VP key ground spawns remind me why I quit this game for half a decade.

Discussion in 'Time Locked Progression Servers' started by Montag, Sep 13, 2017.

  1. Kiaro Augur


    They changed picks a while back to where if you fall below A set amount of people in both primary pick and extra picks it will close.
  2. Nekromancy Elder

    That's incorrect. If there were 3 picks, yes. But if there is only 1 main and 1 pick. The pick can have 1 person as long as the main has enough, which I believe is 33% of the number needed to make a pick. Not sure on exact number but if the main had 50 in it, the pick would stay open with 1 person.
  3. Nekromancy Elder

    Go to sol b and watch 1 person keep a pick open. Long as the main has like 9 in it, the pick won't close with just 1 in it.
  4. Risiko Augur

    That is an absolute 100% lie. I know because I have been there with a group killing at the Efreeti when there was 25ish people in SolB. The 1st pick opened, and we picked over to it. We had 6 people in Pick 1, and there was roughly 18 to 20 people in the main pick when we got the notice that our pick would be closing down.

    We went back to the main pick, pick 1 closed. A short while later because we were back in the main pick which boosted the population in that pick, pick 1 opened up again. We picked over to pick 1, and a short while later, pick 1 closed down again because there wasn't enough people in the main pick.

    Everytime pick 1 closed down in SolB, there was 18+ people in the main pick, and 6 people in pick 1.

    We went through this pick dance 3 times before the group said to hell with it and disbanded.

    So, no. A single person can not keep a pick open if six people can't keep a pick open. It's based on the number of people in the main pick.

    If you want to open a pick AND keep it open, you have to KEEP the minimum number to open a new pick IN the main pick.
  5. Nekromancy Elder

    Load balanced (/pick) zones will now 'lock' if any two versions of a load balanced zone have a player count less than or equal to 1/3 of the zone's threshold.


    I was sitting in solb 2 days ago with 2 people and had 0 issues until a group from the main zone picked over and brought the main zone too low.

    Keyword is two.
  6. Nekromancy Elder

    I'm not sure what the issue was in your scenario but I was 100% camping efreeti in both picks with 6 total toons. I had 2 toons in the pick for 2 hours while I picked another toon back and forth before efreeti would pop each time.

    2 people in the pick for over 2 hours with no pick closure.
  7. Accipiter Old Timer


    Completely and utterly wrong. In most zones the picks collapse if there are less than 6 people in the pick regardless of how many are in the main zone.
  8. Nekromancy Elder

    Weird I must be hacking because I do this in multiple zones that only have main + 1 pick.

    Not sure what you guys are doing wrong.

    Sucks to be you guys. I constantly hold a pick open with 6 or less toons in a pick lol. I'm surprised you guys are so adamant when I do it every single day in zones like sol b and KC.
  9. Thparkles New Member


    Pretty simple. Decrease spawn time.
  10. Risiko Augur

    Maybe it was changed in the last update. I will test tonight.
  11. Gauss New Member

    From everything I've seen it basically works like this:

    Each zone is set to support a certain number of players per pick as a threshold. Let's say the threshold is 25. So you start with just base zone, and then base zone has 30 people in it. This is over the threshold for this zone. This opens a new pick (Base Zone 1).

    At this point additional logic appears to be in play. To open a new pick, you need a total number of people in the Meta Zone (all of the picks of a given zone) to justify a new pick being open. In our running example, if the pick threshold is 25, and you have 2 picks (base and Pick 1) to justify a third pick opening there must be at least 51 people in the Meta Zone. But additionally, there must also be enough people in the lowest population pick to justify opening a new pick. I'm not 100% sure, but I think this number is also 25. So if the pick thresh is 25, and you have 30 in zone, then a new pick will open. Assume 6 people move in to it, leaving you with 24 in base and 6 in Pick 1. Let's say 30 more people zone into base pick bringing the total in the Meta Zone to (24+30+6)=60, that's enough to "justify" a third pick opening. But for some reason no one is moving from the base pick to Pick 1 (maybe there's a raid target in base, and the 30 people who zoned in are in a raid going after a target in base pick), so in this scenario with only 6 people in Pick 1, even though there are enough people in the Meta Zone for a new pick to open, the lowest population pick hasn't had its "individual" threshold met to justify opening a new pick.

