we gave FTE a shot

That problem was already mostly solved by invoking /pick or saying "Ready" to an AoC

I actually like this new feature it makes it easier to target pet when it breaks, you can target old pet by using the pet window.

Use a Gina trigger for charm breaking.

Any chance you could tell use how it works, because it doesn't actually calculate based on the damage done. I'm under the impression that it calculates 2 ticks worth of damage beyond what it actually has done.

Not really sure why any one thought that, it is identical to everquest 2, you could already see the results of mob locking.

So why can I just randomly log into my low level necro and alt sham this very moment, bring a mob below 50%, pop e-bolt onto the mob with sham, let it die, and kill credit consistently going to my sham doing nothing more than hitting it with e-bolt once?

Maybe it doesn't calculate all damage on cast/tick but something in the code is awful at calculating damage for kill credit.

I'd like to thank you for making me log into the game for only the 2nd time in 4 months just to prove to myself that e-bolt remains a one click win every race button.

I would agree. For whatever small bugs exist with it, it's been quite positive for me.

It removes ambiguity for sure. This has allowed me to grab mobs at some open camps that are typically dominated by try-hard box teams.

I'm not talking swiping mobs from camps like HAMLord or anything - but 'open air' camps - like Orc Highway/Oasis Crocs/OOT Skellies and such.

I've had more than one occasion in the past where some try-hard will swipe the mob right from you because they are "oh so good" at this 24 year old game and have UBER DPS. Whereas, I need a break from RL since that's where I work the hardest and just want to casually play and chill out.

IMO, this has done quite a bit to help level the playing field between the try-hards and the casuals.

Sure, they might kill 20 mobs to my 1 mob, but at least they won't steal that one also.

So from a 23 year EQ vet - thanks for this change

Camps were always an artificial construct created and defended by greedy players.

People don't remember the part where "camps" were protected by pet GM's and had a waiting list going 24/7/365 that you couldn't get on if you weren't somebody who knew somebody. Of course that always feel apart when it turned out that the GM's or Guides weren't really that tame after all and there were people who made monks on throwaway accounts for the purpose of training

This came up recently when Meeko learned that ebolt is an iwin button for nec/sha. This difference is somewhat pedantic in classic where it may as well do the full damage on many contentious mobs. I'm surprised he didn't fix it when he found it (I'm assuming you either tested on Oakwynd somehow or if it was fixed on Oakwynd it's fixed on all servers) it'd probably do more to help camp contention in TLP than FTE.

tldr: "Any time you cast a DoT on a mob, you get ONE free tick that is counted towards the kill credit that does not display as dmg on your screen. This works for ALL dots.".

Explanation: https://www.firesofheaven.org/threa...progression-server.14205/page-99#post-4454787

It's slightly more complicated than this and I hope to give more info at a later date.

Artificial construct created by players? Yes. That's precisely the sort of emerging social construct that EQ is known for. Was it perfect? No. However, in my experience it largely worked. Not sure how players creating a semi-organized method of sharing a contested space makes players inherently "greedy".

If I need a drop for an epic weapon or any drop (let's say a T-staff) and I'm "camping" the item for hours or even days this player "construct" was a way to ensure at least some form of organization and fairness. Otherwise someone who just strolls up after 5 minutes can just tag the mob without joining your group or waiting for the camp to open up regardless of how long you have been camping the item. Who is greedy in that scenario? IMO all this does is encourage toxic behavior where anyone is entitled to anything regardless of how they came about tagging the mob.

Not to mention that established camps by their nature usually divided mobs up in a zone into chunks that were generally appropriate for a group to kill before respawns would start so that gaining XP from kills was distributed in a relatively fair way across groups in an area. Sure, sometimes mobs between camps would alternate between groups but it worked for the most part and each group usually has at least 1 potential named mob in their camp. Don't understand how this arrangement is "greedy".

How is that worse? Sure that is annoying but people camping for 18 hours is surely not the norm. The reverse of your point is someone who needs an epic weapon drop (or whatever) and is camping the item for hours on end but someone just runs up and tags the mob who just runs up out of nowhere? How is that better? I'm not saying camps don't have inherent problems. They certainly do. I just don't see how going fully FFA on everything is any better.

To settle contested spawns, now we need the mobs to randomly choose a group in a given radius that they lock to.

While random seems fair, you have to consider the reasonableness of the full context.

1. Group A has been camping a named spawn for 45 minutes. All mobs are being kept down.
2. Group B comes in and begins poaching spawns at the camp.
3. The camp is now "contested".
4. Reason would say that Group A has 100% of the claim to the camp and group B has 0% claim.

