Fix /pickzone to Fix TLP

Discussion in 'Time Locked Progression Servers' started by LDEffectsMe, Jul 10, 2019.

  1. LDEffectsMe Augur

    /pickzone has been a great addition for opening up camps when zones get overcrowded, but there's some issues with it.

    1.) I've been in groups of 6 unique players running a camp in a pick when suddenly the system decides to tell us the current pick is closing and we end up getting booted into main pick, where someone is already camping the spot we were at. Also, if people die in a pick that is closing, they get rezzed into the main pick and often times die because their group isn't there. Picks should not close when there are players in the zone actively playing. Especially because the pick closes and boots us into the main pick, then within 5 minutes a brand new pick with 0 players opens. It's stupid how that's working.

    2.) People are complaining about "box armies" overrunning the camps in the zones. There's a simple fix to this... Let players that are grouped request a new /pickzone to be created. Then if Sebilis is overrun with boxers, a group can make a brand new pick to go play in and have whatever camp they want.

    So to recap, get rid of picks closing while people are playing in them, and let grouped players request new picks to be created and that should alleviate a lot of problems that TLP servers face.
  2. Dythan Ban Lev in Plane of Fire guy

    Not feasible with hardware available.

    Next topic.
  3. LDEffectsMe Augur

    Source? Citation needed. I mean, since it's literally no different than requesting an instance... Which is technology that's been in EQ for years.
  4. Dythan Ban Lev in Plane of Fire guy

    Check any of the other 40 threads on this over the last 2 years. Phinny was able to hold a pick open with 1 person, and the server crashed every 3 days. The instuted the new rules, and it's been stable since.
  5. LDEffectsMe Augur

    I never said a single person should be able to hold open a pick. But a pick shouldn't close when a full group of 6 is playing there. And requesting a new one should require 2+ players. Then if it stays at 2 people for like 30 minutes, then have it shutdown. There's no reason why a full group should have their pick close, then the zone should open another pick with 0 players within 5 minutes.
  6. DeseanJackson Augur

    Picks used to remain open as long as one person remained. That led to a mess of issues (Phinny crowd could chime in?) which is why it was changed prior to Agnarr IIRC. The formula math is pretty simple though, and you do get a warning the pick is closing.

    As for creating group instances, that requires development efforts across all zones and, while I can’t cite direct posts, the development time required for that would be substantial.
  7. LDEffectsMe Augur

    The pick could close if there's 2 people or less in a zone for 30 minutes. My main issue is it closing when I'm in a full group, booting us to the main pick, then a brand new pick opening within 5 minutes with 0 players. We'd switch to the new pick, then rinse and repeat for hours.
  8. Ruhi Augur

  9. LDEffectsMe Augur

    Okay, I see that they said there's some issues with how /pickzone was originally working and they can't have a ton of zones open. But I still think there's room to iterate and make changes to improve the system. They could at least cut the number of players required to open each pick in half. (To keep a second one viable.) Heck, they could make it as restrictive as it requires 6 players or more to keep an additional pick open. Another thing they might consider doing is make pick options that only allow one character per IP address into that pick. AKA, non-box picks. Then all of the multi-box armies can fight each other for spawns.
  10. Dythan Ban Lev in Plane of Fire guy

    So then me and my wife can't be in a pick together? She might enjoy that, but I would get lonely.
  11. VandilIzer Augur

    Lets look at a few things here.

    First you're asking for 6 people to hold a pick open, regardless of total people in zone. That's exactly why it was changed before. Yeah it was 1 character before but putting 6 boxes in a pick to hold it forever isn't much harder for those who want to abuse the system. So this falls back to the hardware issue, I am on Phinny and trust me you don't want the server crashes we had constantly in the days of picks staying up forever.

    As for a new pick opening right after yours closed, I find this... unlikely. Maybe it happens once in a while as 1 group leaves and another enters 20 minutes later but over and over again? Doubtful. I am not saying you're wrong or a liar, just that it doesn't happen that often. If a zone has a pick need of say 35 people and there are 45, so a pick is open, when the server starts winding down for the night and people log you will drop under 35, the 15 minute warning goes off, it gets even later and more people log and then everyone is in main pick under the 35 required people. Generally you don't suddenly see a spike in players again until the next day. Also assuming a group left the main instance, there should be a camp open you can go too (since people logged causing the pick to close anyway).

