Shin's Walk Through The Hidden Forest

[TheBloodmoon]

I gotta say, you are on the right track here. I think involving a more elaborate story line as well as supplemental quests to aid in the story development would give this server an appeal to those who enjoy the more immersive feel to the game. A progressive quest with a back story is just plain fun.

Honestly, every classic game has the same idea. You start with a beginning of the story, fight through the story, overcoming evil, until you confront your final challenge. Your journey along the way has been to improve your ability to face that challenge. The story along the way provides the mystery and suspense. Only with Everquest, you're never finished, and are forever questing to face and overcome extreme evil and challenges.

Seriously, this could really set this server apart. There should be a more clear, involved storyline for this server, and it would be fun for the developers, as well as the players to have.

[Lillu]

shortly: I'm all in for this.

frankly, I think I already mentioned this to a few players on the server, that I myself really miss the background story, and even more the "roleplaying" part of the game. so yes, this is always been on my todo list.. and honestly, for a server dev, this would be really fun to do, actually this is it why I'm doing this, to create an amazing fantasy world, based on EverQuest..

but things arent this easy, and I'll try to clear out some point from our view, and will finally ask for your help..

so, atm, we have a crew of 3 GMs working on the server. all of us has family and suchs, so it's not easy to find the time to work daily on the server. but as you all hopfully see, we are doing our best.

Striat is doing insane lots of work in the background with custom coding, fixes, etc..
I basically do ingame support/server maintenance and sadly item/quest fixes (still) all the time. besides I'm preparing the server for rev update and suchs. for that and for general server maintenance, I have to read emu forum daily, test bugs, post questions and so on.. the list never ends. there is insane lots of "invisible" work with a server from a player point of view.
Tyler is doing the visible work atm, e.g. new zones as ST..and he's doing his best, I can tell that, but his time is limited too. and he has to often rush things which results in bugs/incompletness as you just saw in ST. feeling the push from player side to have new content can be very stressful if you want to keep everyone happy, and keep or even extend your player base. lots of aspects we have to discuss deciding on what we will work on, and what has priority or whatnot.

so, all in all, I could make an even longer post, but my english sucks and I don't want to make any of you feel like we are not loving what we are doing or if there is any problem at all.. I think I can promis that one day it will all happen, and we are all open for good suggestions.. it just can't happen in a few days or even weeks, not with 3 ppl working on a custom server (I regret not to start a legit server but then again, it wouldn't be anything like what I want and planned for the long term..).

conclusion: it will happen! sooner or later.. what you guys can do is keep posting ideas, bugs, etc, and contribute your server in any way. this even could be writing quests stories etc. hell my english is so bad I'm struggling with quest writings, and I'm serious about it lol.. so feel free to make complet quest ideas, including NPC speach, item design, anything! it would be a great help and would be really appreciated.

as a final word, I would like to give some examples, what players can do and actually did to help this server become what it is now:
We have players
- supporting us with feedback on a daily basis
- posting guides about ingame content for new players
- helping other new players ingame
- testing game content
- giving ideas for new content
- being patiente with us :p
- offering their help for anything that we need
- contributing to the server to share the costs
- generally being nice and helpful on the server
and so on..
Honestly, this is offtopic now, but I'm proud of your community. Thank you guys.

p.s. Shin, you have some very nice idea and you definately has the ability to write quest/story texts. if you have some spare time, send me some complet text I could put ingame. once again, we need a writer who can send me complet quest texts. or I start to implement quests in hungarian language but you don't want to see that :p

[Koeril]

The most mainstream recent MMO I have played was Lord of the Rings Online. It was the first one I've played where the game was written completely around the story (in this case, of Middle Earth) and it was like a breath of fresh air! The game naturally progressed you as the hero of your own story and was wonderful.

I too am very interested in something like this. It would bring a flavor that would make our server unique and I am willing to help in any way I can.

I am a writer by nature and enjoy writing, however I severely lack in imagination - something that has plagued me all my life, unfortunately. If anyone can come up with even a single idea of a quest to give me something to go on, I would happily write up a quest dialogue. I'll also continue writing my quest guides - aiming for 2 everday on non-busy days. Lastly, unless it is late evening (after 4pm EST), I'm usually bored grinding leezards for tailoring or whatever (which honestly really kinda sucks) so if you need anything specific done with testing, I would be more than happy to help.

[Lola]

+1 Koeril.

I did also play LoTR online and I really found exciting to follow the main quest via Books & chapters. It was a good way to discover lots of zones.

It can also be totally deconnected from granting access to Tier zones (we already have a good flag/key system) but could be involved in as a cycle event / protect an NpC spawing then roaming whatever the main story could be.

[Shin Noir]

@ GM Time/Issues of Lillu: I've done virtually everything, Lillu. From quest writing, to C++ source editing, to mob spawn management. My biggest concern is that I am still running a hackjob server with an insanely high population for what it was intended (VZ/TZ 25x), and it honestly needs a lot of work. But I'm willing to help you guys out if you want me.

