Project 1999 - For Rogean: A Primer on Teams

I'm listening to the roundtable, and when the discussion turned to teams, it was clear that Rogean's familiarity with the various teams rulesets was limited. In no way do I feel that this lack of familiarity hurts a new server's chance for success. PvP on live was a success almost by accident. The original developers first created a game with engaging content that was worth fighting over once PvP was added. In the same way, by making such a faithful recreation of the original, Rogean and staff have already done the heavy lifting which makes an engaging teams environment on a new server possible.

One thing that concerned me from the chat was when Sirken explained cross teaming to Rogean and his initial reaction was negative. I'd like to give a more in-depth historical analysis of each classic EQ PvP ruleset in hopes of helping the staff make a more informed decision about the final teams ruleset. I'll give my analysis of the various rulesets in order of their release.

Rallos Zek

Rules: FFA PvP within +/- 4 levels, single item and coin loot

Drawbacks: Since there were no teams in the original EQ PvP ruleset, new players would log into a bloodbath and be subjected to griefing and corpse camping from the moment of character creation. Another issue that I found on Rallos Zek was that the narrow level range resulted in quickly out-leveling players that used to attack me, making them immune to any sort of payback.

The narrow PvP range also made out-of-range healing a much larger issue than it is on a server with a +/-8 level spread. The existence of item loot gave PvP potentially harsh consequences. This in turn eventually led to a PK vs. Anti-PK dynamic on the server. I was never particularly dedicated to Rallos, but in the time I did spend there I found that as soon as I killed another player, they waged a PR campaign to label me as a "PK" so that other "anti-PKs" would attack me on sight and decline to group with me. It was the strangest thing to me that, on what was supposed to be this hardcore PvP server, the act of attacking another player led to being immediately ostracized by the majority of the server's population.

Tallon Zek/Vallon Zek (Race War)

Rules: Four race-based teams, PvP within +/- 8 levels, originally coin and item loot (item loot was removed during the classic era)

Drawbacks: Cross-teaming. Later PvP rulesets such as Sullon Zek, Dark Age of Camelot and WoW would be based around hard-coded teams that prevented players from grouping and guilding outside their own team. On Tallon/Vallon, a player was restricted from attacking other players on their own race team, but was not prohibited from taking beneficial action (heals, buffs, ports) toward members of opposing teams. This created the phenomenon of "immortal healing," where a player would assist a pal from an opposing team in attacking a member of their own team.

This is the thing Rogean had an immediate negative reaction toward when it was described to him by Sirken. That negative reaction is why I am writing this post. Because, although on first blush this seems like a very exploitable game mechanic, the existence of soft-coded teams on Tallon Zek and Vallon Zek created more political options and intrigue than existed under any other ruleset.

I played on Vallon Zek as Aenor, a human druid from Surefall Glade, starting the day the server went online. In the early days, it was every team for itself and most guilds were team-purist. As the server aged, cross-team guilds began to emerge. These guilds were initially decried by the majority of the server but cross teaming eventually became more prevalent through the organic growth of the server.

On Vallon Zek, I led a cross-teaming alliance that established a good-vs-evil dynamic that was accepted server-wide. The history of how that came to be is described at this link, in journal entries by Bregolas (a bard alt of mine) that were posted by Luinelen of the allied guild Elven Royal Guard (below the journal of Lannyen, which was written by Luinelen):

http://z9.invisionfree.com/Mordred/i...0&#entry276156

Essentially, my guild Grey Companions and its allies defeated the shortie purist guild First Dwarven Brigade in direct guild warfare, then convinced them to accept a player-imposed dynamic in which the light races (comprised of the human, elf and shortie teams) would only attack members of the evil team on sight. Once this dynamic was accepted by FDB, it quickly became an accepted standard server-wide. The evil team remained almost entirely team-purist but among the other three teams, racial purism became an oddity.

This dynamic remained in place on Vallon Zek for years after I left Everquest and was only abandoned when the dominant light-race guild on the server, Defiant, concluded that it needed to allow darkies in its ranks due to the server's declining population. So again, while at first blush cross-teaming might seem negative, all of these political options would not have existed without it. Hard-coded teams essentially make a player's political decisions for them and remove any freedom of choice.

By way of contrast, Tallon Zek was dominated by the evil team since none of the light-race teams could form the sort of cooperative action that we took on Vallon. In the world of Vallon Zek, the forces of Light triumphed over the forces of Darkness because of the political options created by soft-coded teams.

Sullon Zek (Deity Teams)

Rules: Three hard-coded teams based on deity (divided into good, neutral and evil teams), no level limit for PvP, training allowed

Drawbacks: Many of the drawbacks of the Sullon Zek ruleset have already been addressed during the roundtable. There does not seem to be any interest among the staff in a server with no PvP level limit. And unlike Sullon Zek, which launched with Kunark already open and Iksar playable from day 1, the P99 staff has already stated that a new server would start with the Classic era.

However, the principal drawback of Sullon Zek remains undeniable. As Sirken said during the roundtable, the evil team will always have the most members. On SZ on live, the server was dominated from Day One until the Zek merge by the evil team. The evil team had more population than the good and neutral teams combined, and cooperation between those two teams was rendered impossible by the hard-coded ruleset.

Essentially, Sullon Zek is one step away from WoW PvP, where politics are imposed on the server by the developers via the ruleset. Sullon Zek was the least popular of the three original PvP rulesets. Most will point to the absence of a level limit and the legality of forms of griefing such as training as the reason for this lack of popularity.

I will submit that most people who decided not to play on Sullon did so because they knew they had a choice between easy mode on the evil team or going neutral or good and having no chance at raid content. Creating a new server with hard coded teams would recreate the exact same problem that exists on Project 1999 Red today, where players have a choice of joining the single dominant guild or having no shot at raid content.

In summary, the Rallos ruleset is off the table because P99 has already tried FFA and Rogean is looking to dynamically expand the level range, not further limit it to +/- 4 levels. Meanwhile the staff's stated intentions to keep training illegal and retain some form of PvP level limit indicate that a Sullon-style ruleset will not be attempted without significant modification. The most important decision that the staff must make about a teams ruleset, therefore, is whether to have hard-coded WoW-style teams or use the most popular PvP ruleset in the history of Everquest, the soft-coded teams of Tallon and Vallon Zek.

Sullon Zek had only a fraction of the population of Rallos, which in turn had only a fraction of the population of the Race War servers. The Race War ruleset was the only PvP ruleset that was so popular they had to open a second server to meet the demand. The history of the two servers shows that there is no pre-determined outcome when you give players political options. On Tallon, the darkies won. On Vallon, the lighties won. Same ruleset, different outcomes. With hardcoded teams, the outcome is pre-determined and we all know it.