Thresholds for a new pick should be reduced

I don't understand why every zone has to be a crowded mess. Not enough spawns. Groups fighting for spots and pulls. There should be about half the players in each pick to let people have a little breathing room.

Especially a zone like Ocean of Tears. You have 30 people all looking for Cyclops and the rest of the zone is unused. OoT should create a new pick at 15 or so. Let people log in and kill some mobs without having to dps race. Who cares if people get a few extra drops of Jboots or FBSS. Mischief is a loot piñata and it is doing fine.

Threshold size was chosen so that a large number of picks would not cause an impact on game wide performance.

Picks used to stay open as long as there was at least one person in them. I never saw any issues with game wide performance due to it and I would imagine with the 64 bit client now things should be a lot better now.

Having a 64-bit client has nothing to do with this. The performance bottlenecks are all on the server side, and are based on the server's resources: # of cores, amount of physical memory, etc. Server hardware upgrades are expensive, and EQ runs on a tight budget. Would you be willing to pay a $100/month sub fee for a bigger server?

This is what Classic is like. Things get better when more zones unlock and people spread out more.

There is a reason why they added a minimum number of players for a pick and started closing them down when they went below that number. Just because you personally didn't see any issues due to the number of picks doesn't mean it wasn't an issue.

That being said, I doubt adding a pick or two for a single zone wouldn't overstress the server. Also the problem the OP is talking about isn't due to their being too many people in zone, rather too many people on one island, hunting one type of mob or really one MoB, the AC. It is almost like they need to make that one island an instance with multiple picks, at least until the travel AAs come out.

Whoosh

I would counter that people don't need the jboots either and they can play just fine without them or find other ways to get run speed boost. The number of people needed to spawn a new pick will never be determined by a single camp in a zone.

But it isn't just your spot, there's this other guy's spot, and over there that other guy's spot, and then you have more players demanding private picks because they don't really want to play a MMO, they want EQ to be a single-player RPG. A line has to be drawn somewhere. The devs see zone population numbers you and I don't, and I trust their judgements to tune the pick thresholds the best they can to give the most players access to the most contested spots. This is all part of the Classic experience. Players wring their hands at the thought of skipping Classic, but this is what they've asked for, better or worse.

WoW has had instancing on request since 2004 and Blizzard made sure to have enough servers to handle this. I don't see why Daybreak can't purchase more server hardware to ensure there is no decrease in game performance. Most players who play on TLP servers are paying a premium (All Access Pass) to be there.

The pick threshold should be lowered. Most picks in Lower Guk are dominated by farmers and power levelers who pull scores of mobs at a time. Let's give non-farmers a chance at loot too.

All players matter.

This is a social game, be socialable.

Its not designed so your camp is always open, always able to camp and get named kills. Not designed for no competition.

At least thats how EQ was back in the old days and Classic is suppose to represent EQ back in the old days.
So that being said. Welcome to playing EQ like how it was back in the old days!

It's bad game design to create zones that are so poorly itemized that there is only one valuable item in the zone. The original EverQuest is rife with sparse and uneven itemization that causes players to overpopulate a few zones. This could easily be fixed on Darkpaw's part.

In another thread I proposed a viable solution to the Journeyman's Boots rarity problem. Darkpaw should honor the actual quest that Hasten gives out and ensure that the Ancient Cyclops spawn randomly in all 4 of the Karana zones in addition to the Ocean of Tears and South Ro. The ancient cyclops was never intended to be this rare.

For the love of Tunare, devs please fix this problem once and for all.

The old days also had the following:

-corpse runs
-no Krono
-no cash shop with experience potions and stat enhancing potions
-Play Nice Policy

The introduction of Krono has created financial incentives for professional farmers who would not normally bother to play an old MMORPG like EverQuest. Instances (picks) were presumably introduced to allow more players to experience content which is welcome by most players.

It would not be the end of the world for Darkpaw to slightly reduce the threshold to create new picks.

This is like comparing the strength of a Permafrost Giant to a Level 1 Gnome in just his noob-letter hand-in shirt.

These two games are so far apart in resources I have to ask if this was intentional sarcasm.

I would not say that it is bad design, I would agree had you said this was 1999 design & it is an outdated approach which is not fit for gaming 23 years later.

I think the whole "single item, single spawn" design is outdated now, it worked in 1999 because EQ had so little competition & players had never played any better MMO's or even an MMO before it, it;s players were teens & young adults and not mostly in their 40's & 50's with a huge amount of responsibilities - times have moved on & a whole lot of players have seen other MMO games do loot way better.

Item rarity has its place but iconic items should probably have multiple avenues to acquire them because bottle-necking content on any server feels like pure time wasting, and the most contested spawns are on servers that have accellerated unlock schedules & far higher player density than any live server ever had when that content was first created.

EQ itself does in later expansions approach this slightly differently even if that probably wasn't far enough.

That was a good suggestion that I support.

WoW is also a newer game that was designed differently and has a much larger development team to handle things. Simple differences such as cross server grouping has been part of WoW of a long time but are not possible in EQ due to the major differences in server structre. It isn't fair to compare the two games.

Complaining about the design of a zone from when the game was first launched and there was a much different design philosophy? There isn't anything wrong with that design and the item in question isn't required to play or enjoy the game. There are other means to get a similar effect in that era. You say it was never intended to be that rare yet it is easier to get then it was back in the day when it was originally created.

"

The irony. They DID fix this problem with random loot on Mischief. They should release random loot free trade servers so that people can play casually and still be effective with their time.

I don't think performance is really an issue. Even if you doubled the number of picks active on a vanilla server, that's still a fraction the number of zones active on, say, a DoDh era TLP where there's just a ton more zones in general and who knows how many group instances running at any given time.

Lol

According to Jeff Butler, SOE had more than enough resources and was making so much money that devs got massive bonuses based on sales for a few years until WoW came on the scene. Jeff went on to say that in the history of Sony, EverQuest was by far the most profitable product that they had ever created based on how much they invested into it.

Also, SOE practically invented on demand instances with LDoN. WoW instanced is on demand as well.

So there is no excuse in 2022 as server technology is far more powerful than what existed 20 years ago to run a 23 year old game. I do not believe the apologists when they say that it's too expensive to lower the pick threshold.