When TLPs are "true up" with live servers: AoC?

Just make AOC on Live a Gold/All-Access only feature to make instances or zone in; should limit the number pretty well.

Like I said, give me a small royalty for the idea. Like 12x lifetime gold accounts for my Rizlona crew

Dude ... people have been asking for AoCs on Live since they started on TLPs. Get over yourself.

I just think it's funny all the folks asking for AoCs in this thread and the ease at which it can be implemented when the current developers still have no handle on the lag issues plaguing servers and raids.

What makes you think they can magically make AoCs work on Live with FTP?

Two reasons why AoC's will likely, not go Live ever ...

• The shear amount of AoC instances created per hour, every hour, every day, would overwhelm the overall system
• The Illegal RMT market would get a huge boost and incentivize them to continue to cheat and illegally sell items, time and Kronos for Actual Money.

I hope they do add AoC's, but I just don't see that happening anytime soon.

Why exactly do we think AoCs would have a noticeable contributution to lag on live servers?

Because on any Live server with a decent population, you can tell when there are more than a handful of people are on - instances respond slowly (both starting and entering), zone times become long ... and then longer, you can start telling when people enter your zone because of lag spikes, chat lags, etc. etc.

And then there's raiding. Sunday night on Xegony (or pick another server with 3+ guilds raiding at the same time) is a poopfest of lag once all 3 raid forces are running. And that's just 3 instances at once.

And then you add more instances on top of that from AoCs. Those instances are not "free" ... they take resources.

1 + 1 = 2

We don't know what the breakdown is for resources between a TLP server and a long running Live server. It is entirely possible that the TLP server infrastructure is just better than a Live server. They seem awfully keen on reclaiming Selo and Phinny pretty fast. But in any case, a Live server is almost certainly no better than a TLP.

The biggest thing right now is the devs have no idea how to fix lag on Live. The first attempt didn't work. We didn't see a second try in the March patch (albeit a week shorter than normal). As a long time Live player, fixing lag should be the #1, 2 and 3 priority for DPG once T3 goes live in CoV.

So, after 5 years of Phinny and, during last year, a persistent campaign begging to be informed about what will happen to modern TLP when they reach life, after that, and only after that, when they finally are seemingly reaching a conclusion and fairly and officially informing us... your conclusion is..... "They seem awfully keen on reclaiming" our server?
hahahaha
I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Jokes aside; most of us agree on that. It's logical that they may want to "free-up" hardware and get rid of Phinny. But would live servers notice or what? they are probably going to use that slots to make Phinny 7.0?
I agree on your last sentence.. to the point that I would certainly give up on some benefits on exchange of better instance performance when under stress. We have seen sacrifices likes this on the past; aka when they removed Pick Zones 1.0 and introduced 2.0 version of it in order to fix instance occlusion. It was a sacrifice. Did it do any well?

The highlighted part is pure misunderstanding of how it really works, RMT market's thrive on rarity keeping the price high, AoC create the exactly opposite set of circumstances - equalising access & flooding the market with optional sources, any RMTer who had cornered the timing on some spawn for a rare item would be furious about live getting AoC to undermine their efforts to monopolize something.

That said most of the RMT in EQ these days is on Pre-PoP TLP servers by virtue of the populations & the amount of highly desirable easily monopolized targets. On Live servers its far more about outfitting a crew of alts with clickies.

I refute the idea that extra AoC instances will be in enough numbers to impact live servers a whole bunch - come raid time most players will be raiding not faffing about in old AoC content, the overheads on it are small - the bigger issue in the way of it happening is most definitely dev ideology, they will stubbornly say that AoC were built for TLP & that's where they will stay, it's just how they think & operate.

You're coming around to an image of their ideology I think I can get behind.

AoCs if implemented to live server adding a huge amount of lag is still theory. We don’t know how many people will even use them.

They’re currently experimenting with several lag reducing things in test patches like changing how procs function. I think they should add AoCs to live servers for 1 or 2 patch cycle. People can observe whether the lag they experience is any worse than it was previously and then the devs can make a decision to leave the AoCs or remove them.

Realistically we have AoCs for Classic-GoD. People on live servers would have 2 primary reasons.

1. Doing PoP progression for Artisan’s Prize purposes. This is a one and done thing. Also it’s very easy to organize a whole guild to do all of these on a single day. With level 115s you can AE entire zones and 1shot these bosses.
2. Getting raid achievements. Again a one and done thing.

The drops from the raids that have AoCs available to them are generally not worth selling or even worth farming for tribute on live servers. I doubt they’d see much repeat use from people other than the oddballs who just like to kill certain old raid mobs for giggles.

