Teams - whats better?

[Smedy]

I realize that wipe is just the committee going haywire over the boards, but if there was one, i'd be fine with it.

I don't think they would add teams now without changing the state of the server, that would just be weird.

[liveitup1216]

Originally Posted by SamwiseRed [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The 'Teams':

The Good Alliance consists of: Erollisi Marr, Mithaniel Marr, Rodcet Nife, Quellious, Tunare
The Evil Alliance consists of: Bertoxxulous, Cazic Thule, Innoruuk, Rallos Zek
The Neutral Alliance consists of: Brell Serilis, Bristlebane, Karana, Prexus, Solusek Ro, The Tribunal, Veeshan.

no agnostics. where do i donate again?

[Lime]

Having played on both Rallos, and Sullon Zek servers, here are some thoughts about Sullon type rulesets.

Obviously the evil race has a huge advantage and would have to be toned down alot, As they have the best races, and best starting zones. Dark elf casters started very close to the ogre/troll cities, making it quite easy for them to group up and take the premier leveling zones with balanced groups. While a high elf cleric has to run to halas to group with his min/maxed warrior. Evils got the min maxed races for tanks, healers, and pure casters right away. Hide is very strong on a new server. And a undergeared troll/ogre warrior/shadowknight vs an undergeared human is a large difference.

Not only are these races min/max races but they also share some of the best starting zones. What really tipped evil besides numbers is that evils also had iksars, which means they started off owning kunark. So while everyone else is fighting each other to get out of the newbie yard to get a chance at getting above level 10, iksars have kunark to themselves, and are most likely higher level than anyone that makes the journey over to kunark to contest them. This is a "HUGE" advantage, as iksar necros/shamans/monks were hitting the 20's very fast and levels are everything on a new server.

When you look at the good/neutral options they are sharing alot of zones with kos people. Barbarians, Erudites, Wood elves, etc.... shared a city with all factions, and gnomes shared with 2. These zones are obviously going to be bloodbaths of people fighting each other while evils are free farming. This gives people incentive to go evil so they can level up without getting griefed, have a higher chance of being in a successfull guild at end game due to a large player base, and teaming up is easier as they own the swamp/sro/southkarana/oasis/kunark pipeline which supports many more people leveling than the good/neutral zones. This is important as I remember finding mobs to kill was near impossible during release week.

The icing on the cake for evil is that once their toons get 50+ they can all get Overthere hammers very easily giving them more mobility and a base zone that the other factions will not be privy too. They will be reliant on having a porter with them. This is very important for melees.

So what we have learned from previous servers is that you cannot split good and neutral teams up. You need to combine these forces to even start to make it even against all the advantages evil has.


Downsides and why the team ruleset has major problems.

Now the downside to team servers is obviously that while dealing with your own faction it is much like a blue server. There is no way to settle a dispute with your own team. Someone on your faction take your camp, talk shit, or train you? Tough luck. Or while your guild is fighting tooth and nail another guild may be farming a zone away and not want to help you. Or while your raid guild is raiding, the enemy starts griefing your lowbies while you are pixel lusting, making a large portion of your team dislike its own faction. If you are leveling up and the top guilds never help you out, you are not going to want to help them out. Enter Crossteaming.

As much as people talk bad about cross teaming, if your only option is to join a Nihilum type guild, then you are going to cross team. There is no way to stop cross teaming due to the nature of everquest raid content. Not able to heal the enemy faction? Thats fine my 8 dps and 4 healers that I bring to the raid from the opposite faction are capable of keeping themselves alive inside your raid. With the added benefit of us being able to kill anyone on your faction that comes to mess with your raid. Obvious downside is if your own faction comes to contest your guild, the 12 players wont be able to fight a full raid of same team players.

Now comes the griefers. I decide to bring a good 3-6 dps group to your raid and follow you around and kill steal your guild. Since raid reward damage is dispersed by group damage this means 1 very good group is able to killsteal 30+ people. Or maybe I just bring a spy to get raid timers. Which you can do nothing about. Or maybe I bring my enchanter and chain strip your charmed pets, and boss mobs, break mezzes, highsun your mobs etc. There is nothing you can do about it except cry to gm's, or cross team yourself and bring your own toons to kill me. This means guilds will have to have some cross teamers to defend against people that come to raids to engage in this kind of behavior. So your 30 evil 5 good raid will have to defend against my 5 evil toons that I bring to mess with your raid. People start leveling another toon on the opposite faction as soon as they get max level. You bring your 6 evil toons to mess up my good group in sebilis? Thats cool we just logged out onto our evil toons and keep farming the same camp.

