You can certainly be forgiven for not reading the whole thread, but FYI, this was not pushed live and they are in fact looking at other options. I get where you're coming from though. This thread is...I don't know how to describe it. Funny... Frustrating... It's like watching a bunch of people trying to fix a leaky boat by creating a new universe with more forgiving water... The simple fix may not solve every issue known to man, but neither will anything else. At least simple has the virtue of being simple...
Although how fantastic to try to create a universe with more forgiving water? Thinking big, not just looking down and watching our feet...
As a rule with this game, no one ever thinks to check the boat for leaks first, or repairing them if there are any. It gets put to water without a care and then panic solutions present themselves that involve throwing people over board to be eaten by sharks so the boat is lighter and won't take on water as fast. Fixes for this always could include fixing code/server hardware or actually punishing people who are reported as disrupting zones intentionally. That sort of thing that goes along with checking the boat for leaks prior to setting sail, however. As it is though, people get away with murder and its a race to the bottom to cut costs. The solution we get won't really address what is at the heart of this.
Why not just do like most of the other mmo's have done. Mobs have a max pull range . Once they are pulled to far away from there spawn point. They re spawn back. Lose all ago regain all health. No more trains no more lag
Some features and mechanics of other games are patented so it runs deeper than just saying "if that competing game does this, why can't this one?" The simple matter is there could be patent infringements, law suits or messy licensing that incurs an expense. A competing product in the gaming marketplace can still use all the usual means of getting an advantage over their rivals that any other business can use by means of proprietary tech, procedures etc protected by copy-write or patents. Who knows how much time is spent scrubbing content from a legal point of view before it goes live. Most any game developer will look at what is broken in a competitor's game, come up with their own fix for their competing product and than legally protect it in such a way where if the broken game is ever fixed, they violate the patent. Thus the content has to stay broken and be rendered obsolete or some work around has to be devised the reinvents the wheel in order to avoid a lawsuit. Our world is ruled by lawyers and accountants.
as a Mage on fippy, I hope to get to this point as currently we have been a terrible DPS class for the last 4 expansions, with nothing really fun with the classes mechanics at all.
I don't understand what the big problem it is to fix this issue. a limit of 8 mobs for beam spells. certainly not a game changer. - while wizards wernt happy , it was no real big deal. and had zero effect on the class ( other then not getting massive xp with a exploit
Mages are fighting this particular change, hard. Because they are under the impression that if they tell the dev's that they need this spell to farm grey mobs, the Dev's will be blissfully unaware that in reality. SOME mages are already looking for new areas to Beam, Now. I don't have an issue with beaming. I just think it should be restricted to instances. Although, As it currently stands code wise, I don't think you CAN restrict a spell to that degree. So. Here's what i think will happen 1. They will reduce target limit to X OR 2. They are going to flag it so you cant agro more then X mobs. OR 3. They will do nothing at all Right now, I'm sitting here watching a mage beam kite in City of Bronze, in an open zone .. on 2XP Now. the Mage is netting great XP. But what about the group of players sitting on the other side of the wall. getting aggravated because their mobs are jumping around? Why can't people just do this stuff in instanced zones, where you are not a bother to anyone else? Personally. I hope for option one, As it's much less painful to everyone else, and it brings mages back in line with Wizards. Lets not forget. Wizards are the king of Direct damage. and this should also translate into AEs as well...
CoB has an instance. "The Traitor Revealed" or something like that. It has all the same mobs without named to fuss with. Someone could remind that mage of that, but those who have little concern past their own selfish needs tend to not listen to reason so I can understand why people might not want to bother calling out the people that are creating all the problems. Still, it is zone disruption. They should be reported. It can be difficult sometimes, especially when it might be someone you know or a guild mate and there would be drama. In that case it is best to just log out before something bad happens. Still, if it is a complete stranger...screw em. /report. Nothing will happen of course since with petitions/reports you might as well be stuffing them in a bottle and throwing them into the sea but at least you get that satisfaction. Ultimately you still have to leave the zone and find something else to do. In Everquest the jerks pretty much have a sound advantage when there is no repercussion to breaking the rules. Anyway, its double exp and there is no desire for me to log on and deal with it. I don' want to visit all the ghetto zones like CoB or Grounds that are going to be over camped nor do I feel like logging on my zerk or mage and getting 1000 tells for power leveling. I am guessing I am not alone.
Unerf wizard bard and any other ae class yous destroyed for no reason,and they cant find out why this happend cause it seems soe devs is like the secret service
if the intent is truly to fix zone disruptions, there are a couple things they could do. the first would be responding to complaints about people who are actively disrupting zones. everything i've heard so far is that there hasn't been any willingness to investigate these accounts and punish people that are ruining game play for others. this should be doubly enforced in hotzones and on bonus xp times imho. another thing they could do is to push people into instances, where at least they aren't affectng others in the same zone. an easy way to do this is to ensure that a decent number of named mobs spawn in the regular zone. nameds aren't good for kiting in general, so having at least one spawn in under an hour would probably be enough to encourage people to leave regular zones. in an instance, you would retain the ability to kite trash without the possibility of a named messing up your pull area. this doesn't address the idea of whether accruing a large enough pull to make the zone lag is itself and exploit, but it does offer a content based solution piestro was talking about.
