EZ Server

Thank you Basher for your post, thank you EZ players for your grace. I not only feel obligated to move this server forward, but to preserve the vision that is EZ with everyone's help. We won't be able to do this without everyone's help, so we all definitely appreciate it.

If anyone has any questions or concerns please feel free to PM me.

Some things I would like to get taken care of right away.

• The ezserver.online domain is expiring in 14 days (23rd) and Basher will be working on getting that extended so the website stays up
• The changes that will need to be made from a content perspective will be getting organized by Hateborne, see http://ezserver.online/forums/index.php?topic=4197.msg53441;topicseen#new (http://ezserver.online/forums/index.php?topic=4197.msg53441;topicseen#new)
• The server itself will be undergoing some moves, but should remain minimally impacted from the perspective of players. We will need to take the current hardware that resides at Hunter's house and refit it from the tower server that it sits right now, to a rack-able server that will go into the new data-center that I look over.
• Crabthewall, the person who originally donated the hardware that EZ runs on today has graciously contacted us and has volunteered any help necessary to make sure the health of the server continues on. He has also volunteered to take care of the transition of the hardware from tower to rack server but we will need to raise funding for shipping, the rack chassis and the shipping back to our data-center.

With this in mind, we will end up running an EZ funding campaign that Basher has agreed and advised that we run to make sure we can make this happen sooner than later. This will include discounted EZ Credits, and I will have the funds process through my Paypal as directed by Basher.

Now, to distinguish the naysayers or those that think this is about money, it isn't. But unfortunately we are in a tight situation that requires us to get help from the community to make these things happen for server stability sooner than later. My goal is to stay as transparent as possible as to what we are doing with these funds.

In the meantime while we work on making this happen, we will work on getting funds for all that was mentioned above, and have enough for disaster recovery money in case of hardware failures and we will work on sending proceeds to Hunter's family in the Philippines in due time. I will be moving EZ Server over to my server hardware, where it will remain temporarily while we make these server changes happen. This will include having a fiber DC connection with 1Gbps Internet, I will most likely be setting up a smaller circuit just for EZ, but will still be plenty for our needs.

We will be covering the new rack chassis and the shipping costs so Hunter's dad does not have to pay anything. He has plenty of things to worry about right now and it'd be best if we can take care of it as much as we can.

Also given the past week of events, we want to make sure that Hunter's name lives on and that we give him the honorary treatment that he deserves. I was thinking that we have an NPC in Nexus that represents Hunter and has dialogue that will remind us of him constantly. All of us remember him for his classic trolling, comments in /ooc etc. If anyone has any creative ideas to do so, please share them.

To also honor his memory, I will be working on getting a Double-Loot event up here, I'm not sure on how soon or when. But I'm thinking possibly next weekend.

Requested Player Input:

• Since we have access to far more bandwidth in the data-center, how do we feel about lifting some of the things that were meant to save bandwidth? AFK check, visits to buba (Jail) etc.
• Ways to honor Hunter and his memory

Please post your thoughts and considerations.

Thank you.

~Akkadius

EDIT:

You can now donate using this link, I will update the in-game links but I will need to head to bed here shortly.

http://akkadius.com/akkadius/EZ_Rewards.html (http://akkadius.com/akkadius/EZ_Rewards.html)

Credits are 50% price. I will fulfill them when I have a moment. Everyone's help is truly appreciated, it will help us get things in motion much quicker.

Thanks!

EDIT2:
There has been wonderful support so far. I appreciate everyone's help for the cause. I will most likely be ending the funding campaign FRIDAY 5-14.

Tomorrow I will post more updates on where we're at with the server moves.

If we're going to test the limits of the bandwidth in the new data center....

• Remove mob limitations from all zones
• No longer despawn OOM if mobs are up - perhaps only active to pull if less than 50 mobs are up in the zone?
• Remove AFK check
• Up the drop rate of tokens HOH
• Remove or revamp Ancient Willowwisp

Rename soulbinders to something in memory of Hunter.  Or some other NPC in nexus that is interacted with or seen frequently. 

I think there should be a Hunter NPC somewhere that might give you some minor goodness, but more often kills you and shouts Enjoy!

Remove jail from HoH, abyss, Anguish, Qvic all in private instances. i don't have a quite, but in the past, the idea was pulling was limited by your gear. Hoh sux with jail on. with 4m hp, why am i limited to tiny pulls, that force me to clear the zone in about an hour?
Jail in general was a response to the 2 weeks of dbl loot last December, with 500+ population. after dbl loot was turned off, there was no Lag problems ( and that is on what a 10/2 connection ...) moving to even a 10/10 connection there would/should be no lag.  

Here are my ideas for Jail, private instances = no pull limit for the jail. Public still yes - Double loot probably be good if both pub and private had pull limits with jail just because everyone logs on an incredibly amount of useless characters during dbl loot - It's going to lag regardless but might as well try to minimize it so people can actually play.

