Project 1999 - NEW THREAD

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Quote:

Originally Posted by wehrmacht (Post 252029)

EQ P1999 PVP SERVER

You have two options and I will explain the consequences of those choices:

1 - Make a no teams, FFA style PvP server.

2 - Make a two team, dark vs light based, diety based, or race war type server.

I played Sullon Zek since day one and TZVZ for a long time. I'm gonna lay it out exactly how this works. If you make this PvP server a FFA rule set this is what happens:

FFA, no teams PvP server:

Day 1 you will see 30-40 man guilds pop up. There will be Heresy, some random TZ or SZ guild, and a few random blue server guilds that show up with a zerg of people. You'll probably have four or five viable or semi-viable guilds roaming around. Each guild will monopolize some area like Guk, Karnors, whatever.

After a few weeks, one of the guilds implodes and you're down to three. Now there will be two guilds monopolizing spawns, loot, and beating the shit out of the most likely lower population third guild. The demoralized 3rd guild starts bleeding members, some just plain quit, others join the 2 dominant guilds. Then the 3rd guild completely vanishes except that one guy who just got out of prison and logged back into the game at level 3 with now defunct guild tag.

Now you're a few months into the server with a constant day to day brawl of the two dominant guilds fighting for dragons. This goes on a long time and during this entire process, server will constantly drop in population. New players that join the server during this period of time will mostly be standing around by themselves, occasionally get ganked by a level 50, have nobody to group with, and solo their way to 50 because everyone on a FFA server is your enemy.

The majority of these new people will just plain quit. An occasional few will make it to the top but the server will be losing way more people than it's gaining due to this kind of alienation of the new player.

Now the server population is like 100 people: 30 people in guild A, 30 people in guild B, and 30-40 random noobs wandering around. The leader of one of the guilds gets charged with some kind of bestiality sex crimes IRL (probably Heresy). The guild disbands, only one guild remains, server ends.

Next choice is teams based server:

Similar number of people start on day one. The 30 man guilds move into their positions to try and monopolize some area. A random evil guild stands around on shores of oasis killing alligators and starts leveling fast. A low level crapling comes into the zone, see's them, and zones out to go tell all the other craplings. All of a sudden a giant tidal wave of low level craplings starts to pour into the zone and the highest level troll on the server will have 8 halflings clinging to him like some scene from Lord of the Rings.

All of the craplings die and the entire beach is covered in corpses but the uber, evil guild is completely unable to do any leveling so their progress is held back the entire day. The low level craplings then respawn in Misty Thicket and form a guild with the name "Flowers of Happiness".

This goes on for months. One or two guilds will eventually die but each of the two teams will maintain at least one uber guild and one casual or noob guild. At this point, the FFA server would most likely be in it's death spiral but the teams server population would be better off due to lack of alienation of the new or casual player. It might even still be growing.

The uber guild will constantly use their teams noob guild as human shields in order to defend themselves from attack while raiding so there will always be something to do, someone to attack, someone to group with.

The overall effect is much slower progression, more PvP, higher population, and the server's main zerg guilds have much less power and effect on the server world overall due to having to fight much bigger battles against more opponents. When one team's uber guild leader goes to prison, there will most likely always be a secondary guild ready to step in and take over the team and the server avoids collapse.

This rule set would basically be Sullon Zek type setup except with two teams instead of three. Three teams always implodes due to one of the three always ending up much weaker so it's not a viable choice.

I believe in the team paradigm over the FFA hopelessness that nobody fucking wanted to begin with. And I am shocked that Wehrmacht of all people saw this clearly. Yet... the two-team model is much weaker than a three-team model.

With two teams, there will ALWAYS be a stronger team. Whoever has more and better players will always win and begin to grind down the others. In the three-team option, whenever one team starts to wax truly ascendant, the others will cease their bickering and join forces against the real threat.

Three teams also provides for more targets. Nobody on a PvP server wants to feel safe and superior at all times. When you join the dominant team on a 2-team server, you've got it made. When you join the dominant team on a 3-team server, you become a target. The progression slows down as the two weaker teams invest the leading team in grief and pvp every time. It is inherently the stabler model. It can also be made to be just as balanced as a 2-team server, if not quite as canon.

four teams on TZ was pretty interesting. the dark team was the mac daddy team for the most part, while human, elf and short teams kind of lingered behind yet allied as a 'light alliance' against the top team for the most part. plenty of people within the light alliance still fought one another, but they'd be more open to grouping with each other and helping each other out. it was funny when 'cross teaming' was a big deal (light teams grouping with a dark team member).

teams require population though, it wouldn't work here. too few of targets = just another blue server. ffa makes sense here.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Marglar (Post 594461)

teams require population though

If you build it, they will come.

It is more accurate to say that population requires teams.

I loved the old school TZ team dynamic (dark vs light), but I don't think this would do anything for the server in its current state. It would break up every guild on the server, for one. That alone is enough to cement that this is not going to happen.

It's also not all that different from the FFA setup. Just pretend that Nihilum is one team, and everyone else is on the other team. There's your two team setup, with the flexibility of FFA.

What the server needs is global channels, which has been said for months. This was evident to me tonight in my three hours of grinding highkeep, with only my guildmates to talk to (/ooc HAY GUYS). There is a point where there's too few people across too many zones and it's okay to flip that switch.

Race War would be pretty cool.

Evil vs Good might be too one dimensional though.. need at least 3 "factions"

Maybe do factions something like this

trolls, ogres, dark elves as one faction

humans and barbarians as a faction

half elves, erudites, wood elves, and high elves as a faction

and dwarves and gnomes as their own faction.

Could leave iksar as loners like the bastard children they are.

lol slave still talking about teams

Quote:

Originally Posted by Flunklesnarkin (Post 594493)

Iksar!

3 teams, sz style and deity based. good, neutral, evil. shouldnt be based on race alone rather race/class/diety. again sz style, training legal, no level range in pvp. u scured?
EDIT with yellow text of course, maybe a leaderboard but more importantly a zone control board that updates freq. seeing zones controlled by opposing faction makes you wanna go there and beat some ass. why fight over one dragon when you can fight over control of Norrath?

I will say the Sullon Zek diety based teams was the best, by far. But you just can't do that with a server pop of 150 max. Also would be pointless on a server that allows unlimmited accounts for free. Everyone will have their "evil acount" their "newt account" and their "good account". Sure you could do that on old server but not many did because you had to pay for each account.