Guide Things You Should Not Do When Making A Server.

[Xanderॐ]

The following bulletins are things you should not do when making a server. They come from my experience as a player ( that is things that annoy me when i see them in a server ) and as an owner ( things that will make the players blast you ). The order in which they are presented here does not define any kind priority or importance factor. They are layed down as they come forth in mind.

 

1 ) Do not use private forums that need registration for viewing rights. As a player, before joining a server i always look at the forum activity to get a glimpse of the community. When i see hidden forums that want me to register, it doesnt only make me frustrated but it gives an indication that the owner wants to hide something ( Drama ? Complains ? Low forum activity ? ).

 

2 ) Do not give many priviledges to your staff. Its proven that at least 1/2 staff members will get corrupted at some point in time costing you money and reputation. Keep an eye on your staff through logs and keep their privs at minimum.

 

3 ) Do not advertise false promises and do not boast in it. That is, do not use stupid titles that make you look stupid. For example "Perfect balance server" , "The server you've been waiting for" , "Best highrate server ", "Best pack server" , "Great machine with 50000 GB ram" , "234% ANTIHACK Protection" , "Anithack protection: on , anticheat protection: on". You get the point, all those things make you look stupid at the eyes of the experienced clan or player. Make sure to tell the unique story of your server in your ad and not boast about things you do not have or everyone else has. Its not a big deal if you have TvT, everyone has, etc.

 

4 ) Trust your own powers, not powers for hire. That is, a hired developer/admin/web designer will work for money without passion. He probably wont do good work but thats the minimum. In most cases dissagreement in the payment will leave you damaged and most of the time without the source code making your server frozen in terms of updates.

 

5 ) Dont use a super cool looking rip of a website but use a functional website. Too much style can make your site unreadable. Be sure to have the most important things, like connection info, features in public and easily accessible view. Noone likes to spend hours just to find out how to register or download your client patch.

 

6 ) Dont use all the customs just because they are free. Having way too many unrelated and different custom features taken from public shared sources is as bad as having no customs at all. The customization is the identity of your server. Too low and your server is the same as everyone's. Too high and it becomes a circus that noone takes seriously. A server is not evaluated by how many custom features it has, but by how many bad custom features it does NOT have.

 

7 ) Dont waste resources yourself fixing single players issues. That is, if someone lost his account, it is his problem. Same if he is hacked. Having many players and treating them in person will waste much of your time. The exception is important people that can influence the server. You do treat big clan leaders in person cause they can influence many people.

 

8 ) Do not forget the stability of the server.People dont like it when they lose things nor when they cant play. Be sure to take frequent backups incase of dissaster. Make sure that you wont need to downgrade effort quality cause people forget the death of their parents faster than the loss of their fortune - Machiavelli

 

9 ) Dont talk about class balance too much. There is no perfect balance and as much as you try you will always end up arguing with players. The reason is not that you are bad in it. The simplest reason is that in each pvp one man loses , one man wins. The one that loses will always blame the balance.

 

10 ) Do not be an admin, be a player. Yes you heard right, make an alt character and play your game at least two hours a day. Playing the game gives you a better understanding of its structure than making the code. Even allow your gms/admins to play the game without corrupting themselves ( be sure to check them ). Having a team that consists of player - admin hybrids is better than having a team that is full of technocrats. First time i played my first server i was like "Who's the idiot admin that made such bad class balance ...". Turns out it was myself :)

[Malamandre]

Nice bro!

[Zoey76]

I had fun reading it, I'm not agree on everything, but If I was it wouldn't be fun :D

[fokys]

Do not agree on this:

----Do not use private forums that need registration for viewing rights---

 

If you have Forum opened it is very easy to DDOS website with noob botnets and if server and site is on same hosting this can cause even more problems!

 

Only my opinion!

[Zoey76]

Actually one thing that you should never do is:

Put game server and site/forums on same machine!

If you are serious enough to open a server don't even think about using only one dedicated.

[Pauler]

Good job. I learned something useful today.

[Xanderॐ]

Actually one thing that you should never do is:

Put game server and site/forums on same machine!

If you are serious enough to open a server don't even think about using only one dedicated.

 

I was about to send you a PM regarding this issue wanting your opinion. And then i came here and saw you already replied. Howler and I are thinking to integrate Java Servlet inside the L2JServer. One single JVM instance loading the l2jserver and a website that can have direct access to the L2JServer runtime ( since they are the same runtime ). We were thinking about using Jetty as the webserver.

 

Pros:

 

Direct access to all objects of L2. No need for site to connect to db to drag info to the site visitors. (Imagine what kind of things you can display with js and ajax !! ).

 

Ridiculously fast !! You wont need to access I/O at all to display things at the website.

 

Opinion on that ?

 

If you have Forum opened it is very easy to DDOS website

 

DDoS has nothing to do with forum being viewed by unregistered members. Absolutelly nothing.

[Pauler]

I was about to send you a PM regarding this issue wanting your opinion. And then i came here and saw you already replied. Howler and I are thinking to integrate Java Servlet inside the L2JServer. One single JVM instance loading the l2jserver and a website that can have direct access to the L2JServer runtime ( since they are the same runtime ). We were thinking about using Jetty as the webserver.

 

Pros:

 

Direct access to all objects of L2. No need for site to connect to db to drag info to the site visitors. (Imagine what kind of things you can display with js and ajax !! ).

 

Ridiculously fast !! You wont need to access I/O at all to display things at the website.

 

Opinion on that ?

 

DDoS has nothing to do with forum being viewed by unregistered members. Absolutelly nothing.

