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

Not sure if it's been mentioned. But I like the idea of adding some repeatable quests that have the Mischief loot bucket/shared drops as random rewards for whatever level quest you do. Put a replay timer on them, 4-6 hours maybe nothing absurd.
If it has been brought up, then I second that idea.

An OP and 40 replies and the single mention of training is a comment about fictitious unscrupulous RMT crews training to steal camps.

FTE is about training, pure and simple, not distribution of resources. Prior to this DPS race was the way that contention was dealt with but they want to change it.

I want no part of a game that registers and condones RMT squads for any reason whatsoever.

Dynamic spawn rates are interesting. I think just lowering spawn rates in a lot of TLP zones would be (potentially) an easier change.
Man, personal loot would be wild. Pretty big paradigm shift.

So long as afk PLing dies off it will be a huge win, that needs to go asap

Now imagine that spawning 15% faster, with no CC, where a puller has to try and split them. Not every group kicks out your kind of DPS either. The group players struggled as it was I'd hate to think of it with faster spawns.

Yeah, I'm also pretty proud of this community for staying within the intent of the thread in the title, which is resource contention. There's probably some points about FTE and training that need to be made in the 104 pages in this thread: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/oakwynd-feedback.289766/

Why don't I just imagine instant respawns and mobs that hit for a million too? I don't know why you have to exaggerate and create issues where none exist.

The only real solution to resource contention is to increase supply. Increasing supply means that the value of the resource is devalued. This is easily done with increased spawn rates / rare spawn rates. It is why mischief works. The supply of loot is not locked to one mob. Meaning it's impossible to monopolize that piece of loot. It was the first server without an Eboots Cartel.

It seems pretty obvious that the devs don't want to do another random loot server right now. Therefore the easiest way to reduce scarcity and hence resource contention is to increase spawn rates.

The only real resource contention I've experienced is with quest mobs. VP/VT key, DiZok ring NPC turn ins, and epic mobs. Simply reduce the respawn timers - 99% of the problem is solved.

Contention over group gear NPCs is simply not important enough to worry about. Contention over open world raid bosses is fun and part of what makes EQ great.

This is a game, if there's contention for resources then it should be played for and not allocated. We already have picks and instances to thin the population down enough that there's some elbow room for players. Mischief was one way to spread groups out and worked well but we don't need that as the default ruleset.

I hadn't heard that idea in this context, very interesting! I added a version of it to the OP.

The issues are none existant at the moment, but will be if their legacy server goes ahead as is it will be.

Just for the record I'm not exaggerating. I have clear memories of being in a group where we have struggled to keep spawns down to progress. While the increased spawn rates is great in most instances, there are some which will cause issues if they have an increased spawn.

So, my favorite idea is dynamic respawn rates. I'd actually love to see the paradigm of players spreading out invert and instead motivate players to funnel together, lag be damed. Here's some thoughts I had in Patch Notes format.

TLP 2024: Monster Tide

• Each NPC spawn now has an "NPC heat" level. This heat level is increased when players kill that NPC spawn quickly, and decreases when it is not killed. It provides more difficult encounters and greater rewards
  • Heat level changes as follows:
    • It is a moving average based on the lifetime of of the last hour of spawns, allowing players to "warm up" camps if they are able to kill the NPCs quickly for multiple spawns
    • In order to apply maximum heat for an NPC spawn, it must be killed within 30 seconds of spawning
    • NPCs with a respawn greater than one hour are not affected
  • Heat level makes the spawn more dangerous in the following ways. At max-heat level:
    • NPCs will respawn 4x faster
    • NPCs will have 50% higher damage and HP. This buff is not retained if the NPC is charmed
    • NPCs will be 2x more resistant to crowd control spells like mez, stun, charm, fear, snare, root, blind
    • NPCs will have a 2x higher aggro and social radius
    • NPCs with rare spawns will be 2x more likely to spawn as a rare
  • Heat level makes the spawn more rewarding in the following ways. At max-heat level:
    • NPCs will reward 2x more experience
    • NPCs will reward 2x more loot
  • Maximum heat levels are intended to only be achievable in raids or over-leveled groups. It's intended that a normal group fighting mobs near their level will achieve a heat level that provides half the above difficulty and rewards
  • The values above will be examined each expansion release and tweaked as necessary to ensure the proper amount of loot is entering the system.
• Calculations for loot / experience claiming have been adjusted
  • The bug allowing some abilities (Especially DoTs) to overestimate their damage contribution has been fixed. Now only damage actually done to the mob will count
  • Damage shields will now correctly attribute damage, such that a mob injured by a damage shield will count that damage to the owner of the damage shield
• The experience penalty for being in a raid has been removed
• Experience bonuses will now be extended to 12 person raids. The bonus for a 6 person group or raid is still 2.56, this scales linearly to 4x for 12 person raids. Raids with higher than 12 people will retain the 4x bonus

It'd be great to see players group together to try and hang on to increasingly difficult waves of mobs in order to sustain maximum rewards with increasing risk. Outside of fighting difficult camps, this would totally break open bottlenecks like Lord Bergurgle, who, once it's been killed a few times would spawn 4x faster, be 2x more likely to be a named and drop 2x crowns, effectively generating 16x more crowns.

The configuration, as stated, might turn everything into a raid swarm loot pinata session and trivializes the entire thing, maybe the 50% hp/dmg/resists makes it too hard, maybe the raid bonuses will work out poorly, I don't know. Making NPCs have a base heat level that actually reduced the spawn rate, difficulty and rewards is interesting and would open up harder areas to less capable groups. Something like this system could be fun but would need tweaking once players tried it out.

And of course, it doesn't solve all the problems that FTE is intended to solve. It'd actually increase trains where a raid would wipe and one dodgy bard drags a super-hot raid of 2x social radius through to the zone-lines. The changes to damage attribution would improve small-scale DPS races and incidentally change power-leveling.

I would lean on anything to "generally increase difficulty and overall danger".

There's way too many comforting parts of modern EQ and this FTE thing is just another one in my mind.

I'll toy around with this server just because...but likely will stay over on 99 for the longer term.