The Al`kabor Project (EQMac) - PoP 1/5

a_skeleton_02_sl said:

confirmed.

I never lie Radditsu you know this.

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It would really change my world view if i could believe this bro. You got lucky this time!

furst you got banned on TAK for talking about p99 RMTing on this forum? im confused but that sounds fucked up no matter how you slice it. obviously it wasnt RMT on TAK cuz lol.

Furst_sl said:

I also remember looking at the magelo and seeing the sword so I know it happened at some point, but I left that point out because I cant prove it now.

You should be happy anyways we are gone, you/speedz have been trying to get rid of A&H since beta started. Remember when you were following us around invisible? The infamous "Hi Torven" because you felt like we needed to be watched? When we were doing nothing wrong.

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The problem guilds have is they get a distorted view of reality because you all spread rumors amongst yourselves while seeing things from a single perspective.

In the efreeti room I replied with a joke because stairs and wharhogg were telling your guild everything I was saying in dev chat. (requiring me to send whispers about anything sensitive) You had suspicions I was there because I was making comments such as charm being OP while you had a charmed pet. When I made a comment about kilroy (then your guildmate) telling a friend of mine about a bugged words of bondage drop, stairs (or wharhogg) of course immediately tells kilroy what I said in dev chat and I start getting tells, although I wasn't happy your entire guild failed to report it, not just him.

I was watching all of the high level players when the server was new, not just you guys. You guys just happened to have most of the 50s. I also caught several of your members exploiting certain things in the game, so we had reason to monitor you.

I also have no control over GMing the server, I can only watch players. (technically I can temporarily suspend players but I defer to the GMs) The TAKP team is split into two halves: one half just puts an open source game server out into the world, and the other guys admin the actual server. The actual server is mostly Speedz and Rob's thing, but of course there is overlap. Some guys only do one side of things.

Furst_sl said:

Oh btw Torven, Vox is buggy as all hell. We were testing her last night, she only starts CHing when she hits 15% health. She should start at around 40% i believe, at 15% you can just blow her up before it lands. Hard to notice when you are a raid force, but as GM it was obvious shes broken. Not even mentioning the fear warping you around the zone, but "that is a know issue...should have buffed MR".

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It's not 15%, it's higher than that. You're just killing her super fast in GM mode and/or she randomly delayed the cast-- there is a random component to NPC spell casts. I'm not 100% happy she's not CHing sooner but she'll certainly cast CHs before 15%. She cast CH every time I saw players attack her if they failed to stop them. Starvald prevented CHs from casting with a legitimate tactic that your guild is oblivious to. I won't spoil the game by telling you what it is.

The entire mob spell AI needs a major rewrite which was something I was going to do before planes opened.

Pointing out bugs is easy. Now that you've got a server running, git push some fixes.

There's a thousand things I want fixed/worked on, and everybody thinks the problem that affects them is the most important. It took me two full days just to figure out why dragon AoEs were bugging out. I didn't even sign up to be a coder nor do I code for a living, so I had to learn some of this as I went. I'm doing 5 jobs here. I had no control over when the server launched, nor can I fix every code issue. Forum drama only wastes more of my time.

Daybreak laying off half their employees paniced me into making data collecting a priority as well. Guess how many people are logging into live, leveling up dozens of characters, parsing spell resists at many level ranges, parsing every pet in the game, inching up to mobs and measuring aggro radius, watching mob paths and making grids, parsing every raid boss resist rate, video recording showeq windows, etc? The answer is 1. I'm sorry I didn't fix vox fear so you could have a perfect raid.

Unlike p99, this project is 100% open source, yet people outside our small team making contributions is quite rare. There is zero trust required for pull requests or making logs. You had programmers in your guild, you could have fixed something yourselves instead of complaining.

So...what are the primary differences between this server and Project 2002? One allows you to multi-box and the other doesn't....is that it?

pharmakos_sl said:

both allow you to multibox. Project2002 allows you to have more than three server accounts (people there are doing one account per character so they can mix and match their box crews as needed). TAKP only allows you to have three accounts, but if you want to swap characters between accounts they'll do that to an extent.

P2002 was splintered off of TAKP. they took TAKP's base code/DB and started runing their own server with it.

i think P2002 has Kunark already? or soon. TAKP will have Kunark soon too. TAKP is taking the time to test all the major quests before they open the gates to lizardland.

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Thank you for the information. I'm guessing there must have been some drama in the past since they both have the same end goal of recreating the Al'Kabor experience. I hope it doesn't split up the population and doom both servers.

I spent countless hours learning how to build a hackintosh so I could play on Al'Kabor years ago so it's pretty cool to see this effort being done. Just don't know which server to play on...

Policy wise the biggest difference is that TAKP has staff mandated rotations for the major raid targets. (just nag/vox right now, not planes trash)

We have a 3 account limit, but that may be relaxed in the future if people make enough noise about it. (don't hate me for saying this Speedz) I'd be in favor of increasing it, personally.

TAKP has more of the ex-Al'Kabor players while P2002 has more p99 players.

Virtually all of the server code is done by TAKP staff.

Both projects are going to claim to have the superior database. I don't want to turn this thread into a pissing match, so if you want my take on that, ask in PMs.

Thank you for the further input Torrid. I kept to myself for the most part on Al'Kabor but I did play for a couple of years there so I guess I'll land on TAKP.

Lenas_sl said:

Kunark going live on October 7 followed by a GM launch event

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+1 for this server (slightly biased because it's muh baby)

Is this still only playable on PC with that really buggy hackjob patch where a bunch of shit doesn't work?

axeman_sl said:

Is this still only playable on PC with that really buggy hackjob patch where a bunch of shit doesn't work?

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Pretty much, though the PC client is a bit better now and has a lot of 'shit that doesn't work' fixed. Still preferably played on Macs, though.

Secrets_sl said:

Pretty much, though the PC client is a bit better now and has a lot of 'shit that doesn't work' fixed. Still preferably played on Macs, though.

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Which is a shame, because this project had a great population at the start. The client issues chased off many people, myself included.

You'll have to be more specific regarding 'shit that doesn't work'. People are playing and raiding, and there are workarounds to particular issues. I used to 8 box raids on Al'Kabor using the PC client, including two clients on a netbook.

Stuff like no target rings and no mouse zoom are because the client we use is older than those features. There are various third party tools to ease the alt-tab/mouse cursor window lock burden. (although not eliminate it)

Incidentally one advantage to our old client is very fast zone times.

We're aware desyncs can happen, but they tend to be rare and happen most often in large raids as far as we know.

The problem we have is that nobody reports them. We can only assume that it's a rare phenomena when people don't bring the issue up. Reports are important to distinguish between user error and server bugs, because often issues people have are on the user's end-- if a dozen people have the same issue however, then it indicates a server problem. Also reports help narrow down where the problem is. Desyncs resulting from throwing weapons was brought up recently and promptly fixed. I haven't seen a desync since January, personally.

Anyone still playing here? I rolled a Monk/Shaman, Alexzander/Alexzandra if anyone has low level characters who want to group up.