i've always felt that the answer to placate progression players isn't a progression server rather it's a new game feature of some kind.
What I was always thinking of was a expansion tag on every single item in the game. So all items would have a tag on them when you look at the item description that would say what expansion it was in. Second would be a new character called a progression character. During character creation you would be allowed to create this character by toggling it on or off. If you toggle it on then your character starts in their homecity. If you toggle it off, then everything is back to normal.
Progression Characters:
* Any race can visit any zone that has a creation date preceding the expansion it's a part of. So Iksar can visit pre-kunark. Vah Shir can visit pre-luclin. Frogloks can visit pre-LLOY.
* Races cannot visit future expansions until they have completed objectives for each concurrent expansion. So humans will have to complete objectives in pre-kunark before entering the kunark expansion. Similarly, Vah Shir cannot visit POP zones until they complete luclin objectives.
* If you want to shut off the progression feature after creating a progression character then you cannot turn it on again. It's like the pvp feature in that it's a permanent feature of your character.
* A character cannot wear an item that's in an expansion that has not already been completed or does not precede the actual expansion the race is a part of.
* All changes to zones would remain the same so there would be no effort to mirror 1999. If you start a multi-expansion quest you will be allowed to but you cannot complete it unless you have access to the zones themselves that're required to complete stages of the quest.
* Whatever else i've missed
I haven't thought much about the details of this idea. But history has taught me that most problems, aside from the big theories in science like special relativity, can be overcome. I'm confident.
Granted, it would take a lot of work, but you could do it on any server. I think it would be a very popular feature for guilds that organize on websites or in the forums. You could even twink your progression character by using your main to kill the gods in the old content and then give what you get to your twink so that the twink can more easily complete the expansion. It's not a perfect solution, but the one thing it doesn't do is segregate progression players from the rest of the population. This allows for servers to retain more of their populations without players going to a separate progression server. And it doesn't require more hardware!!!!
An easier idea is just to attach progression rewards to players that complete tasks for each expansion. This would be a lot easier to do. The rewards could be as simple as new titles (like loremaster or the wisened or the learned or something) or colors for their name or a new field that shows up when you look at another character that says what they've accomplished in the form of progression. I'd prefer a reward that wasn't an item or a direct hp/damage/etc benefit because then it wouldn't be about progression anymore.
Keep in mind i played earlier this year on live in jan/feb 2010, so I'm not being a blow-hard.
I think any new MMORPG needs to implement a progression feature to plan ahead for these types of players.
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