By opening a port to the server machine you can easily access your db from the website. So you can do the same things when the website is on different machine. Also the protection problems that may occur connecting your website to the server db are the same with hosting both of them on same machine.

 

The only reason you may want to host the website and the server on two different machines is the ram usage.

[Xanderॐ]

You missed the point. There is no seperate webserver here. The L2JServer integrates a web server inside it. Once you run the L2JServer.jar you run the webserver too. And since they are both the same JVM runtime, they dont need to access the database at all. Here's an example.

 

public void handle(String target,

                      Request baseRequest,

                      HttpServletRequest request,

                      HttpServletResponse response)

        throws IOException, ServletException

    {

        response.setContentType("text/html;charset=utf-8");

        response.setStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_OK);

        baseRequest.setHandled(true);

        response.getWriter().println("<h1>Hello World</h1>");

       

        for(L2Object obj: L2World.getInstance().getAllVisibleObjectsArray())

        {

        if(obj instanceof L2MonsterInstance)

        {

        L2MonsterInstance inst = (L2MonsterInstance)obj;

        response.getWriter().println(inst.getName());

        }

        }

 

This is direct access on l2jserver. No database. And what it does, is read all online "monsters" and prints them out. Something that database can't do.

[UnixCode]

Thanks but i think that it's not a Guide, it's just an opinion.Anyone admin should think about things like that before he opens the server, don't you think? Anyway an opinion always helps :D , it helped me too.

Off:check your PM when you are able ;)

[Romotheone]

Exactly my thoughts Leluche. Also don't forget that there is no such thing as bad balance, only lazy server owners who don't take the time or are not intelligent enough to customize some skills without overextending and -beep-ing up everything.

 

And when we are already at it, can anyone answer me the question "why players get scared when they see a server has custom stats?". Is it because the negative experiences they had with poorly "balanced" items and overpowered single items which may cause extreme gaps between player - player?

[Gries]

For me  balance on l2 doesn't exist, if you nerf a class another one will be OP, also I don't get what you mean with "balance" word.

[Romotheone]

For me  balance on l2 doesn't exist, if you nerf a class another one will be OP, also I don't get what you mean with "balance" word.

 

Balance in my eyes means that you are trying to find the golden middle way between classes. Wether its done by changing item stats, skill reuse/duration times or even adding special effects to them. The easiest way to do this is to use your general L2 knowledge about which class beats which one and how you would like them to be compared to the other ones. There is no perfect balance, because there are no 2 equal players as far as skill is concerned. But setting the expectations high and trying to make classes "balanced" for the better players might be the best solution. A class is always as strong, as it's user is skilled or you as an admin allow it to be.

 

If by L2 you mean Lineage 2 official settings, then I have to say you are perfectly right. Crowd control effects last way too long and are too random as far as the chances go. Always the class who lands the debuff first wins, because those are just way too OP. Lineage 2's skills need to be revamped, debuffs, stuns, anchors and basicly everything need to last shorter and also need to be more reliable. The class designers seem that they just wanted to give people more power without limitations, not even caring to put some thoughts behind those. But the way I'm going right now is what I said above, "A class is always as strong, as it's user is skilled or you as an admin allow it to be."

 

Lineage2, as a game itself is capable of having a good balance. The skills are given for that, it needs a lot of reworking, but its do-able. You have everything you need to set up a good balance, all you need is to spend time. You can limit everything, which means you can pretty much calculate the damage a class will deal to another one. This game only lacks reliable skills, thats all.

 

New thoughts:

_There is something else which came to my mind while reading your reply "I don't get what you mean by balance" again and again several times.

 

Balance can be seen from many different aspects. There are classes which excel at 1vs1 while others are awesome in a mass PvP. While watching some retail party vs party PvPs, all I saw was daggers cruising and trying to hunt down the robe and light classes. While trying to plan the concept of a balance, you have to think on different levels, as well as in 1v1, 1v2, party vs party, siege and PvE. Creating balance is a complex thing, and maybe the reason you cannot see good balance at all is because there are many inexperienced administrators who are trying to win players by playing with the word "balance". If you say balance, its not only the intention in trying to create a balance, it means you are done, you are ready to present it to your players and that you have thoughts behind every class and you have tested them in almost every possible situation, skill by skill, hit by hit. There are just too many factors which influence this word. Vampiric effects, crits, skill crits, reflect, resistances, player skill/knowledge/reaction time, knowing how to squeeze out the most damage possible at a certain time. I admire WoW's so called balance. The PvP is very controlled and just by taking the time to imagine things you can predict the outcome after every skill usage. WoW has only a few random factors which influence PvP, where as L2 is full of them. Its basicly a random game, starting by pressing a button. You can never predict the outcome unless someone has a great advantage early on, either by gear/buffs, etc.

If someone wants to create balance, he has to remove as many random factors as possible.

I don't want to advertise my own server, but that is exactly what I have done and it works exceptionally well.

 

Okay, thats all for tonight, I think I said everything I wanted to say. Good luck to everyone! :9

 

Ps: If I went totally off-topic and this board was not meant to discuss this, its fine ,just delete my reply please.

[fokys]

DDoS has nothing to do with forum being viewed by unregistered members. Absolutelly nothing.

It is more easy to take down site when it is opened for all users,bots will be able access all forum posts/threads and keep sending queries to server by ''browsing'' forum which will create huge load on web server and it will stop responding!

[Xanderॐ]

@fokys

 

The same thing is if "bots" try to register. Once again, private forums wont affect DDoS success. Most Denial of Service attacks target the TCP/UDP level not the web level.