Semi-hardcore: Since I doubt a permadeath server would work in an mmo I would like to see some kind of middleground between the old regular EQ servers where you lose a small amount of exp when you die and the Hardcore ruleset of Diablo with permadeath. Something along the lines of if you die you lose 1 level.
Not sure if my first one is a special ruleset or just a good idea for Pantheon in general.
Each account can only have 2 mac addresses attached to it. You can change one of these a month but requires CSR assistance. This will block a lot of team leveling, paid leveling, botting and account theft while still allowing 2 family members to share an account.
Ruleset ideas:
1) Only Epic quest rewards are no drop, all quest items are perception items that once looted disappear and become a flag in your perception and don’t show up again for your character, all other wearable items have item degradation. Each item has a crafter that can repair it back to functional but it slowly loose max durability, the amount lost is based on the crafters skill. Durability can be recovered by a stronger crafter repair that consumes some of the base material gained from salvaging other items or the equivalent harvesting, this will be very difficult for very rare material items.
2) Hate to say it but an Auction House / faster travel server. There are going to be a lot of people that will be turned off by EC style selling and will go to a server with an auction house, even if it is one per continent that don’t link together, and will sacrifice immersion for getting where they want to be in under 10 minutes. Kids these days, in my day if I wanted to go from Freeport to Qeynos I needed to make a ramp of my own corpses in Kithikor.
3) RP/No common language server where you need to speak the language of the NPC to be able to get them to respond and learning new languages is hard. (actually really like this idea for the base game)
4) And the big one, Logarithmic Character power curve where 90% of the game is tuned to 90% of play time to 50. (See previous logarithmic posts for details)
Have fun,
Trasak
Trasak said:3) RP/No common language server where you need to speak the language of the NPC to be able to get them to respond and learning new languages is hard. (actually really like this idea for the base game)
I second this.
Had a friend who mained RP server back in EQ, made an alt to go play with them and it was some fun times :)
My understanding of the quesiton is not what I would prefer or want but what would be popular. Unfortunately what I think is popular to maintain a community is not what I want- heh- but I could be wrong.
So I will have to speak in generalizations, a server where:
1. An end goal that is forseeable and obtainable and when obtained considered enviable and admirably difficult, to encourage others to attain same goal. (Arrgh! BiS/META!)
2. An environment that is intuitively easy to understand from observation alone, including NPC interactions. (Pantheon difference= where perception improves this intuition)
3. Accidental creation/discovery of almost OP things/strats from apparently random combination or association of items/observations by the individual player. (I have observed the monsters leave the nest an noon to drink from the pool- we can get the babies then, or, I combined this bent nail and pocket lint with bacon grease in a tacklebox and when I cast the ugly named lure it created; I caught this blind, deadly, huge, award-wining shark!)
4. Puzzles that gradually increase in complexity. This allows "learning" from previous solutions, as well as allowing players who have solved the puzzles to know what step in the puzzle another player is in and can provide a hint to the next step without giving away all the steps to the end solution. (Zelda-ish)
5. Regular and personalized GM involvement, everyday, everywhere.(possibly not sustainable)
I think the community would support a role play preferred server with a ruleset similar to that of FV in EQ. (Perhaps even a PvP version of this as well?)
Something along the lines of:
I'll buck the trend on FB and say a relaxed server. One with fast travel and easy to solo content.
My biggest concern with the game is it will be so hardcore that I won't enjoy it. So having an even more hardcore server doesn't make sense to me. But a relaxed server that appeals to a bigger base than the hardcore crowd might just attract a significant population, maybe even funnel more players to try the harder version.
• Everything is no-trade except temporaries/consumables/buff & class items. You cannot trade ~anything with other players, including currency.
• Each player can max out all tradeskill professions.
• One account per server. No transfers to or from the server, for any reason. No name changes for any reason.
• All loot is personal. You never see what other players loot. You cannot, ever, see or loot other players loot/bodies/kills.
• The /follow command is disabled, globally.
• PC guild level is dynamically the sum total of the top 24/48 members non-combat XP, including tradeskills, quests, exploration, achievements, collections, diplomacy, perception, inspiration, etc values. If all those members leave, the guild level goes to zero. If all those members form a new guild, the guild level is immediately set and adjusted in real-time, based on their current values.
• Characters in the same group playing from the same public IP address are visually flagged with an icon to indicate this fact to other players in the group, while not indicating any specific details (number, country, etc).
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I think that would stir the pot enough for a distinctive experience. :)
A first person only server, it's only way of not feeling like a knobhead playing in first person while everyone else is in 3rd due to vision and awareness benefits.
Also a 1 character per server, and a no fast travel server would be cool options.
I personally on a rule set server would like to see a naming rule set put in place, (Especially on the RP servers). I know this one can be enforced, just like you guys did in Vanguard.
Had to add max value set prices on items put on the market place, nothing like seeing things on auction house for a gabillion platinum.
I definitely think RP servers are great for immersion, but also enabling PvP. Nothing ruins my sense of immersion more than running across members of the opposite faction, but not being able to engage in combat - I know it can also lead to griefing and lots of bad behavior, but I feel like it's an element that makes or breaks the immersive nature of factions.
As a dedicated permadeath player in MMOs I strongly agree that a permadeath server would be a poor idea. Losing a beloved character carefully nursed for many months to a crash or major lag spike would be awful. We can play permadeath without special rules - just the determination to delete any character that dies.