So now that the ruleset has broken down, you have two options from a staff point of view.

A) A sullon zek type anything goes ruleset. People will be hacking, training, griefing, and competing for the biggest cockbag award. Fansy the famous bard griefs oasis till players commit Sepaku and stop logging in. People cry on forums about 1-2 people wiping entire guilds with trains and pvp immune cross teamers that are breaking mezzes, training, and stripping debuffs, mem blurring, kill stealing, and being cockbags. The hardcore players grief the server until the playerbase hits 70 players and people lose interest.

B) Gm's involved in everything, obviously Gm's have to make calls on things that happens everyday and enforce the rules. Taking action against people's accounts on the daily leads to widespread GM corruption complaints. (For example, Hardcore raid guild rolls up with 12 people and rolls a group of 6 in a dungeon. Hardcore raid guild camps them till they start training/xteaming. Guild of 6 gets reprimanded for rule breaking. The side thats already winning now has even more advantage over the other side.) This leads to onesided server ala current red server.

WoW got around all these problems by instancing all raid content. Obviously thats not an option here. Just imagine trying to do a wow raid with people from your own faction running around trying to fuck it up. It would be a miserable experience for anyone involved except the griefers.

In closing I think a team server would be fun for a small amount of time while the playerbase has its new server critical mass of players ,assuming you can balance the different teams. Eventually it is going to degenerate into a cross team clusterfuck that will be impossible to police, and will turn veteran players off to the ruleset.

[Jepaxis]

Originally Posted by Lime [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Having played on both Rallos, and Sullon Zek servers, here are some thoughts about Sullon type rulesets.

Obviously the evil race has a huge advantage and would have to be toned down alot, As they have the best races, and best starting zones. Dark elf casters started very close to the ogre/troll cities, making it quite easy for them to group up and take the premier leveling zones with balanced groups. While a high elf cleric has to run to halas to group with his min/maxed warrior. Evils got the min maxed races for tanks, healers, and pure casters right away. Hide is very strong on a new server. And a undergeared troll/ogre warrior/shadowknight vs an undergeared human is a large difference.
...

Good reasoned post. Still means my method of handling teams from page 3 is the only workable method.

Originally Posted by Jepaxis on page 3 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

...
Maybe if you did something like assign players/classes to a team at say 50 and have the server balance out the classes amongst the teams, then things would stay fairly even.

It would be easy to do and keep the server more interesting and balanced. You could even modify the assignment based off which team is dominating in PvP and give the other team(s) a boost by giving them more people on their team to help offset the domination. If the tables turn, the boost goes away or shifts automatically.

Also, your team is your guild, so we don't have people stuck solo and/or in tiny guilds unable to do shit or reason to help their team.
...

[gotrocks]

While I do like sam's idea a lot,

Originally Posted by SamewiseRed

The 'Teams':

The Good Alliance consists of: Erollisi Marr, Mithaniel Marr, Rodcet Nife, Quellious, Tunare
The Evil Alliance consists of: Bertoxxulous, Cazic Thule, Innoruuk, Rallos Zek
The Neutral Alliance consists of: Brell Serilis, Bristlebane, Karana, Prexus, Solusek Ro, The Tribunal, Veeshan.

no agnostics.

and I do mean I like it a LOT, I think ultimately the server needs to be 0 teams, mostly for the reasons already listed. Things are going to get imbalanced... or other horrific shenanigans like immortal healers. In fact, that all by itself is a bigger problem than the imbalance, since the way sam has the teams laid out should keep things ultimately fairly balanced.

Personally, I'm kind of split, and will put half a vote towards each:

1/2 vote for hard coded teams listed above, with prevention measures put in place for OOR pvp assistance.

1/2 vote for no teams at all like it is now, but include item loot. also, keep level range at +/- 4 levels all the way to 50, then raise it to +/- 8

[Rahkim]

I'd vote 3 teams, Sullon Zek style, minus the legal trains.

The evil team DID have a big advantage early on, due to their population and the location of their cities relative to some important early dungeons (Guk, everything in Lavastorm, etc).

