What's your favorite idea to handle Resource Contention you'd like to see tried in a TLP?

Instance everything
Everything is no drop
Not random loot

This server would be an absolute blast.. If you want an item, camp it. The camp is always open, but you have to loot it yourself.

This is specific to live which has very different population challenges than a newish TLP, but, an evolution of the current hotzone/Teek system. On a live this change would provide up and coming players an easier time finding groups to finish their progression, hunter, gain AAs etc while moving the playerbase to all the zones instead of just the easiest ones. On a TLP it'd be pretty gross for a few reasons.

Aside from a select few cases, there really isn't so much resource contention on TLPs that anything needs to be done about it. It's pretty much just the efreeti camp, the chokidai prod, the Droga chief camp, and the shady/angry goblin. And then the VP key, of course. The latter two (VP and shady/angry) deserve to be looked into because players don't really have proper options and alternatives. Just reduce the goblins' respawn timers to two hours or something, and do for the VP key what they did for the VT one. Everything else is pretty much a non-issue.

Contrary to what alarmists like to claim, the whole world is not just claimed by botters and RMTers. It's a select few camps that you can just live without. Even if you need something that drops from there, the fact that they're monopolized 24/7 means the loot there is pretty cheap. Anyone can afford a pair of GEBs or whatever, and it isn't a critical item anyway. Outside of these isolated cases, you don't run into resource contention with any real regularity.

Pickzones and DZs are enough as it is. Every player on the server has a chance to clear all raid content in the game every week, uncontested. If they want more than that, they have to compete for open world content by being the stronger guild. It works fine. There's no issue there. For regular solo/group content, the competition simply isn't bad enough that any action is necessary. As long as you don't insist on trying to camp one of the few items that RMTers like to corner, it's just not a problem.

This doesn't happen often enough to be a problem. It's really just The Deep and sometimes Sebilis. In Sebilis it isn't even always happening, and there's enough picks to get away from it. The Deep is not a zone that anyone really needs, you can walk in there and pick up your VT shard for free in minutes and then there's no other reason to care about the place.

That's simply not reality. There's a select few camps that RMTers try to monopolize. It's basically efreeti and one or two Kunark ones, as well as the VP key which should be handled the same way they did the VT one. None of the items from these places are crucial, nor are they expensive when they're permacamped for the express purpose of selling the drops. By no stretch of the imagination are "virtually all high value camps" monopolized, that's ridiculous hyperbole and simply untrue.

Most ordinary players don't want to run around looking for opportunities to KS people. FTE doesn't present a reasonable solution to anything. It was already perfectly possible for a whole group to show up and KS these targets in front of the 2-3 macro-driven mages or whatever is usually camping things, but normal players just don't have that mindset.

People will not be using FTE to combat RMTers. It will just be used to grief real players. With FTE, if someone shows up at your frenzy camp or whatever and starts trying to steal mobs from you, it's not even worth it to stay anymore. They've already won just by being there because you can do literally nothing about it, and now you're losing probably 30% of the spawns so it makes no sense to stay and hope you don't lose the named mob. It'll be more sensible to just leave and try another camp where you aren't losing a chunk of what you're working for. FTE does not help ordinary players. All it does is facilitate griefing and forcing people out of their camps.

What's some group gonna do about a dude who just waltzes in with a flux staff and a macro that makes them insta-tag the named mob the nanosecond it spawns? Odds are the group literally doesn't have anything similar to attempt to compete. Now you have no choice but to give up the camp and leave. Previously, camps were not muscled in on by full box crews capable of KSing a whole group, at least not with any kind of regularity. I think I experienced that all of two times on Yelinak, and I played every day from launch until mid-Luclin.

And FTE helps them KS real players. Contrary to popular belief, RMTers don't usually play full groups of six mages or whatever, and usually couldn't KS a whole group of real players. There was no such thing as predatory 6-man box crews roaming the world pillaging mobs from whatever groups they came across. By and large, they corner a camp and hold it with enough damage to prevent soloers from showing up and contesting the content. What FTE does is offer RMTers a new way of making money: snipe the named mobs from real groups.

FTE helps the KSer, not the victim. On previous TLPs, getting KSed by RMTers was not something that happened often at all unless you were trying to stake a claim to the efreeti camp or some other well-known RMT-farming location, of which there were few. It simply wasn't practical to KS a full group of six players all reacting individually in real time. Now, with FTE, it is. You just sweep in, attempt to tag the named mob first, and if you don't manage, you simply leave and go to the next camp. And since a KSer will know to have instant clickies and macros to tag with, while regular players often don't, this feature helps the KSers.

People tend to hysterically exaggerate the impact that RMTers have on a server. While it's annoying that they exist, it's not like you have to accommodate them at every turn. As long as you avoid the select few places where they usually go, you almost never cross paths with them. Contrary to popular belief, there aren't hundreds of individual human beings who do RMTing on TLPs. We're talking about maybe two dozen people in total. And most of those aren't actually botting, they just play the game and sell stuff for RL cash. I don't know why this has been blown so out of proportion. 99% of the time, they're just not a concern at all.

Reminds me of when people complain that 6-mage box crews are taking all the content on the server, and then I'm sat there thinking, "I've played for 4-6 hours a day for the last month and I have seen such a box crew literally twice, both times just running past them somewhere out in the world." People are so irrational when it comes to judging what the real problems are. RMTers are a tiny, easily avoidable thing and in no conceivable way does it make sense to implement such an intrusive, game-altering feature as FTE in order to combat this so-called problem.

