Dear SoE please do something.

Within a month there was the potential of only having summoning mobs left up. All of the mobs they wanted to change to summoning shared spawn spots with non summoners.

I remember similar problems in other zones, when there was quests to kill a single mob type, you would go there and find none of those mobs up and had to kill others to get them to spawn. Killing trash in EW to get griffins to spawn springs to mind.

Get rid of powerleveling and you get rid of a lot of zonedisruption. Make the max lvlspread for grouping 5-10 lvls. Seriously: what business does a lvl 70 player have in Grounds?

Spending time with their friends?

How exactly does this beam kiting thing work? I mean, what are the exact mechanics? Without being able to snare the mobs, I would think it would be pretty damn hard to get the mobs controlled enough to hit them with a beam of anything. So is it like a team of people where one guy gathers and snares the mobs, then the mage murders them?

Yes typically that is it. Druid or ranger rounds them up, drops aggro and mage goes to town.

I have been wondering what exactly causes the drop off the cliff in terms of zone performance as the size of the pull increases. Is it all the aggro messages being passed between mobs (an O(n!) function)?

Been a victim of this a few times, a few bad apples are ruining things for everyone in more than one way. Not calling for any nerfs, just make more instances and also it was a good idea to bring the exp levels closer might do away with some of the powerleveling, if you want to do that go to an instance where you won't disrupt others game play. Eq is full of disrespectful people, who ruin it for the good mages/sk's whatever.

If I had to guess, I'd say the constant path reevaluation. Every time the person being chased moves, the server must have to recalculate how to get to that person for each mob. If the recalculation isn't efficient, I could see it taking a lot of resources. In a given zone, I wonder how many people at any given time are being actively chased (as opposed to mobs just standing there or following pre-defined waypoints).

They COULD give some power back to the Guides!

If that is correct it should scale linearly with the number of mobs on aggro though, rather than the way it seems to behave in-game which is either exponential or factoral. (This is probably testable, have 2 people pull seperate 20-mob trains at the same time and compare with how the zone lags vs a single 40-mob train, which is where mobs started to noticably rubberband for me when I was swarming guardian instances on my cleric)

I've already seen it. There's about 5-10 people any given week jumping in and out of the beaming scene in PoS on Tunare. Sometimes it can almost be like clocking in and out of work.

Sometimes, when I am not quite done yet, one of those people will go and beam the beetles and bats on the other side of PoS (far fewer mobs than the main side with 120ish constructs, ghosts, and akeevans).

Pretty sure he does it just to chase me out of zone, because it makes my mobs start to lag 1/3rd of the way through the pull instead of near the end.... makes the time investment per pull drop off a cliff.

Another option would be to adjust the pathing code so that this zone lag doesn't happen in the first place. Imagine overall lag going down in a zone. They could even pack in more mobs without fear of the natural zone mechanics disrupting the zone.

IMO, they should do this AND some type of anti beam/swarm/etc mechanic that only checks in static zones. Raids are going to be instanced, so it would be safe if an SK decided to kite 50 mobs for their guild. For those raids that aren't (I'm sure very, very few these days) exceptions would be made for those zones.

This seems like the most logical, non-nerfing solution to me.

One thing that could be implemented is range on mobs. Let me explain...

Some zones you can get aggro, and pull the mob to anywhere. Some areas, the mob will lose interest in you if you get X-distance away from where it spawns (or its pathing routine). So...

If Mob=Aggro and MobLocation<MobSpawn(or path) then MobFollow
Else MobReturntoSpawn

This little routine could be applied to zones, and let players get an area, beam it to their heart's delight, and still leave lag intact. Some areas may have more mobs / range (density), and others sparse.

The easiest solution might be to simply say that if a person has more than 20 mobs on agro, the remainder should give up and go home... after all, does the ENTIRE goblin nation need to chase down one guy? You'd think at one point some would say "gee, I think the other 100 people chasing this guy is probably enough to catch him".

Anti-Swarm code like was used in Halls of Honor

there is a new thing on povar. I first noticed a group using it in mistmoor, but over the last 2 weeks I have seen 4 groups doing it. one group did it for 9 days straight. Its an automated series of maneuvers and aa's, connected together somehow. the group sets up in one distinct area. one toon chooses closest mob, runs in range, uses an aa to agro. runs back to designated spot, once there the tank aggroes and that starts the rest moving. after mob is dead, the toons move back to their precise locations and facings ready for next cycle. how do I know its automated programmed actions and reactions? let us count some ways. 1) a tell goes ignored 2) precision. no human would be as precise as to location and facing on every toon involved. not over a long haul 3) not exactly proof, but it is suspicious that none of the 100-s of mobs they kill gets looted 4) if I agro a mob from 2000 feet away, pull it to a nearby location, snare it, root it and damage it slightly - the groups puller still comes out to my mob if I am closest mob to them - even if its 300 feet away from them. they run right up and agro the mob then run back to camp.. waiting. until root falls off they do nothing else. 5) the group that did this 9 days in a row. no tell repsonses, no change in behavior over 9 days? <cough> . /petition on day 2 no change. /report on day 3 - no change. /feedback on day 7 no change. /sigh

Sadly autobotting is harder for SoE to deal with than more aggressive forms of err cheating. You most likely will be stuck with those players on your server. My server has a few players like that too (autobotters) They are kind of sad and not very good at EQ but I guess it makes them feel like they are important so they continue to do it.. funny thing is their reps are widely known and people get a good laugh at their expense yet they persist at doing it.

I played a mud that had the same thing going we called it 'script hunting' good thing was PvP was allowed so the fool running around killing mobs while snoozing could be and was killed. They had an easy test say you were hunting rats afk, the GM's would observe you and place a rat dummy in place, all the script caught was 'rat' so here was this guy swinging at a dummy rat, you wound up in a jail of sorts, you had 3 chances after that your account was banned, sounds like GM's need to be more pro active monitoring suspicious activity.

What is this "GM" you speak of?

)

/report and /petition this. Thats all i can suggest. It is breaking the EULA. and sadly there is one in particular on my server who really grinds my gears.

This guy has a druid. Bound at his camp spot. You cant make him stop, you cant do anything in the area he does it in. He does it at the Neahs in Shards landing, so there is minimal risk for him to AFK. But its annoying because he kills them all. You cant do Shards partisans. And he seems to be there all the time.

He has ZERK MNK BARD CLR SHM SK and a Druid bot out of group parked there for "Getting back in the event of a death"

His Cleric was in a raiding guild i respected. But i took care of that.

In current content it's called zone disruption. In Permafrost it's called trade skill farming. What a silly thread.