People keep suggesting instances to curb the enthusiasm of zone disrupters. These are the people selling power leveling services for the most part. The draw back of instances is that you can't get the lower level characters into the instance. Forcing people into these instances won't solve anything because the powerlevelers will ignore the instances to achieve their goals. If you look at the intended change that didn't go through you can see how soe policed this in the past. But it wasn't just mob types. They had the customer service to support complaints. More people looking into zone disruptions would help tremendously. I never will understand upper managements stance on mass experience. In house of Thule when the sand portion of Mcastle was fully slowable they were quick to change it because full groups were making tremendous experience gains. At the least there was risk involved ... And the same could be said about almost any other fast xp method. Look how far we've come. Not only are these people making xp at obscene rates they are doing it at the expense of other players... Seems strange. Is this the evolution of eq?
Are people blissfully not aware that beam kiting isn't the only method of mass zone lag inducing swarming? The summoning changes stop beam kiting, and so does limiting beam to 8 mobs, but it doesn't stop SK swarming, berserker swarming, paladin swarming, cleric swarming, etc. etc. etc. There are tons of ways to swarm in today's EQ. Beam kiting is just the best exp return / time. But nerfing beam kiting won't end swarming.
The hilarious part is for a long time, mage beaming was only a problem on like 2 servers, and then this one guy (forgot his name) kept posting over and over trying to get it nerfed and drew mass attention to it and now the method has exploded on to pretty much every server and now mage beaming gets blamed for everything despite all the other fast methods of exp that existed way longer. That guy just griefed the entire mage class all those months ago when he kept posting back to back nerf posts, now a bunch of other people are all over that bandwagon now - it's sad really.
Someone please let me know where I can swarm an entire zone full of yellow cons as a warrior, sk, paladin or cleric without tanking a single mob. Ah wait, such a thing doesn't exist -- that's why you see the mage beam hate. Ignorance is bliss huh
Yeah god forbid another class has such a tool when those said classes were able to swarm for exceptionally fast exp for YEARS getting some of the fastest exp in the game while mages were getting the slowest. Some of the first people to ding level 95 in alaris were knights and tanks swarming kaesora which at the time was absolutely amazing exp. Ignorance is bliss huh PS. no time to bleed
Justify it all you want man, I was merely pointing out facts - a mage can beam an entire current zone down, no other class has this power. For a guy who's admitted he refuses to exp this way, you sure are pretty adamant about keeping it as-is. Knights were swarming lower level content, not current level (95 in Alaris). Good effort though P.S. NTTB is a utility best used to close the gap between grouping warriors and mage pets/knights, sure is amazing that these poor grouping warriors even needed such a thing just to compete...huh? As such, you can't swarm -anything- with it due to the 400 counter limit (which, not surprisingly, a non-warrior troll kept pushing in beta). That's fine though, warrior isn't a solo class and I would never expect it to be. You're welcome to make a warrior and try to swarm with NTTB though, it'll wear off in about 8 seconds and you'll be left with nothing.
So just expand the level range of instances to match the XP sharing range. and as I said at the bottom of the prior page, limit the HZ xp bonus to full (or 5 of 6) groups of players, that are within 5 levels of each other in the static zones. Hot Zones are to encourage getting groups together, not for soloers/powerleveling.
I would love to see how a zereker can swarm current level stuff? My wife is a 100 zereker with maxed out aa. she is raid geared with just under 100k hp unbuffed. zereker decap only works on mobs under level 88. that limits her to mobs in hot t3 and lower with some mobs in voa t1. Even in Grounds with just one merc any more then 6 or so mobs and she is toast. Even then while in grounds if decaps gose off it can kill the mob in one hit sometimes, while Voa it if a mob is at 100% decap will not kill it in one hit. Unlike mages who swarm form a distance. and sk/pallies who swarm using disc/aa/etc that self heal. Zerekers don't have disc/aa that help to heal them.
It's just mages clinging to whatever they see strongbus. Personally, I don't care if all forms of current content swarming disappear. SK, Mage, Ranger, etc... There's zero reason why any class should be able to kill a whole current content zone. 88 and below? Sure. It's "trivial" content, therefore should be able to be killed en mass. Granted, you'll be hard pressed to find any SK, berserker, ranger.... well, let me narrow this down... You will be hard pressed to find *Any class that has to get hit and take any form of risk whatsoever* swarming any current content.
