I have recently begun to play shaiya's pservers again and I must say the server admins of today are a joke, it really honestly seems every last one of you is out to make a quick buck(on a borderline legality, but I won't get into that), and the server be damned.
The biggest issues I've noticed with these pservers;
1) Complete lack of balance, perhaps before you start adding stats to armor, weapons etc you should think about how the game mechanics work. Every server I've tried so far even the "Uber" geared full rec statted guard not to mention his 4k stat points not from lapis and 2000+ damage absorbtion is still dieing in a matter of 5-6 hits from a fighter. You've added so many stat points to gear that it really doesn't matter what you spend your initial ~700 stat points on. I could go on and on and on about all the balance issues I've seen but that should be enough to get you thinking about it, hopefully.
2) Your loot tables, just sad, halfassed, rushed, no thought into it. I've looked at the editor for this and it wouldn't be all that difficult to make well thought out tables and taking out the absolute trash items that have no use in your game. If you don't have the lv40 sets in your game why on earth do you have the enchant items for the lv40 sets drop, because you're lazy and you rushed it.
3) Quests, if you're a 200, 300, 500, 1500x exp server why didn't you remove all the quests that are there pretty much just to give you experience. You have an entire game world at your disposal use it.
4) Skills, now not all of you have this problem but stop just randomly changing #s if you're not gonna take the time to think of how it will affect the gameplay.
5) Gear, outside of the fact that you have completely fucked any kind of balance by the ridiculous # of stat points any given piece of gear gives, every piece is EXACTLY the same, remember on the OS where you could get 4 of the same piece of i.e. dread gear and it would have 4 different sets of stats(not orange stats I mean the actual stats of the item).
6) Donations, while this is a borderline legal thing to do how about you DON'T DO WHAT AERIA DID TO RUIN THEIR GAME IN THE FIRST PLACE. Stop selling your ridiculously overpowered uber gear sets. If you want a balanced server where donators don't just wtf shitstomp everyone they come across STOP SELLING GEAR, oh you try to justify it by saying oh it all drops in game blah blah blah. Yes while some idiots with some disposable income are going to spend 200 dollars so they can stomp everybody, hate to break it to your but most are not gonna spend that kind of money on a game that probably won't be there with any sort of playerbase in a few months because you sold gear to people and they proceded to 1 shot everyone that tried to spend the months and months of grinding up gear(which you have put on abysmally low drop rates in order to encourage the instant gratification kiddies to spend those $$$) to be able to compete with these players and got sick of your game and left. Here's a suggestion how about you try sticking to cosmetic items for your donation items, i.e. Rare Mounts, appearance change scrolls, not sure how exactly to phrase this but reskin(?) sets of gear for a different appearance don't change the stats just the appearance, don't give them the gear just change the appearance of the gear they already have, and so on and so forth be creative. Make your donation items cheap, $2-3 dollars for the simpler ones, maybe $15-20 for the more involved ones. People will donate to help keep your server running if it's a game they enjoy, meanwhile selling gear for cash will inevitably run off your players and kill your game.
7) Assassins and Rangers most all of these servers there is a very very low population of assassins and rangers, while obviously not the most powerful hero, it's also a game mechanic issue which you've made worse with your gears. Yes everyone wants their sonic lv2, but have you ever considered how this affects this class. You've totally negated one of their buffs when everyone is running around in sonic 2s and you've made it impossible for them to actually hit anyone who runs straight away from them. Now if only they could actually use their buff to be faster than other people... since people would probably throw a hissy fit if you didn't have sonic 2's in your game, balanced be damned etc. My suggested fix is to increase the range on the assassins skills or weapon not entirely sure if increasing the weapon range would make their skills actually hit or not but as it stands unless you can get a good distance in front of whoever you're chasing after which even you do if it's anything but a priest/oracle they're just gonna kite you around until their skills are off cd and force you to stop chasing since you'll die if they keep kiting and it's impossible to actually hit them if they're smart enough. And to top it off because of a dumb mechanic lets say you hit your skill too soon and you weren't quite in range and you get an insufficient range message well now you've lost all hope of catching up and may as well stealth and walk away.
8) Things to Consider You are not a game company. You should be doing this to improve upon the original, not make money. A balanced game will get you a larger playerbase and keep them around longer. Try alpha and beta testing your ideas before implementing them and then make changes as needed before the final release.
And to the person who is inevitably going to say well why don't you do it better, while I have a very good head for numbers, I do not have sufficient knowledge of SQL and how to setup and run a server, if you are interested in giving me then rundown on it and teaching me then I will make you the most balanced pserver out there. Or if you wanna setup the server and I'll give you the numbers and you can make the most balanced pserver out there.
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