@ Quest Writers/Roleplay: My favorite part is imagination. I can create anything for you if you set the guide lines on what you want. And the part I usually don't enjoy is the quest writing, because well, it's a little more time consuming and not as rewarding as just imagining the big picture. But that's awesome you guys are willing to help, give me some time to sit down and I'll establish a slew of quest ideas you can write the details on.

If Lillu gives me the thumbs up, I can make her life really easy to implementing the new fixes, it would more or become a "submission & review" type thing, review quest/code instead of writing it from scratch, and fix it to your liking.

But like I said before, I'm still new to the server, well I guess I can't say that so well anymore, but i've only been here 5 days, so I still have a lot to learn about what is being designed, and I dinged 70 yesterday. I am getting the general idea however, and as you see paying attention to every little detail I see that doesn't seem to "flow". Hehe.

[Lillu]

@ Quest Writers/Roleplay: My favorite part is imagination. I can create anything for you if you set the guide lines on what you want. And the part I usually don't enjoy is the quest writing, because well, it's a little more time consuming and not as rewarding as just imagining the big picture. But that's awesome you guys are willing to help, give me some time to sit down and I'll establish a slew of quest ideas you can write the details on.

My favorite part is also the imagination. at least this you can hopefully see in the starting city and npc design.. but english isn't my mother language so I'm strugling with quest writings. Jeido is helping me all the time fixing grammatical and other typo issues before I release a quest. :p time is another issue too, but that I already covered in my prev post.
if you can come up with nice quest ideas and sorties, Koeril (already offered his help) and others will surely help us make it a complet quest.

If Lillu gives me the thumbs up, I can make her life really easy to implementing the new fixes, it would more or become a "submission & review" type thing, review quest/code instead of writing it from scratch, and fix it to your liking.

Koeril doing an amazing job posting walkthrough and complet quest texts at the quest area. if you think you could improve any of those, just send me a pm and I'll send you the perl file for editing. so all in all, thumbs up!

[Lillu]

I think a "Road Map of Progress Through the Hidden Forest" would be handy.

Actually, thinking about this, if you made it where when you hail each of the custom NPC teleporters, they kind of TEASE you about content they will unlock. E.g.:

I'm a level 1, and I /say Hail, Trin (level 30-55) : I am able to teleport you to The Ruins of Old Guk, The City of Mist, and Karnor's Castle. These areas are much harder than you may recall, so a barrier stops me from allowing you to visit these realms until you are higher.

reword as needed, but giving a hint like that helps show what is to come when you level up. I didn't realized Western Wastes was a higher end zone until I finally figured out how to visit it (By the way, you need to properly do the "planar lock" for it, I visited it at around lvl 55ish I think.

westwates, toveeshan, cobaltscar, sirens, don't work on old zone teleporter, but necropolis does, so I used necropolis and just turned out to get to WW and bypass the level requirement system.

very nice idea about the porters. I keep working on details since I think it's all about the details! well as my time permits.

about the custom zone teleporter. she has a list where you can port here. the list will change if there is any request for extension or if we customize a zone from the list.
for the rest, we have custom zone porters or nothing at all. for a reason. I want ppl to run and look around in this beautiful world, not just getting insta ported to wherever they want to go.

[Lillu]

A new quest NPC inside Paludal Caverns: This NPC is like a scientist, perhaps more of an enchanter of sorts, who is very curious about the mutations within the paludal caverns that have fruited the hostile fungus and mold creatures. He is especially curious why the creatures are able to weild the weapons of various classes. He asks you to collect 5 prestine samples of their mutations, and if you do so he will help you. This is actually part of a chain of quests, but for now the reward is simple enough. A reward of a 25hp/etc neck item (or perhaps a 50hp in par with other slots) and has a+ disease resist of noteworthyness, and when you complete hints that inside the City of Mist one of his friends is investigating the City of Mist and it's paranormal activity.

This continues onward, the scientist in CoM rewards with perhaps another upgrade of sorts, perhaps a +50/75 hp neck item with bonus resistance to poison, and also tells you how Nagafan's Lair contains strange spiders that have adapted to resist fire, and how another scientist is interesting in that.

Eventually, with all these upgrades, and assuming you utilize the neck as a non-click slot, make some class specific modifications to the neck to aid each class a little in their ways.

How that's done? Well, consider the balancing suggestions I suppose.

very nice idea, sounds like or first additional quest provided by players! anyone keen to write this down and make a complet plan with details as NPC names, complet dialogues, etc?

[Topsy]

Reallylike the idea of upgading quest items from the different xp zones. To be honest when i leveled up my enchanter I skipped most of the quests because i knew the items wouldn't be worth much once i got to 70. Having progressive quests like the charm quest would be quite beneficial.

[Shin Noir]

When you're in sebilis, at the mushrooms, right by that first "platform" deck area with 2 mushrooms on it, there is a spot a mushroom spawns behind it. That spot spawns 2 mushrooms on the exact same spot. I'm guessing that's not intended.