Pantheon Lite actually isn't that bad an idea. But I see it as harmful to the other servers where the "real" game is played. How about this - taking some ideas from the free trial threads. Throwing some thoughts out without a lot of analysis.
1. Have any free trials on this server. Granted it won't give the full feel of the game but I would guess that the first 10+ levels may not be all that difficult in the real game. VR will not try to appeal to the masses but it will not want the game limited to the most dedicated either, and a killer starting area where you die to level 1 giant rats and need a full group to get your first loincloth is highly unlikely. No sane developer wants to drive new players away before they can get a feel for the game and the community.
2. Allow free transfers to the real servers at level 10 or other appropriate level, but not higher. To avoid people speed-leveling to high levels where it is easy and then moving over. This is mandatory for a free trial server - free trials don't work well if the player is told that if they subscribe they will need to start a new character at level 1. I would do that but I am not ...normal.
3. Allow anyone that wants to stay on the Pantheon Lite server as long as they wish as a subscriber (after the free trial is over). Note that some of us will keep characters there to help genuinely new players and encourage them to play on the real servers (and quite likely recruit for guilds there). No transfers to be allowed to other servers after the designated level. Not for free - not for money. None.
This will combine the benefits of a free trial and the benefits Ruar mentions, but hopefully without draining too many people from the real servers.
Is a RP server a good idea? I usually play on RP servers when I can because they tend to have less annoying names and slightly more mature people (on average). But we can RP on any server, and most RP in games I've played has been in guilds and maybe one or two taverns. What would a special ruleset give us other than possibly stricter enforcement of naming rules? A RP channel? But communities often create their own channels if the UI permits.
A RP server may be a good idea if enough people want it but I am not sure there is a really good reason why they *should* want that more than a pvp server (yes pvp will be a minority but their subscription money is as good as mine) or a no AH slower travel server or a free trade server or a lower competition server (more critical bosses instanced to reduce any stranglehold large aggressive guilds may have) or a language server (need to know the local tongue to deal with NPCs) or ..........
The immersion server is my favorite:
Something like the RP server from eq1 would be cool too, but I've heard some of the ideas it had backfired. No concrete details on my end there though, since I never actually played in it.
Honestly even a server that was only different because of no inter-player soda machine marketing mechanisms (like traditional game auction houses, bazaar) would be plenty great for me though.
I would like to play on a mostly number-free server. Combat log has XX replacing all numbers. Health/mana bars (not including your own) are left full until death. Stat values on items are listed as "+X Stamina" and such. Currency, item counts, and that kind of thing would not be affected though.
I like the idea of a first person only server too like @jpedrote said. I also like 1 character per account notion that others have mentioned.
I dislike the idea of special "easy" servers. If you intentionally create a path of least resistance you had better believe that a significant number of players will choose that path. Do you really want to spend years creating and balancing a game only to watch a large portion of players choose the easy server, solo their way to 50, beat all the content in two months, and then cancel their subscription? How do you think other players will react to this? To me, watching other players rush through the game on easy mode destroys the foundational risk vs. reward balance that makes the game enjoyable in the first place.
Now, if you want to create "hardcore" servers that take away things like fast travel, auction houses, etc. then I fully support offering this option. I also support private servers.
P.S. As a side note, why is there no spell check / grammar check function in our forums? Am I missing it or something? I hate having to edit my posts because I missed something small but obviously wrong.
That's really all I need along the base game. :)
- Both, a server that is harder than the normal server and a server that is easier than the normal server. So everyone would have the server of his choice, easy, normal or hard server.
- I really like the 4th idea of Manouk. A server that offers a lot of riddles and maybe some adventure game elements. Some of the riddles could last for several month or even longer, until they get solved by the first player(s).
- The idea of Ainadak is interessting too. Having not or at least less numbers than in a normal MMORPG would on the one hand make the game harder, but on the other hand make it more relaxed, as no one is only hunting numbers.
-A server that I would call a casual server but could also be interessting for min maxers to play. On this server you only have a certain amount of time to play or can online run one dungeon in a specific time frame or are limited in the number of crafting ressources you can gather and the items you can craft. For the casuals this would be great, because no one could play three days without sleeping and then having first char at max level, while they are still in the starting area. On the other side the min maxers could have their competition, because all have the same time to play or have the same number of dungeons to go or what ever. Beside the luck you always have in such games, the one with the best strategy will lead in whatever list you want.
One character per server (regulated per IP address) is the only one I would consider that I:
think would be popular enough to maintain a server's community?
I have other thoughts but they aren't popular enough to maintain a servers community so I'll not include them.
Would love to see an absolutely no-boxing-allowed server handled at the client level. Make it so you can only run one instance of the game on a single computer so couples and/or kids could still play together onlne in the same household.
I know, I know, there will be the ones that actually have 6 (or more) comptuers in front of them, but make it so when they are caught boxing, all of the offending accounts get permanently banned from that server.
Coming from EQ, I know that there are some that love to box, and that is fine, but from my experience it is really aggrivating seeing a box-group take over whatever you are camping just because they can.
When the Ragefire (TLP) server whent live, it was a just disaster of bot groups controlling entire zones.
I'm interested in playing on a special ruleset server that does not have voice chat enabled.
Without even playing this game I know that if you do not participate in group (voice) chat you will be left out of group communication. No one is going to say something and repeat everything into text for those that do not want voice chat. I don't want to be the guy who has to advertise "LFG but no VC!".
I was disappointed that this game is going to have incldued VC, but I understand that some people want it. I just hope it's not forced for everyone and that there will be non-VC options.