a long time ago, before 2010. The presumptions made are not realistic about where the server would go.

Necro's were probably the least played on VZTZ. Actually, they were probably one of the least played on live. I do mean RZ rule set/ 8 level range. 4 +/- wasn't a big enough range. The server would be a lot different run by level headed people.

The MQ thing is an issue but could that not be addressed?

Biggest thing with MQ is having GMs that watch... But even then sometimes it is hard to prove...It was fairly obvious who hacked once you had been on the server awile. Some were better at playing it off than others.... the snare could be like a 300 weight item on all characters on all their accounts.. and change their surname to My Guild Tries to Hack...

The worst thing possible is for players to think it is needed to compete... that is really how most players seem to justify it.

Maybe if someone displays a pattern of things that would indicate MQ or such.. Dock 10 Levels and publicly announce it? In my opinion one mistake on VZTZ is peer pressure was not generally applied when punishing hacking.. Public announcements, docking exp or maybe a 7 day snare buff on the rest of the members of offending guild? Because really... I am sure someone would suspect something is up.. Just thinking here..

Bump, don't let the dream die!

It's not entirely far-fetched to think it could happen. All you'd need is a poll of how many would feel inclined to donate for a new server to open/ sustain in electricity costs. I guarantee the funding could be found without great pains. The one concern would be having a crowd police it from dummies who feel it's just a playground and meant to be fucked with (MQ). It'd just be difficult to find people who aren't the developers here. There's no way they'd (Dev's) police it, it would go against everything this whole project stands for and I would think most people, including myself, would be against that idea anyway.

The best way to get that kind of thing ironed out is to have like a pool of 20 different GM's who would log on whenever they had spare time, so that generally there would always be a representative online guarding the best interest of the server. That is the difficult part.

EQemu pvp is terrible and several things need to be addressed before ANY pvp server has a chance of being level.

1. Resists need tweaked 100 MR should make you near immune to stuns and roots but since the resists aren't accurate you'll need to have at least 250+ to have the same effect. Which means only the people spending hours upon hours cultivating MR gear have a shot in hell at resisting a caster.

2. Certain spells need to be tweaked such as snare, whirl til you hurl, and clinging darkness as the duration for any of these buffs even on low resist characters either lasts for .2 seconds or completely immobilizes the target permanently which is a rather OP situation depending on the antagonist.

3. Melee mitigation needs to be addressed, as pushback does not work as intended, and damage is severely nerfed. Wizard can literally stand in front of you and cast ice comet with the smallest chance of actually being interrupted and given the current resist situation in my first point you'll be perma rooted and nuked for over 1k every 6 seconds.

4. Terrain and warping issues need to be resolved as there are several points of play that allow characters to completely avoid damage outside normal circumstance. What comes to mind is intentionally spamming spells to cause packet loss (I.E chanters alliance stick, or druid's AOE) which breaks your connection GG instant pwn.

If none of these issues are fixed fully and or at least tightened up pvp on these emulated servers will only be 20% up to par with what live was back in classic period, and 20% is being generous.

It was never the poor melee characters that you had to worry about ganking, of course. It was that poor melee character's pissed off guild and alliances that made sure you never had a moment's peace ever again. THAT was the beauty of EQ PVP.

Get a clue.

I found going through pvp code, that the client was trying to limit snares to be 24 seconds max. I adjusted the server code to replicate this. So snares are shorter duration in PVP now, or should be.

One of the big advantages to macroquest, is figuring out where other players are. It is easy to make it so you cant see another player coming at you. But since you can see mobs moving, disappearing, corpses spawning when they kill something. You can see exactly where someone is located.

Until something was put together to scramble mob and player locations outside a certain range, PVP would never be fair. I have some code i was working on that did this, but never finished it. It was looking very promising, with little additional cpu overhead. But I spend most of my time working on mechanics of the game, or trying to add missing features, or worst of all fixing and detecting hacks.

I want to get back to this kind of fun, to make it so that if someone did want to go PVP, it would be somewhat fair. There just need to be a lot of changes and testing.

Haynar

I finally found where the pushback is handled for clients. I have not decrypted how to set the packet yet. But I am getting close. I am not very fast at working with decompilers, but that is where I am at now. Looking through assembly language, tracing how that one part of the packet is handled.

Its only a 32 byte word. How hard could that be to figure out?

Hah. Hard. Let me tell ya. For someone like me who is not a super fast coder.

haynar