I have suggested this before in another thread somewhere, and this would also be an "easy" way to allow multiple groups/players to get flag drops from mobs by allowing all players/parties to have a chance at getting flag drops. Flagging has been a sore point on many TLP's.

That would work fine for stuff like VP key mobs and PoP flags, but it obviously wouldn't work at all with loot. And that is, after all, what 98% of competition and KSing comes down to.

That's a pretty generous number, considering I don't fight over loot all too often, and I do often spend multiple full days working on each key/flag for guildies.

But I digress, and agree none the less.

A lot of people have this bizarre misconception that anyone who's not dutifully playing a single character and grouping with strangers at all times is an evil RMTer. Not every multiboxer is an RMT bot, and camping an item without a full group of six single-boxers is not some kind of crime that needs to be dealt with by changing the whole way Everquest is played.

A lot of what people think is an RMTer "monopolizing content" is just some 3-boxer camping an item the normal way. There's nowhere near as much RMT botting going on as people claim.

Random loot and free trade went a long way in making any items accessible on mischief. The few toxic camps were ones that were not randomized : gimblox, bergurgle, cazel.

But for xp mobs, or hunting nameds, I'd love to see either spawn rate picked up, the pick threshold lowered, or personal dz available. Un nerfing the aoc xp bonus would be great as well.

I'll add that some folks dont like random due to the inability to target farm. The idea of keeping a roll on the original mobs table plus a chance at the random pool would be a fair compromise to me.

Another way to spread out people is to ramp up the spawn rate while also normalizing zem, then it would be possible to find enough mobs that give decent xp in nearly any zone. Throw in random, you have a crack at getting any item, too.

I completely agree with this but I've seen people say it would tax their server to have hundreds of thousands of instances running simultaneously (not that anyone posting this stuff really knows anything about their server architecture lol).

I would think its possible in this day. You have Battle Royale games with 100 players in a map and there are THOUSANDS of instances of that map all with 100 players. In EverQuest the player base is tiny compared to say call of duty and the instances only need to support 6 players AND the textures and what not are TINY compared to a modern 4K resolution game.

I HATED boxers until I became one. The last thing I want to do after a hard work-day is sit around trying to coordinate a group and then after and hour it breaks up. Boxing allows me to play when I want to play, period. "Go play a single player game then". No, I like EQ

The respawn rate of regular mobs could definitely do with a boost. Characters on TLPs are so much stronger than they were back in the day and most of the traditional camps are just too small now. You end up spending more time waiting for respawns than you do pulling/fighting. With all the non-classic mechanics and features on TLPs, the 20+ minute respawn times of most dungeons is just too long.

You have games with 100x the player base of EQ, and therefore 100x the budget of EQ, and therefore the ability to lease blade servers with 100x the capacity of what EQ is using. There are IT professionals in the EQ player base who understand these concepts 100x better than you do.

When phinny hit PoP the number of pickzones + instances hit the server very hard. It was barely playable and you would crash zoning just to log back in and crash a second time. Thats why they made it so pick zones closed with low player counts, server couldn't keep up with the mass amount of instances.
IDK if anything has improved serverwise since then but thats where the experience comes from.

Randomised Named spawns like City of Mist, GE and probably other zones I don't remember.

Maybe restrict them to certain areas to avoid having a high level named spawning where lower levels are hunting, eg The Ghoul Lord spawning at the entrance to LGuK.

Groups can spread out and just claim a few rooms rather than a specific camp and have a shot at multiple nameds appearing within easy reach, sure there will be Necros attempting to snipe nameds, but they can't be everywhere at once.

Alternatively make all the items zonewide rare drops. Every mob in SolB having a chance to drop GEBS even if it's one in 200 would give everyone a chance at it rather than be at the mercy of the kronolords that park a group of Necros at Efreeti 24/7.

I think FFXIV has the best system of that. Everyone gets loot/tags IF they reach a minimum damage threshold. What that does is prevent people from just tagging it with a low spell or clicky and not actually helping at all. Also prevents low levels that can't even hit the mob from getting credit. Open tagging is good as long as it doesn't let people send a lowbie spell against a raid mob to get loot and flags and then leave without actually trying or helping at all. I think it could possibly open up new social opportunities not seen in EQ. Imagine cooperating with 20 other people to bring down an SG at level 15 or a dozen people in that back corner in unrest basement trying to get some boots.

Faster respawns and more ways to obtain rare items make a lot of sense to me.

And if large trains do cause a performance problem maybe they could come up with a fun in-game way of discouraging them. Like if you get too many they call for help and despawn/get replaced by a couple elite mobs that are hard to deal with using FTE rules so you can't train them on people. Something fun.

The early game needs faster respawns, faster xp and faster unlocks.

Nobody wants to sit in guk for levels upon levels, just get in, get done get out. The sooner a TLP gets past the nonsense and into the real game where none of these complaints people have and things like FTE will just not matter at all, the better.

Faster respawns is a good idea, until you get to the zones with fast respawn. I remember struggling to clear part of a dungeon to move on as spawns were so quick. Can't remember which zone it wasn't an early expansion, mid I would say.

Recently I remember having issues in ToV clearing an area to get an update for a quest. Lceanium spiders in EoK was another which caused issues with fast spawn rates.

The reduced spawn rate should have a limit on how fast, so they don't mess up later expansions .

I actually wish most areas were like the spider cave in EoK. I was able to do the quests I needed in there with my wiz/enc box but it was a little challenging sometimes.