A tale of Green's opening and a request

[AenorVZ]

I'm looking for people to help me test out some PvP mechanics. Please send me a friend add at AenorVZ#0037 on Discord if you'd be interested in helping out. I had a thread for free banded on Day 1 on Green. Here's the story of how it took me until Day 3.

Prior to the launch of Green there was a lot of theory questing on the forums about what the best opening leveling strategy was. I was also recruited by the leader of Kingdom who told me he liked my concept of trying to level up a master smith to make banded at cost on Day 1 of a brand new server.

But there were a lot of haters. Some accused me of running a scheme to try to get others to pay for my blacksmithing skill ups so I could corner the market and get rich in game (lol). In retrospect, the haters were idiots. I knew I could make hundreds of plat within 24 hours of Green launch, and I did. I had the cash to master blacksmithing on Day 1 but didn't do it until Day 3 because my focus shifted.

On the Green Achievements page, Coalena was the first level 10 on the server a full five hours ahead of Leknaat, the second level 10 server wide announcement. Coalena was not a main. This was a mage that was specifically created to assist me with farming plat for Day 1 banded. But a funny thing happened. I tested my opening strategies on Green beta and almost all of the quests I planned to use got nerfed. Some quests that were live in beta were nerfed and useless as people logged into Green on launch day.

https://www.project1999.com/achievements.php

The devs appeared to be tracking what Coalena and I (Kaneh) were doing and in some cases live nerfing my strats. Galach came by and waved. But they didn't nerf everything. The plat and the levels started rolling in and we realized we were way out ahead of the rest of the server. I shifted into a support role of Coalena and paused my own leveling to make a trip to Erudin to pick up spells. Using the plat for spells delayed getting started on blacksmithing.

For launch, the devs doubled the spawn rate so that mobs wouldn't be too hard to come by with the entire server population crammed into a few zones. Another unannounced nerf severely inhibited my plans for getting the mages to level 16. Within minutes of Coalena's server-wide level 10 announcement, people started complaining in OOC that the spawn rate of mobs had been nerfed. Apparently the devs created a script so that as soon as the first player dinged level 10, the accelerated spawn rate would be removed and normal spawn rates would return.

We easily got to 12 and got our new pets but this changed our plans. Our easy path to 16 was taken away and we had to start making new plans on the fly. We decided to try Slaythe in Misty Thicket, a level 20 mob you can infinitely spawn if you charm the quest NPC. I didn't get a chance to test Slaythe in beta so I don't know if the exp was specifically nerfed for Green launch or if it was always that bad.

Unfortunately we stuck with it for too long and soon other players in standard leveling zones were flying past us. Meanwhile I was dealing with multiple distractions. The process of skilling up the master smith was under way and I was running around tagging Kingdom members as a temporary officer.

The smith reached master on Day 3 and I started doing combines. Nobody other than Coalena and Seloer contributed to the skill ups. To this day I have never accepted payment or made any profit on Green from smithing. Any plat that has been donated has gone into the pool Silveron has for making banded for the next new player that asks.

Anyway, with Green approaching its end-stage state, I'm still hopeful that Rogean and Nilbog's plans for a teams PvP server will happen. To let them know that the player base is still interested in such a server I'd like to run a PvP event simulating the opening of a new teams PvP server. There's some prep work that needs to be done and if you would be willing to help out, please contact me at AenorVZ#0037 on Discord.