RFC EQ Emu Server

I think this totally depends on what quality the content is. Rehosting some basic out of the box emu shit would get very little traction. I think a fresh uncorrupted host of a P99 or Alkabor type environment would be absolutely worth it.

There's always going to be demand for a classic server with:

1. A good/legit DB
2. An active staff that has the manpower and motivation to address bugs/issues and bring in expansions (assuming progression) in a timely manner
3. Solid hardware, ample uptime, and the ability to handle inevitable ddos attacks
4. An uncorrupted, fair, and reasonably professional CS staff
5. A development team that time/energy/ability/desire/dedication to keep things as close to classic as possible
6. A development team that can resist the urge to add in custom content
7. Reliability. In other words, the server is going to be around for a while.

There have been plenty of emu servers that have met a few of those goals, but none that have met all. P99 has always been the closest to getting it right, and that's why their population has been high for years, despite competition.

a_skeleton_03 said:

RFC is frequently short hand for Request For Comment.

This is an exploratory thread because I am thinking on spinning up an emu server and hosting it official FoH ran and all.

I am curious what people would want it to be if we did that.

I am assuming pretty basic ruleset and P99 style up to Luclin? What would be new? No corrupt admins and no changes just to change things. Stable server and a fast pipe.

Maybe it wouldn't be interesting at all.

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I'd play it, I'm sick of running servers. FV ruleset in PoP 1-box is what i'd prefer

If you need something compatible with the latest EQEmu client (ROF2), I'm sure Rise of Zek would be willing to provide their DB to you. They're on Luclin right now. I don't think any of us really want to run a PVE server. Obviously, I'd want nothing to do with a GM/Dev position on one of these servers.

So I've been running my little corner of norrath over on VoG for like three years now I think, but I've never really played on any of the other emu's except for NL. I spent a few weeks getting things shaped up like I wanted (mostly usability tweaks and a bit of balancing/bugfixing), and other than replaing a quest item here and there, it's been pretty much hands-off unless I want to do dev work.

Maybe I'm just not seeing the problems some of the comments want solved? I can see the peq db not being great if you want a perfectly vanilla environment, but if you're opening up to velious anyway? Other than excluding a few things, it seems pretty servicable. And support staff/corruption/uptime? How many players do you need/expect for these to be serious issues?

Not being critical of anyone's comments, just genuinely curious.

Difficult to explain if you haven't played p99 or many of the other servers over the years. Replicating p99 would take a ton of work. Making a half assed version with a million "close enough" differences and a population of 50-150 is relatively easy (it's been done dozens of times). But the difference is night and day. For all its faults, p99 captured that true feeling of OG EQ. Turns out that's a really really hard thing to do.

You could probably shortcut a lot of the work if you got your hands on a good DB, but I'd bet it would still be an enormous amount of work trying to achieve the versimillitude of p99.

Are you getting bored without a forum to run? Considering your distaste for the eqemu population in general (and I'm by no means saying you're wrong in that opinion) I'm surprised to see this coming from you.

It depends on your level of ambition for the server - how big a population do you want, boxing/script rules, how in era accurate you want it to be, the difficulty and - this is the big one - what level of emu degenerates you want to attract. Control's server was excellent while I played on it for a solo or 2/3 player experience and his advice is well worth listening to.

Personally I think a server in the spirit of FoH could be fun, I like lurking around these forums, and it might attract more registrations here from old eq obsessives.

a_skeleton_03 said:

I think that if I made my own without the first thing it might be interesting and there are some technical aspects that I haven’t touched that I would like to get better at.

The thing is 99% of the servers out there are gimmicky and I want a fairly classic style experience if I do this.

Just spitballing here.

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Just take a weekend and give it a try. PEQ basically has 1-click installers now, so you could seriously have FQ live in under an hour
Having said that, building and installing the bits yourself will help you understand how it all fits together.
Definitely go linux, in case there was any question. And if you do it yourself, you get exactly as much corruption as you want

Also, imo, getting it "classic enough" is fairly simple. Going all vanilla eq purist would be more work, but I still can't see it being some herculean effort (maybe if you cross over from purist to autist...). To be fair, I never tried to go that route, although I think in many cases, making the game more forgiving/usable is harder than the opposite if you actually want to preserve the original design intent.

Not sure which technical bits you want to focus on or where you're starting from, but you could go anywhere from zero technical bits required to as far down the rabbit hole as you want to go. You may already be familiar, but in case not or in case it's useful to anyone else, here's a mini tech writeup of the rabbit hole.