I really think after the first month of initial shock and rush to finish PoP flagging on an alt has worn off, the lag added from AoCs on live servers wouldn’t be noticeable.

If there is even the slightest chance of there being an adverse effect on live server performance, AOCs should not be implemented on live. I would like them as I enjoy making various era thinks, but I wouldn't want them right now.

They also shouldn't even think about releasing a new TLP until the current issues with live are fixed. It's pretty unplayable on raids and a complete turn off. The enjoyment factor is just so tarnished with the lag. Their one and only priority should be to fix it.

I am a big advocate of AoC on live, but I do think your point is valid here so I agree the time is not right.

Raid lag has to be top priority because it has become a chronic problem, it does seriously impact raiding which is one of the major pillars of the game.

Once the raid lag has been addressed will be when AoC should be looked at being implemented for live, that said I still maintain their impact will be minimal, and as Darchon points out, that impact would probably be short-lived anyway. But as much as I am a fan of it, I still think the devs wont do it anyway.

Tying them to gold accounts only would elimintate the problem. Even if you didn't, most new TLP's have more pop than most live servers. Not sure why you think it would be a problem for live when it's not on TLP.

Even with a lower population per server than TLP, live servers are stressed way more with just the sheer amount of computations occurring on live vs TLP. An example is a single character on live can and does crank out more procs per minute than an entire tlp raid.

Adding to that stress will potentially just increase the already almost intolerable performance.

I do love hitting the 'proc on every attack' ability on my beastlord dual wielding swarm pet procing weapons.

But anyway, do AOC instances create more lag than whatever *other* instance the players would be in anyway?

It's like complaining about all the BMW drivers on the road; if there were no BMWs they would be driving Mercedes or something instead.

I love the whole "but the lag" argument which is supported by 3 complete raid guilds all raiding on the same day... when talking about extremely out leveled content that would be solo'd at a single person's personal time.

I love the RMT argument when RMT exists on every server already, and only exists because of limited access to resources.

But you do you. Enjoy camping for YEARS for that one click. That is a weird kind of elitism that I'll never understand.

it's possible live AoC would create lag and the fear of it is what is stopping them. I don't know that anyone has solid proof of that. A lot of people are creating instances on live all the time, not just for raiding. Group missions, HAs etc are all instances. People farm raids GoD+ that have natural instances all the time on live as well. Unless you actually saw a dramatic increase in player base on a server, I"m not entirely sure adding AoCs would mean any significant increase to instance creation. The people interested in farming old stuff are already playing on these servers most likely and only have a certain amount of play time they want to mess around each week. Maybe they are popping more PoFire DZs or such but less Anguish / Tacvi / DemiPlane etc, who knows.

Making them All Access only would help because it'd avoid people on random larks of nostalgia logging in on a free account to kill a bunch of old raid bosses.

An interesting alternative question is for a long time TLP and live had different spawn rates for open world raid bosses in old zones (TLP spawned much faster), Prathun eventually synced those up. But we know they can have differeing spawn timers. Why not just make those guys respawn like every 2 hours on live servers? There's nothing mechanically special about PoP or Velious era raid bosses. They are mobs that spawn in zones within a timed window, if you made that window much much shorter people would have less reason to demand AoC. Most people who want AoC want to complete some really obsessive "checklist" of bosses, complete PoP flagging for Artisan's Prize, or acquire a few harder to acquire nostalgia clicky items. None of this content has any relevance to balance or the economies of any live server other than FV, and FV is kinda whatever (you shouldn't make game decisions based on it.) There would be virtually no impact to anything meaningful on live if all the open world raid bosses pre-Omens of War simply respawned every 120 minutes.

Also for anyone saying "RMT" when it comes to AoCs on Live... what? Any heroic character could solo/molo any AoC instance that drops a tradeable item. Not a single item from AoCs would be worth anything in the bazaar.

RMT is not remotely a concern to factor in when considering adding AoCs to live servers.

Phinigel is in the era where a single character can generate an absurd number of procs. My druid on Phinigel has 5 sympathetic procs, proc potion, proc aura and 3 melee procs just when grouping. We also have 3 active raiding guilds and we have AoCs. The lag is not that bad on our server even when 2 guilds are raiding.

not sure about the AOC causing raids to lag thing, on Phinny we had 20+ guilds running raids with no major lag problems back in PoP time, and that was with 72 man raids!

This is a good point, I've been on several early era TLPs with 15+ raid guilds actively raiding at the same time and no serious lag.

Selo gets event lag in CoV when we raid and do DPS burns and we are the only guild on this server, I think the live issues are serious design flaws that have little to do with the number of instances running.