Originally Posted by wehrmacht
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EQ P1999 PVP SERVER
You have two options and I will explain the consequences of those choices:
1 - Make a no teams, FFA style PvP server.
2 - Make a two team, dark vs light based, diety based, or race war type server.
I played Sullon Zek since day one and TZVZ for a long time. I'm gonna lay it out exactly how this works. If you make this PvP server a FFA rule set this is what happens:
FFA, no teams PvP server:
Day 1 you will see 30-40 man guilds pop up. There will be Heresy, some random TZ or SZ guild, and a few random blue server guilds that show up with a zerg of people. You'll probably have four or five viable or semi-viable guilds roaming around. Each guild will monopolize some area like Guk, Karnors, whatever.
After a few weeks, one of the guilds implodes and you're down to three. Now there will be two guilds monopolizing spawns, loot, and beating the shit out of the most likely lower population third guild. The demoralized 3rd guild starts bleeding members, some just plain quit, others join the 2 dominant guilds. Then the 3rd guild completely vanishes except that one guy who just got out of prison and logged back into the game at level 3 with now defunct guild tag.
Now you're a few months into the server with a constant day to day brawl of the two dominant guilds fighting for dragons. This goes on a long time and during this entire process, server will constantly drop in population. New players that join the server during this period of time will mostly be standing around by themselves, occasionally get ganked by a level 50, have nobody to group with, and solo their way to 50 because everyone on a FFA server is your enemy.
The majority of these new people will just plain quit. An occasional few will make it to the top but the server will be losing way more people than it's gaining due to this kind of alienation of the new player.
Now the server population is like 100 people: 30 people in guild A, 30 people in guild B, and 30-40 random noobs wandering around. The leader of one of the guilds gets charged with some kind of bestiality sex crimes IRL (probably Heresy). The guild disbands, only one guild remains, server ends.
Next choice is teams based server:
Similar number of people start on day one. The 30 man guilds move into their positions to try and monopolize some area. A random evil guild stands around on shores of oasis killing alligators and starts leveling fast. A low level crapling comes into the zone, see's them, and zones out to go tell all the other craplings. All of a sudden a giant tidal wave of low level craplings starts to pour into the zone and the highest level troll on the server will have 8 halflings clinging to him like some scene from Lord of the Rings.
All of the craplings die and the entire beach is covered in corpses but the uber, evil guild is completely unable to do any leveling so their progress is held back the entire day. The low level craplings then respawn in Misty Thicket and form a guild with the name "Flowers of Happiness".
This goes on for months. One or two guilds will eventually die but each of the two teams will maintain at least one uber guild and one casual or noob guild. At this point, the FFA server would most likely be in it's death spiral but the teams server population would be better off due to lack of alienation of the new or casual player. It might even still be growing.
The uber guild will constantly use their teams noob guild as human shields in order to defend themselves from attack while raiding so there will always be something to do, someone to attack, someone to group with.
The overall effect is much slower progression, more PvP, higher population, and the server's main zerg guilds have much less power and effect on the server world overall due to having to fight much bigger battles against more opponents. When one team's uber guild leader goes to prison, there will most likely always be a secondary guild ready to step in and take over the team and the server avoids collapse.
This rule set would basically be Sullon Zek type setup except with two teams instead of three. Three teams always implodes due to one of the three always ending up much weaker so it's not a viable choice.
Training, Corpse Camping, Other Random Cool Stuff
The way I feel on this issue is that if you can't hard code something, it shouldn't be a rule in the first place. It takes way too much manpower and there are too many variables involved in solving disputes about training and corpse camping. Even on TZVZ where there was a no-training rule with GM's enforcing it and banning people, you always saw people do it anyway. They'll make a 1 foot detour to the side while being chased and make it look like they accidentally did it or the best tactic of all, just run into a giant camp of mobs when someone is attacking you and you're about to die. The surviving guy then brings the huge train back to his guild and they both blame each other for training as everyone in the zone wipes.
I get the feeling the devs do not want this to be a high maintenance server so I only see one logical solution that fixes both of these problems at the same time. Give the priest of discord the ability to summon corpses after they've been dead X number of hours or just implement the shadowrest zone and all corpses pop there after X number of hours. This way you don't need any rules concerning corpse camping and training or really any rules at all.
Now if you're in Plane of Hate and someone trains you for fun (even when it would have originally been against server rules), you don't have a 48 hour long CR. You just log off and come back the next day and go summon your corpse at priest of discord or get it from Shadowrest. Some people are gonna start whining and say "omg training is so terrible omg, I don't want training to be legal". When I played Sullon Zek, training was encouraged and I never even died from a train once. I even had people like Fansy the bard running Sand giants at me. It's really not that big of a deal. You typically already know which direction the train is coming from and who is bringing it to you before it even arrives. So you either take off running, hide, gate, or kill them. It's a pretty easy element of PvP to deal with.
If I was to personally choose an arbitrary number, I would probably make the priest of discord or Shadowrest guy summon your corpse after it's been dead for 4 hours. I think that game mechanic would make it so death in enemy territory would have a long enough penalty but still doesn't prevent you from playing the remainder of the entire day.
Possible Team Setups
Race War using race as selection variable: Probably the best choice since each team gets every class
Dark Elf Alliance (evil)
Dark Elf
Troll
Iksar
Ogre
Half Elf
Erudite
Human Alliance (good)
Human
Dwarf
Gnome
Halfling
High Elf
Barbarian
Wood Elf
Good vs Evil using diety as variable for selection: This setup tries to keep all the races like halflings and elves on one side and trolls and ogres on the other. Might have to disable selection of agnostic somehow because too many races get it. Good team gets no necros or shadowknights and evils get no rangers, druids, or paladins. Diety distribution looks lopsided but it doesn't really matter, People don't choose them equally and you basically just choose your team at player creation. Population on both teams would probably be similar. Evil has more offense, Good team has more healing.
Good team:
karana
tunare
elrollisi
brell
mithaniel
tribunal
quellious
rodcet
prexus
bristlebane
sol ro
Evil Team:
innoruk
bertox
rallos
cazic thule
veeshan
Expansions at Start
Most P1999 and TZVZ players are probably tired of original expansion with no kunark by now. I would either release Kunark on day one or make it so Kunark opens after Nag, Vox, CT, and Innoruk are dead.
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05-15-2013, 10:42 PM
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