Why was pick changed?

I don't see the issue with the above scenario. Sounds pretty sweet actually.

Speaking of locked picks, I had the pleasure of experiencing my first one yesterday. Here's a question. Is there some reason it needed to do this:

02/19/17 03:27:11 AMPlease use /pickzone to choose a new zone instance. This zone has the fewest number of players and is now locked. All corpses have been moved to the base zone and mercenaries will despawn in 120 seconds. Players that leave this zone will no longer be allowed to return.
02/19/17 03:27:12 AMPlease use /pickzone to choose a new zone instance. This zone has the fewest number of players and is now locked. All corpses have been moved to the base zone and mercenaries will despawn in 120 seconds. Players that leave this zone will no longer be allowed to return.
02/19/17 03:27:13 AMPlease use /pickzone to choose a new zone instance. This zone has the fewest number of players and is now locked. All corpses have been moved to the base zone and mercenaries will despawn in 120 seconds. Players that leave this zone will no longer be allowed to return.
02/19/17 03:27:14 AMPlease use /pickzone to choose a new zone instance. This zone has the fewest number of players and is now locked. All corpses have been moved to the base zone and mercenaries will despawn in 120 seconds. Players that leave this zone will no longer be allowed to return.
02/19/17 03:27:15 AMPlease use /pickzone to choose a new zone instance. This zone has the fewest number of players and is now locked. All corpses have been moved to the base zone and mercenaries will despawn in 120 seconds. Players that leave this zone will no longer be allowed to return.
02/19/17 03:27:17 AMPlease use /pickzone to choose a new zone instance. This zone has the fewest number of players and is now locked. All corpses have been moved to the base zone and mercenaries will despawn in 120 seconds. Players that leave this zone will no longer be allowed to return.
02/19/17 03:27:17 AMPlease use /pickzone to choose a new zone instance. This zone has the fewest number of players and is now locked. All corpses have been moved to the base zone and mercenaries will despawn in 120 seconds. Players that leave this zone will no longer be allowed to return.
02/19/17 03:27:19 AMPlease use /pickzone to choose a new zone instance. This zone has the fewest number of players and is now locked. All corpses have been moved to the base zone and mercenaries will despawn in 120 seconds. Players that leave this zone will no longer be allowed to return.

... every few seconds for the hour and 20 minutes I was in the locked pick? Log parser shows it spammed me this message 3,585 times in about 1 hour 20 minutes. I was thinking that was maybe about 3,580 times too many.

Poor mercenaries. Forced to despawn in 120 seconds every few seconds.

These pick changes may work on other servers but they don't work on Phinny. Phinny's population is too high.

Solo XP is terrible. Group XP is less terrible but still very slow. The best places to xp only have 1-2 picks available instead of 4-5. XPing at less popular, lower ZEM zones just makes this game an even bigger timesink than it should be.

Gotta sell dem exp pots!

I can confirm that the Undead camps at Lower Guk had been completely overrun by high level power level groups, leaving nothing for players that were actually level appropriate. When asked them what was going on, they explained that because of the pick changes they could no longer vacate the zone for normal XP groups.

Kind of a bummer.

You guys pooped the bed here. Admit the mistake, roll back the /pick system and do not ruin this server. kthxbai

The devs haven't stated why they made this change, which, as near as I can tell, is across the board bad from a player's perspective.

So, WTF?

RadarX,
At the very least, you owe us an explanation.

Which brings us back to the question of . . . Why was /pick changed?

All this anger....mission accomplished. killing interest in phinny...should see news of the new server some time in March around the anniversary event

I'm going to quote RadarX so everyone saying he didn't give a reason can read it again.

RadarX DID give a reason. It's to prevent a small amount of players from having an entire zone to themselves.

I certainly don't agree with the reasoning, but there it is.

What is considered pick abuse? What were these people doing in these picks? Was this TLP or live?

These are the questions that people want answered.

Yes, so much killed interest that 3 new guilds finished quarm since the change.

It doesn't make sense to me either. I'd accept resource issues and such, but picks were never preventing others from entering. .

It's curious how they adapt an old game to appeal to a larger population by incorporating picks and then change the very feature that was a factor in phinny's success.

Daybreak, you have messed up and ruined gameplay for paying gamers.

Revert to old system

It's not that 'everyone' quit.

It's around that expansion (and onward) is when EQ's population started to gradually decline.

I am with the majority here. The pick zone feature, as it was implemented, was the major reason people played here. I thought it was working fine. You rip it away...which makes things worse. Can't even kill in zones because they are camped (the whole point of the pick zone feature). THEN your going to make these new changes that even IF we get a pick...your going to take it away from us if we dont keep enough people in it? W T F? Once again you guys are horrible at customer service. If I treated my clients this way I wouldn't have a business. You guys don't know what your doing.

It reminds me of when I interview people, and they give a bad example....and I can tell they knew it was a bad example from the very start....but they just keep rolling with it and expanding on it in the hopes they will in someway redeem how horrible the example was. It never works it just keeps getting worse. It's like watching a train wreck.

Don't be that guy DBG....

Again, wrong (at least on Fippy, which is all I've discussed. Obviously EQ took a big hit at Gates on live with the release of WoW, no one's arguing that.) On Fippy, EQ's population gradually declined from the very start. Big hit at the hacking fiasco with all the downtime, and then after that, it was roughly about 5-10% decline in total pop per expansion from Kunark through DoDh.

This is terrible. Most of the zone that had picks constantly spawning could support the number of players actively EXPing in them. The beauty of the /pick system was you would end up with a few groups per pick with enough mobs to support all the groups. Forcing 3 to 4 groups into the primary pick is just silly. Just because a few bad apples farmed all the picks for gear? This is a terrible solution, why cant you just revert the pick changes back.

How about just keeping an incremental counter that increases after each pick within a given time frame. Add 10 min to the pick timer if its done within a 60 min time frame or something along those lines. For example if Bob the Loot farmer pick within the 60 min time frame his next pick would be 15min. If he does it again, its up to 25 min and the 60min starts over, the 60min lock out doesn't get rest unless Bob stays in the pick for 60min. So, 15min, 25min, 35min, 45min, 55min and 65min. So after the 6 picks of so Bob would be locked out of picking for 60 min. Bob cant abuse the picks anymore.

Keep the pick system construct, it gave the old EQ enough content that the game was actually fun again. For me this new change would be the main reason i will not participate in another TLP server. PoP as it stands was a stopping point for me with all the issues it has had.