VP key the current cancer of Aradune

I dunno, I am currently fighting cancer and can honestly say the VP key is worse than what I have been through so far. Though admittedly my cancer was caught early and I don't need chemo, so YMMV.

i haven't actually actively played since like, two months ago, but my autoclicker has been picking up the ground spawns for me to destroy. hope this helps.

This is somewhat inaccurate. Pick thresholds are retuned on a recurring basis, and the reason has nothing to do with "combatable population". Too many instances of a /pick can cause server crashes. The larger a zone is, the fewer total instances a server can maintain without risking a crash. Phinny had all sorts of server crashes due to this problem, so pick thresholds were bumped way up for certain large and high-use zones. It is still possible to launch more picks and get more keys. The reason that isn't happening is because people would rather come here to the forums and complain that it isn't simply being handed to them on a platter.

Do you need help following along the conversation? I'm aware that it's possible to spawn more picks on Aradune lol. I never said it wasn't. We did it several times, however generally only were able to maintain the picks for a few hours at a time. Also, I'm completely aware that picks are retuned all the time from server to server, but I wasn't about to get in to the nuances of this that only the people playing on the servers know of, but instead stuck with what can be proven in patch notes. Combatable population and size are what are referenced in the patch notes for the changes, thus why I gave them as the reasons.

Waitingformoreeq was trying to say that pick thresholds were much larger on phinny and harder to pop than they are today for these zones, and I was explaining to him how he's 100% wrong on that.

But it factually is 2.5x to 3x what Phinny was in Classic and the start of Kunark

I don't think he's wrong. I don't remember what the exact numbers were, but the huge pick thresholds assigned after the Phinny crisis have been retuned since, and lower numbers are used. Comparing Phinny at its highest, and what Aradune and other TLPs have now, is >probably< in Aradune's favor. It's easier for devs to tune the thresholds down somewhat now that the issue of a single toon keeping a pick open is solved.

In case it wasn't obvious, I am very much in the camp of those who are tired of all the whining and flaming the devs over a problem that can be easily solved by playing the game as a MMO and not a single-player RPG.

Lets go on things you can prove, and not things you "think"

VT is much better than VP : all shards but the Maiden's eye one drop from trash mobs.

The best thing to do with VP is to simply skip it : raiding begins in Velious !

You're the one that thinks you could've gotten "15+ Picks of FV" by zoning in 800 toons. Not realizing 500ish toons only popped a single pick on Phinny. I've done VP keys on many different TLPs. Phinny was by far the most time consuming. The fact that people complain about ground spawns now just shows how much the Key has changed.

While I agree completely that people were still learning how to game the system on phinny and could have potentially done FAR more keys than what were done there... it's absolutely crazy to think you have it figured out now either.

Picks seem to take up to 10 minutes to spin up, and 15 + up to 10 minutes to close. If you took TEB on a kunark safari you could spin up a half dozen picks, get the loot out of them, move to the next place allowing them to close, get the items in that other place, move to a 3rd place and repeat, go back to the first place...

You lose the ability to keep a dozen picks up with an afk box but that doesn't matter IF you can manage to leverage enough people to repeatedly spawn and collapse picks, as you can get far more crap that way. Only I think AJ would be cut and dry better on phinny regardless.

I don't think the way picks worked on phinny is a viable solution for the current VP key situation. We need Daybreak to investigate and make adjustments on the VP key. Them having old code that's hard to alter is not a viable excuse. We are paying customers and are asking them to improve a quest that was made 20 years ago. They've only changed the time on 2 ground spawns in 20 years. That was done a long time ago and it's not even close to enough.

VP keying was not a problem on selo. That solution is my preferred...

Yea I wouldn't think it was a problem if I got funneled keys the first week of the expansion. You run your guild like a Chinese sweatshop.

Swamp/kaesora: Spawn time is now 20 minutes. Pick zone threshold for Swamp of no hope is no longer 50 people, and now is 20 people.
Dreadlands/TT/FV/KC - Triple the chance to see the named, they are currently too rare.

The ground spawns were originally 8 hours. Then after Phinny they lowered them again.
They reduced the spawn timer of BGM dramatically
They increased the spawn chance of Ancient Jarsath
They increase the spawn rate of Pain Soul, VKR and Rotting Skeleton
They increased the number of teeth Trak drops, reduced his respawn and added AoCs

It is 1999 thats what tlp servers are all about living in the past.

Andarriel

Spawn rates/times too low, population too high, causing time sync poop sock bottlenecks. They made some necessary adjustments in the past, how it's time to do it again. The population is too high with the current systems in place.

Biggest problem is Swamp of no hope. Everyone is blatantly cheating with speed hacks, warping and other software I won't mention by name. Spawn time is way too low 50-70ish mins and 1 spawn with 1 pick zone the majority of the time.

I said it before, I'll say it again.

TLP's need to have 0 key/flag locks on content. Keys/flags were meant to slow down progression (which never worked against the crowd it was intended for) and (in some cases) allowed further development of zones/encounters behind said locks.

With the rate of advancement in TLP's and their significantly reduced time scale (3-4 months per expansion vs ~1 year for a full, normal expansion), all these do is further the divide amongst the community. With the exception of things like: Emp Ssra room key and Lord Seru port key, there's no real reason to have such bottlenecks. Let the difficulty of the content be the limiting factor.

It is absurd that so much time is wasted to key/flag people, along with the griefing that occurs up through GoD, by blocking access to content by certain guilds.

That's racist man, why does the sweatshop have to be Chinese?

Yaboi - Your kind of toxic yourself. You have good points about what the issues are, why the need to be changed, then blow it by insulting the people/company you want to make the change.

I personally don't play on the TLP's for this very reason. I hate the old world rushing to be the first and using it to block others from the content.

Hope they increase the spawn rates for all of you fighting over keys.