Dev. Suggestion: Eliminate the 20+hr respawn delay mechanic; at least for quest turn-in mobs

Outstanding post with undeniable logic and reason. If I ran DBG I would hire you as the Lead EverQuest design developer in a heartbeat. EQ is riddled with inexplicably tedious quest bottlenecks that serve no other purpose than to frustrate the player with artificial scarcity. As you mentioned, there is no skill involved in waiting for a mob to spawn or a ground spawn to appear.

Today I completed the VP key quest and the level of tedium, frustration and player toxicity I encountered along the way has caused me to seriously consider quitting playing EQ for good.

Artificial scarcity is why we play.
How is this hard to understand?

If you had everything you wanted you would no longer have a carrot to chase.

The means of creating artificial scarcity matters. Some methods are better than are others.

Just look through Veteran's Lounge. There are plenty of people that continue to disagree with certain content design that creates artificial scarcity. It is not hard to understand.

82% of epic quests have a reasonable level of artificial scarcity. We are just asking that the other ones are brought into alignment with those quests. No one is asking for a change to all epic quests. You are trying to make it seem that if a wiz is able to get better access to their quest, that every quest in the game becomes easier.

The existence of picks and AoCs is an acknowledgement that the player base has no interest in waiting hours for camps to open up, nor in racing for raid mobs. There's no reason to hold long respawn mobs to a standard that the community has enthusiastically dumped for a better game experience.

Exactly! The fact that DGB has included the DZ and pick mechanics proves that providing content for players is far more important that scarcity for scarcity's sake.

The Veeshan's Peak key quest is probably one of the most poorly designed quests in MMO history. Because of it's horrible design, this thinly veiled time sink that has caused untold thousands of hours of anguish and mind-numbing tedium for the players who managed to attempt it. The purpose of this quest is to allow the player to enter a zone. Quest mobs should not be rare for this type of quest.

As the original poster so eloquently said, every rare NPC in this quest should spawn with the same regularity as the Bloodgill Marauder. This would fix most of the problems with this quest.

My good friend on Mangler server spent 17 hours camping the Ancient Jarsath in Firiona Vie only to be KSed a number of times. He finally gave up and swears he will never do another key quest as long as he plays EQ. For this kind of thing to be happening in a 20 year old MMO is disgraceful and unacceptable. The buck stops with the EQ devs in charge.

Every year, every EQ dev should be forced to roll a character on a TLP server and complete an epic quest and a VP key quest. If by some miracle this were to happen, I can guarantee you things would change fast.

If I were an EQ dev I would have a sense of pride about the MMO that I work on and get these key quests and epic bottlenecks fixed ASAP.

A storm is coming to the MMO world in August Daybreak Games. You were unprepared back in 2004, but today there is no excuse.

There's a couple stupid points:
1) If you're a gamer and you think waiting around for days for a spawn is "difficult" you've somehow lost your marbles. It's tedious.... Stop being the gamer equivalent of an old man yelling at the clouds.

2) Artificial scarcity being needed is the second dumbest argument in this thread. Several classes got their epics ASAP... yet they still play and play a lot. Do you honestly think making SK/Enchanter/Wiz quest turn ins *reasonable* instead of tedious will make people stop playing their class?

Really?

I swear if WoW made you wait 1-3 days for a spawn you'd all be calling WoW trash....not "difficult".

I'm 100% on board with this request.

I really question the mentality (and mental capacity) of the people who think it's somehow hard to sit around and wait for a mob to spawn. The challenge should be in the QUEST and FIGHTS themselves, not finding the mobs.

So much of EQ has changed over the years in order to better respect the player's time and make things much more accessible. This is a situation that has been neglected for far too long. TLP servers now launch every year and this complaint resurfaces every time. At least half of the player base is on the TLP servers... Daybreak needs to give a little bit of development time to them in order to remedy these Epic bottlenecks.

Also, the best analogy I saw was saying that people saying these spawn times shouldn't be changed are definitely the gaming equivalent of the old man yelling to get off of his lawn. Clearly those folks don't have a problem finishing their Epics, and that's cool. These requests are made for literally everybody else, who wants to spend their time playing the game, not sitting around and waiting on spawns.

OP: Great post.

enjoy classic or play selo

Games are about meaningful decisions. Three day spawns not only make things scarcer, they also present an opportunity for players to make a meaningful decision, such as:

1) knowing what it will take to do it, do I want to do the epic?
2) do I want to trade 3 or more days of farming or leveling time to camp epic mobs instead?
3) how do I go about it if I do choose to pursue the epic, straight up camp, check only after server up, spot check, pay someone to camp it for me, some other way like popping an instance, etc - you have to use your brain and strategize an approach
4) you have to learn about the spawn, figure out timers and windows and spawn locations, server up behavior, pick/dz behavior

All these meaningful decisions go away if you just make it spawn every 50 minutes

You want to hear people going crazy over things like this? Change the warrior and cleric epics to be as rediculous as the Sk, Enchanter ans Wiz.
Won't happen - but it would get things evened out for people playing on TLP servers. Share the pain baby!!!

Show of hands: how many players don't miss the batphone days when you had to log in well after midnight because a raid mob popped? Does anyone miss that "meaningful decision" from the glory days of EQ?

Same deal here.

people miss being the only "haves" and gloating over the "have nots"

The list is far longer than this; regardless, the lack of a serious campaign to eliminated instanced raid content is pretty much all you need to demonstrate that players do not want their access to content to be limited, interfered with, or completely blocked by, other players.

That’s not accurate. I object to changes being made to the game that reduce its complexity. The current incarnation creates a complex situation with complex dynamics that requires thought and perseverance to overcome and people want it to basically be replaced by ‘show up and the mob is usually there waiting for you’.

This is called emergent gameplay. For example, say I roll an SK and expect to have problems doing these hands ins, and somehow it works out that the hand ins were easy because you get lucky and the day you show up only two other SKs are there and they are both afk when the mob spawns and you get your item. Now you have a story - you find yourself telling your guildmates ‘oh wow I got so lucky on that hand in’ and then you have trouble on a different part due to RNG and you lament that your “luck has run out”. You finally finish it and now it is a saga you will remember forever about how you got so lucky and then hit a wall but overcame it anyway.

We shouldn’t just replace that with ‘show up and the dude is just there because nobody should have to wait for anything in 2019’.

Please don't lump in Shady and Angry with epic mobs.

The last 3 remaining ridiculous epics (SK, Ench, Wizard), I can 100% get behind making less silly.

Angry and Shady I actually feel like are in a completely fine space given you can pop picks for them and angry is now loot locked. The items are also super optional and you could honestly never do them and not really miss out on much.

The OP listed the goblins, so Meredyth's mention of them seems fair. The emergent gameplay for those mobs is a real -show, though. If the spawn mechanisms for those mobs were significantly improved, either by shortening the timer, or else by changing the mobs to despawn fifteen minutes after the first hand-in, nobody would care, and the dramas would vanish overnight.

Changing the cords quest to start with SoL would also be fair. I'm certain now that this quest is post RoK era, and probably post SoV.

Is Angry truly loot-locked now, by the way? I'd read a number of people claim that he wasn't.

I'd like to know who, exactly, said, "Leave it as it is" when asked about the enchanter epic bottlenecks. Seriously, I want a name (I'll never get one, I know). Really. Who makes these decisions? A decision was made to improve the wait times on the SK epic but not enchanter? How idiotic. I'm not standing up in support of the enchanter epic, I'm just drawing a contrast.