/instanced picks when they coming?

I'm curious DPG what is stopping this from becoming the fix for all of the bot / box issues on any single new TLP?

I don't hear anyone complain about raid content anymore. Can we just get charged (x) for a personal group instance to any zone for (x) hours and just make the math work to cover the cost for more server support and coding to get it up and ready?

This idea would completely dumpster the economy.

That is going to make server performance even worse as that would be a lot larger load on the instance servers.

So just to be clear, you believe the solution for "all the bot / box issues" would be to allow them to spin up infinite instances of every zone on demand and farm whatever items they want 24/7 with zero competition? Isn't the main complaint about these group content bots their infinite plat farming causing inflation? Do you have any idea how many automated mages would be sitting in their own personal Rathe Mountains instance just endlessly farming? Hardware issues for that many instances notwithstanding, I'm not even sure the /pick zone system in EQ is capable of counting high enough to give each instance a unique name.

I think this is the most likely scenario for why the new servers haven't been announced yet / what they are working on.

It won't be pickzones, that would be a server killer. But some other form of instancing.

Bots don’t matter if they don’t stop you from doing anything. What they make items cheap so people who don’t want to farm can buy them? They only farm if there is a market anyway.

This is the solution every single MMO uses to fight the problem of people not being able to play the game because of other people.

But it kills “EQ experience”, yeah well I see no one asking for a server with no AoC’s....just saying.

Not every zone. If every zone in classic was instanced your Mage in Rathe mountain scenario would definitely be realized lol. We'd just need dungeon instances. The issue is botters camping items 24/7. If everyone has a chance at loot the botters will be forced to find another avenue for their krono schemes.

Dungeon instances is one of the more cost effective ways forward.

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I don't get this concept that botters monopolize EVERYTHING. I played on Agnarr and also Mangler from Classic/Velious, and there was not a single camp for an item that I couldn't get myself. Example, I was able to get fungi staff and tunics for all of my characters and alts on every account. I got GEB during classic, etc.

Sure in Seb there may be 8 picks and 7 of them have some mage crew at King camp, but I was always able to find an open camp at some point.

It's not access to camps that drop valuable items that's the issue... This complaint is more "I want this camp any time I show up to the zone and don't want to compete against other players/bots for the camps." That's a different thing entirely.

I highly disagree that giving people personal instances of zones would be a good idea or really solve the problem. How would such a thing work: you get a personal instances of a zone every X days?

The only players who benefit from a system that creates bottlenecks for content/desirable targets & the loot from them are the ones who can monopolise it - that is at the very root of the problem with why botting is so damn attractive it lets a handful of bad actors easily monopolise content & consequently also partially control the prices on the bazaar for a subset of items, that in turn allows botters to build up vast amounts of wealth allowing them further power to disrupt the market & adversely affect prices.

Building defeat mechanisms / code to prevent what they do has proven to be a losing strategy, it is expensive, time-consuming & often easily circumvented the only thing they will not be able to handle is fair competition & the only way to create that is to remove the bottlenecks on content as much as possible & reduce the ability of these bad actors to monopolise spawns/items/zones & the markets dependent upon them.

Servers can handle a lot of instances already & many of them (HA's etc) actually use the same zone files as the regular zones they just reduce the mob count.

Having AoC "on demand" for zones acts as a way to remove those bottlenecks & the knock-on affect is that this almost entirely removes the ability to monopolise the content that bot groups often enjoy sitting on for days weeks or even months at a time, it won't remove botters altogether though so it's not a panacea.

Servers were built to handle up to I think 4,000 players in the early era - though I suspect that the servers cannot actually handle that many in the later game with so much more processing than before - FV & Mangler most populated at somewhere under 2,000 but how many servers even house that many players regularly - 3-4 currently perhaps, majority of them are a lot lower.

So I think there is plenty of headroom for at least some instanced zones on demand but there very likely are some hurdles involved & perhaps not every zone is going to be suitable for AoC that provide access to an entire zone, some may need to be created as "areas" within it so that only some of the areas are populated so for example a huge dungeon on 6 floors may have 3 instances each with two populated floors to help reduce the server loading & your group can just choose which suits their needs best. Zones have a lot of load-balancing already - this just takes it that step further.

Lets say they did that for the most popular zones between Classic & PoP to begin with and see how that panned out? they don't have to make every single zone have it to start with, that can come later if needed.

A zone instance for every group would destroy the servers and not even during prime time I'd think. They changed how picks works a couple years back because too many picks were killing the game servers, and that was just picks.

I've always speculated the new hook for Aradune would be BST/Zerk classic start and they are having difficulty uncoupling them from their expansions but that's just speculation on my part.

If zone instances destroy the server then how do you explain OMM missions? Use the same mechanic that powers those.

Instances like OMM's do not use the same mechanics as /pick instances. Zones that were originally designed to be instanced interact with memory in a different way than /pick instances. I'm not smart enough to know all the details behind that, but this quote is from RadarX back when they changed the /pick shutdown system in 2017:

"These [pick zone instances] behave differently than normal instances (LDoN, Raid, etc.) because they aren’t designed for it. Normal instances have spikes of activity that can easily reclaim memory reserved for that zone."

Source thread

The OMM missions are instanced versions of classic zones and people ran them 24/7 when they were current. I don't see why they can't use the same system that powered those.

Their excuses don't add up. Nothing they do adds up. The solution is staring them right in the face. Take the OMM code and reuse it.

Or they could release with Velious so people can spread out. There are tons of solutions to the problem if they would just listen to feedback.

How many different OMM's were there available though? I think three group and two raid? Been a long time since I did those. So five total types of instances to set up and code etc. And each instance would stay up for maybe 20-60 minutes or so depending on your efficiency. This post is asking for the same treatment for every zone in the game in order to create xp grinding instances that presumably players would want to keep open for several hours at a time. Those are... well, not comparable situations to say the least.

You really don't need to don your tin foil hat when the employees provide us with details about their technical limitations with this game. Their excuses don't add up? Umm ok. They could have simply said "We don't want to do this" and provided no insight at all into why. They chose to provide some details. The fact that you apparently think they are just making up technical limitations to divert their customers from discovering the REAL TRUTH is... well it makes for fun internet reading, I'll just put it that way. By the way please don't inject the disinfectants.

Dont' you 4+ box IIRC?

There are plenty of different examples on live EQ of them being able to have instanced zones. Pick was a quick implementation to solve a problem that doesn’t work very well.

But that doesn’t mean they can’t do better, just they haven’t so far.

I'd be fined with on demand instanced zones for full groups, ,but only if all loot contained there in was made no drop.

This just isn't true. If they were all pickzones it would destroy the server. If they were all ldon style instances, or Old Man Mckenzie style instances, or raid instances, or modern eq mission instances, the servers would handle it just fine. The vast majority of eq's history has been spent in eras with players playing most of their time in instances. It can be done, it just needs to be done right.

Oddly enough, the economy still functions just fine in eras where there is droppable loot from instances.

It would change the economy, but it would not end the economy. Players will adapt.