Closing picks while people are in them

I know resources are limited, but during off-peak hours this is absolutely a bad idea to shut down a pick people are playing within...

Tonight, the pick I and a few other people were playing in shut down and we lost our camp because we landed on top of other people who were already playing there. What was the result? Everyone logged off and quit playing.

Please consider adjusting code so these picks stay active when they are populated; I was pretty steamed when that happened tonight. It absolutely ruined my experience.

I've been there and it definitely sucks. From what I understand on previous TLPs there was no timer on the picks and one toon was holding picks open for days. I don't think they'll adjust anything, sadly. Whenever I notice my group is the only one left in a pick or there's less than 10 of us in one, I sit there waiting for that obnoxious zone closing in 15 minutes message.

Its unfortunate but it doesn't happen often.

Right now for off hours it could definitely kill a group but what kimchi said is accurate. I think they made the change for agnarr going forward. I honestly would not hold your breath or expect any change.

What I did is make a Gina trigger that counts down based on that "this zone will shutdown " message. It gives you time to prepare at least.

(When the zone dies you lose the loot too. So assign it and just old school random it after. )

Here's the thing: Pickzones take up server resources, and when servers run out of resources, guess what... they can crash. In an ideal world, every player group could have their own instanced pickzone to do with as they pleased (and you don't know how often this is requested), but EQ servers don't have that kind of horsepower, it goes with the age of the game. The current system, which has been live since March 2017, keeps servers a lot more stable than they were when the /pick system was originally created.

The upper and lower limits on player count in a /pick vary by zone, and there is no concise documentation, since devs can tweak these numbers per zone at their discretion. As a general rule, if your /pick falls below 10 players, it's going to close. There is a 15-minute warning in the system messages (main chat window) when this is triggered.

As long as you have two or more groups in a /pick, totaling at least 10 players, you should be OK. Plan ahead. It's part of how the game works. Twenty years ago, players wouldn't have dreamed of the kinds of luxury the system we have now can provide.

in modern EQ, you gets HAs, missions etc.. all instanced just like a pick.
how is that not taking significant ressource, but pick is ?
curious as to what the answer is

They're smaller chunks of memory, with only a few specific NPCs in each one; not nearly as big as copying a complete zone. They've also been coded to optimize their use of said resources, and in old world zones that's not the case, some of them are huge. Every NPC in a zone has to be reproduced in each /pick, whether you as a player need them or not, etc etc. Raids are larger instances, more or less the same amount of resources as other zones, but only a small number of raid zones are up at any one time, and devs can budget system resources accordingly. On the TLPs, you get this mad rush through all the Classic content, and for at least the first few weeks, multiple /picks of practically every zone in the game are spawned. There has to be a rule for determining when the total # of open picks can be reduced. What we have now is the result of some significant trial and error.

It was also "highly exploitable" and not in the you are doing something wrong and would get banned type of way.

In the, A box could technically keep 1 toon in say 4 picks and then use his two he wasnt holding picks open with to pick back and forth and farmed named mobs. Keep in mind that picking didnt used to put you at the succor point, it put you in the same spot you were in. This led to a lot of items being flooded into the market. I dont think that was considered when the pick closing thing was implemented, like others have said, tons of picks were being kept open and it was draining the servers resources.

Also unlike instanced zone in modern EQ which close automatically after XX minutes, these would stay open sometimes indefinitely

You could honestly see the strain on the server tonight, zoning was taking a long time, sometimes 45-60 seconds when it normally takes like 10. chat channels were delayed by 10-15 seconds at times. This im guessing was due to them increasing the server cap (Theory, cause the queue was only 45 minutes during prime time) and so many pickzones being open, Unrest alone had SIXTEEN seperate picks.

It's an unfortunate necessity. I do wish the minimum players to keep a pick alive was higher (ex: 3+) though.

Picks seems to stay open with a very small number of people in them, assuming the OTHER picks are at or above their threshold. So lets say main pick of Paw is at 20 people and a new pick spawns, 1 person can seemingly hang there until the main pick drops below a certain threshold and then the instance closes.

Captain Video gave you the overview. I was wondering, though... You weren't dumped to the zone-in when the pick closed? They changed pick switching to take you to the zone-in instead of your current location. I would have expected they do that for picks closing, too. I guess not.

I think this was covered, but each zone has its own thresholds for opening new picks and for closing down picks. I don't believe I have seen a zone that will stay open with 5 or less characters. Some will stay open with 6, though.

Picking with /pick gets you ported to the evac point . Picking because your pick closed does not move you to the evac point. Just as zoning into a pick another group member is already in does not port you to the evac point, you stay at the zone in you entered from.

Ah, yeah. Usually the evac spot is the zone in (for dungeons) but not always.

I would not expect the same problems we saw on RF/LJ and after on Aradune. On older servers, you'd see problems with picks because one person with 12 accounts could keep a bunch of picks open. Here, you can't have 12 accounts. So the odds of 6 people working together to keep picks open indefinitely is less of a concern.

Could set it so a full group can keep a pick. That way you'd need at least 3 people to hold a pick.

Yeah, it can be a useful trick to know for certain dungeons as well. Live side Guk, for example.

Before this was changed, I knew a person that would peek an Everfrost pick open just with 1 person so they could farm the ice giants. Wasn't against the rules but that entire zone was up for that 1 person.

It seems to me there’s an easy way to solve this issue. (The idea is simple at least, I don’t know wether the same could be said for the coding)

When a pick gets below a certain limit of players (let’s go with the current 10) you get a warning, like you do when the pick is going to close, but instead of closing the pick, after the 15 count down, it gets locked so no new players can enter. And the pick does not show up on the list.

Only the people in the zone at the time of the lock can continue to use the zone. Maybe have the zone actually close down after a more lengthy period of time, like 6 hours or so, unless everyone leaves before the time is up, in which it closes down as normal.

The locked pick thing cydonia described already exists. The issue is the threshold is a bit higher than a full group, and someone can get locked out if they zone or die. I dont care if someone can farm giants by themselves, but as others said it is a resource hog.

You can choose to prioritize main pick camps to mitigate this issue- even if you dont get the best camp, it will last as long as you want. Another option is to talk with the base pick folks and coordinate taking over when their group leaves while you're in the short lived pick.

Agreed that it is frustrating, especially for us Pacific players who start grinding as zone population is shrinking.

Isn't that the point of picks though? The point of picks is that zones don't have enough mobs for everyone.

If Ice Giants are camped in the main (and only) pick, shouldnt someone be able to spawn a new pick for Ice Giants? Especially on Aradune, you don't have to worry about 1 person with 15 bots sitting in 15 picks killing Ice Giants.

I don't feel super strongly about this as I think, especially in the early days of a server, there are plenty of picks to go around. But IMO they could really loosen the pick controls quite a bit.

That's the theory. Problem is, it probably takes 50 people to spawn a new pick of Everfrost. I'm guessing at the number. Need a Vox raid moving through unless you have a LOT of friends.

To allow 1 person to keep a pick open indefinitely to farm something? No, that's not the point of picks.