Thresholds for a new pick should be reduced

Update on the Krono farmers on Yelinak:

On the evening of Friday Jun 17, the frenzy spawn in lower guk dead size was permacamped and monopolized by gnome mage armies on all existing picks. The only way to obtain a FBSS on Yelinak is by using Krono and paying to a professional farmer.

This is not how EverQuest was designed to be played. This is not working as intended. This is outrageous and unacceptable. The EverQuest TLP experience is broken. Nobody can justify this.

That was EQ at it's peak with around 250K+ subbed accounts not the 60K+ subbed accounts of today, EQ is now less than 25% of the number of players it reached. So more than a 75% loss of sub revenue.

EverQuest at it's pinnacle in 2003/2004 is still dwarfed by WoW at its lowest point so far in terms of staff & earnings.

260k ish EQ accounts vs 4-5 million is a staggering difference with WoW at its worst around 16x larger than EQ at it's peak.

So yeah, I stand by my assertion that you are making a broadly ridiculous comparison.

You are right EQ used to have a lot more devs but my understanding is even at their peak they never matched the dev team that WoW had. Not to mention in EQ there are several different types of instances and each of the impact a server differently. How a pickzone (which is based on a zone from the game started) impacts the system is going to be different then a zone that was only designed to be an instance and one that was later designed with instances in mind.

Yes, there are reasons why code that is 25+ years old with a smaller dev team isn't able to compete with code that is younger and has a larger dev team that can do more rewrites as needed. Just because you feel someone "invented" instances doesn't mean that they will be the best at it.

And that's the problem with the 1999 design of one spawn having one iconic item.

Randomized loot addresses that monopolization problem.

A TLP with Randomized loot & Free Trade for ALL non-Raid loot would be what I think of as a perfect solution to the monopolization issue.

I will never understand why a 23 year old game doesn't place an enjoyable user experience tantamount to everything else. The current player base is about 15% of the peak of 400k at the time of WoW launching, and it appears that very little is being done to move the bar to the right.

There is nothing fun nor epic about a 72 hour, or whatever, wait. 72 minutes is longer than most gamers find acceptable. Hell, staring at a wall for 7 minutes alone makes me start considering my life choices.

Easy design changes, such as reduced spawn timers are being largely ignored, to what end? Pitting players against one another causes uneeded strife that a couple of database modifications could permanently fix. It also costs them support dollars to manage the fallout.

The increased RAM available after the move to 64 bit alone should help alleviate a number of system bottlenecks that they've been dealing with since launch. Yes, WoW is a newer game, but they will be *18* years old in the fall. They have managed to allow people to (mostly) peacefully coexist with a vastly larger audience, and Daybreak could do the same if they wanted to make incremental design changes.

At this point, based on past and present, I believe that they are quite content with the state of the game today. I also don't think there will be any significant changes made anytime soon. I like to be surprised from time to time, though.

How much time should they spend revamping old content versus making new content? As for the claims of easy changes by reduced spawn times that won't prevent people from camping it just like they are now.

As for wow it has had a much larger dev team since the start so they are able to devote developers and coders to updating code and older content to keep it more relevant.

Ahh, while I was penning my post I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that yours would be the first reply I was going to receive.

I only skimmed your response by the way, because I already knew what your retorts were going to be. I even threw in a few roadblocks aimed at you along the way.

I need to work on that a bit, oh well.

I hope your weekend is going well. It "feels like" 103f in the midwest right now, and I'm slowly shedding some of the turkey I ate last year!

Edit: Changing a respawn timer takes under a minute, which includes opening the database and locating the field to modify. That is low hanging fruit in my opinion.

Was chosen to help not stress the servers trying to make a million instances, as well as keep the botters/box armies from force picking zones with small numbers, taking advantage of it.

Wrong. These timers aren't in a database, they're hard-coded. In many cases the respawns are part of a much larger script, where if you change the timer of one thing, it has a cascading effect on many other parts of the script. This is not modern software development, it's very sloppy coding using 25-year-old tech. If it was as easy to change as you seem to think, it would have been changed years ago.

While I understand your point, do you really think that changing something as seemingly simple as a spawn timer is beyond the capabilities of the people that pay their bills by working on this game? Pressing "X" for doubt.

As an example: I've setup private servers a couple of times in the past, and I do know that changing the experience rate can be done by searching for "exp", and then changing it from 1.0 to whatever. I can get to level 10 or higher just by killing the first mob if I want to.

Also, Alan VanCouvering has been working there for over 20 years. I'm pretty sure he can make this program do whatever he wants, and however he wants at this point.

100% agree with the OP. Some of the thresholds are completely crazy especially as the servers go on in time.

We weren't sure what the threshold for OOT was until last night when we were trying to pop a pick for the monk 2.0 and it is...64. Why? Why on earth is that so high? Meanwhile PAW is 20 (Which is almost 100% appropriate, as it supports 3 main groups and a small 3-4 man group).

What this whole post doesnt recognize is WHY we have instances the way they are now. On Agnarr and lower you could spawn a pick and it would stay up forever. Well we all saw what happened on Agnarr at PoP launch and it was literally an unplayable game. The Devs attributed this to having too many picks game wide open and made the change where picks now close.

So now that picks close on their own when the player count drops. Why can we not have lower thresholds, especially for these classic zones? It doesn't make any sense now. Even if we had lower thresholds it still wouldnt get anywhere close to where it was on Phinigel/Agnarr with picks being basically permanent.

And to those saying "The devs have data, blah blah blah." No they don't. I 100% guarantee you that Prathun and Ngreth created these thresholds way back on Phinigel and have NEVER LOOKED AT THEM AGAIN. Id put money Ngreth has not once ever looked into early expansion Pick thresholds since Phinigel.