The other teams will be able to eventually put up a fight though, as anyone who played in Black Crown, Black Prophecy, or Tides of Wrath on the original server could tell you. Plenty of my coins (item looted when you killed someone, which could be turned in for a summon corpse potion) came from the top evil team guild. The 1-shot AA abilities given to SKs, necros, and wizards (which were more common on the evil team, as their only porters) and train-locking access to the elemental planes is the only thing that limited the viability of the newt/good guilds on live. The good team actually had the most guilds in post-AoW content when i quit.

There would be a decent amount of raid targets of varying difficulty, able to support multiple mid-high end guilds. Without AAs, and content being eventually locked at Velious, this could develop into a great, competitive server, even with an easier start for the evil team.

[Champion_Standing]

3 teams. Good, Evil and Monks.

[Danien]

Having played on Sullon Zek servers, here are my thoughts about you talking out of your ass;

Originally Posted by Lime [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Having played on both Rallos, and Sullon Zek servers, here are some thoughts about Sullon type rulesets.

Obviously the evil race has a huge advantage and would have to be toned down alot, As they have the best races, and best starting zones. Dark elf casters started very close to the ogre/troll cities, making it quite easy for them to group up and take the premier leveling zones with balanced groups. While a high elf cleric has to run to halas to group with his min/maxed warrior. Evils got the min maxed races for tanks, healers, and pure casters right away. Hide is very strong on a new server. And a undergeared troll/ogre warrior/shadowknight vs an undergeared human is a large difference.

Not only are these races min/max races but they also share some of the best starting zones. What really tipped evil besides numbers is that evils also had iksars, which means they started off owning kunark. So while everyone else is fighting each other to get out of the newbie yard to get a chance at getting above level 10, iksars have kunark to themselves, and are most likely higher level than anyone that makes the journey over to kunark to contest them. This is a "HUGE" advantage, as iksar necros/shamans/monks were hitting the 20's very fast and levels are everything on a new server.

Servers are not gonna be decided by the first 48 hours. Even if they were, the exp penalties for ogre/troll/iksar are not worth the trade off when it comes to leveling early on. It's for min/maxing at a higher level, the benefits early on are negligible. Besides, I'll argue that the kunark zones are not really better for leveling at all (especially early on).

Originally Posted by Lime

When you look at the good/neutral options they are sharing alot of zones with kos people. Barbarians, Erudites, Wood elves, etc.... shared a city with all factions, and gnomes shared with 2. These zones are obviously going to be bloodbaths of people fighting each other while evils are free farming. This gives people incentive to go evil so they can level up without getting griefed, have a higher chance of being in a successfull guild at end game due to a large player base, and teaming up is easier as they own the swamp/sro/southkarana/oasis/kunark pipeline which supports many more people leveling than the good/neutral zones. This is important as I remember finding mobs to kill was near impossible during release week.

The people who aimed to get ahead did so with the method of severe neckbearding. Once ahead there was little to no pvp, though some factions did inevitably claim different zones to themselves. This lead to little confrontation between random people leveling up and neckbeards. Once the neckbeards on the respective teams had identified their competition battles occurred for zone-control.

Originally Posted by Lime

The icing on the cake for evil is that once their toons get 50+ they can all get Overthere hammers very easily giving them more mobility and a base zone that the other factions will not be privy too. They will be reliant on having a porter with them. This is very important for melees.

OT-Hammer is nice, no doubt. It's main use is for getting out in spots where it's tough to get out though, such as Planes/Deep Seb/HS. I'll concede this point, it's absolutely an advantage. Nothing says we have to make teams evil/neutral/good though, and even if we do hammers will not be unattainable for other teams.

Originally Posted by Lime

So what we have learned from previous servers is that you cannot split good and neutral teams up. You need to combine these forces to even start to make it even against all the advantages evil has.

SK's and necros were much stronger on live then they are here. I will however concede the point that it attracts the min/max crow, which generally will determine which team comes up on top. Teams can be adjusted to avoid this though.

Originally Posted by Lime

Downsides and why the team ruleset has major problems.

Now the downside to team servers is obviously that while dealing with your own faction it is much like a blue server. There is no way to settle a dispute with your own team. Someone on your faction take your camp, talk shit, or train you? Tough luck. Or while your guild is fighting tooth and nail another guild may be farming a zone away and not want to help you. Or while your raid guild is raiding, the enemy starts griefing your lowbies while you are pixel lusting, making a large portion of your team dislike its own faction. If you are leveling up and the top guilds never help you out, you are not going to want to help them out. Enter Crossteaming.

