I thought I'd expand a little on my earlier post.
Firstly I understand that changes need to be made but here's why I dont think changing MVP cards is going to solve the problem.
Making changes to the cards is all about lowering everyone to a closer level. In a game as complex with as much depth it will not help players as much as some people think. Numbers/supplies/co-ordination are all important parts, but with how many different builds or gear options there are people are always going to be making "overpowered" characters. You will also have to look at every single MVP card and top tier piece of gear to keep things "balanced" and I'm not sure that it's possible for the GM team at this time.
You also risk harming the legend of some of these cards. It will create more confusion about what does what and how they work. It will also give players another reason to avoid Classic as "the server that changed how MVP cards work". One of the largest problems we have with them is people are able to just go drop their paycheck for items, it's obvious who they are but either they're not getting banned or people just dont care enough to report them (maybe they try, person doesnt get banned and then they just dont bother again).
Nerfing cards is also going to potentially make them undesirable and you're going to remove peoples interest in MVPing. This has always been a staple of Ragnarok, you do not want to discourage people from logging on throughout the week.
However lets use the FBH as an example because people like it so much. It's at its strongest when combined with other things. If you nerf FBH as hard as you've suggested it would become significantly less useful, so much so that it may not even get used (-50% SP is a lot) especially when you can already get the effect of two FBH cards just by dragging along a Scholar for Mindbreak. Do you then disable Mindbreak because magic is too strong? Then people just shift their focus to another class and then that will get nerfed/removed, so people will swap to another. You cant ever win, there are a lot of skills or items that increase player power several fold and it will *always* be punishing to new players who dont know how to deal with them yet.
In my opinion you're far better off looking to increase player skill and participation. Before the dumb the other day rojoky113 talked about scarcity, motivations, rewards and a bit about god item creation. For me these are the things you should be looking at. Undyings post in this thread is also bang on. Our largest problem is the number of players we have and there are things that can be done to address that.
Right now there's probably 8-9 groups of players participating in 1.0, throughout those groups there's some that have been here for years and some that are fairly new. There's some that are small 5-6 players and some that are moderately sized ~10-15 players and some that are large 20+. There's some with MVP cards or god items and some with none. Unfortunately due to the size of the server these groups have to mix. Even if you nerf some of a player/guilds power by modifying items, a skilled player can still do some serious work against the smaller groups. It's just how the game works, you cant counter everything with only 5-10 people. People in some of these smaller groups only run into people using these items (or the players using them) for a few minutes every weekend and never get an opportunity to learn about them or how to counter them.
What the server needs is more interaction between players, people have very little reason to sit down and party up anymore outside of ID3/AL3 and battlegrounds is full of AFK players. This is even worse when both sieges are 24 hours apart, a lot of the players who you want to be participating throughout the week just dont because their four hours of fun is jammed into the weekend, not to mention if they want to level they can do it in Thors and dont have to interact with anyone to do so. This could also help with the general community (or lack thereof). needmorezleep also had some ideas in that other thread from other servers that could be used or incorporated to draw in more players.
Here are a few PvP related things you can do to address some of these problems:
- New battlegrounds - Conquest, FFA (or with teams)
- Event/training siege - You can have a TON of different rulesets rotating in and out, force participants into one fort (depending on popularity) and give players incentives to do so (hats, spot prizes, supplies)
- Battleground/PvP "events" - Stuff like the Champ tourney or even something as little as a battleground happy hour where you get bonus badges (as long as it's not farmed/afked/botted) and PvP events to get it active again
- Make 1.0 god items an achievable goal - I'm not saying flood the server with gods and the current issue with how many pieces are around would have to be solved, but it's not a realistic goal for many guilds on this server right now
- Fix guild treasure/rewards - Drop rates are crazy, you get a lot of pieces but also a lot of pre-trans gear that is essentially useless and very difficult to handle for a guild leader
TL;DR: Nerfing MVP cards wont make things more fun for small groups. They're always going to have trouble with something. Shift the focus from nerfing gear, to bringing players up to speed on how to deal with geared/solo players. Look for ways to bring more players to the server and for the players we have to interact more often.
With all that said, the community here on the forums is awful. You're going to need to find ways to reach out to the people who dont care to wade through the bull-_- and the bickering to find out what's happening on this server (of which I'm now one) because they're most likely the people who are suffering from these issues and have the most to benefit from the changes.