Well that should change. Please Ngreth, we love you for all you do for us on these servers. Lets make these classic/Kunkark/Velious/Luclin thresholds much more reasonable (no zone should ever be higher than 30 IMO, and most should be around 20)

I'll take that bet. Search the forums (I'm not even going to bother). You'll find multiple posts from both Prathun and Ngreth since the Phinigel revamp about pick thresholds. A lot more tuning has been done since the big change to force-close empty or nearly-empty picks.

You're also speaking for, at best, 1% of the playerbase. The vast majority are able to level, progress and raid just fine without needing to give the slightest thought to pick threshold numbers.

That's a global parameter. Respawn timers are not global parameters.

1%? I have never formed a group or been part of a group forming that didn't actively check picks, what camps are open in those picks, and discuss where we would go. Just today I formed a group in WoS and we checked picks to see if Cubby was open...no, picks are not just for 1% of the playerbase.

Every single person is affected by picks every time you play, and its even worse in Classic where there are a lot fewer camps and less places to level in. I mean just yesterday our entire guild was popping picks for peoples 2.0 epics...as well as multiple other guilds doing the same thing at the same time...the classic pick threshold is still affecting us in OOW.

It is far easier to recover RAM from DZ instances than it is for Picks, that has something to do with the scripting for zone events.

So making a lot more picks is not going to be good because it will impact server performance negatively, it's not called "load balancing" for nothing, the system works well enough to create enough zones for the amount of players susing them but it cannot currently offer each group their own pick and certainly not each individual.

What we have is pretty good for such an old game.

Your argument about resources is a bit of a strawman. Of course Blizzard has more resources than SOE/Daybreak. Comparative resources are not the point though. It's really about a MMO company making sure to purchase enough hardware to adequately service the players on a server.

From a non-profit MMO like P1999 to a blockbuster MMO like WoW, you're going to be using comparable server technology. Sure, due to Blizzard's bigger size, they may enjoy a slight economies of scale advantage when purchasing server hardware in volume, but it won't amount to much. Servers are a fixed cost for a MMO, unlike a pizza restaurant that has to continually purchase flour, cheese, sauce, etc. to make pizza every day.

EverQuest TLP servers are a cash cow for EG7. They certainly have more than enough money to purchase hardware for their respective MMOs to ensure that paying customers are free from a degraded player experience cause by content monopolization from professional Krono farmers and RMTers.

The argument that Daybreak is keeping the threshold high on additional picks due to hardware costs is a red herring. Unless I see something in writing from one of techs at Daybreak, I will continue to challenge this explanation.

This problem was not created by the players. Rather, it is a symptom of the addition of Krono which makes RMT more attractive to non-players who play EQ for a living selling Krono and desirable items to player. SOE/Daybreak created this problem, SOE/Daybreak needs to fix the unintended consequences of their actions.

All we are asking is that Daybreak games delivers to players the play experience that we are entitled to free from outside interference.

Not what I said, not what I meant. The 1% are those who can't be satisfied with the system the devs have provided. Searching to see what's open at the first moments you're logged in is just part of the game, we all do it at one time or another, if not every session.

There are quite a few different levelling paths in Classic, it isn't necessary to follow the cult path. I never go to either LGuk or Unrest during Classic, and I level just fine. Several of the zones I typically use never have picks because very few go there.

Classic isn't affecting you in OOW at all. Every zone in the game has its own pick threshold. Now you might not be used to having to open any picks in OOW because on prior TLPs the population had dipped low enough by then such that it wasn't necessary. Mischief is higher pop. So there are enough people working on 2.0s early in the expansion that you may need a few picks of various zones. It will still all get done. If you get to the end of the expansion and there are people complaining they couldn't complete their 2.0s because there weren't enough picks, wake me up. Note that if RMTers have started to interfere, when they couldn't be bothered before, that's a totally separate issue, and for that you will need some form of dev attention. More picks doesn't solve that, since they just use more bots.

Comparing the amount of money that Daybreak and Blizzard has to spend on games and hardware? Game performance isn't just about how much hardware you throw at it but making sure the software is able to take advantage of that hardware. One company has a lot more resources to dedicate to improving software to match hardware then the other.

Thanks for making me spit milk everywhere. That statement is so utterly ridiculous, it instantly invalidates everything else you've said in this thread.

Vaniki, 4 days after server start. 92 players in gloomingdeep

3 additional picks with 35-37 each

4, count them 4 Gloomingdeep captains.

Everquest should work on mob availabiility to quests vs pick thresholds.


Everquest should work on mob availabiility to quests vs pick thresholds.


Everquest should work on mob availabiility to quests vs pick thresholds.




It took me 4 1/2 hours to complete the tutorial under these conditions and everyone doing it had the same issues. MORE picks would have meant players not dwelling in tutorial for half a day vs the 30 minutes it normally can be done in, which ADDS to the burden.

The lack of availability of mobs to fulfil quests chokes the zone and players stack up.


Blizzard wins at this, EQ fails at this. Having a tutorial named on a 17 minute respawn timer with 92 people waiting is just dumb.

This is patently false. Nothing in the tutorial takes 17 minutes to respawn. The captains are 5 minute respawns. Six people in a group can all get credit for the necessary kills from one set of four captains. If you insist on doing all of the content solo, then yes, it's going to take longer. But that's on you, not the game design.

And if you know there are open picks, why are you staying in the OW zone?? That's also on you. You certainly wouldn't do that in Classic LGuk, why should this particular zone be any different?

This is how the game works when you're doing the content as it was in-era. The devs are not going to completely re-design the game to suit solo players. Even if they wanted to, they don't have the resources. If you don't like this, you have a simple alternative: choose a different server.