Another new server idea

Discussion in 'Time Locked Progression Servers' started by cybertoothlion, Jul 22, 2021.

  1. Green_Mage Augur

    The main reason people pile into certain zones to pug, is that that's where everyone goes to pug. It takes awhile to get a balanced group together and get everyone to camp. It's a lot easier when everyone goes to 1-2 zones to do it.

    So ZEMs can help change up where people meet up potentially...but it doesn't do much to spread people out.

    I thought I cared that people didn't spread out. Turns out I don't care as long as I personally don't have to go to lower guk every TLP. So I just make my own groups in off zones.
  2. Stormblossom Elder

    Honestly I think they need to look at removing the pick system and replacing it with something that uses the DZ code or some other form of instancing that doesn't cause breaks in the server load. Rather than restricting people from getting their own solo instance of areas, encourage it. Restrict or remove name spawns if you feel you need to, but make xp camps just not a contested thing period from the getgo.
  3. Accipiter Old Timer


    I don't know. The competition/camp struggles are part of EQ. I get frustrated, too, when I can't find a camp but it's part of the game. Relatively speaking, this period doesn't last long.
  4. Machen New Member


    If people just keep playing past POP, they get this.
    code-zero, Tweakfour17 and Triconix like this.
  5. Stormblossom Elder

    @machen Yeah, they totally get it past PoP, and that is why the game prior to that era is not fun, but starting late on AA is also not fun.
  6. Stormblossom Elder

    @accipiter They are part of the game for the early era of the game, and it is a not terribly fun time for most of the player base. This is something that could easily be accomplished via NPCs who either spawn or don't spawn, so rather than removing picks, maybe make both systems possible and only have it available on some rulesets? I know it is the only way I would ever make a toon pre-Luclin on a tlp again.
  7. Machen New Member


    Eh. If you start at ldon, you have about 100-200 useful aa's to earn, and another 400 of fluff that you can just hold off for autogrant if you are behind. Later on it gets much harder, but if all you want is instanced content to xp in, you aren't gonna be far behind if you just start at that point. Gates instances are MUCH better xp than ldons, too, so it will pick up there a lot.

    For what it's worth, doing normal ldons on Rizlona where we have an xp penalty yields about 1 aa per ldon, and they're taking about 20 minutes each. Someone starting fresh is gonna be caught up on needed aa long before they get their 366 ldon wins for the aug.
    code-zero likes this.
  8. Stormblossom Elder

    @Machen

    Agents of change were introduced because a small subset of raiders will dominate the contested content and prevent others from enjoying it on a given server without it, and it did a great job of fixing that problem. Constant adjustment is made toward ensuring that problem is fixed completely, accelerating flagging, keying, etc. To make things doable in era for guilds who aren't going to bat-phone it in. Guilds that do get even more loot and more power to them.

    I am simply suggesting doing the same thing with the group content, which the current version of the pick system fails to accomplish adequately past the first few days of the server. It runs into severe failings in particular when confronted with power levelers dominating entire zones with a handful of toons that would take several groups of at-level characters.

    I don't want a heroic character, auto-grant to current expansion or any other version of everything on a platter, but if I have a static party of 6 people and we end up giving up in frustration several nights a week because there simply aren't enough places available to make reasonable progress unless we engage in toxic behavior there is a systemic problem and every TLP I have played on from launch has had those kind of issues. They then get more exaggerated with time as players drop off because they wanted to play but couldn't, so power leveling becomes increasingly the most appealing strategy because actual play is hard to come by.

    TLDR: Just because it isn't a problem for you doesn't mean it isn't a problem, and I think it would be good for the overall health of the servers and player base if a solution to the group play issues on early expansions were pursued as enthusiastically (IE at least tepidly) as fixes to raid progression. As you said, from LDoN onward and particularly from GoD this doesn't matter. The redesign of basic gameplay solves itself. That doesn't leave Classic-PoP unworthy of a little TLC.
  9. Niskin Clockwork Arguer

    Ideally they would just lower the pick-zone thresholds, but we already know they can't without fixing issues related to these zones having picks at all. Making them DZ's would be more efficient and solve that problem, but would also require a lot of work. I don't think it's likely, as making them DZ's would run into the same problems that are preventing them from fixing pick zone thresholds. Who knows what the future holds though, maybe they will find some easier way to address the problem.
  10. Machen New Member


    It HAS been addressed, with pickzones. Maybe that's a tepid solution but it is DPG addressing the issue.
  11. Stormblossom Elder


    They addressed it with the original pick-zone design and then tried to adjust it in ways that make the problem less severe that instead had the opposite overall effect. A different solution is needed.

    The reason we were given for them making the pick design LESS effective (more people required to spawn instances, instances closing when main pick empties) during Luclin era Phinigel was server load issues due to the content not being designed to be instanced from the ground up, thus the suggestion to move it onto the dz system or something that WAS designed from the ground up for instancing. Again, this is something that was made worse rather than better and negatively impacts group players. They have shown it far less attention than tweaks to the raid progression. If they had introduced the initial AoC system, made a minor tweak that made it less usable, and then ignored it from then on out THEN you would be correct.
  12. Machen New Member


    It was made worse, yes, for good reason... But it is still vastly superior to having nothing at all, and generally gets the job done well enough. A different solution would be great, if the devs had the time to completely redesign 100 zones so they will work with the dz system. Since they can only churn out a handful of zones a year for new expansions, it's unlikely that's going to happen.
  13. Captain Video Augur


    They didn't make the /pick design less effective, they tuned some parameters to control how many separate picks get opened. Each pick eats up server memory, which is finite. Too many picks and the server crashes. If you had played during the periods when we had multiple server crashes on the earlier TLPs (it wasn't just Phinny), you might understand this better.

    The DZ system was indeed designed from the ground up for instancing; the problem is that the zones in the original expansions were NOT designed from the ground up for DZs. To do what you ask would require essentially rewriting each of the original expansions in their entirety to work as instanced zones, and they don't have anywhere near the development resources to do that. It isn't some great conspiracy to inconvenience players.

    As a group player myself, when I have been on a TLP, I strongly disagree with your claim that the pick system negatively impacts group players. Classic is always very congested, and that's just how it is. From Kunark on, there are plenty of zones for groups to level, and many of them sit stagnant and empty because a lot of players simply refuse to go there for one lame excuse or another. "It doesn't have the best ZEM." "It doesn't have the best spawn rates." "It doesn't have the best cash drops." If you keep trying to play EQ as a min/max game, which was never ever its original intent, you are going to end up disappointed no matter what the devs might find some time to do. Explore. Try other zones just for the novelty of it. Do some quests. If you neither raid nor quest, I'm not sure you're in the right game.