Aradune and Rizlona are ~7 months away from needing Plane of Storms medallions. Normally TLP players are hyper reactionary and demand a solution for the bottlenecks this presents only when we are already in PoP. I want to get ahead of the curve and request the minis spawn in the DZ when the DZ is started. This seems like it would be a simple change and allow a guild to get 6 extra keys a week per DZ. Every TLP asks for something to be done. We're looking at numerous bot armies on both servers monoplizing these spawns to sell. The same kind of toxicity that forced VP and VT keys to be made no destroy and no . Players shouldn't be forced to camp for 40 hours straight at an expansion launch or pay Krono to get these items, but that is exactly what happens currently.
Good luck. I tried before PoP went active on Phinny. https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/plane-of-storms-progression.237262/ I guess sometimes it just be like that.
On Mangler a bunch of the guilds organized and had their members AFK in Planes of Storm picks for 2-3 weeks of PoP. Basically held 3-4 picks open 24/7 in order get through the bottleneck and reduce the fighting.
hahaha, can you give an example of that or are you just salty because you lost that race so badly? I think my favourite rumour was that one of the officer paid $10k for a plugin which injected picks into the game.... amazing the levels of crazy people can think of when they are just not as good.
Except there is the very real fact that the /pick dialog box displayed exactly 40 people in each pick regardless of how many people were actually in any given pick. And this continued to display for many many hours until a guild had gotten what it needed and moved on. Curious, wouldn't you say?
Toward the end of agnarr the hacking became more public, and that's when I first saw the pick exploit. Itd be off hours and yet 15 people in 4 or 5 picks of The Deep, but they were empty. Obviously that 1 other group on east side had a neat trick. By the time selo launched the hacking was just out in the open. There are actually threads here with screens shots... unless they were deleted. However, it seemed that hack was patched out.
You got 5 months in pop. Making the key easier just means people quit faster. I have a better proposal: Only allow base zone in Plane of Storms, no picks at all. Give MOTM to all medallion droppers and drastically increase their respawn time so you only need to go there when they are in window. Reduce the amount of time allotted for completing a Plane of Justice trial so that they are much harder to complete. Decrease the amount of flags given per raid by half. Alternatively...launch LDoN and PoP together so PoP is only 3 months long. Either solution works for me.
No guilds on Selo raced for anything in PoP, so you are probably confused. The phantom picks that did 100% exist just artificially sped up PoStorms progression for the entire server and had no magic benefit for any one guild on a meta level. They have never been explained but everyone has pet theories. The same pickzone behavior also was observed in the Deep a few times on Selo during bonus XP but was less publicized. If this only occurred in PoStorms on Selo launch, I would half believe it was just Darkpaw taking action to mitigate drama on a server that had already required a lot of CS support for all the petitions around hacking/exploiting. The fact that it was observed in XP zones on Selo before PoP, and on Agnarr when Agnarr was all but a ghost server, suggests something else. I'll never do early EQ again so I have no vested interest in PoStorms, I'll only say that maintaining it in its current form appears to be a strange decision given the decision they've made to remove or reduce most other bottlenecks on TLP servers. I posted a thread a long time ago on the math behind storms picks and how for most servers it isn't actually a big deal, and I think that still largely holds true. But at the same time it's undeniably a source of drama almost like clockwork every year as the flavor of the month TLP moves through PoStorms.
I forgot about this nonsense rumor. Thanks for the laugh. Trust me if the "special" people that were officers in Amtrak knew about this they'd be exploiting it to farm Kronos on Aradune and Rizlona.
Regardless of why or how the phantom picks in storms formed during Selo it does showcase a need that as it currently stands storms is not "ok." If someone forced the picks through some exploit it obviously wasn't ok for them. If Darkpaw forced the picks it obviously was for good reasons. We don't need to argue why or how the picks existed; they existed and someone thought they were needed. I'm looking at getting ahead of the issue so that perhaps Darkpaw has time to improve the situation before this forum fills up with drama for the 4th or 5th time since Phinny.
Right, so to get out of old TLP drama--it's obvious the team at Darkpaw has tacitly accepted bottlenecks are not great game design on TLPs. There is a pretty unified set of design decisions that explains things like drastically reducing the difficulty of VP keying--originally the Kaesora and Swamp of No Hope ground spawns were 8 hour respawns, and they have toned this down repeatedly in the last 5 years. Even the Old Sebilis key was much harder and toned down on TLP, it used to be the hunter and forager were on cycling spawn cycles, and you could never have both up at the same time, and only one mob from the two cycles could be up at a time, while they were instant spawns and you could work through them relatively quickly, this would be a huge bottleneck to anyone wanting to level in Seb on a TLP. Thus they dramatically changed how those mobs spawned so getting a Seb key was not such a bottleneck. They have also increased the number of teeth Trakanon drops. They have likewise totally redone encounters like Vule which used to be open world only to remove that bottleneck. The thing about the storms medallions is they don't really just control raid progression, they control the ability for more casual players to get into better XP zones. The storms giants are kind of a meme for the serious raid guilds, those guilds will sock storms and get their medallions done, every guild I've ever been in has had zero issues with that. The people who actually deal with the most misery in storms are always the players in smaller guilds and in groups trying to farm these medallions so they can get into BoT for XP / gear farming, who have to contend with frankly much more toxicity than the large guilds do in their initial PoTime rush. The giant minis aren't really raid content and should just respawn as named with a PH, the big giants that are raid bosses I would leave be. If I was fixing it I'd make: Pendubk the Turbulent Solnebk the Unruly Faruek the Bold Paruek the Strong Laruken the Rigid Zertuken the Unyielding regular rares with PH and normal spawn timers, and I'd leave these mobs the same as now: Gurebk, Lord of Krendic Jeplak, Lord of Srerendi Neffiken, Lord of Kelek`Vor That basically makes the group giants normal spawns and leaves the raid giants with their current spawn/AoC structure. I'd probably also make the raid giants drop significantly more medallions than they do currently.
