I am willing to bet its not about that at all, I betcha they were bugged and dropping two drops instead of one drop like most named loots in group scenario's. Looks like velks and dn will be super busy until there is a emergency patch.
Sooo, while you are fixing loot, how about adding Undead Dragongut Strings back to Trakanon, the way it used to be?
Prathun is there a list anywhere of all the item numbers and the expansion they belong in, or is this something that you could provide the community? I know it would be a huge help for those of us with EQ related Web sites that are trying to piece together the items by era. We can criss reference the item numbers with allas for the rest of the data.
Just for fun, we looked into what it would take to find out where every item in the DB comes from and figure it'd take around 314 hours to generate just a list of what treasure table / reward set / NPC / recipe each item comes from. O_O But that information doesn't necessarily indicate what expansion they were part of. That'd be a much more complicated research project.
I wrote several php scripts that do exactly this on the PEQ / takproject (alkabor clone) databases. The takproject DB is pretty accurate through Kunark, but falls off during Velious. The PEQ one is deeper, but contains stuff like defiant armor loot drops mixed into the early expansions, so some sensitization is required there for practical use on the progression servers. Can mess around with my web UI here: http://tinyurl.com/eqtrilogy Currently it's wired up to a takproject database. Sadly they stopped issuing database updates awhile back.... If the site isn't the fastest, just keep in mind its running on a raspberry pi. =D
You could most likely migrate all of the data from EQ to a modern database engine (just for research purposes), and do your work there. You can integrate pretty much anything from one form of data store to another. Once the data is in a modern database engine, you should be able to perform these sort of tasks much faster.
It's likely already in a "modern database", just not optimized for the kinds of output we're asking for. Ie. there's no server-practical purpose to see a list of 500,000 items and what expansion they came from. It's probably more geared for "give me all loot drops from a specific npc ID" - and do it in less than 50ms. Part of my efforts in extracting expansion-based and zone-based information from the peq / takproject databases was adding specific compound indexes around multiple tables, and even creating meta-lookup tables. Sans that effort, they can probably build the queries (joining on half a dozen tables no doubt) that are probably N seconds per NPC * X NPCs = ~314 hours.
Fun bit of Friday trivia: there are fifty different ways that an item can enter the world via database entries. There are the obvious ones like treasure tables on NPCs, ground spawns, quest rewards, and claims, and a lot of methods that are less well known and less frequently used. In addition to those fifty, items can also be created via scripts and these scripts aren't easily query-able. // Script gives out cloth items for no reason at all // good luck programmatically determining that I can create item #1005 int ItemIDOffset = 1001; int NumItems = 10; int i = 0; while (i < NumItems) { give_item(PC, ItemIDOffset+i); i += 1; }
It looks like querying item creation dredges up a little-known piece of Norrathian history: Miragul's discovery of the Halfling Problem. The Halfling Problem is a universal law of magic and, simply stated, says that it is impossible to research a spell that inerrantly reports whether another spell can ever summon a halfling. It's not known why Miragul picked halflings when stating this problem, but scholars suspect that it has something to do with the Tolkien estate.
When I was younger I always wondered how SOE could break bards every single patch. After the few posts you have made on the forums while I have been here, I understand. <3
I am oddly various curious as to the magical ways items appear in EQ. If is not a drop or a ground spawn or a quest reward where does it come from?! Please to answer Prathun.
I would assume that every script has something that queues it to run. If I was trying to document this behavior, I would start by generating a list of all scripts, and then linking them with their triggers. Next categorize all the triggers as: 1. Quest based 2. NPC based 3. Environment based Then based on the type the trigger falls under, you can determine the steps for attempting to link the trigger to an expansion. All of this is part of narrowing down a massive list of data to a much smaller list of data. The majority of the data should be easily easy to determine the expansion. It's the smaller subset of data that you end up with that ultimately requires more specialized attention to determine. That's the data set you have the community help identify. Is be willing to bet you would find a lot of worthless scripts that should be taken out.
PSA: EVERYTHING DBG claimed they removed still drops in Velketors on Phinigel. It's just that they don't drop 2 items each time now. The namers are rare, but they are still there.
