Mob kill rules in case anyone doesn't know

Sure, if a named pops every spawn cycle then having a group monopolize that camp would be annoying.

However, with random spawns, where a group is working to get a named to spawn, having some other group run in, DPS the named and take the loot is even more annoying.

How would you feel if your group hade been killing trash for an hour, only to have some other group swoop in and kill the name you were after?

This is the other thing that made me reconsider ever playing on a TLP again. If one is looking to experience the game like it was originally, a TLP is very different. The focus on BIS or go home and the prevalence of RMT influence completely destroy that if you want to do 'current' unlocked content. If you're content to do previous content, it's not quite as bad.

It's even worse when there are players who insist they have possession of the camp simply because they "called it" at the entrance and/or total group wiped or left for any other reason and returned. For the first, not everyone has OOC or the zone channel up. Some might have it disabled because it strays into toxic too often. But if you call a location from the door and then find others already there, it's not your camp. For the other two, if you're not there, you're not there. But, I've mostly only seen these behaviours on the TLP in the "current" unlock or Live in "current" expansion.

And on TLP is the only time I have seen someone trying to pull other mobs on to a group to try to get them to leave an area. When that happened on Oakwynd, it was easier to ignore because, unless you were doing AEs, the trained mobs would just walk away and not engage. But it did make it a lot more crucial to use the Extended Target list and assist. The only time on Live that I got intentionally trained back in the aughts was when a guy wanted to punish me for not accepting his 'romantic' overtures (I turned down his pick-up lines by just saying I wasn't interested). Maybe I was just lucky.

I always felt like if they truly wanted EQ not to have camps then they would not have set PH/Spawn points. Just randomize everything in each zone. While you may know mob xyz spawns in zone x there is no specific PH or spawn point. Simply it pops when it pops and where it pops. Thus making it truly random and then its a DPS race (as intended) to get the mob. This would alleviate camps per say.

I always wanted to see named spawns be random thru any zone of comparable level. Thus making it truly and adventure to find / locate namers. This way while traveling thru zone y namer z may spawn on or near you.

That is actually the way the developers have said the original zones were coded. The pegasus in South Karana is one such (drawing a blank on the name). There are a lot of conflicting conspiracy theories on how to get it to spawn but it's really just random and is one of the hardest named to get for an epic drop item.

In theory it's better because it offers a way to distribute players across the content. In other words, a group can see the area is camped and go somewhere else instead of sharing the content and come back later.

The theory is doing a lot of heavy lifting there Since in practice people who are camping named generally want a specific named, and arguably the DPS race still spreads people out because if you don't care which named/camp you're at why bother racing at all.

I can think of nothing worse.

I have times when playing lower level alts in zones I don't want named to spawn as I'm not big enough to kill them, so can easily avoid PHs in an area where no named spawn. On the other hand if I'm after a named it is for a purpose be it for hunter or loot.

Camping an area works pretty well for an exp grind. In which case I don't mind if there is a named in that camp or not, I just want to be left alone and not have a DPS race on every mob I pull.

Motivation to have a higher dps group.

Perhaps the game was not intended to be based around DPS races, but it absolutely was built around DPS races. A programmer was at some point tasked with writing the code that decides who has loot rights when a mob dies. The decision was made to give those rights to the group that did the most damage. They could have decided to give those rights to whoever tagged the mob first, or any of a number of other things. But they didn't. That implementation was tested and approved. That implementation would have been apparent from the earliest alpha tests. No designer objected loudly enough to have it changed. The game was quite literally built for DPS races.

I agree with you that the PNP indicates that DPS races were not the intention. But the actual implementation differed from the intention. And that is weird.

I recall back on Ragefire long ago when DBG finally had enough of trying to enforce raid rotations and the PnP and they officially declared DPS race as the rule and that is the law ever since. That inspired the FTE mechanics on Oakwynd which is what it is

More motivation to intentionally pull multiple mobs, deflect, wait for them to engage, fade and watch them get plowed. Not a train if you're simply pulling and people are engaging

Yes.

The alternative starts getting into "Well, we aggroed every mob in the zone with the puller and we are very slowly killing them a few at a time", and thats the LEAST stupid thing to try and arbitrate.



We solved this back in the day by either playing nicely, coming up with our own rules for how to resolve disputes between people / groups / guilds (there was a lot of dueling), or creatively forcing people to bugger off. People need to get back to doing that.

Camps, Rules of Engagement, and anything similar dont exist, They have never existed. It was never Verant / SoE policy to enforce them, they just went along with whatever the parties involved agreed on (which is the core of the old PnP). The game is a bunch of people making temporary ad-hoc treaties with each other to not escalate things to a place its too stupid to recover from.

By that logic, the game was absolutely built around training. The devs designed, tested, and implemented the ability to aggro a mob and run it to the zoneline with no issues and zone out to drop aggro and leave anyone who remained at the zone line a victim.

The way I would make named work is when a 'trash' mob dies it would have a chance to instantly pop the named that is encounter locked to whoever killed it's trigger. And if they fail and it goes unaggroed, it goes back to the ether.

DPS wins in all situations

You can win the DPS race and still be a looser.

Being a D!ck over a video game is pretty darn small.

OR and this is quite possible. They just didnt think of it. I think at the time EQ was being developed Ultima Online was still non optional PVP so you might be right. Took Utlima Devs years before they admitted most people did not want PVP and they created a double of each world per server a pvp side and a non pvp side that folks could move between. Almost every person played on the non pvp side.

So yeah maybe the devs intended possible pvp races but my guess is they just didnt consider mechanics that could prevent dps races.

The game was designed around "social friction", where no interaction between players is a bad interaction. Scarcity and fighting over mobs leads to drama, which scales from individual relationships up to community relationships.

Wow totallty disagree, in fact your entire post sounds entitled and selfish. Someone else was there first playing, now YOU get on and all of a sudden they should just let you have it? Life sucks you dont always get what you want. A dps race is not always on an even keel either. There are plenty of people who do not use ISB so will not put out the DPS. Perhaps they are handicapped in one way or another so cannot manipulate the keys as you can?

If you just cannot wait to get that named go to a diff pick , or work on another. Dont expect someone to bow down to your wants. Just how I see things but I realized I grew up in a different time.

I'm sure I heard on a podcast that the developers never imagined the lengths people would go to for not only camping names, but camping them over and over for their rares.

Maybe it was the naivety of the 1990s and the early stages of the genre.