Kunark Instances & Phinigel

That option worked so well on Ragefire with the SoNH piece - 2 weeks or so of that piece being blocked certainly seemed amicable.

I remember my first TLP. Wish I still had that feeling you have.

Yes this is bringing a long existing problem into light. Ask any enchanter how much fun it was doing their epic on Ragefire/Lockjaw when they have to kill a long respawn NPC in zones that never get extra picks. If this server needs 10 times the number of end game grouping dungeons to support the population, why do enchanters for example, have to deal with just a single Cabilis for the entire expansion. We can extrapolate from the fact that we're filling up 10 Guks or 10 Sebilis that we need 10 Cabilis to support the enchanter population of the server.

Lexi's been on multiple - just conveniently always been on a server that's cratered in population before Kunark opened. (And with only one guild getting Trak's Teeth in any quantity)

Just wondering. How many guilds do some of the posters here actually expect to compete for VP keys the first month?

I propose the large guilds of the server cooperate to all zone into each VP key zone on a Thursday or Friday night and spawn 8 or 10 picks. Could hold them open through the weekend (at a minimum) and produce a lot of keys.

I'm guessing all the guilds that have cleared Plane of Sky will attempt to get into Veeshan's Peak. How many do you think will compete? I know from experience on Ragefire that many players that never saw a Trakanon kill still competed for medallion pieces and on Phinigel everyone can easily get Trak kills.

Yeah we'll see. I haven't been keeping score, but there is a pretty long list of things that DBG said they wouldn't do.

I'd love to raid VP and I have a pretty healthy playtime, but I'm not going to invest a huge amount of time to camp highly contested rare pieces and deal with a bunch of drama.

With 84 day lockouts noone is here to raid an expansion behind. They'll just be moving on to Velious.

My guess is we'll see the same solution they used with the trak idol.

Most of a guild actively trying to get mass keys over levelling the first month? Id say 2-3 tops. Lots of guilds just want easy instance kills and will have no problem skipping IMO.

Well considering that Trak drops around 8 teeth per kill now IIRC - I'd expect more than a few. Not counting those that "pre-camp" their parts before teeth.

I'd hope that's true for VP if it stays as is... but VP loot is largely forgettable and doesn't carry far into Velious at all quality wise. But it sets a horrible precedent for VT which really isn't skippable.

I don't see how this is a better scenario. How is a huge flood of people working on the key on day 30 better than day 1? It's still a bottleneck that needs to be addressed.

If your guild is serious about VP key you do it at launch / early on with mass picks and lower competition before the pick number goes down. It didnt take TL long at all to clear VP. Some posters here kinda make it seem like all guilds killing instance raids are full of hardcore members which I personally doubt. I think most members in the majority of guilds would rather get their char level 55-60 over putting the time in and camping VP keys.

1.) Everyone from every raiding guild zones into FV/LoIO/Swamp when necessary for appropriate piece.
2.) Spawn ALL THE PICKS. Keep at least three alts in picks at all times.
3.) Profits.

That's how this is intended to work! right?

In my experience this does not work well. I've intentionally moved my guild's raid force somewhere to spawn a pick only to have the NPC in the new pick sniped from us. On Phinigel most of us want to avoid this type of interaction with other players.

I felt bad when i got mine on RF. Both myself and someone else was camping AJ for about 4 hours killing every random trash in the zone. When i got mine i felt like crap know that the person camping AJ was likely going to be camping the zone killing lootless grey cons for 4+hours for another 50/50 shot at something that is nothing more then a needless time sink.

But let's say for instance we as a community can keep 8-10 active at all times. (i do not know if picks kick/despawn when # of players in zone is to low, y/n?) Sure, competition and sniping would still occur, BUT there would still be 8-10 times as many AJs/BGs/GroundSpawns spawning. Seems the only viable way to up the numbers.

Hell if we could agree on it, each raiding guild could claim their own pick.

This is a load of nonsense, and you posted it knowing that full-well I presume. You need only look at the fire beetle eye farmers to know your "in-game tool" are nothing more than a cover.

Take a look at the eqemu source if you want to know how easy it would be to change a few spawn timers. Burdening devs with a few minutes of work after all the money poured into the server by the players is the least we can do.

Remove the key requirement for the instanced version of the zone. Let the guilds that want to poopsock keys have the extra run through. The key pieces aren't based on skill or require any strategy so why have a zone blocked based on luck. Or if you want to slow the pace at which people enter the instance just require a Trakanon tooth to enter.

This would be a great solution, but I don't think it is practical for a few reasons.

1) In the past (Ragefire) we have seen that greatly increasing the amount of open world content does not result in sharing of said content.
2) We have also seen Daybreak mandated rotations fail (Ragefire), and player created rotations fail in an even more spectacular fashion (Lockjaw).
3) It would be difficult to organize this for every zone for the key pieces

I'm kind of at a loss that Daybreak doesn't have any insight into how miserable this is going to be and how much it goes against the spirit of the Phinigel server. The players on these TLPs have shown time and again that they cannot get along or cooperate. That was the sole draw of the Phinigel server for many people. Daybreak needs to set up a solution for this, not the players.

The main problem here is that some individuals, and guilds, can and will attempt to block content. This has always been done by a select group of players, because it's fun to be able to say you can accomplish something, and prevent everyone else from accessing content. This is simple psychology. The top guilds benefit from blocking guilds, making them unable to compete with them, in this case VP.

I feel like this completely goes against the point of Phinny, which was a server where the top guilds couldn't block content from the majority of the player base.