What do you think about something like the following system?

Every spawn point (or a set of spawn points in a small distance to each other) represents a lair.

Every monster \"knows\" to which lair it belongs, and every lair has a population value.
Every time a monster belonging to a lair is killed, the population value goes down.
If a lair is left alone, it\'s population value will slowly increase over time (e.g. by one every 10 minutes or so).

So, what\'s this value good for?
I would say that it should determine things like the time in which new monsters are spawned (value = 0 means no spawn at all, value = 5 means one monster per hour, value = 10 means one monster every 30 minutes and so on), and maybe how much the loot of the monsters belonging to the lair is worth.

Each lair could keep track of the monsters belonging to it, so that a maximum number of monsters belonging to a particular lair can be set. (e.g. if there are 10 living monsters belonging to lair A, it\'s spawn point(s) will not longer produce new monsters until one of the lair A-monsters is slain).

Off course, there should be a maximum the population value can\'t exceed.

If the server could handle this, you would have
- a dynamic aspect in the world (one time more monsters here, one time more monsters there)
- the campers would be forced to move elsewhere after some time

Perhaps they would even move earlier if the spawn rate of a lair seems too low for them, so others could come.

I don\'t know if this is a good idea, just wrote what currently was on my mind.

Hmm... an additional idea: there could be quests to fight monsters of a particular lair until it\'s population value has dropped to a low value...

Sorry for the long post. Hope the idea isn\'t too bad.

Cool idea, I think. I am for it, too.

I\'d like to make the following suggestion to allow raids later in the game:

The idea is that PCs can form raiding parties. These can be groups with many (let\'s say up to 100) player characters, but they can also be smaller.
As soon as they want to do a raid on a town or on other PCs, the leader activates a \"raiding mode\" for his group. As soon as this mode is activated, the members of the raiding party turn to \"raiders\" with the following effects:

1. Raiders can attack others (non-raiders) without having to challenge them, and others can attack the raiders.

2. All raiders are marked in a certain way, e.g. their names could turn red or so. NPC-Guards attack them.

3. When a raider is killed, he goes to Death Realm and loses his status as a raider. Additionally, he can\'t be a raider for some time, let\'s say an hour or so.

4. When a PC is killed by a raider, the PC is \"robbed\" by the raider, that means, the raider gets a copy of something his victim has. This should be money and/or a valuable item. Since PCs can\'t do anything against beeing attacked by raiders, they shouldn\'t lose anything, at least nothing really valuable.

5. When a PC kills a raider, he should get a reward, like fame points or something like that, and perhaps some money.

6. Raiders are able to rob houses or something like that, so that a raid on a town could be very profitable.

The raider status is turned off either if a raider gets killed or after some time, let\'s say an hour or something like that.

It should be discussed what could happen to the victims of a raider.
Shall they really lose nothing?
Do they go to Death Realm, or are they revived where they died after a short time, unable to take part in the fight that\'s going on between the raiders and their comrades?

What do you think about this suggestion and the questions?

I would like to propose a component system with the glyphs.

This should work in a way like this:
You have one basic component that determines the main effect (e.g. fire damage, invisibility, flying, whatever).
Using the basic component alone would make an effect only working with your character (a flame for light appearing above his/her head or fire damage for meelee attacks, character becomes invisible, character can fly and so on).
Then you can add additional (secondary) components like distance effect, area effect, stronger effect and things like that.
I don\'t know how complicated it would be to implement such a thing, but it\'s great in P&P-RPG. In most cases, I think, the graphical effect used on the character when casting a spell on himself could also be used when the spell is cast on a different target. For damage spells, I would like to propose using a particle system. So you could have a different particle colour (and perhaps even particle graphic/form) for each basic component and a small piece of code for each secondary component that determines how many particles are created, how long they last and in which way they are moving.

Hope this isn\'t too much work and doesn\'t lower performance too much.

The world of Planeshift is an underground world, so I can\'t think of weather in it. But perhaps something can be found that could influence the magic instead of weather.

I have the same bug: 23 PPs instead of 1.
After training, 0 PPs were showed correctly. But after the next login, there was a 23 again.

It is also my opinion that there should be no automaps, at least not for characters without a map making skill. I like the idea of PCs making maps and selling/giving them to others.
But I think, at least in the starting town there should be a FEW signs to help the newbies.

I think players shouldn\'t be able to build everywhere. To my mind, there should be areas PCs can buy on which they can build like they want. These areas could have different sizes and prizes. So a single character could buy a small piece of land to build on,  and a guild could have a huge area to build a guild house. In this way, the devs could avoid labyrinths of player built houses, but every one should have enough freedom to build at a place he likes.