I like the idea of Hunter npc just randomly DTing somebody every X minutes or something, that'd be great.

its darn funny that you said that. I can dig up the emails if needed, but I suggested to Hunter that T9 should have a random "trap' that would either give you a MGB super buff, or wipe you. it evolved into a player decision in which you would have a choice, you ran over a "trap" like the ones in T7 and it would spawn a NPC you hail him and either get the super MGB or wipe you completely. Super buff that we came up with was like crab 5 or shammy epic buff 13, etc. and the wipe be a dot that would slowly but surely wipe you OUT!

Why couldn't this be converted into all zones and Hunter, his actual avatar be the NPC and he asks you to make your choice. Clearly you wouldn't get crab 5 in T2, but something similar.

I do not know the mechanics of the T7 zone trap (the bat traps) but it was an idea that I bounced off him and it seemed to amuse him :)

on the other front

1. Double loot in honor of Hunter accomplishes 2 things. since it was thrown out I will go the extra step and call it a wake of sorts. where we all log in and remember him, talk about him, tell his jokes, think about his work, think about his family and most of all enjoy the game he created here. secondly it would serve as a great stress test to give akk a good idea of what our server needs.

2. remove the jail thing, please dear plane of gods!

3. the HOH thing. I would suggest converting HOHb into an upgraded token farming zone. Harder mobs for more reward. If HOH has a 3% drop rate on tokens, HOHb would have a 9%. Mobs would mimic T7 in hps/attack, etc. Higher risk, higher reward.

4. I would not agree with changing T6, lifting the 50 mob pull limit would accomplish this goal. T6 is a cash cow and xp cow. If you really want to help that situation, make a new cash cow zone and a new pofire type xp zone for high end players (T7+ geared). xp zone drops no cash/loot, cash cow drops plat/crafter's guild merchant items/materials, SLS's, magical blue diamonds, metals, etc, but no XP.

5. half off credits week, raise the cash we need through that. I would start that first, then do double loot. for instance people would have a chance to buy a 250% xp item for $125 and then use it while doing the massive farming for double loot. And/or make new toons with the newbie package and have double loot to gear them. Also if HOHb were implemented first would help as  well before a double loot.

6. reassure everyone that a % of this initial proceeds would go to Hunter's family, scaling up to a point where we have the cash to make this server run and the rest going to his family. like an initial 5% of each dollar going there, and 95% going to the server. Over time the first number goes up while the second down unless the need arrises that the server needs funds more.

just some thoughts :)

I think the idea of having a Hunter NPC is the best idea. Some way of remembering him in game, not that it will be hard to forget the Man that has given us this home, but just something to always have him in our heads. How about something to do with the Guild Hall? Like have some quotes from him on the walls, or a "Hunter" NPC that you could hail and get a story of EZ, something like that? I know custom zones like that a huge pita, but given the reason It would be worth every sec put into it.

Donating the money from credits to Hunters family I think its a perfect idea and something not a single person on the server would fight over.

The jail, I think we all understand why Hunter did it, but as said before in the other posts, if we are going to upgrade the server and the bandwith, please take it off in instances, I was messing around killing old world mobs the other day and got sent to jail in PoG..  Perfect reason why he was put in place but maybe not needed anymore with a server/net upgrade?

I think HoH is a bottleneck for a lot of us, Its not a hard place to farm tokens but just seems like its one of them time sinks. Maybe change it where if you have say t5 Flagged HoHB is avil for token farming? Maybe a once in a blue moon charm drop? Something like that?

All and All I think the future is bright for EZ, While We should never forget the hard work from Hunter and Others, I think its safe to say Hunter would want us to move forward and grind, grind, and, grind some more.


*forgot* :P

If we are going to talk about things that could be changed from upgrading, Maybe think about the weapon delays? Isnt it like 40 for everyone right now? I would love to see some of these chars swing at full speed lol. Just a idea tho.

I always liked how hunter would come in and send some crazy message over the chat line , it was always something funny that made you go what the heck lol ,, I think a npc that would do something like that would be great , as for changing things I will leave that up to the people that knows how to do that kinda of stuff , thank yall for keeping the sever going and the things that everyone does behind the Scenes , if it wasn't for the ez sever I would have never came back to eq , this is just my two cents , I hate this It really make me so sad ,

Oh, we are more than ready to help out, all we've been waiting on is a way to do it!

Thank you Akk, Hate, and Bash for your help and dedication in these sad times, and i'm hoping, nay expecting, you guys to be surprised at what the playerbase is willing to step up and do, if only on the financial side of things.

And i don't care if we're on the best network in internet history, NEVER get rid of Bubba! ;)

Change buff bot to hunter, bring back the random kill.

lol yes!

and give him a chance to buff the current high tier buffs!

This is awesome communication Akka and I for one am pleased with what I am seeing. There are a lot of good ideas floating around and it looks like they are all being looked at.

The donations I think is a great idea, I would much rather see no cost to admins and gms as costs would be burdensome and EZ needs some EZ to ensure it stays around.

Sent from cell.

You have internet access in jail?

i dont think anything should be unlimited. Increase the cap in private zones. just because you can clear a entire zone in one pull doesn't mean you should.  farming sucks but, it is part of the game. increase it up to like 100. i would even do that in increments.



tweaking drop rates should be done small increments not double or triples.  i dont think anyone has quit over HoH tokens for example. increase the drop rate 20-30% and see how things go mixed with  higher mob pull rate. it will increase number total tokens per hour like 50%. please please please small tweaks. 


