We need our own unique Pick Zones already.

Nothing worse than spending 30 minutes pick hopping trying to find an open camp. The run time, pick hopping time, dungeon crawl time.. only to finally get to the camp you want and discover a group already there that didn't reply to /ooc Camp Check is such a buzzkill and waste of time.

I would love if I could create my own unique pick, give it a password and then only myself and people that have the password could join.

/pickcreate name password

You can add restrictions to it too so once I created or enter a unique pick there could be lengthy downtime before joining another pick or any other number of restrictions you put on it so I can't abuse the system for loot.

I'm 38 now. I have limited playtime and a family. Saving an hour of setup time before I can actually play would be amazing. I would also love not having to deal with toxic people constantly trying to steal your named mobs, training you or any of the other drama that can happen due to toxic players or automated boxers.

For the umpteenth time, it can't be done, the servers won't support it. If you can't live with the restrictions of 20+ year-old technology, you might be playing the wrong game.

Frankly, if you want your own "zone", you can make your own emulated server and just play by yourself or a few friends. I think part of the EQ experience is to deal with others, even when it can become a pain, IMO.

Hey look, two known mega boxers shutting down a fantastic idea and trying to end a rational debate so they can continue to lock down some fishbone earring.

I love your idea, sadly though, as I was recently reminded, they found that when there were too many picks of older zones it would cause massive performance issues because of the way the early expacs were coded.

Yea I totally understand from a coding perspective.. but they are able to do this with raid bosses right?

Maybe a few more AoCs? I realize the original intention was for raiding, but at least that could provide a fun dungeon crawl for a couple hours when all else fails. This could also serve for a planned outing with a group of casual friends. I'd suggest Lower GuK, CoM, and Chardok be added. Allows a bit of load-balancing when there is a timer rather than unlimited private picks that stay up with respawns for hours.

I am a "known mega-boxer"? Someone should alert the media.

A raid instance is typically 54 people, sometimes even more. Big difference between that and a whole zone instance for one (1) person. If you already "totally understand from a coding perspective", then why are you even asking?

I really like the way pickzones are done today. Its a good balance of creating space to play and still keeping the game social. The classic lguk drama is what EQ is all about. It's caused my groups to explore new zones and new camps at times which I've actually found enjoyable in retrospect.

I do wish there was a way to check picks without the 5 min cooldown. Hopping across 4 picks to see if camps are open eats up 20 minutes of playtime. That said, I'd rather have 5 min cooldowns than folks hopping picks and camping multiple pickzones. That was toxic before.

As you progress towards more current expansions, groups will farm raid instances for augmentation drops

They recode the zones for aoc's. No respawns makes the server load much lighter.

Raid DZes are functionally different than picks. Also, those raid instance clears give multi day loot lockout. TLP groups forming and wanting to create a pick for themselves will cause dozens more picks than live players create DZs on a daily basis.

You're comparing apples and oranges.

The solution is reduce pick zone timer to 1m. Anytime you kill a rare mob, your pick zone timer becomes 20m

The classic zones weren't designed to be instanced. They found a way to do it anyway, at a cost. That being inefficient operation of these instances. They tuned them originally to be as available as they could, and players were happy, until the servers started crashing. The fix was to have less of them, so that's what we got.

To be honest, I don't think you would even need private picks, if the numbers to spawn and keep new picks were lower. But they can't be, so we live with something that is better than what we had, but worse than what we want.

This would be nice if a new pick zones were more plentiful. When only 1 to 3 picks are up and each pick has 18 players yet every camp is already taken.. just a huge waste of time.

I was acknowledging their concerns yet describing that the technology they are saying doesn't exist.. already exists.

I'm sure its no different on the server load for 54 people to be parsing data in one zone vs. 54 people parsing data in 10 zones or how its already doing it with that same # of players in 3-4 zones.

We don't get to decide how much the company spends on bandwidth. Obviously between server lag issues and /pick being nerfed from it's original implementation, we wish they'd spend more. As players with no part in that decision, we pay plenty. It's reasonable to expect convenience and a smooth play experience.

I have argued for "zone DZ" rather than "personal Picks" in the past, the reason I suggested that was as a way to get around the monopolization of mobs that can take place on mature servers where a box crew or bot team are blocking other players that may need it for progression or where players would like to have an opportunity at the loot from that monopolized spawn but the boxer or bot team are there pretty much 24/7 or at least always at the same time as the other players are online.

The Mischief & Thornblade random loot server rule largely solves the monopolization problem.

So perhaps a randomized loot would work for live & non free-trade TLP servers better than a "personalized pick" or a "personal zone DZ" the problem is that system really only works well with free trade and live servers other than FV are not free trade.
You would very likely end up getting a whole bunch of loot you were not after before getting what you wanted - even if the monopolization would be alleviated.

DZ's are much better from a memory management perspective than pick zones but lots of players are concerned about too many DZ's clogging up the instance servers & maybe affecting raid performance.

Personally I think the past design paradigm of having specific loots tied to specific named is outdated, and has always been problematic in one way or another.

Here's how I would do it

1. "Generic loots" both attunable & no-drop items, such as the full range of armor molds & offslots that are usable by any class drop frequently from any named - much the same as they are now.
2. Attunable "Zonewide Rares" can drop from any mob in the zone, same as they can now in higher level content.
3. No-drop "Iconic loots" are a set of rare items that may only drop from rare-creature designated mobs in the zone - any of the zone's iconic loots can drop from any rare-creature - opposing faction mobs may have "stolen" an item from the other faction being an example for the justification of why they might have had it in their possession.

Having those iconic items as a rare thing from any rare-creature then prevents someone being motivated to monopolize that one single named that drops one specific item because now any named might drop a desirable item nobody is blocked, and it is unlikely someone will be able to monopolize every named in an entire zone by themselves.

It's not quite the same as the Random Loot system of Mischief / Thornblade but I think it might help.

In terms of "finding a camp" for XP then that's becomes a case of making zones more consistent for ZEM's etc. in early expansions, too much disparity will just cause crowding in a few zones leaving others largely unpopulated, and the pick thresholds need to be sensible enough that once the main camps are occupied another pick is generated.

I don't think the game will ever need personalized picks, there are zones that are only designed for one group LDoN adventures are such a thing later on.

You have been hit by a wall of text for 999999 damage. Just kidding. Thank you for taking the time to join the discussion.

My biggest issue is not loot. Loot is nice, but my time is more valuable. I can not stand spending 1/2 to 1/3 of my allotted game time pick hopping looking for an open camp. One night we went from LGuK to SolB to the Hole and still couldn't find a pick with open spot to level in, let alone even consider looking for a named.

Twice last night in the hole we did camp checks, got no response, get down to docks and a mage box army is there clearing everything.

The one time we did manage to get Hamlord in Guk 2 guys from the Fires guild would show up everytime our named spawn and try to steal him.

Huh? Typical. Someone shows up out of the blue presenting an "idea" for the 50th time and then gets snippy with the responses. As for your "known boxers" obviously you are just making things up.