Make /pick available upon request

My wife and I moved to Lockjaw when it opened and often spend more time traveling to find an open spot than we do actually killing things. The instanced zones are nice to ease the overcrowding of popular places, but a good number of zones only support one group of players of a given level range, if that. The number needed to open new instances is set *way* too high in these many cases. If DBG is going to allow free transfers to Lockjaw, the problem of overcrowding is only going to get worse. /pick needs to be made available upon request.

Yeah...... no. And the reason I say this is it makes things even easier for the farmers to dominate spawns across multiple instances. If anything, they need to make the cooldown on /pick more like 10 minutes instead of 5.

Agree. My wife and I mostly stopped playing for the very reasons you mentioned. We decided our time would be better spent playing on test where we don't have to waste money. Recent comments by the EQ staff have only reinforced our decision.

No. I agree that classic is a problem, when it comes to available leveling zones. But changing pick is not the answer, and is a worse solution than opening kunark early. If it is this much of a problem for you, try Ragefire out and see Kunark earlier.

Lockjaw seems to be in a weird population state, where there is t enough peop,e in a give. Level range to populate multiple pick zones, but enough to keep the main so Ed locked down. Whereas ragefire still has loads and loads of people playing

That said, it's still possible to find stuff to kill, just have to go off the beaten path. Freeport sewers, Kera isle in too, etc

Getting experience is easy. This post isn't about finding a group in popular zones. It's about getting a spot in the many zones that don't have enough players to have multiple instances going. The number is set *way* too low for these zones. I guess the RMT crews would be against the idea, but I haven't seen a good argument against it. Having one bottomfeeder block limited level appropriate content is a problem now and it's only going to get worse with transfers.

EK suffered from this problem on RF last week. Everfrost a few weeks back. Too many players in same level range hunting the same stuff, but not enough to pop an instance.

The solution isn't instance on demand.

The solution is fix the instance cap thresholds. The metadata can (and is) set separately for each zone.

For EK and Everfrost, it is too high.

Yes I know I know that it 's not "classic" to only see 20 or 30 in a zone, but we KILL STUFF a lot faster than we did in Classic, we REGAIN MANA a lot faster than we did in classic (esp with conc pots), but the spawn timers are unchanged.

A zone that could support 50 in 1999 can barely support 30 now, because players have also learned *where to hunt* for most effective level-applicable xp. So when you go into EK, when you see 30 playes, they are all within 8 levelf of each other, because there are much better places that are closer to a starting city to kill from 10 to 15. Sure, you could get great xp 10 to 15 in that zone, but nobody does.

In 1999 there was no instancing, so you sucked it up. Hell, here was nothing to even compare it to lol.

In 1999, the second most popular class wasn't druid (at least I don't think it was), and druids weren't so heavily 2-boxed like they are today. This means...TRACKING! This further dwindles level-specifc mobs in a given zone. They are laser targeted. That leaves a TON of gray trash up and about. 3 druids in the same level range hunting the same stuff can decimate an outdoor zone today. When they are 2-boxxed with a Mage? LOOK OUT!

We had that in EK just yesterday. 2 Druid + Mage 2box teams and my Druid + Shaman team. Stuff was literally DEAD as soon as it popped. I felt bad for people hunting in that instance without a tracker. We pretty much ran everybody out.

At the end of the day, you can always most likely go someplace else to find XP (which is what I did yesterday). Yeah, it may be a bit out of the way, but for me that's the fun.

But I still would personally like to see some of these caps lowered a bit...

When DBG does something firm about the mess they have made it might be just to consider being inconvenienced to "stop the farmers" but until then its all just hollow BS. I dont buy from these guys and I dont deal in kronos at all yet I gotta waste half or all my time to play on finding a place to play?
The game aint that good.

/pick on request would be the most exploitable mechanic in game.

A RMT crews dream.

Zone in, /pick yourself an instance. If any named on track, kill them. 10 minutes later, repeat. They would not need to camp anything ever, just hop instances.

Unless /pick on request would somehow bring up an instance where named wouldn't spawn specifically for XPing, this would be a silly idea.

Not so much /pick on request as the constant "oh we cant do that because farmers" line.
It is complete BS.
I can end farming right now along with a ton of other problems just by ending the krono ready availability on TLPs.
Oh the blasphemy...

Yeah, I suppose it would be exploited by a few. Still better than the current option, though. Perhaps a better idea would be to make new instances available the moment greater than 50% of the mobs of a given level range are missing.

It's frustrating more so now that we're finally of level to camp some upgrades. Take the ogres in WK, for instance. They'd be a good experience camp for us and would possibly see some upgrades from it. Every time we've checked this week, there've been high level bottomfeeders or bot crews clearing it. That's pretty much the only content in WK that is 25-30ish and there were never other instances available. Figure spending thirty minutes spent traveling to five to six other places to see the same thing and we've run out of time to play.

Making more instances available when more than 50% of the mobs of that level range were missing would have solved this problem. There's a chance that this might be exploitable, too, but it'd take far more work than most would commit too, I'd think.

You do know that out of Combat regen isn't enabled on this server right? ... the icon turns on, but it doesn't actually give you any increased regen...

That is true. But it is also true mana regen is faster than it was.

How so? I am unaware of any changes to the basic mana-from-meditation-skill formula

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I and others asked for higher spawn rate on non-boss mobs early on and many replies were against it. The only thing that could make these tlp servers farther from 'classic-esque' would be adding in Merc babysitters and Decrepit armor. Give us more mobs to exp on please.

I think its preferable considering multiple tracking/mage grouping whether boxed or not in each instance, higher dmg spells, out of era baloney etc... put more exp mobs in more zones. Here and Kunark and Velious as far as this point is concerned. A third server or more mobbies. Do it.

health and mana regen is as it is on live out of combat. this was stated at the begining faq before server launch

Why would more than one group hunt in any zone then? If I went somewhere that had a group, even if they weren't close to me or pulling my group's mobs, I would /pick a new zone so I could have one all to myself. The inefficient use of system resources would slow the game down to a crawl.

yea, clarity is an extra 10 mpt (mana per tick) now it used to be only 4 you can get 3 with a potion now. I remmeber quad kiting in the old days with 60 wiz in cobalt scar for coin and it taking at least 15 minutes to med to full without clarity and that was epic clicky. which added i think 3 pts per tick to mana regen. so mana regen is definately faster than it was on live.

Look saying it took x amount of time to regen was was a much larger manna pool is frankly irrelevant. Manna regen is exactly where it always was sans OOC or any other aids including spells. In fact OOC was added to accommodate the the huge manna and health pools resulting from the steady mudflation of the expansions.

None of which has anything at all to do with the crowding problem that moves like a series of bell curves through the game. I am all for whatever makes the game better and if Verrant could of instanced in early EQ they most certainly would have done so.