[Phinigel] Master PoP Instances Testing Thread

Discussion in 'Time Locked Progression Servers' started by Warrior007, Dec 7, 2016.

  1. Darchon_Xegony Augur

    As always, thanks for the replies! I look forward to testing this stuff to confirm fixes once Test updates.

    There should be some distinction made between the group bosses with keys.

    PoTorment - You need 1 single key to enter the tower.
    BoThunder - You need 1 key per group to enter the tower (though you can evac this keyed player and click up more groups)
    PoStorms - Every player needs a full quest completion to enter the next zone.

    PoStorms is clearly the worst case scenario of the three. PoTorment and BoThunder shouldn't be too bad for guilds to sort out after the first few days seeing as you only need a single key for a guild to progress.

    PoStorms on the other hand will be packed for the a few months just to access the most common exp zone in the expansion excluding Elemental Planes. Plus its required for every member of every guild to complete progression

    Really they need to spawn in the Plane of Storms instance, that zones instance is pretty useless otherwise. The Plane of Justice instance allows guilds to do their trial in there, as it should. To alleviate an extremely common group-flag bottleneck in the open world.
    Cyrris and Jenarie like this.
  2. Popanasty Journeyman

    Or just lower the Respawn on the POStorm names to a reasonable time.
  3. Jaera Augur

    Absor,

    Currently in the Plane of Storms instance, there are three raid events that *do* drop medallions:
    * Jeplak, Lord of Srerendi
    * Gurebk, Lord of Krendic
    * Neffiken, Lord of Kelek`Vor

    The issue is that these are raid fights intended for more than one group, and yet they only drop three medallions on a six and a half day lockout. With that few medallions, you can only make 4 keys to Bastion of Thunder (with two medallion "left over"), which seems very strange.

    As a compromise, instead of adding the named that always and only drop the medallions to the storms instance, modify these three raid encounters to drop a total of 9 medallions each instead (3 that they would normally have, and 6 that would be on the two medallion named for each theme) which would allow a raiding force to key up to 13 people per instance, with one medallion left over.

    On the whole, this increases flexibility for guilds to have additional avenues for continuing progression other than sitting in storms trying to KS each other, it "adds" the medallions to the raid instance without having to change anything except the loot tables of three raid encounters, and also makes it so the medallions are more of a challenge to achieve in the instance than potentially in the open world by finding the appropriate named giants up and killing them, when those six giants are otherwise just normal encounters.
    MabbuPhinny likes this.
  4. MabbuPhinny Augur

    If you guys haven't figured this out by now...were not letting this go.
  5. Machen New Member


    Surely you all have learned by now that they prefer to deal with things by trainwreck followed by emergency patch, instead of proactive and sensible adjustments up front.
  6. MabbuPhinny Augur


    If its a train they want.... ;)
  7. Machen New Member


    He's making death threats again!
  8. Toodles Elder


    agree, instant pop in the expeditions would be the best solution... but i think a couple compromises the devs might consider are:
    1. significantly lowering the respawn timer & respawn variance/window. Dial down the respawn to like 1-2hrs, with a variance window of 0 to 2 hours, making them similar to taskmasters in Ssra. Makes them quick semi-rare competition in openworld base+picks, should be fast enough to not be a massive bottle neck. bonus side effect is it would allow people to go into the dz-expeditions and exp on their own away from chaos and they should eventually see all the required giants for BoT flagging, so its not immediate but its reasonably guaranteed that the quest mobs will spawn in the 6 hours allotted time limit for an expedition
    2. increase the # of medallion pieces that the named drop
    bumping it up from 3 medallion pieces per mob... to 5 or so might also relieve some of the pressure, increasing the throughput in the flagging quest.
    3. make the medallions very rare regional drops within storms
    all giants of that type within that specific section of that zone(north,south,west) would have a very rare% chance to drop the corresponding medallion, give people a reward able reason to kill within storms and not just sit their socking the rare giants for aiding askr quest.