AFK check is just a good idea.  adjust it sure. get rid of it no.

i hope the new admins remember, people will always ask for more than they need. keep the server on a logical path with it's history in mind. lets not use this event to change the server to some other vision.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0315327/quotes?item=qt0480028


-Hate

I agree with leaving the AFK check, maybe it should be bumped up to a longer time, but it doesn't help anyone to have players AFK for days on end.

Regarding other items:

• Remove the jail, or up the limit significantly.  If I can handle the pull and am in a private instance, who cares?
• Remove leashing.  It sucks, it's no fun and is a drag, what else is there to say?
• Agree on drop rate changes in small increments, lets see what impact it has
• Remove the ancient wisp, it is annoying, even sitting at the keyboard, when it pops and you end up dying to it.  Macro'ers will write around it, it only hurts legit players

1. Because the private instance still pulls from the bandwidth of everyone else playing having a negative impact on those connections.
2. I agree
3. Yep
4. I would like to see it removed, however I would like to see the SLS put on a vender in the crafting guild for current market price.

We were CPU fine before December 2013. he only put in Jail because of the 2 weeks of dbl loot, and the 500+ population.

Remove the Bandwidth limitation ( moving from a residential to a commercial connection) will essentially remove all bottlenecks.

Might want to enable it during Dbl loots for a "rev limiter" effect, but there should be no need normal 300-500 population.

How about we try it off in private instances and see? if it is sucky laggy, just turn it back on, and no one gets to bitch. eliminate several problems all in one go.

This is why we care: https://forums.station.sony.com/eq/index.php?threads/changes-with-the-february-update-alternate-ability-grants-for-gold-members-and-ability-changes.207363/
Hunter has said time and time again that massive pulls cause huge CPU spikes. The post above has Sony saying the exact same thing.



There is a rule setting to allow it to fight X units more than it's aggro radius. We can look in to that.



LoL nah, we'll just triple drop rates to ruin the economy. :-)



That statement is actually not entirely true. It does hurt both sides. He and I got to watch a few bots get burned by it. It is already on the list of things to adjust.



This assumes that processing power is unlimited and we are never running low on it. While this game isn't super CPU intensive, numerous players pulling zones is still a server wide drag. (This is pretty much part of why double loot sucks so bad. Everyone playing at the maximum possible potential to reap the maximum rewards in the finite time frame.

That being said, potentially loosening it up may be in order. Going to wait based on a variety of things (info) that come down from Akkadius.


-Hate

How many mobs are in HOH? That should be the pull limit before getting sent to jail :P Or remove just pulling restrictions like such in zones like that. HOH token farming is already dreadful, I'd at least feel like I was making progress if I could just loot it all at once instead of running each corridor down and getting 1 token and the next 50 tokens being MCP

Latest EQEmulator code has some huge major performance fixes in it that will almost negate the issue of CPU when you pull zones. I've been in talks with Akkadius about assisting in getting those changes in without affecting anything major. It will also solve the issue of Perl-related zone crashes, again, without breaking anything or changing mechanics.

Once those changes are in, the server will almost be one hundred percent stable. PEQ rarely gets crashes with all my changes in.

Will going to the newer Rains client be possible any time soon?

it's got some game breaking bugs in it (augs/guilds don't work), but I don't see why not for those who want to use it.

I think what he means is will RoF become Ezserver's preferred client, will ez be moved over to that client

I don't know how the technical stuff works lol, but does the server have to be geared to RoF for us to use RoF and take advantage of things like click from inside a bag, bag in bag, etc?

I agree with removing jail/pull limit in private. If we start seeing a negative effect we can always go back to it. I've personally slowed my playing mainly b/c of the pull limit. If you're pulling a butt load of mobs in a zone chances are you're well past that zone and are only back tracking. For the sake of the higher ups they don't want to spend forever back tracking before getting back to progressing. For those who can't, we've all been there for the most part. AFK check, I don't see a problem one way or another unless we're seeing too much negative effect. Leashing...drop increases made this tolerable and makes for less crap to sort through. AW, I ignore it anyway so personally don't care.

It has to do far more with the server side implementations that had yet to be finished.

There were three main things left to make work for RoF from Server <-> Client, Guilds, Augmenting and the massive amount of item reworks to support all of the back-end slot translations that are required to occur in order to maintain cross-client compatibility but more-so how we already handle item instances all over the EQEmu code. This is has been getting worked on for several months.

I would not put your hopes up for RoF quite at this time, though it is a very nice client with a lot of benefits.

Is the temporary donation site working? I tried to click on the link and it brought up the page but nothing happens nor is there anything to click on. Just a black page and says Temporary Donation Site or something like that in white letters. Could be my internet connection or certain things getting blocked on a military/ship network.

Mixlor, there should be a button right below the huge letters that will bring you to Paypal.

Hopefully that helps.

I have to say just cause you can't kill the AWW, does not mean in anyway that nobody can! I actually love to see this mob pop.