Challenging Server (Like the beginnings of DDO)

[OohSaucy]

I wonder how many people would play a challenging server with a new ruleset. I know I would jump right on it and have a blast. Here's what I'm thinking:

- Number one thing is absolutely NO SHIP BUFFS. These clearly made DDO too easy.

- Next is an experience point loss on death of 1%. This would make people play smarter and improve their game, as well as create a real pain to death.

- Limit the number of supplies on vendors. Maybe a very small stack of some random items depending on the vendor every few hours, just to make it so consumables aren't unlimited but to still allow gold to have a value.

What other things could make a fun, challenging server? How many of you would play it? Is this in the realm of possibilities with enough people interested? It wouldn't take much for Turbine to make it happen.

Bring it on, I'm game!

[General_Gronker]

- Number one thing is absolutely NO SHIP BUFFS. These clearly made DDO too easy.

No, they didn't.

- Next is an experience point loss on death of 1%. This would make people play smarter and improve their game, as well as create a real pain to death.

Meh, I thought you wanted something challenging. 1% XP loss isn't worth coding. No, if you're dead, you're dead until someone casts reincarnate, raise dead, resurrection, or true resurrection on you, and that includes after the module ends. No coming back to life at a tavern spirit binder. And if it's raise dead or resurrection, you come back missing a level or -2 Con if you were 1st level. I mean, you want something challenging, right?

- Limit the number of supplies on vendors. Maybe a very small stack of some random items depending on the vendor every few hours, just to make it so consumables aren't unlimited but to still allow gold to have a value.

Vendors should have supplies available as per the rules for towns and cities in the mothergame.

It wouldn't take much for Turbine to make it happen.

That's baseless speculation on your part. Baseless speculation on my part says yeah, it would, in fact, take much to make it happen. Coding, hardware, time away from actual monetized development, etc. All for what would be little reward.

But I'd like to see some suggestions to actually make it challenging, as opposed to the minor little things you proposed, which would not make it challenging at all.

Personally, I'd apply the Massive Damage Threshold rule from the mothergame. For those unfamiliar:

Massive Damage
If you ever sustain a single attack deals 50 points of damage or more and it doesn’t kill you outright, you must make a DC 15 Fortitude save. If this saving throw fails, you die regardless of your current hit points. If you take 50 points of damage or more from multiple attacks, no one of which dealt 50 or more points of damage itself, the massive damage rule does not apply.

I'd also remove shrines. You want to rest in the dungeon? You clear a space out, you set a watch, some people sleep (but not in heavy armor!). Get interrupted? That's life as an adventurer.

[Bloodskittle]

I'd also remove shrines. You want to rest in the dungeon? You clear a space out, you set a watch, some people sleep (but not in heavy armor!). Get interrupted? That's life as an adventurer.

What I would prefer to the OP's challenge server is just another difficulty, everything is a champion, and this rule as quoted applies ^, no need to do silly things like make a whole new server.
If everything were a champ people would consider rooms more carefully, weighing up which enemies to take out first (true seeing, fort bypass type champs would be high priority). As a person who plays EE regularly the one thing that kills me the most is champs, by far it is champs.
I'm not complaining, I like champions they make it harder to Zerg and make the quest more challenging, so an entire difficulty based around them lets call it "Mythic" seeing as that's the word of the day at Turbine right now, where all quests are level 32 and all (or the majority say 80%) of mobs are champions. On Mythic you would be given a large increase to the drop chance of named loot and rare drops. You would not be given additional EXP you would not break or build bravery. You would be given the equivalent base experience of Elite. Additionally certain new items could be made that drop exclusively on mythic, not OP damage items or anything that necessarily added to power creep just handy gizmos like a Ddoor clicky once per rest, A trinket that stopped you from moving or doing damage but also stopped you from taking damage, but did not make you helpless, handy for situations where your only hope is to wait for your teammates. these are just examples the items are not for discussion they are just ideas of what type of thing could be added as incentive.

[Flavilandile]

Challenges :

- no Bravery Bonus, Underlevel Bonus ( the lower you are below the quest level the more XP you get by completing it ). Bravery Bonus is NOT being brave.
- Rest Shrines Usable only once.
- No Dungeon Scaling, Dungeons are scaled to be challenging on normal for a party of 4 people of the relevant level.
If you want to solo them, have fun.


You'll get DDO is too hard threads pretty fast with the above.

In the begining of DDO you could die in Euphonia's Challenges...
And with that death it was obvious that your character was not going to go far, as those challenges were class specific. So if you died in your class challenge you were doing something wrong.

Nowadays, you get a Get out of Jail Free with the Death Protection Celimas gives you in The Grotto... and then you just steamroll the revamped quests on Korthos ( the same quests in the Lower Harbor were more difficult ).

[dunklezhan]

You know what, in a utopia where anything like this was remotely feasible for Turbine, I would totally love to have this sort of option.

Better yet, whilst we're living in fantasyland, I'd like the ability to run a max 6 or 12 player server of my very own with my PC as the host, complete with options to activate/deactivate content packs or certain key game versions, all tied into my and my guests real game account and the DDO Store (so that even if a content pack is enabled, anyone I invite can still only play with stuff they've got access to anyway). Auction House tied into all the other 'private server' auction houses. Like one big hive.

Why? Because lag, roleplaying, and [del pet hate as applicable] noobs/elitists/newbs/casuals/morons/bullies/harrassment and because it would be SO easy to monetize, which keeps the game going longer.

In fact, the more I think about it, it would be an awesome model for DDO2. Maintain a persistent MMO world/worlds, but allow paying customers to host mini-persistent worlds all still tied back to the same store and subscription processes. And while you're at it, a UGC system like NWO, which although it is full of ****, is still surprsingly easy to find good stuff.

But that's a fantasy. Like the idea of a hardcore server, or a basic DDO server, or anything like that. Its a wondrous, amazing fantasy that I'd love to see... but its a fantasy.


EDIT - speaking of distributed models, I wonder what would happen to lag in general if whenever your party went to an instance, the game checked for optimal connection speed for the group by hosting that instance on one of the player's PCs vs hosting it on the server, and only used the server when it was definitely better? For sure it would increase load times while all the checks and handoffs happened... but would it help overall I wonder? I guess it depends on how much grunt and storage you really need to run a DDO dungeon instance (I mean, could a PC ever be good enough?). I think a half decent home PC with a solid connection could handle it, but I have no way to know that for sure. And Macs are beyond my experience except that I have always given up in frustration 30 seconds after trying to use one for anything (I'm nearly positive I don't hate macs. I just can't work out how to use them!).

[Rofaust]

Way ahead of you brother-man

https://www.ddo.com/forums/showthrea...-based-servers

[SirValentine]

I'd also remove shrines. You want to rest in the dungeon? You clear a space out, you set a watch, some people sleep (but not in heavy armor!). Get interrupted? That's life as an adventurer.

And it should take 8 hours to rest, right? Don't forget that part.