I must confess that I have been annoyed for decades (it feels so!) by inconsiderate players blocking doorways, crowding banking NPCs, the GL Magus and so on. When I've said anything in game, people have been rude to me so there must be a lot of hooligans about. Some of the aggravation comes from players not dismissing a steed; they can be huge and must be eating you out of house and home! Going AFK on top of an NPC should result in slowly sinking into the floor!
I don't blame players for this problem (and I recognize that blocking is a problem sometimes), any more than I blame a large person for being large in real life. I blame the game. Several design decisions could be made at any time: Make AFK players not able to block (no collisions), not just invisible. Maybe even give this option to players all the time (turn off player character collisions, not environment collisions), since it doesn't appear to ever positively affect game play. Log out AFK players after 30 minutes. To address @Brohg's important point about chat availability when you aren't logged in, ALL chat should be available from a separate chat client. Why do we even need chat windows taking up our valuable screen real estate, when it could be on a different monitor or a mobile device? Give players a RELIABLE way to port themselves to their guildhall. Anchors are terrible at best. Put a corpse summoner and Magus in guild halls and the PoK. Then nobody would ever need to use the guild lobby again. Other than the Magus and the corpse summoners, the guild lobby is just a redundant middleman zone that only serves to eat up valuable time by forcing players to zone twice for no reason. Eliminate the guild hall and move it's two useful resources (summoner and Magus) into the PoK. Then, take any 3 existing objects (like trees) in PoK, preferably close to Teek, and make them clickable zone-in points to the Neighborhoods, Standard Guild Hall, and Neighborhood Guild Hall. But, as often pointed out, it is very unlikely that any changes like this will be made. Wheeee!
Easier idea, allow us to bind in our guild hall.... then broken anchors are in the past and I wont hardlynuse the lobby! Plenty of good ideas, and as EQ Dev will say, visit whatever website and let us vote on it. I’d like to have tradeskill vendors in the guild hall, bind in halls, get rid of some “cool” factor crap in PoK... I mean do we really need trees...
I hate it. Every time I port to PoK, I land right next to it. And every time I go to the GL I have to run through it. It is a nuisance. I don't understand why they didn't make it on the other side of PoK where people hardly ever go, and it is away from the port in and GL.
The lag pile is a crowd-based phenomenon, not something that is official. I assume it ends up existing in the most convenient locations (next to the port-in loc, GL, daily task-givers, bank, vendors, etc.) precisely because they are convenient locations. As long as people are allowed to go AFK for extended periods, they will naturally congregate somewhere. Suggestions for ending the lag pile: Auto-log out AFK toons. Place self-service buffing NPC's in the PoK/Guild halls - just like the NPC in the tutorial - so that players don't have any incentive to go afk and wait and hope for the buffs they (rightfully) believe are required to play successfully. Seriously, what's the harm in letting players play the game right now, instead of making them sit and wait (and beg) in a lag pile for buffs?
I’ve always wants a quest based npc per class for different ranks of buffs. Example, you want rk 3 lvl 109 brells for 4 hrs. You must have a pally based quest completed. Nothing to extra hardcore but something like bring me the sword hilt from the troll dude in castle mistmore. And then it costs you 200p per hr of buff up to max of 6 hrs. Just like a vendor you hit buy then 1-6 for duration and pay the man. Buffs fade after time or death. This also dumps plat from the game.. Want 6 hr shaman focus, bring me a alchamy bag and the rpic quest piece from the wolf for 1.0, simple easy and makes ya do something... Or hell, make it faction based!!! Also you as the requester need to be of approximate lvl to receive said buffs!
I love your description of how the buffs would work! I don't care about the quest requirement, I'm neither for or against it, but at this point it sounds like the devs don't need the extra work (just the buff vendors would be super awesome!).
usually when I port to guild lobby and wanna use guild hall or magus I go to the side route away from the big group of people on other side of wall of port in (throne of heros) when I do that see maybe 5 or so people when I hit the hall or magus. Andarriel
Can't say I give one about the number of people in the lobby - hardly a big deal. But If we could get the LDoN magus's to be able to port us to the PoK one rather than just outward travel, that would be fab!
If buffs were allowed to decay in PoK and the Lobby, where would the AFKs move to? Tranquility or Nexus, maybe?
As a melee class, I would love the ability to have a "clicky gate to guild hall" item with a 30m cool down or something. As it is, my only two options are: Origin to Kaladim, run to the book, run to guild lobby, run through a crowd of people to guild hall Throne of Heroes to guild lobby, run through a crowd of people to guild hall An option to port/gate directly to guild hall (especially as a non-gate class) would be so appreciated.
I know it’s been awhile but for quite a while the anchors broke with every patch. I have portal doors, drunk stein and gate pots on all my non gate spell owning classes. Coupled with throne AA, yes I can get back to the lobby/pok/guild hall pretty easy, but Id rather not have an anchor that can break, stupid long refresh time. Speaking of gate pots, why the hell do they collapse!! I understand an interruption if getting hit, but no other potion fizzles or doesn’t work!
Yea, use-able by anyone. You just need placement privilege in your guild hall to place and use, I think You can buy them from the Loyalty Vendor, they might also be in marketplace
Put "Jimmy the Buffer" NPC in each home city, every 15 minutes casting a slate of buffs. Then you are using origin to get your free buffs and countdown timers off could be moved to only be in guild halls. An AA "guild hall origin" could easily be added. Era-set it to RoS (then all existing things aren't obsolete on progression servers right away).
I'm pretty sure players aren't supposed to collide with each other but unfortunately some things like shields still have collision? That's the most obvious solution: removing collision between players (and their equipment/mounts/etc).
