Three teams. Teams are pretty important, otherwise the server is just automatically won from the start by whoever makes the most tryhard guild. We've seen time and time again that P99 servers are always dominated by one guild, and that's even more the case on a PvP server where the incentive is much greater to dominate the server. Without teams, players who are not in the #1 guild just get shit on too hard and end up quitting. With teams, everyone has something to fall back on, and the two lesser teams can form temporary alliances to keep the stronger team in check. There should be no grouping or beneficial casting between teams, the only interaction would be communication and trade.
Every team should have access to every class. There's no real good way to determine teams based on deity or race since this gives an automatic advantage to whatever team has the best options available to it. Proposed system: everyone starts with a blue book, a yellow book and a green book. At level 8 or something, turn one of these in to a PoD to be permanently assigned to one of these three teams or be FFA (red) if you don't. If you try to join the team with the most players, you have to also hand in 1000p with the book in order to join it. This encourages equal teams while still allowing players to join their friends even if those are on the biggest team. Name color will indicate a player's team.
Cash loot only. Some people love to insist that itemloot is important, but it's so brutally punitive to new/casual/loner players and massively encourages griefing while discouraging fair fights to the point where most players will actively avoid any encounter that isn't a cheap gank. It's also harsh on melee classes from two different angles: they're generally weak in PvP until endgame geared and can't easily get away from opponents, and they're the most gear-dependent by far. Casters can function pretty well naked and can just gate or remove their important items, and aren't hurt much if they do lose some gear. Itemloot is one of those tryhard "I'm such a badass, I need people to see that I'm in favor of itemloot so they know how tough I am" things, but the reality is that it will guarantee a tiny playerbase where people resort exclusively to gank squads picking off helpless loners, avoid any fight they could lose, and play mostly naked casters. It's not viable. Item loot ensures that the playerbase will be one fifth the size that it would without it.
The only way I would touch an item loot server with a ten-foot pole is if there was a custom option to permanently turn an item no drop, allowing you to keep it but ensuring that you could never sell it and give it to an alt. But I would just rather not have item loot in the first place. It may have been interesting two decades ago on RZ where nobody knew dick about EQ and players hadn't min-maxed the gameplay to perfection, but it would be a clusterfuck today. Those cool politics and high-stakes fights won't be returning in 202X. You'll just get a server where nobody is willing to fight if there's any chance they might lose. Horse enthusiasts might pine for a time before cars, but that doesn't mean you could succesfully run for office on a policy of banning all forms of motorized transportation. For the same reason, flexlords might like the idea of an itemloot server where they get to dunk extra hard on those level 46 casuals, but that doesn't mean such a server would be popular. I especially laughed at the idea of "RZ + FV rules." That guy must have fantasies of a server with 50 players, 35 of which are naked magicians. There's a reason Everquest tried itemloot once and never again.
Classic resist system. What red99 had was trash, at least the first iteration (don't know if it was ever changed). PvP becomes garbage if you can land root/snare on geared players. Melee can't even really participate in PvP under the system that red99 launched with, where spells seemed to have like a 25% baseline minimum chance to land regardless of resists and fire/cold resist did practically nothing. If you have ~150 in a resist (or 250 for a -100 check spell, etc.) it should be exceedingly rare that a spell of that resistance type lands fully. While this does kind of screw one or two classes over, the alternative is worse as it makes PvP into a wildly polarized affair. Most caster classes have spells with negative resist checks and/or strong poison spells for which most players don't have high resists. It's really mostly magicians that get shafted, and they still do have their pets and you can try to get off a Mala and land some half-damage nukes. If you team up with an enchanter, that plus tash is like -75 MR.
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