Green 2.0 advice

[AenorVZ]

Just read this entire thread hoping that there were 15 pages of additions to Videri's excellent breakdown. Instead it's 15 pages of suggestions for how to make a more custom/less classic server that would be better placed on TAKP's forums.

Here's my addition. I took about a month break approximately one month after release because there were no mage pets past either level 24 or 29 (I forget) in game. These pet spells were not available on a vendor and the ability to research these spells was not implemented until about two months into the server's life.

This implementation was a result of a pre-release thread by Dolly that I wish I could find. Dolly was able to demonstrate through documentation that the implementation of mage pets that was adopted for Green followed the actual timeline of 1999 vanilla release. As such, I supported these changes even though it negatively impacted me on a server where I decided pre-release to play a mage as a main for the first time.

Some additional thoughts. Everquest is the greatest game ever made, but it failed to reach its full commercial potential because of short-sighted design decisions that created massive bottlenecks. For example, on Green (where I'm a retired Seal Team member), at one point Seal Team had over 150 Sleeper's Tomb keys while the rest of the server combined had maybe 10.

As a result, it was within Seal Team's discretion to wake the Sleeper and deny warder loot to the rest of the server. There are four warders and if you kill all four they never spawn again on the server. If you only kill 3 and leave the fourth up, they will spawn indefinitely and you can continuously farm some of the best items in the game (e.g. Sceptre of Destruction, the single most valuable tradeable item in the game).

https://wiki.project1999.com/Sceptre_of_Destruction

I was glad that I got the opportunity to be in Seal Team because for the first time in 20+ years of playing, I got to be a part of the top guild on a server during the Velious era. I played on Vallon Zek from the day it launched in 1999. I ended up quitting during the Velious era in part because raids became so difficult that it required a massive zerg guild like Defiant to clear all of the content. I didn't want to be in a zerg and realized that the small family guilds that I preferred would never see end game content, so I left the game before Luclin was released.

Others have correctly pointed out the distinction between Everquest and WoW. I wouldn't still be playing the game 23 years later (not currently playing on P99) if it wasn't for the direct competition over content. When I played WoW beta and saw the implementation of instancing, I didn't make it past the first month of launch. Even though every server I've played on prior to Green I was on the losing end of those bottlenecks, it was the challenge of the competition between the haves and have nots that kept me coming back.

I agree that there needs to be a better implementation of the list system but I don't know what that would look like. I only encourage those of you posting here to stop trying to turn this into a custom server project. It's never going to happen so you're wasting keystrokes.

From what I've read, many of the content decisions that led to the extreme bottlenecks of EQ were driven by Brad's sense of competition with Fires of Heaven, the guild that defeated all of the content in Everquest beta. He kept trying to throw things at them that they couldn't overcome and was continuously disappointed in how easily FoH beat everything that was thrown at them.

I'm guessing this was part of the decision to make the penultimate content in the Velious era -- warder loot in Sleeper's Tomb -- subject to an unpredictable nerf that only became common knowledge once enough servers had killed all four warders and had the best loot in the game permanently and irrevocably removed. I think this was Brad's way of finally sticking it to FoH, which was undoubtedly one of the first guilds to clear Sleepers on live. You got there first, but you screwed yourself in doing so.

This is a really dumb way to design a game. If there's any truth to this version of events, it means decisions were made that affected the bulk of Everquest's player base that were driven by the actions of less than 1% of the population. This is why I think WoW was so successful. It created a reasonable expectation that an average player would eventually be able to see end game content.

Green has been a remarkably accurate representation of what vanilla eq release looked like. A single guild was able to exploit the existing, known bottlenecks to its exclusive advantage. If there's to be a Green 2.0 I hope that the dev team will consider that they don't need to do the same thing again. I don't know how they would change it without further customization but I think it's worth considering that an emu project doesn't have to continuously emulate the worst mistakes that the original game made, which kept it from reaching its full potential.

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

Green 2.0 advice for would-be raiders, nostalgia seekers, and the content-curious (a work in progress - feel free to add your input and maybe I'll turn this into a Wiki article or something)

Things to watch out for on future Project 1999 timeline servers. Warnings to the casual and hardcore alike. A crystal ball of what might be in our future on the next server.


