I don't think raid mob details matter much given they're all wiped the moment they spawn. The risk is this might happen slightly faster or with fewer people than it already does? The mystery is gone.

In any case I think I'm just going to go make a game myself not even EQ related. I wanted to play P99 again with better classic mechanics but staff isn't interested in having a conversation. Just because modern games suck doesn't mean I can't make a game I personally enjoy and making it based on EQ in any sense would just be limiting.

I hope in the end P99 is open sourced because I think it's pretty obvious this won't last another 10 years. Not after the way Green played out and not when considering the legal position of P99. I'd hate to see classic EQ disappear along with the player base that will inevitably dwindle. If Rogean and Nilbog disappeared tomorrow what would happen to P99? What if they're served with a court order due to change in ownership of the IP holder? I guarantee you they won't be open sourcing anything if that happens and overnight everything will be gone.

I'm pretty doubtful there is anyone else in the world who has full access to everything needed to recreate it even considering some devs likely have large pieces. Maybe I'm wrong and things are more secure or others have all the keys but if there are 2 people holding the keys to put together the project it's pretty much guaranteed it's fucked.

Clock is ticking on Daybreak in my opinion. Enad Global 7 buys Daybreak a little under a year ago. That shit isn't going to stop. EverQuest is a powerful brand and it may eventually end up with an owner who simply tells their lawyer this little project needs to stop and then poof. Bye bye EVERYTHING that has been worked on here by everyone. P99 if it continues to improve and grow, which I don't really think it will by a large degree due to limitations on the project, will become a victim of its' own success once it is noticed by the IP holder. If it doesn't continue to improve and grow, which is likely given the stale nature of a cyclical "Green" launch with boxed in parameters due to client limitations which seems to be the case, will simply fade into irrelevance and the motivation will disappear for those involved in making improvements.

If it was open sourced before then though? Yeah, it will never die...

I'm a realist what can I say. Whatever. I think it's a bad idea to wait for the that letter or the boredom of the players to kill it either way and then there is no future for people wanting to spin up a private server for nostalgia.

If a new IP holder pulls the plug, all they gotta do is find hosting outside of the US/EU, and they're good. Besides, the new IP holder is gonna be happy with all the player data collected over the years.

Dollars to doughnuts that "anticheat" file that your antivirus flags does more than watch client software for cheats.

"oh p99 wouldn't do that, they are benevolent overlords"

In this era of humanity, if you can collect data on others, you absolutely 100% do so.

How many times have you jacked off to this post? If you say fewer than 3 I'm gonna need to see your source code.

Click ‘home’ at the top of this page and then ‘eq emulator website’ on the left panel.

Reeee my ping/FTE chances!

Look out he's got a gun

The hard part of P99 (and eqemu in general) isn't the source (although some of the game mechanic tweaks are hard) but rather it's the database, and getting all the data right.

As an exercise, go and set up your own server using stock Eqemu and a ProjectEQ database dump, and try making changes. Revamp a zone. I did this with Splitpaw and GeorgeS's tools. It ain't easy. In fact it's absolutely frustrating at times.

And now imagine dozens of people crawling all over that code trying to make tweaks and changes and breaking everyone else. Because even big software houses find it incredibly hard to get automated testing working on this stuff, and EQEmu was absolutely not designed with testability in mind, lol.

Sometimes it really is a case of less is more.

That's not how open source works. The person in charge of the code can approve or deny someone's submission (pull request). It's not as if it's 100 people tweaking things whenever they feel like it.

Now, open source would be a good idea because p99 seems awfully slow and quiet about their updates these days especially compared to other servers. It would also be a shame if the leads stopped caring about the server and no one else could start a new one.

devs stopped caring about the server since the "rooted dragons incident"