    People being able to open their own pick is never going to work for a bunch of reasons, most have been said so I will leave that alone.

    Which zones are you specifically having issue with that you cannot ever find a camp in the main pick after the pick closes and are forced to go into a pick again?
  12. LDEffectsMe Augur

    Specifically, in this case, I was in a group in Nagafen's Lair. We were camped in the pool room. I forget how many people were in the first pick, but it was crowded. There was a second pick with only a few people, so we went to that one. After about an hour, we were told that our pick was closing in a few minutes. Right after that, our bard got rooted and she died. The cleric rezzed the bard, and because the pick was closing, it rezzed her in the first pick (without our group) and she died again immediately. Then we were kicked to the first pick. We tried running our camp there, because those mobs were up, but there were enough people that no mobs outside of our immediate area were up. We looked and a second picked had been created again with 0 players. We switched to that one. About 10 minutes later, it told us that pick was closing. It became a vicious cycle that for the next 4 or 5 hours we kept having our picks close and kept getting booted back to the main one where there were no mobs for us to kill. My best guess is that Nagafen's Lair pick 1 was teetering close to have a second pick, but not quite there, and each time my group was put back in there it crossed the line of justifying a second pick again.

    I'm not saying we need pick zones to stay up forever, but there is definitely room for improvement. They could at least stay active for an hour after being created, not ten or fifteen minutes. That would at least reduce the number of times this kind of thing is happening.
  13. Dythan Ban Lev in Plane of Fire guy

    If each of your real people in that group had a box, the zone would of had enough people to keep the 2nd pick open permanently.
  14. Imukai Augur

    From my experience, a pick remains open if there are at least 10 in the zone. Once it drops below 10 you risk getting the 15 minute shutdown warning, from which there seems to be no stopping the collapse even if the pick population goes over 10 again. Once that pick closes, if the main pick is still above the threshhold for spawning a new pick, then a new one will pop up after a short wait.

    I'd personally be happy if the threshhold were 6 instead of 10, but I personally also have 8 real honest to goodness actual PCs in the house that can be fired up if I need to zone some mules in to pad my group's pick numbers to keep us going.
  15. oldkracow 9999 Is the Krono Account Limit

    The real issue is....

    1. DBG can't spend $ on better hardware for /picks to function at a higher rate.
    2. DBG can't spend dev time on fixing those issues so any type of hardware can handle more /picks
    3. The real issue is DBG and they aren't willing to spend time to improve it currently.
    4. We are talking about 1999 game in the world of cloud spin up computing for extra resources.
  16. LDEffectsMe Augur

    I don't think that the revenue for this game is nearly as small as everyone implies. All that Krono out there costs like $17+ (with the 5 pack being their "recommended" and probably most commonly bought package) and people seem to buy more every day. Plus, the actual traditional subscribers... And Daybreak Cash sales... I think this company makes more money these days than people realize. The development team is undoubtedly smaller than ever, and there's got to be more overhead in the form of facilities and bills now that Daybreak isn't under the Sony umbrella... But I do believe that EverQuest draws enough of a profit that they can afford to reinvest in the product hardware when they need to. Just because Daybreak chooses to have a smaller development team for a 20 year old game doesn't mean that they're broke... These things are business decisions. It doesn't take a large development staff to do amazing things, it just takes prioritizing and the right people. EQ still has very talented developers working on it; they do a lot with the tools available to them.

    Even so, I don't believe it's a faulty hardware issue. It seems like a coding issue that needs to be investigated, tested, and changed. It's not broken in its current state, but it definitely can use some tweaking.
  17. Accipiter Old Timer


    It's a fixed number and that number varies by zone.
  18. Nothappening Lorekeeper

    they made picks close because they stated people holding picks open with "1" player was causing the server to crash. they also dont want people to have their own private instances (yes i know we get Agents of change).

    clearly they cant even prevent the server from crashing after that change but it happens less frequently. before that it was every 2-3 days.
  19. Waring_McMarrin Augur

    It could also be that they don't want pickzones to end up becoming private zones for a group of players.