• Once you're up and running, you can do a truly suprising amount content editing and creation with the in-game commands. It's clunky and convoluted as fuck, but it's possible.
• If you install the web db editor, you can do pretty much all of the basic creation and admin stuff almost as easily as running a forum, including most of the server rule/mechanic changes.
• If you can use a visual db editor, you can step that up quite a bit, and if you can sql a little, you can do even more (or at least do it faster).
• Quests/events/etc. and even some mechanics are perl/lua scripts, but you can edit/create them without really knowing anything about coding so long as you can copy/paste from other examples. Of course, the more you learn, the more you can do.
• With just the above, you could essentially make an entirely new/different game, aside from the graphics. You can add assets, remake zone geometry, etc., but that's a whole big ball of wonky that I never went near. It's probably the only technical bit that is so specific to EQ that the skills wouldn't really transfer anywhere else.
• Some behavior that you may want to change is hardcoded, and some things may not be reasonable to create with just scripting (although, with some creativity, you can do a LOT with it.) In that case, you'll need to crack open the source code and start making real changes, and that can take you as deep as you want to go.
• Note that the client is still the EQ binary, so make any client related changes, you'll need to go reverse engineering, and it's very hard do dig up any info due to previous legal threats making it forbidden to discuss in the normal emu spots. (I don't know any details, and I haven't tried to find out more, just my impression from a couple of "we don't talk about that here" responses.)
• Once you've started to move from tinkering to actually working on your server, you'll need to figure out version control and automated backups.
• If you want to take deving seriously and especially if you want to collaborate, you'll need some sort of change control with a dev/qa/production setup with deployment/patching/etc. (I think the problems that a lot of emu type projects run into is because this type of thing isn't really set up in the beginning, so any time they get someone to step in and help, they're essentially giving a new person the keys and trusting that they won't steal the car or drive it off a cliff. This is basically why I never let anyone help on VoG despite plenty of great people who were willing. I just never got around to setting up an infrastructure condusive to collaboration. )
• You could pump up the logging and dig in on the metrics/analytics side of things.
• If you want to focus on server things, there are endless places to take it. The server runs suprisingly well, but there are always optimizations that could be done. You could set up your own login server, creating your own web-based dev tools or player tools ala magelo which could be integrated into the forum etc. Do the docker/netes thing distributed over a few nodes/servers, etc.
• You MIGHT even be able to port it to a browser one day!

I think the real magic is that any of this works at all. The guys that put all this together and improved it over the years have really done an amazing job imo. We can bicker over the finer points of emuing, but the idea that you can just 1-click your way into a fully functional EQ is just incredible really. And for anyone who's ever wanted to go into the game industry, running your own server is about as close as you can get without making some pretty terrible life decisions lol. In fact, it's far better, since you get to be the one that runs the show.

turn pvp on and im game

What you want already exists. Hardly anybody cares about accuracy because they haven't played the game in 15 years to know what's wrong/missing or if they do they still want their precious mousewheel camera enough to play on a server without the dedication to accuracy. Realizing that was personally very disheartening.

I'll also add that a good server is far more than just a database. Mechanics changed quite a bit over the years and EQEmu's implementation is closer to the modern game. We had to fix so, so many broken things in that code. Since they have to accommodate so much of EQ's feature bloat they cannot concentrate on minor details in the way a dedicated old era server can. Not to mention quest/scripts; much of which we had to write from scratch because they were missing entirely or just completely inadequate. EQEmu did a great job getting clients connecting to servers that players could interact in, but when it came to content and mechanics details they really left much left to do. Of course we all work for free so that isn't a complaint.

Torrid said:

What you want already exists. Hardly anybody cares about accuracy because they haven't played the game in 15 years to know what's wrong/missing or if they do they still want their precious mousewheel camera enough to play on a server without the dedication to accuracy.

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Major issues i've seen as arguments against playing on TAKP:
- No mousewheel
- 3box policy
- Era-specific client performance issues (random 'ghost' letters being entered in chat, random client crashes, Nvidia Optimus, etc)

I think if those three issues were addressed early, that TAKP would've seen P99-levels of population. Unfortunately without the client source code for EQMac, two of these three issues are unavoidable or have insanely complex workarounds.

PS: Fuck Daybreak for having no faith in projects like TAKP. The AMA on this site was a complete insult to people preserving their work.

Real talk: there is a demand for a teams-based PvP server.

If you're gonna stand up a box it might as well be different from p99

idk if enough people are clamoring for post velious, id start with classic, build a solid foundation, go from there. most p99 blue players seem to be interested in a hard-coded 3 faction based PvP server as far as alternative rulesets, throw in inventory item loot and let people pvp over manastones.