    There is a converse piece to this logic, though. As long as enough people are in the Meta Zone to justify at least 1 pick being open, that 1 pick will ALWAYS be open, regardless of how many people are in that pick. The clearest example is Commonlands, throughout most of Classic base pick had a couple hundred people in it. That's vastly higher than the Meta Zone pick threshold for Commons (which is probably like 50ish or 60), but after the first couple of weeks not many of the people in Commons were leveling. So you'd usually see main pick with a couple hundred, and Commons 1 with like 1-3 people, but that pick of Commons *never* closed. Yes, it was below the individual threshold to hold a pick open, but because the Meta Zone population was vastly above that required for at least 1 pick to exist, it would *never* close. Now, if you had watched, you'd see that Commons 2 almost never got created. Why? Because the lowest population pick (commons 1) only had like 1-3 people in it. There is some additional per pick threshold before it'll open a new pick. So they've written the logic such that if there's a pick that is not being used, you have to have people start using it before they'll open more picks. Since the Meta Zone population of Commons was so high, if enough people picked over to Commons 1, Commons 2 would be generated almost instantly.

    So in Nekromancy's case, what's going on isn't that he's "holding a pick open" with less than six, it's that the Meta Zone population is high enough to justify however many picks there currently are. When it comes to picks closing, we have a little bit of wiggle room. Take KC for example, let's guess that the threshold for KC to have a pick is 18 people. So if there are 72 people in the Meta Zone, that's enough that you'd expect to see 4 picks open. This will happen if those 72 people start to distribute to each new pick that opens. E.g. people start to move to Pick 1 til good camps are taken, then the next people move to Pick 2 til good camps are taken, then the next people move to Pick 3 etc. So you end up with a roughly even distribution of 72 people across 4 picks. Now, let's say a group leaves Pick 3, that pick now has 12 people in it, and the total Meta Zone population is now 66. At this point, the game will "want" one of these picks to close. But to avoid the situation where too many players are too pissed off, they did put some threshold in place where "even if a pick shouldn't exist, it can be kept open by a certain number of players." For each zone this number is different. Let's say for KC it's 11 (I have no idea if it is), since there are still 12 people in Pick 3, it'll stay open and a 4th pick will stay open even though in terms of Meta Zone population, you're under the 72 required to justify 4 picks, but since the lowest population pick still has "above some number" (which is set for each zone), the lowest population pick will remain open.

    But then let's say another group leaves Pick 3, dropping it to 6 people. BUT at the same time 30 people zone into base pick (to kill VS), at this point Pick 3 is way below its minimum threshold to stay open "even when it shouldn't" (i.e. the Meta Zone population is too low to justify 4 picks.) But since 30 people have zoned in, the Meta Zone population is like 90, so it's way higher than the threshold to keep 4 picks open, so now Pick 3 has a new lease on life. Since the game believes 4 picks are needed (because Meta Zone population is high enough to justify 4, and since Pick 1 and 2 are above the threshold to justify a new pick), so even though Pick 3's population is really low, it'll stay open. It'd even stay open with 1 person or even 0 (you can actually see these 0 person picks all the time.) Now once that VS raid leaves, and the Meta Zone population is down below 72, the game will want to close unnecessary picks with too few players, so since Pick 3 only has 6 people in it, and a 4th pick is deemed unnecessary, at this point it will close out. The players in Pick 3 may have been under the impression they had been keeping Pick 3 open all this time, but they never were--it was a consequence of the Meta Zone's population being high enough to justify that pick being open. The only time the people in it were keeping it open is when the Meta Zone population was at like 66, and Pick 3 had like 12, in that case they were above the arbitrary "minimum to not have a pick closed on you" threshold that was set to avoid player unhappiness.
    Kattria Minx likes this.
  12. Gauss New Member

    If you raid with a larger guild on Agnarr you can actually see this stuff happen in real time. This is a literal example of something we used to do in classic all the time. We'd zone into SolB with 70-odd people (enough by ourselves to justify like 3 new picks), meanwhile SolB already had 4 picks. So it had enough people spread across the "Meta Zone" to either justify 4 picks, or enough to justify 3 picks and the 4th pick had enough to "keep it open" (i.e. probably like 12 people.)

