I'm leaning towards damage scaling rather than super fast leveling. Still fast but not like one kill gets you a level fast. This retains the enjoyment of PvE for longer while still making PvP viable. Going back to my original idea of a 1% penalty/bonus per level difference. A level 10 hits a level 50 for 30 damage it becomes 30 + 40% = 42. A level 50 hits a level 10 for 100 damage it becomes 100 - 40% = 60. I think the sweet spot is actually 1.5%. In this way a level 10 and 50 can actually fight each other. The higher level still has a big advantage but it fades quickly especially in group fights. Any resist, damage mitigation, etc from level is turned off for PvP so your resist checks are purely gear based.
The default EQEmu code doesn't actually support coin loot. It has a weird half assed loot system but what it can do is allow you to assign an item for players to drop when killed. In this way it allows you to loot coin. I could fix that to just loot coin but I like this mechanic.
I'm thinking of making players drop a Joker card which is turned in for rewards like items including legacy items. They could also just randomly drop gear and another idea I have is we can randomly select a piece of the gear they are wearing and just duplicate it as a drop. In this way the player doesn't lose the item but you still get nice rewards for kills. This allows a balance mechanism as well where lets say one guild is dominating the server and raids if you kill their members they have a chance of dropping their raid gear if they're wearing it. This brings back the old Rallos item bagging strats in a softer but relevant way.
I want to have a live beta on eqemulator loginserver by next weekend. Once these issues are worked out it will be ready for beta. Really I just need to get this beta going and have people test some variations. I'm thinking I'll just make everyone a guide at login and give them a command set that makes testing easy.
https://pvpeq.com/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=3