Yesterday our group was trying to do progression and hunter in Resplendent Temple. However, there was a 115 Zerker who was devastating the zone. Kills about every 1 to 1.5 seconds and basically wiping the zone out. Before getting flamed, I want to state that he had every right to do so. It did, however, preclude us from doing any questing and it was our final T3 zone in Alaris. He did not respond to tells, as was his right, so we really couldn't work out any mutually beneficial situation - and he was there 24/7 for two days. My suggestion is to allow people to create their own picks of a zone that is limited to your group (like tasks that let you add people) that lasts for like 6 hours (can you say mechamatic guardian?). This mechanic already exists in the game, so would be easy to implement I would think. You could have tradeable pickzone tickets that are random drops or just make them buyable with DB or Loyalty cash - maybe even PP if you want a money sink to reduce server amounts. This would be really helpful in the new zones where BOT armies basically lock down every camp so progression is at best, a serious hassle. This would really be awesome on full servers like FV. Anyway, not complaining about what happened, just looking for a fix so our group can keep enjoying the game.
No one has the "right" to prevent others from completing quests. If there are a limited number of quest mobs, then those actively doing the quests have a priority on them. Although monopolizing mobs is not specifically mentioned, the official rules of conduct do state: Sure, a technical solution of personal pick zones would be great. But since that doesn't currently exist, people need to "play nice".
I've long been an advocate of enabling instances of zones for groups (minimum 3 players) so that they may avoid players who are able to monopolize entire zones or key quest mobs or key named loot droppers. Creating more picks actually eats up more resources that instances like the AoC makes as those instances RAM can be more easily recovered by the servers. The detractors to that idea claim that the servers would be negatively impacted by increasing the number of instances available while I disagree with them no Dev has come out to say whether it would be a severe impact or not - for them I imagine the issue is who is going to create the multitude of instances required for that and how long would it take to create them for enough of the game. There are further issues around these instances generating respawns or not & the xp rates in them too, so perhaps the devs see this as a solution they can't resource well enough to implement. Instancing would be the ideal solution, probably not the most workable. Sad thing is on most servers "Play Nice" is a relic of a bygone era and you may as well just re-schedule what you intended to do in a zone until later on when whoever is clearing it has moved on, they may have perfectly good reasons for being there after all.