That was the best conspiracy theory to make its rounds since the turning off of COTH in seb one, back on fippy. It always brings joy to my heart to hear the accusation repeated. In fact I'd go so far as to say that half the reason I felt so warmly welcomed when I moved to faceless on selo might be that everyone there kept bringing this awesome topic up and asking me about it, which made me so happy. Of the 3 observed cases of it happening on selo: 1. In FG if memory serves right after aten died, it appeared to have helped amtrak the most. Note that the race was already over. 2. In the deep during bonus xp weekend, and my observation was AM utilizing these by far the most. Note here that gris (the dude generally accused of creating them) was not actually around when these ones popped up. 3. In POS during the expansion launch. Both amtrak and faceless got what I understand to have been about even benefit from the picks, and I believe both guilds actually moved on before they were closed. My theory is that there are a few dudes who have friends on (or formerly on) the team and they reached out for mediation or assistance and in these occasions they got it. The first 2 cases were ones in which petitions were launched prior to the picks, and the 3rd one where everyone preemptively tried to ask for mediation in advance. I think some CS person in the company, not hax, did this. I personally think these picks worked great as isolated uses. FG shortly after the race allowed a bit of steam to be let off with all the bitter emotions swirling after such a long competition. Deep during bonus xp allowed more people to benefit from the event and catch up on aas that had until recently been horrendously too slow. Storms meant that the pop expansion launch went nice and smooth and other than the actual accusations of wrongdoing like here, there was not otherwise a bunch of drama around it, which was great. My hope is that daybreak continues to utilize the creation of "bonus picks" as a means of dealing with the most serious bottleneck issues. Given how well they worked on selos, I would be all for seeing them used again on aradune/rizlona and the endless repeats of these tlps to come. Just have a dozen extra storms picks for the first couple days. Create a few extra picks of the most popular zones coinciding with bonus xp events that can cause serious overcrowding.
People have also seen the "bugged" pickzones in XP zones on servers like Agnarr where only one box crew would be in a zone farming stuff, which means if it's exclusively something done by Darkpaw it's being used improperly.
How could anyone doubt that an EQ developer with high level access would be making fake picks of The Deep so they could grind AA's on Agnarr? It would be too obvious if they simply assigned themselves the AA so this is what they have to resort to. Then they go to SG to farm deepwater inks and supplement their 6-figure salary with 2-3 krono sales a day.
So, the guy who is in charge of doing this was Absor. Back on Phinny we had a thread about this that ended up in PMs with Absor and Prathun and Absor said under "no circumstances" would the Medallion mobs be changed in Plane of Storms... We have asked every server since then, but nothing has changed. The good news is, its really not as bad as it seems, as long as your not trying to be the very first guild to go in. Honestly, who cares if your guild does it week 2 instead of Week 1, just wait 5 days and the top few guilds will be done. I ran the Storms farms for 3 different guilds on 3 different TLPs and all of them were able to key over 70 people with about 8-10 hours a farming on a single day. These "farm" sessions were done 5-8 days after PoP launching and we had very little competition. Its true they were planned and we ran a full day of 50+ in a raid watching picks etc, but in the end it was a ton of fun to be honest.
Right I mean, if I wasn't so lazy I'd search for it, but I posted a thread I think back when Mangler was crying about storms showing the basic math of Storms spawns with expected pick numbers means the supply of medallions vs the number of raid guilds and raiders isn't actually that bad, but I do get where Foaming is coming from. On a server like Rizlona there's a lot of people looking to flag out their box crews and the "raid rush" for those medallions probably won't be that big, so you are going to move directly to Phase 2 PoStorms which is just groups fighting nonstop for weeks, I do think that's actually the more toxic time for a server in Storms. Larger raid guilds that want to be into ele planes in the first week or so really don't have to worry about this, but smaller groups of people will be complaining extensively. I would put little stock into being told it would never happen. We were told similar 5 years ago when complaints started about VP keying being too toxic, or how there was no way we could expect instancing of old school EQ raid content, then were told you could never have pickzones of open world zones that have raid bosses in them etc etc. A lot of people on staff at this company are prone to saying things that are not very accurate long term.
I don't care about people quitting or when they quit. What I'd like to see is a simple change to the NPCs and zones in question. Just increase the respawn timer of the giants. Allow more heads to drop per giant. Allow the giants to spawn/respawn in the DZ at the same rate. Problem solved for Storms.
