The interval has varied every time. It's been as long as 18 months and as short as 6 months. Here's the full schedule history. http://everquest.allakhazam.com/wiki/EQ:Hotzones
My guess is it's gonna remain a 12-18 month gap going forward at this point, i'd be shocked if they change hotzones again anytime soon.
I hope it's a very short span till new ones this time. I think a lot of them were VERY poorly chosen this time around.
The Grounds is wild for a hotzone. I love it, there is training , camp stealing , /ooc griefing. Its like a game i remember called Everquest.
I'd trade the aug and meta-aug quests the devs have to design to have hot zones change every week. Of course, this is coming from someone who has every aug I want that is currently attainable, so my opinion is skewed.
1 hot zone per expansion, per "continent"...and "others areas". I could go with that make people go back and check out some of the old world again
A neat idea. But maybe every two weeks or months, this way people can get a good taste of various zones. But, that would probably be a lot of work work for the devs to keep shuffling zones.
I'd code it to be an automatic process. The devs put zones in level categories, the devs exclude zones that aren't meant to be level grinding areas (like plane of air!,) the program picks the zones for each level range. Switch each week/month/whatever. But it's a pretty unrealistic idea.
They could also instead of having a different aug for every hot zone(which takes more coding time and planning), make one aug that has a req level 1 and recommended level 100. One aug that scales with your level that drops from every hot zone in the batch.