Enter a secondary guild on the team. Is it possible that they help another team? Sure, it is. But the benefits from having "safe zones" for your team cannot be underestimated for a large portion of players. Whether you want to accept it or not, the vast majority of people on pvp-servers did not roam through zones endlessly to fight other people, but rather enjoyed pve coupled with the occasional fight. To attract these people would be in the interest of both play-styles.

There's going to be animosity within the teams, much like there is animosity between people on blue. That does not equal failure though.

Originally Posted by Lime

As much as people talk bad about cross teaming, if your only option is to join a Nihilum type guild, then you are going to cross team. There is no way to stop cross teaming due to the nature of everquest raid content. Not able to heal the enemy faction? Thats fine my 8 dps and 4 healers that I bring to the raid from the opposite faction are capable of keeping themselves alive inside your raid. With the added benefit of us being able to kill anyone on your faction that comes to mess with your raid. Obvious downside is if your own faction comes to contest your guild, the 12 players wont be able to fight a full raid of same team players.

It may happen. With hardcoded teams it wasn't a huge problem on Sullon (Though I remember it did happen to an extent during Planes of Power), but it was still better then the option of these people simply joining those guilds. It's simply better to have allies on your own team rather then another, for obvious reasons.

Originally Posted by Lime

Now comes the griefers. I decide to bring a good 3-6 dps group to your raid and follow you around and kill steal your guild. Since raid reward damage is dispersed by group damage this means 1 very good group is able to killsteal 30+ people. Or maybe I just bring a spy to get raid timers. Which you can do nothing about. Or maybe I bring my enchanter and chain strip your charmed pets, and boss mobs, break mezzes, highsun your mobs etc. There is nothing you can do about it except cry to gm's, or cross team yourself and bring your own toons to kill me. This means guilds will have to have some cross teamers to defend against people that come to raids to engage in this kind of behavior. So your 30 evil 5 good raid will have to defend against my 5 evil toons that I bring to mess with your raid. People start leveling another toon on the opposite faction as soon as they get max level. You bring your 6 evil toons to mess up my good group in sebilis? Thats cool we just logged out onto our evil toons and keep farming the same camp.

Policing by GMs coupled with the harsh lvling process by GMs should stop the majority of these problems right in its tracks, much like with training now. Not saying training never happens here, I'm just saying it's not a gigantic problem because people know that even if they only get caught one out of ten times its going to hurt them a lot.

Originally Posted by Lime

So now that the ruleset has broken down, you have two options from a staff point of view.

A) A sullon zek type anything goes ruleset. People will be hacking, training, griefing, and competing for the biggest cockbag award. Fansy the famous bard griefs oasis till players commit Sepaku and stop logging in. People cry on forums about 1-2 people wiping entire guilds with trains and pvp immune cross teamers that are breaking mezzes, training, and stripping debuffs, mem blurring, kill stealing, and being cockbags. The hardcore players grief the server until the playerbase hits 70 players and people lose interest.

B) Gm's involved in everything, obviously Gm's have to make calls on things that happens everyday and enforce the rules. Taking action against people's accounts on the daily leads to widespread GM corruption complaints. (For example, Hardcore raid guild rolls up with 12 people and rolls a group of 6 in a dungeon. Hardcore raid guild camps them till they start training/xteaming. Guild of 6 gets reprimanded for rule breaking. The side thats already winning now has even more advantage over the other side.) This leads to onesided server ala current red server.

WoW got around all these problems by instancing all raid content. Obviously thats not an option here. Just imagine trying to do a wow raid with people from your own faction running around trying to fuck it up. It would be a miserable experience for anyone involved except the griefers.

In closing I think a team server would be fun for a small amount of time while the playerbase has its new server critical mass of players ,assuming you can balance the different teams. Eventually it is going to degenerate into a cross team clusterfuck that will be impossible to police, and will turn veteran players off to the ruleset.

In closing I'll be the first to admit that team-servers require more GM oversight, but it's worth the gains.

[Technique]

Originally Posted by liveitup1216 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

At least [the most vocal of the non-factors, have-nots, and otherwise clueless forum warriors] can almost unanimously agree that red wants a wipe.

FTFY

[big league chew]

0 teams cause im not a crybaby