User:Woldaff/Something Awful Post

This is a transcript from the post created by Wiz and posted on the Something Awful forums. It is recorded here for use as a template:

What's this all about?

Shards of Dalaya is a total conversion emulated server for ye good olde EverQuest 1. It's the most successful EQ1 emulated server, having been running for close to five years and sporting a playerbase of several thousand active accounts, reaching upwards of 300 players online every night. We've taken EverQuest, spun it around, and created something of a hybrid between the classic game and something new of our own. We've done our best to eliminate the real hassles and boredom of the original game, without taking away the danger and challenge. Poopsocking is there, but downtime is significantly reduced, and all classes can solo, albiet with varying efficency. Raids are there, but we've slimmed them down to 18 players, to make everyone absolutely vital to the raid instead of just another cog in a huge raiding machine. Dungeons are there, full with nice loot and frogloks. We have ~110 zones with some 5000+ NPCs and 10000+ items, all created by our own developers. Nothing has been directly copied from the original game, it's essentially an entirely new game in the EQ client.

Stuff for the Hardcore

- An established high level population and raiding game that is reasonably easy to get into, or even to form your own guild in. - Dozens of zones and hundreds of mobs of varying tiers, from your average giant gorilla to your stereotypical giant elemental gods and dragons. - Hundreds of hours worth of AAs to grind, heavily customized to be more useful for classes that got a bad draw in the original game. - A stable and well-balanced game that will not take sudden gigantic leaps in content power to make people buy the latest expansion.

Things for the Casuals

- Unique Adventuring Bands that allow you to keep gaining experience at the same rate as your friends, regardless of the difference in amount of hours you can play. - Treasure hunting, powerful tradeskills, high end dungeons and other casual content as an actual rival to raiding, allowing you to progress even if dragon killing with seventeen buddies isn't your thing. - Hundreds of quests, including a massive main quest that spans from level 1 to 65, introduces you to the lore of the world, and gives you a number of irreplacable rewards. - Experience debt puts a limit on how much time bad luck can cost you. - Groups are promoted via large experience bonuses, and powerlevelling is heavily penalized via experience penalties, encouraging players to be social and generally making it easier to find a group to slay your gnolls with. - A healthy mid and low level population, that at any given time is made up by more than half the players online. - Starting cities that are still the centers of player activity, rather than being deserted as in the original game post-Velious.

Other neat things

- An ongoing, dynamic storyline that you are able to participate in and affect. The game world is in the midst of a war, and zones can be gained and lost, and ultimately lead to victory or defeat, depending on how dedicated players are. Either way, future content will be heavily affected. - A dedicated developer staff that do regular patches and additions of new content.

If you're looking for a slightly harder, better balanced and more innovative monster slaying MMOG that just happens to cost absolutely nothing to play, feel free to check us out at http://www.shardsofdalaya.com. If you have any questions, post them in this thread, and I'll do my best to answer them.