thanks mqnoob, I would've gone insane waiting for the EQemu team to bring the software up to live compatibility just so I can use all 5 of my necro toons effectively without constantly alt-tabbing.
Night Hawk wrote:From what I've seen on Emu servers (which don't seem as popular as they used to be when I was playing, maybe they had some people do some stuff again who knows), the mobs NPC health is just a guess, and most servers just allow you to get whatever gear, go to whatever zone and kill the big bad guy, except the big bad guy dies in like 4 hits.
lies, all of it! (sarcasm, don't get offended)
npc health can be calculated within a tee using the basic math they teach us in public schools

even for deities and other 'boss' mobs. Most servers are legit, meaning you can't just run commandline strings and expect to have big soul D in both of your toons weapon slots... fundamentally, you play the game pretty much as you would on eqlive, with some notable exceptions. And personally, it takes up to 30 uses of Cazictouch to kill some of the critters currently spawning ;p.. My guess is that accurate packet sniffing takes care of most of this anyways.
As for the notable exceptions mentioned earlier, there are some exploits found on eqemu that aren't on eqlive. wielding a 2hander and a shield simultaneously, 'smuggling' no drop gear in stationary tradeskill containers, for starters,
publicly available databases are complete only up to kunark (with many rough edges that still need sanding), with a velious beta underway. Meaning... content is playable and working up to kunark. However, many custom servers offer content well beyond velious. Also, a luclin DB maybe started (relatively) soon, however a given student may likely finish med school before ProjectEQ completes the database up to and at DoN content, seeing how there's an average 4-8 month wait between starting work on a expansion-compatible db and finishing it. There's a very similar developement cycle with the software core as well.
Alternate advances absolutely DO NOT WORK atm, and the problem lies equally with the public databases and the software core. The database 'gurus' have stated that AA implementation is a "low priority!"; I assume this is compared to getting most of the content available NOW working and comparable to live. I personally can make up for this by 'multi-logging'; running several toons off of the same box, at greatly reduced gfx and sound settings (no losing sleep over that anyways). No need for AAs when you have 4 other toons under some degree of your control. ANd the loginserver is setup so you practically creat any number of accounts without limit. Might get you banned on some servers though, and you'll need a pretty modern machine. ;p
To sum, it will be a few years (if ever) before emulation offers serious competition for the live service, but not for the reasons you listed ;p