PoP instanced / expedition raiding for standard servers

Hi there! Would like to suggest PoP instanced raiding on standard servers to help with the Planes gods and flags being down most of the time when trying to do the older quest flagging for parts of the Artisan's Prize. Discussion? thoughts?

YES

I would love this so much. I would do quests and progression on so many alts.

We tried last summer for attention to this. The thread was a Billionty pages long and received zero response. Never hurts to try again.

While I support this idea for about a billion reasons... it would completely trivialize the recently added Hunter and Conqueror achievements and so if they were already against the idea before, I see it even more remote of a chance now.

Fair? Not at all.

No need really, wait 2-3 weeks and the targets should be up again, right now that's the worst moment to make your flagging, with the new hunter achievments released. The rest of the year the mobs are up nearly all the time.

I hunted the Elemental Gods a few months back for my Quintessence of Elements (on two characters) and had no issues finding them up.

As stated above, I think you are just hitting this at the wrong time, due to the new hunter achievements.

Why not make it known on your server that you need the kill. There's a good chance that people would form a group/raid to get more people flagged or their 'hunter' when the God decides to show iteself.

Instancing for everything PoP and under is already in place on progression.
There is no reason they can't make it accessible on live servers.

Sure they can, but SHOULD they?

Imo NO, and reason is on p servers the challenge is the fights themselves, while live servers the challenge is to find the event up.

Live you would otherwise yawn and then do in 1 min, now it does require a bit.

In 2 months the pop is forgotten again on live when people done the hunter. So til then, let there be challenge to find the events.

Beside i dont think devs want prog for artisan to be done in 30 min

What challenge?
Killing PoP bosses has been a 20 second yawn fest for a decade
The only challenge is FINDING them up.

But I suppose if you had the large amount of play time to camp all the mobs for weeks on end, why should anyone else be able to do it easier?

This isn't a valid argument to any point. "Just wait 2 months" ... No, I don't think anyone should have to wait a super long amount of time for a retro part of the game, much the same as they introduced the spawn mobs for epics to prevent stupidly long bottlenecks. There's just no point to it. Hunter achievements and all that aside.

If you look up the amount of stuff required for that quest, the flagging in the planes by killing the gods and such is a VERY small part of that quest that is just needlessly long, annoying, and seriously not worth having to wait for a 3-7day timer for each flag. Tradeskill crafting quests should be about the journey and the crafting itself, not in having to wait months because you keep missing the spawn timer.

Not that I care really if things are instanced or not, but if it's not a worthy challenge to find the mobs up, then it's not difficult and doesn't need to be instanced.
Also, there's nothing really challenging in this game anyway so I don't think it should be used to determine if something is worth being changed or not.

You don't have to wait a super long amount of time, the mobs still spawn right now and you can kill them like anybody else. I suggested 2/3 weeks if someone was actively killing for hunter on your server so you can just show up whenever you want and find your mob up but you still have the option to check every 3 days like everybody else to see if the mob is up or not. You seem to choose to currently not do that, sure, then you wait (and certainly not 2 months).

Lots of "it should be" when it's obvious that in reality, it is not. There is no small part of the quest if it requires spending time on it, the Earring of the Solstice is actually way smaller since you can buy everything in bazar. Also no, you don't have to wait 3 days (not more for pop) for each flag, you can kill multiple mobs every 3 days.

Challenge in finding them up?
Its also a challenge to wait for the bus...

You say you don't care but then criticize any argument for taking the annoyance (your challenge) our of camping them.

You've misunderstood what I was saying. When you're going every couple of days and checking the planes for your flags and they are never available, there's some cause for adding an instance / expedition version of this. I can't play all the time, but even so, I've checked on Teris Thule each day for 2 weeks once in the morning, and once in the evening before and after work. I haven't found her up not once. Now take into account that multiple people are looking for these flags, even more so with the hunter achievements available. The chances of finding one of the gods up are dwindling, and even if you find it up, and you kill it, chances are the others are not going to be up at the same time, not to mention you're taking that flag from who knows how many others that are doing just as you are and just happen to not be online at the time.

The whole point of the post is to get the devs to take a second look at how the system is structured currently and, perhaps, add in a way to obtain these flags much like they did with the extreme bottlenecks in class epic quest lines.

This whole paradigm that static spawns are a crapshoot to find up and you need to suck it up Nancy is something I wanna call bs on. Frankly, people who are paying for EQ have a right to be able to access the content...that is what they paid for. They paid for the ability to work on these flags etc and having to check zones for days, weeks on end is outside of the mainstream in regards to thinking in today's MMORPGs.