Instituting a random selection between the groups systemically decreases Group A's claim by 50% and increases Group B's claim by 50% before any /random function even occurs and actually increases the incentive to attempt to poach camps.

The topic of camps and ksing have been debated for years, people need to understand that all mobs are contested.

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq...-11th-rules-update.224966/page-2#post-3290123

Perhaps not the norm. But it certainly happened. Or group A would camp for 6 hours, followed immediately by Group B, followed immediately by group C. End result was the same to any casual person poking their head in zone to inspect: you see it's perpetually camped.

As you noted though, equally sucks when you're the one camping for 6 hours, your placeholder finally spawns the rare, and it gets stolen.

This is a problem without any easy solutions. You can add more "pick" instances, but it takes a certain quantity of players to spin them up. And it doesn't prevent people from pick-hopping and KS'ing that way.

Likewise, if you made every zone instance-able on demand? That would yield complaints about "Economy Loot Inflation", "Bad Server Performance", or "Now People Aren't Socializing With Me."

EQ camps and rare spawns are a Kobayashi Maru.

I was only half joking but I'll play devil's advocate...

If there are 5 groups wanting the named spawn...maybe 45 minutes (or x spins at the spawn) is a fair limit on the camp. They had an opportunity and now it is time to let someone else have their opportunity. If nobody else wants the camp, then nothing needs to be decided.

If the content is trivial to group A but not group B, what is fair for how many mobs they can claim? If the mobs are not trivial for group A but trivial for group B, what is fair in that situation?

There are limited resources that need to be allocated. To be fair, everyone paying the same price of admission would get an equal chance at what they want. However, the limited resources and number of variables in the interactions will always have someone feeling shorted. If the players cannot agree amongst themselves, a mechanism must be used to decide for them, the truly fairest is possibly the one that makes nobody happy.

Lol, no it was etiquette and respect for fellow players that created camps. The greedy people were the ones that didn't want to follow the unwritten code, because they wanted the loot off the named someone else has been waiting on for hours.

It's always the greedy people that are against camps and respecting other players. While trying to use terms like "DPS race" to justify KSing, and being a jerk in general over a 24 year old game.

what's great is now i don't need a gruop of mages auto-clicking a pet target macro ... it can be done with one

the lack of dps racing has made the game pretty plain jane ... and even though camps haven't really held any merit for a few years now ... this really kills it ... losing a named to a dps race feels better than losing it to someone with an auto-clicker peripheral

fte is still the dumbest idea this game has seen yet .... even worse then true box

Uh oh. We got a rules lawyer! Yes. That has always been the "rule" that there are no camps and everything is contested. However, the camp arrangement was a player driven system created in the spirit of the "play nice" policy and was fully implemented and adhered to (mostly) by players so it doesn't matter what the official "rule" was.

Despite it's flaws and drawbacks it worked remarkably well and is one of those "community" things in EQ that you just don't find in modern MMOs. There were a multitude of player driven "systems" that were unique to EQ and I think that's worth preserving even if imperfect.

Nowhere in the rules did it say PoTime required working with other guilds and yet all raiding guilds (at least on our server) worked together to schedule lockout timers in an orderly fashion. Not because the rules said so but because it was the most efficient and workable solution that benefited all.

The other night, my group hit a fresh pick in SolB. We went straight for the efreeti lord. After the placeholder had been killed for a second time, we started to notice a regular stream of invisible mages (thanks see invis) at the spawn with us. We made it known that we saw them, and they would soon camp out. We had the placeholder on timers, two of us running them. We made the kill each time, and killed Djarn enough times to provide each of us with a pair of GEBs, but sadly no rings. We only left because we had already been on more than 12 hours total, and most of us are old enough not to be able/willing to poopsock anymore.

My point, had they not implemented FTE, even with the bugs that remain, we would never have been able to beat the inevitable mage army that would have spawned in and taken the kill from us, each time. While the system isn't perfect, they did turn it around enough to be useful most of the time. Hopefully they can polish it up before they inevitably release it to all servers, because they definitely will.

A lot of us came up in the day when camps were largely respected, and even enforced to a degree by GMs. That was easily two decades ago, and camps are no longer respected, and haven't been enforced in as many years. People need to realize that this has been true far longer than it was not, and that the official stance has always been, "There are no camps". Today, a camp is a known location on the map where you can relatively safely set up and pull mobs to kill, or close enough to a rare spawn to be able to get it when it spawns.