team or pure red?

[Nirgon]

I'm pretty sure you're high on under the sink drugs if you play anything but evil especially on non-item loot.

[greatdane]

Why is it so unthinkable to play non-evil? It's pretty much just ogres that are good tanks/shamans, nothing else is particularly great for the evil races. I would never play a troll on a PvP server, they have like 5 base fire resist.

Gnomes/halflings are really useful now that targeting rings are gone, and dwarves have +5 MR. Dwarven Ringmail Tunic is amazing for a really long time. I don't even think there are any comparable resist pieces in Kunark. As elf/midget only, that's a pretty big bonus for those races. A dwarf warrior essentially has 13MR/8FR/8CR over any large warrior, plus the advantage of small size. Slam is pretty clutch, but there's kickstun at 55 and anyway you're better off trying to juke spells since you're jousting anyway. It's only the three ogre classes that get any advantage at all from being evil, and it's a toss-up early on for warriors because that extra free 13MR is huge.

[Ziggy]

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

I'm pretty sure you're high on under the sink drugs if you play anything but evil especially on non-item loot.

1. Humans, the most powerful team, with access to all classes.
2. Darks with Cleric, Enchanter, Mage, Monk (kunark), Necro, Rogue, SK, Shammy, War, Wiz. And the best stats for many classes.
3. (tie) Shorts with Cleric, Druid, Enchanter, Mage, Necro, Pal, Rogue, SK, War, Wiz
3. (tie) Elf with Bard, Cleric, Druid, Enchanter, Mage, Pal, Ranger, Rogue, War, Wiz

Im only giving the edge to darks over elf/shorts because of the fatties... all in all the 3 non human teams are pretty even.

These teams would NOT be hard coded, you can group with anyone and attack anyone from another team.

[greatdane]

Oh, hardcoded teams based on race is a no-go. How can you hope for balanced PvP when teams don't all have access to the same classes and can't choose to group with the teams that do? It never worked out on SZ. If we are to have teams at all, it should just be three arbitrary teams that aren't distinguished by anything other than name - players would get three tokens and choose which one to turn in to PoD to join whatever team they want. This is 2011, why would we wreck the server from the start with those ancient, broken team models that never had any merit whatsoever?

[Ravenlof]

i miss SZ

[Kope]

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

1. Humans, the most powerful team, with access to all classes.
2. Darks with Cleric, Enchanter, Mage, Monk (kunark), Necro, Rogue, SK, Shammy, War, Wiz. And the best stats for many classes.
3. (tie) Shorts with Cleric, Druid, Enchanter, Mage, Necro, Pal, Rogue, SK, War, Wiz
3. (tie) Elf with Bard, Cleric, Druid, Enchanter, Mage, Pal, Ranger, Rogue, War, Wiz

Im only giving the edge to darks over elf/shorts because of the fatties... all in all the 3 non human teams are pretty even.

These teams would NOT be hard coded, you can group with anyone and attack anyone from another team.

Yes you are correct but only in theory. Like on TZ all 3 teams alligned to fight darks and darks still came out ahead sometimes. Way more people wanna play darks over anything else.

[mimixownzall]

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

Lol @ no x-teaming on SZ. We x-teamed constantly in Hate if it served our interests, and so did everyone else. You must have pretty out of the loop, because it was pretty rampant, and we were always pretty unapologetic about it.

Examples, please. I think your idea of 'cross teaming' is different than mine.

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

Next, I have no idea what you're basing your 'teams = more population' argument around, but you're ignoring the only population check that could possibly serve as a test, which is when all 4 Zek servers were up and running at once.

Population: RZ (no hardcoded teams) > VZ/TZ (softcoded teams) > SZ (hardcoded teams)

If you're going to claim 'teams= more population' the burden of proof is on you to prove it, because any data that we have indicates otherwise.

That is a really a bad example to base everything on. The servers weren't all released at the same time. If SZ had been released at the same time, I have no doubts that it would have held a higher population.

Another thing is Everquest was the first really popular MMO to come out. FFA was really all we knew.

One burden of proof came from my example of why there are no more games that come out that have FFA PVP. You know.. the one point you conveniently passed right over without comment. If FFA is so awesome and superior, then why is there not a huge outcry for it to return in MMOs? Because it sucks.

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

And finally, I'm not going to even dignify the 'if you don't like the people you're hardcoded to be on a team with, then just reroll' argument with a response.

Why not? People reroll all the time. These are called alts. Just make an alt on a different faction and see how you like it. If you came from SZ, then you would know this happened a lot.

[JayDee]

on his level you are not

[mimixownzall]

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

On launch day, yes. That's likely to drop by a fair bit as the new car smell wears off, and anyway the numbers are half to a third of the peak numbers for like 12 hours of the day. If we expect 2-300 players, which is a little optimistic, divide that by whatever number of teams and you have the effective playerbase for group/raid availability. For PvP, you have the playerbase minus your own team. With FFA, there's no such limitation and you've minimized the risk of population-related problems as much as you can without actually attracting more players; and since a significant majority seem in favor of FFA, it's safe to say that FFA will actually attract more players in the first place.

No such limitation? So if you have two or three guilds with 70-100 people, that won't limit it?

[Ziggy]

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

Yes you are correct but only in theory. Like on TZ all 3 teams alligned to fight darks and darks still came out ahead sometimes. Way more people wanna play darks over anything else.

Thats how it played out on TZ, and somewhat similarly on VZ. It could be a completely different story on red99. At the start of the server, any race or combinations of races could rise to supremacy.

Lets say the dark team was way over populated. There are mechanisms in classic to deal with such a situation. (Guild wars, PoD)