    some other things to consider to limit the ability for players to cause grief
    1. make sure they are immune to memblur (please not another sseru praesertum fiasco)
    2. put a no-destroy tag on them (stop people from killing them just to loot/destroy, just to block other people from finishing, or to try and force them to buying the lootrights)
  9. Xoner Baby Joesph Sayer

    While I'm disappointed in this decision, I think we need to be proactive in our response as a community. I propose that as many guilds as possible cooperate in scheduling a couple days that we all focus on PoStorms as much as possible, so we can spawn numerous picks and alleviate some of the headache.
  10. AgentofChange Augur

    Group difficulty content that is required for RAID PROGRESSION. You can't create instancing and exclude certain bosses because a single group or a small group can kill them and think that that is ok.

    You are defeating the purpose of creating instanced content. You are forcing unnecessary bottle necks and it is quite frankly shameful to hear you say that this is ok.
  11. Darchon_Xegony Augur

    I appreciate that people are coming up with different solutions to the problem...

    But all of these solutions like increase drop rate, reduce respawn, add to trash mobs... those impact servers other than Phinigel with completely different rule sets.

    The only real solution here to not impact servers which are designed to be competitive is to add the 6 named Giants as spawns in the PoStorm instance so 2 groups can go in and complete their flag. Just like they can in PoNightmare with a Hedge event or PoJustice with a trial. To avoid the bottleneck and just experience the content, as is the purpose of the Phinigel server.
    Cyrris likes this.
  12. PathToEternity pathtoeternity.pro

    I just don't understand the feet dragging. Even going back as far as Ragefire/Lockjaw with the pick zones, devs were adamant they were only going to enable it for newbie zones. The playerbase tried to tell them that wasn't going to be enough, and of course it wasn't, and finally the devs relented and added pick zones for all zones except a few hand-picked raid zones. On Phinny we've continued to see this trend with tweaks in Classic, Kunark (remember the VP ground spawns?), Velious, and Luclin.

    In spite of that, communication seems... pretty good. The players have been able to post and detail issues on the forums and dev interaction is fairly solid. Yet this stuff still keeps cropping up and it doesn't really make sense as to why.

    As players, we don't really have access to the backend numbers that Daybreak employees surely have access to. However, we do have some public information, like how many guilds are currently clearing content in-era. 18 guilds have completed Luclin, with at least 3 more guilds actively raiding Luclin. It's pretty obvious that we're going into Planes of Power with no fewer than twenty guilds planning to raid. By this point on the previous 4 progression servers there were never more than about 5 guilds trying to do in-era content. I'm not really sure what the situation is with casual guilds on this server, but obviously it doesn't bring any of the numbers down.

    Just doing some fast head math, you're looking at a minimum of 1000 - 1500 players who are looking at this Plane of Storms bottleneck. Keep in mind that's a minimum - this doesn't really include the more casual guilds or any boxes. It's also a conservative number estimate - many raiding guilds have more than 50 - 75 active players.

    So I guess if the devs are sticking to their guns on this one, can one of you do some napkin math and confirm that the numbers fit with the Vision(tm) of the server? It shouldn't be hard to take the average drop rate, multiply it by anticipated number of instances, divide that by the number of guilds/players, adjust that further by play time (most of us are not playing around the clock), and get an idea for how long this should take and see if that matches up with how long you expect it to take. And then of course consider the CS impact, if this decision to force open-world competition is going to send (once again) the PnP out the window.

    It's possible we're all wrong here. You don't even have to show the math. I'm just asking if it's been done.
  13. Machen New Member


    9 guilds on Fippy doing in era content during PoP. According to bkfippy.com (and it was a little less robust than more recent efforts so I suspect there were 2-3 more not listed--I know of at least one more that wasn't on the list that I raided time with.) So around half the guilds Phinny currently has, and with no instanced content. (Of course, not all of them finished PoP in era.)

    Otherwise, I agree with your points.
  14. Xoner Baby Joesph Sayer

    With regard to PoStorms discussion, please see this thread.