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CLASSIC / VANILLA / PRE-KUNARK
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—Launch era—

Crowded newbie zones
Expect to camp the spawn point of a decaying skeleton while 99 other people rush around KSing each other.

Legacy camps: Manastone, Guise of the Deceiver, Rubicite Breastplate, Drelzna JBoots
There will be 10-20 players standing at these camps around the clock. Each character will have to wait 3-5 days to get their item. To accomplish this, groups of players will take turns on a single character. The list mechanic allows a 15-minute grace period in case of connection loss. This allows one player to camp out and another player to log in to the same character. Players will take shifts in this way to keep that character on the /list for long enough to get the item. If you cannot do this or are not willing to share account info, you may not be able to get these items. These camps were camped by 10-20 people 24/7 from the moment it was possible to camp them until the moment they were removed from the game.

My druid Naala spent 87 hours on the manastone list. Each night, one of my friends would play her for 6 hours so I could sleep. I would keep my laptop with me the other 18 hours of every day for 4 and a half days. That’s how you get a manastone. If you can’t do that, you won’t be able to camp a manastone. You can farm a lot of plat and buy one.

—Plane of Fear—

Planar rotations
Fear and Hate were rotated between guilds in 8-hour blocks, with each guild owning 1-3 blocks. A guild would fully clear the Plane of Fear during each of their eight-hour blocks in order to fully utilize their slot and get as much loot as they can.

Plane of Fear legacy items
Lustrous Russet armor, the legacy item Plane of Fear armor, will be farmed assiduously by those who know about it. It is the same as Indicolite armor (the later Plane of Hate warrior armor), but it is usable by all plate and chain classes. Expect clerics and shamans wearing Lustrous Russet Boots, rogues wearing Lustrous Russet Breastplate, bards wearing Lustrous Russet Bracer, and more.

Spinechiller Spiders drop the Cryosilk Robe, but only until Plane of Hate comes out. In later eras, this robe is trash, but it looks really good.

Fear Golems 1.0
Initially, Fright, Dread, and Terror don’t drop anything at all. They also don’t death touch or have any AEs. One of them blinds the tank (surprise!). They are just large golems with no loot table.

—Plane of Hate—

Fear and Hate were rotated between guilds in 8-hour blocks, with each guild owning 1-3 blocks. A guild would fully clear the Plane of Hate during each of their eight-hour blocks in order to fully utilize their slot and get as much loot as they can. The level cap is still 50, so it’s quite difficult. Expect to wipe sometimes.

—Plane of Sky—

The Ishva Mal for Summon Corpse
It was announced that Plane of Sky would be “competitive” for the first two weeks. As the release date of Plane of Sky approached, experienced players realized Summon Corpse might be necessary to quickly progress a whole guild through Plane of Sky (get some players keyed to the next island, have other players die on purpose and summon their corpses to the next island, and rez them).

As soon as The Ishva Mal was added to the game, <Seal Team> began permanently camping it, rotating in shifts and holding the camp indefinitely. They did not keep a camp list. Other players asked to camp the Ishva Mal after them, but they did not respond to /tells. They held the camp for many days. Other guilds were incensed.

Players petitioned them until finally the GMs implemented a /list mechanic for the Ishva Mal. Only necromancers could join the /list. Due to the 36-hour spawn time of the Ishva Mal, necromancers had to stay at the camp for hours or days at a time. Most necromancers did not bother.

“Competitive Sky” did not end up happening. The guilds quickly agreed on a weekly rotation. Also, it turned out nobody used Summon Corpse that much to advance in Plane of Sky. So the round-the-clock camping, the drama and rage, the petitioning, and the /list torture was all for nothing. the end

Plane of Sky while the level cap is 50 is a form of torture
During this era, when the level cap was 50, it took normal raid guilds 8-12 hours to clear Plane of Sky. Supposedly Seal Team would do Plane of Sky using almost exclusively mages, something like 20-30 mages, and that worked better when the level cap was 50.

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Please post your own advice for players next server. Please reply with anything I missed or got wrong. I'll post my Kunark notes later.