    Our zoning in instantly puts the MZ threshold vastly above that for a new pick, and let's say the lowest population existing pick has enough people to justify a new pick opening. What then happens is a new pick opens with 0 people. We kill Nagafen, and by then it may have a couple people in it, but often time sit would still only have 0. Now, Meta Zone population, we've really added enough people to this 4-Pick SolB to justify 7 total picks, but we weren't evenly distribute so only 1 additional pick (a 5th pick) was generated. Once Naggy was dispatched and our combat timer ended we'd just pick over as a raid (in Giant Fort) and clear all the Fire Giants as a guild (for quick loot from the named FGs, who get created whenever the pick is spawned.) Now, think about what is happening here, 70 some people have moved from base pick to the new 5th pick. We clear giant fort, but because the "meta zone" thresh is high enough for 7 total picks, and we've now super-filled 5th pick, a *6th* pick also opens. We'd then pick from 5->6 and clear all the FGs again. But when we picked from 5 to 6, we'd actually leave enough people in 5 to make sure we kept each per pick threshold met. So then finally we see Pick 7 spawn, we pick over into that and clear Giant Fort for a 3rd time in a row. At this point no matter how we moved people around we couldn't get an 8th pick to spawn unless more bodies came into the Meta Zone.

    A joyful occurrence you'd sometimes run into is the infamous box groups that held down FG fort for much of classic would sometimes see this happening and try to pick over as well, hoping they were picking into an uncontested pick. When they were then confronted with a 75 man raid steamrolling over giants, they would grow very sad knowing that a Magus Rokyl or King Tranix would not be theirs this day.
  13. Barraind Grumpy Old Bastage


    I can give you specifics for KC:

    It requires 21 people in the base to spawn pick_1
    It requires 21 people in each of base and Pick_1 to spawn Pick_2
    It requires 21 people in each of base, Pick_1 and Pick_2 to spawn Pick_3 (Even with enough people in the existing zones, if each pick doesnt have enough people in it, a new pick isnt guaranteed to open).

    It requires 22 people across base and Pick_1 to hold Pick_1 open
    It requires 43 people across base, Pick_1 and Pick_2 to keep Pick_2 open.

    It also requires a certain number of people in each pick after a set time (Ive watched Picks shut down with 1 group of 5/6 in a pick and 20 people in the base zone), which seems to vary based on the individual zone, time of day and pick /uptime.

    I wouldnt doubt theres something hidden to make picks start closing after a certain uptime if its not heavily populated. Swamp of Hopeless Murdersuicide, for instance, closes regularly after 12 hours uptime with 24 or 25 people across both picks, which is enough to keep it alive prior to that.
  14. Machentoo Augur


    They did that already, significantly.
  15. Kiaro Augur

    They've done it like 3x and yet the population of agnarr has no idea what it was like originally so they see that THEY suck at clicking on a ground spawn so there for no one in the history of the game must have done this key in era.
  16. dOOB New Member

    I want to go get more ground spawns and destroy them now, just for fun.
  17. Lendarios New Member

    They should reduce the spawn timer even more, several times per hour even. I logged in this morning, while i worked from home and camped the spot, bag appeared and within 1/4 of a second it was gone.

    I didn't had time to move the mouse from the center of the screen, to 2 inches to the right. This is just ridiculous.

    There are only 16 people who will get keyed in one day, at the current spawn rates. This is simply too little for the server population.

    If Daybreak does not want to fix this bottleneck. that is fine.
    I wont be subscribing any more and I'll rather buy kronos on the black market, than to pay with my money for an expansion I cant access the content, because reasons.
  18. McJumps TLP QoL Activist

    All I see here is you admitting that you were lax in your play by not having your mouse at the EXACT spot the ground spawn would be and someone else who WAS paying attention beat you to it. And they should. Because obviously they care enough about the ground spawn to know PRECISELY where it spawns.

    Also, if you think Kronos are on the "Black Market" you have been reading too many spy novels. DBG does not respond to threats, so they care about as much about you quitting as I do. Which is not at all.