    In other news, Bob the instance cleaner on test server is bugged and does not respond after clicking the "clear out" link.
  15. Pikallo Augur

    I did some napkin math in the other thread that was in response to someone who had made some flawed assumptions. I'll copy/paste:

    First off, there are 6 giants, and the respawn can be as low as 4 hours(at least currently on Test anyway). Each giant drops 3 medallions. You need 2 unique medallions for a key. So for each round of giants, that is 9 BoT keys. Even using your conservative 6 hour respawn, that is 4 rounds of giants per day, yielding 36 BoT keys per pick, per day. Using your guess of 5 open picks, that is 180 keys per day, or 1260 keys per week. That is not counting any keys obtained from the instance if people decide to go that route (the 3 larger "raid" giants also drop key pieces and spawn within the instance). Realistically speaking, you should be able to key a significant portion of the population in 1 week. This is EQ we're talking about here. That is not that bad at all.

    It is really dependent on the number of /pick zones that are available. Assuming that this zone will be a madhouse upon release, I would expect 5 picks to be pretty realistic, and perhaps even more considering the popular zones like Seb/Velks/Ssra had upwards of 10 upon release of their respective expansion release. If there were indeed 10 picks up, with 36 keys per day. That is 360 keys every 24 hours, or over 2500 in this first week alone. Again, this is all dependent upon the number of pick zones.

    Finally, I'll re-iterate that I think it would be MUCH smoother for everyone involved if the 6 named giants simply spawned in the instance and I agree with those in this thread that find this to be the logical approach, but ultimately its not going to be a multi-month bottleneck that people seem to be anticipating.
  16. Cyrris Journeyman

    Not sure where you see anyone saying it will be a multi-month bottleneck. It will definitely be a bottleneck, and there will be lots of training/ksing/mem-bluring/etc. going on.

    It's what we came to Phinny to get away from like a lot of other people have already stated.
  17. Pikallo Augur

    Yeah, it was a bit of hyperbole. Point being that after the initial mess in the first few days, I predict it will be more accessible than people are anticipating.

    And again, I understand and agree with the people who want it changed.
  18. Zanarnar Augur

    Seriously with you here; at this point they know exactly what will happen. This is DBG giving us permission to do whatever we want in this zone. I plan to fully take advantage of it, just gotta re-level my monk some since I sacc'd him down to 45 when luclin came out ;)

    DBG: Hay guess what, we now no longer care your bundling OOW/GoD since it looks like your trying to kill the server with PoP. /facepalm
  19. Darchon_Xegony Augur

    People love hyperbole. This decision isn't going to kill the server. Neither is bundling GoD/OoW. They are both bad decisions, don't get me wrong. The decisions go directly against the intent of the server.

    In the case of PoStorms, Phinigel was made for two specific reasons. One, to allow players to experience raid PvE content without having to compete with other players for it. So they created instances to allow players to skip most of the unsavory behavior that occurs on a competitive PvE server (kill stealing, training, memblurring, 3rd party program use, etc.). The decision to force these groupable mobs, required for raid content access, into only static world zones goes directly against the intent of this server. The second reason the server, and all Progression servers are made in fact, is to experience content in era with roughly the levels, gear and spells players had back when the content was new. Releasing GoD/OoW together makes the GoD expansion a total fly over that most players will skip for the lower hanging fruit that is CoA raiding.

    But on topic. PoStorms should have the groupable Esoteric mobs spawn in its instance. It's a part of the raid progression everyone is required to complete. This isn't a single key that the raidleader needs like the Agnarr or Torment or Arx Key. It's one everyone needs. To reduce the inevitable open world competition and shenanigans that will go along with them, just lets them spawn in the instance and there will be absolutely no massive bottlenecks in PoP. Just a few small key pieces that just one raider needs to acquire per guild, and those won't be bad much at all with picks.
    Jenarie likes this.
  20. Xoner Baby Joesph Sayer


    [IMG]
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