If the publisher detects a bottleneck on content that paying subscribers cannot access they should fix this through instancing. This decades old mentality of camping spawns for weeks on end needs to die.

I would also add plane of Fear to this for certain drops that are permafarmed by people who basically live their lives in EQ. Or make the farmed drops a zone wide rare drop. Bottlenecks in progression can be planned but content blocked by other players really is a model that EQ competitors have abandoned for good reason!

If anything I would say make instances for these zones AT LEAST for subscribers.

You're reading what you want, you're the only one that keeps talking about a challenge. There's no challenge nor annoyance here, just take 10 second to do a /uptime and then check if it's a multiple of 3. There's no challenge here but there's also no difficulty to remove.

I criticize what I think doesn't make sense and can be solved in an easier way than changing the game.

You're making stuff up, noone talked about making it hard to "deserve" those flags. Yet before changing how things are it seems way better to me to find out if there's not an alternate way of achieving things.
I will also add that you're not entitled to find mobs up because then there wouldn't be such things as place holders for nameds, people would just spawn an instance and get the named they want in the zone they want, all for themselves, at any time, the only difficulty being killing the mob. Right now, that's not how this game works: you're paying to have access to the content, then what you do with it is up to you.
If it's too much for you to (multiple solutions and I may have forgotten some) either ask in general if people are doing the pop hunters, check the zone everytime the mob is supposed to be up (and not at random time), ask in guild if people can let you know if they find those mobs up, ask your friends the same, wait for 2/3 weeks (and not 2 months) till people got their hunter if really your gametime is only a couple hours per week, if you can't do any of those things then no, your monthly payment doesn't entitle you to progress.

You're right, if the publisher detects a real bottleneck, they'll change things and we can just share our opinion on this issue, mine is that it's not a bottleneck (there are real ones, but this one isn't).
I would have name plane of fear instead of plane of hate for content blocked, that was (is?) an issue maybe but plane of hate?

Finally, you guys overestimate the so called "farmers", most of those old world mobs are not killed by people that have no life and play eq 24/24, they're mostly killed by either organised people that make their playtime more efficient than others either by people randomly passing by in old zones to get a classic feeling and find bosses up and kill them cause they can. The myth of the farmer that perma camp 1 mob forbidding everybody on the server to have access to the content is in the majority of the cases vastly inflated.

There's no need to check everyday, just when the mobs are supposed to be up. It's like killing a mob and checking every hours if it's up again and then complain it's not...
If there are so many people that want to have the achievments or the flags it should be easy to team up, most servers do that.
Your issue has nothing to do with let's say the plane of fear golems that were kept down because they still dropped Amulets of Necropotence, the pop bosses are far less chased and while there is only a limited amount of AoN per fear clears, there's 72 spots for people to get hunter reward / flag per mobs.

The system worked well when these mobs NEEDED a raid. A raid is a fairly visible thing. And in olden days, when a raid was forming and you needed the flag, getting a spot was often a simple matter. So someone would get in zone, see mob up and start calling in guild, friend guild, and what not. What mattered, it would be 40-50 or more people heading in and getting the kill. These days, a single 105 can just go and quickly solo the thing, none the wiser. So an event available only once every 3 days cause it was expected to provide for 50, is now consumed by one, making the kill about 50x harder to get than it was around 2005.

And whats this nonsense about "checking when mobs supposed to be up?" That sorta requires knowing when a mob was killed. When raids killed them, it was a more visible thing. Not anymore. Plus, spawn timers are often randomized. I.e. Seru is anywhere between 60 and 84 hours. Good luck checking that one when it's "supposed to be up".

Imho, hunter achievements are one thing and finding the mob up is part of the fun. But getting your quintessence just to get to that room in PoI? Please. One option might be: lesser quintessence combined from 'living fragments' from the Concerrentia quest, providing access to the room but not the full Time flag. Still fairly hard to get but less dependent on contested mobs.

Give us instanced classic eq also so I can farm naggy/vox/aow/fear golems.

Funny how people can't even manage to follow a simple mob respawn, how did you survive in this game back in the days when there was waaay less info available lol.
You should ask for this useless flagging to be removed instead of demanding for instances.

If its the Quintessence you need, you know you can get someone who has one to group you into the room, right?

This post isn't meant to be an argument. It's a suggestion about opening up retro content to make it easier to access, much like they did with the epic quest lines. No one is 'demanding' anything. Keep on topic folks and leave the attitudes at the door please.

This is also an idea that would fit just fine.