Why was pick changed?

I'm in PoN a few times a week when I solo, and I've seen over 100 people in zone and it never spawns a new pick. I realize that lots of these are headed to Hedge or TT, but still, this zone gets over loaded at times and never spawns a new pick. NEVER!

The pick changes have been the worst decision made by Everquest sine releasing GoD way too early back in the day.

Make Picks !

There is not one good idea in any of these. Be honest, you guys are just stopping what made this server great. Seriously, if DBG can screw something up, they will find a way to do it.

That is certainly possible, but I doubt it for three reasons:

1) That would make sense if a nearly empty zone instance was expensive, and there would be a significant savings on server resources if they were shut down.

But that is not the case.

A zone instance with a handful of players users a paultry amount of server resources. EQ is extremely thrifty, and being driven by a 6-second tick, if there aren't many players in a zone instance (say 6 or fewer), that zone process uses very little compute resources, and virtually no bandwidth resources. EQ only uses a handful of MB / player / hour, regardless of what zone they are in. So shutting down zones only saves memory and compute, but a nearly empty zone has virtually no compute load.

Yes, it would use memory, but again, EQ zone server process is very, very memory efficient. Remember, ti was designed and coded for the most part in 1998. Back in the day, zone process instances, even for large zones, consumed < 30mb.

2) More importantly, the number of zone instances they are saving by shutting down low-load public zones is inconsequential compared to the number of expedition instances, which have *exactly* the same scale of overhead. Exactly. How many expedition zone instances do you think are running nightly on Phinny? Answer: LOTS! The /pick changes in no way affected that. None. Yet they have the same costs.

3) The fact is, only a small percentage of zones have > 1 instance. Less than 10% of the zones in the game have > 1 public instance at a time. I estimate less than 3% have > 2, and remember, these changes do nothing unless there are at least 3 instances. So we're really only talking about a handful of zones compare to the overall number of zone instances running, yet EVERY zone in the game has at least one instance running...evne all of those with exactly ZERO players in them!!!

Even if these changes cut the number of active instances in half, we're talking at most a 5% savings of memory. Maximum. And that doesn't even take into account the expedition instances, which wouldn't have any savings. And the bandwidth consumption stays flat, regardless of what zone the player is connected.

The math just doesn't hold up. The savings here would be paltry. The sheer number of instances they are "closing" are insignificant compared to the total number running. A few percentage points, tops.

Any cost savings would be trivial compared to the amount of $$$ they'll lose over this...

Unless...

This is part of a master plan to REDEFINE the playerbase, to move them to new, more profitable, server...by creating an artificial problem that said server is designed to address.

Anyone that ever goes into a new pick from base zone is risking having a camp in a zone that won't pop respawns, won't give xp and not being able to get replacements. Then if you go back to base pick, no camps available. Why even think about going into a new pick with this stupid nonsense? What is DBG thinking?

I was killing in Seb the other day, and a team rolled into an area around my camp. I was upset, at first, but then checked /pick and there was an extra pick, so my group moved over instead of getting pissy with the other group. I.E. - Used the /pick system exactly as it was intended to be used to reduce drama and allow for more access for all players.

Later on, a friend needed a rez at the zone-in, so I zoned out, and zoned back in to rez him. Tried to /pick to rejoin my group. Needless to say...they were then without a cleric as the pick was locked.

...serves me right for trying to be nice.

This was a bad change, DBG. There was nothing broken about the /pick system. It was one thing you got spot-on, right almost the first time. Why try to "fix" it?

I'm not going to go so far as to say I'm going to quit over it, or anything, but y'all had developed a very cool solution to a real problem that existed, and then just ruined it in one swipe. It makes me sad.

Why all the conspiracy theories? The 9th post on this topic by RadarX could not be any more clear.

This is the only account given to us, the players on the most popular server is the history EQ. A server whos monumental success is due, in large part, to instanced content, specifically, raid instances. Or in the devs own words...

.

edit: I need to add that I, in no way endorse the changes made to pick zones. I think its one of the worst mistakes this company has made regarding the Phinny server.

You are once again overthinking it. My post WAS their intention. Did it achieve that intention? Of course not. But DBG Genius #1 was told it would help a little and every little bit counts, so they went ahead and did it. Does anyone who actually works on EQ agree with it? No, they don't. But they haveno control over what DBG decides to do.

I also love hearing the story of the AoS Necro who got an Abashi's for basically a minimum bid though because all the monks went in on the Gharn's that dropped.

Different issue - PoN never spawns picks because of problems with moving into picks from the mazes, or something like that.

You are, of course, giving DBG a *LOT* of credit. You really think they plan that far ahead? The last time anyone tried to plan ahead at this company, we got EQ Next, which looked like a disaster and a half long before it was canned.

Unfortunately, they don't often reverse their position either. For whatever reason, they are rarely interested in their customer's enjoyment of their games.

Planning ahead generally doesn't mean pissing off your loyal customers who stuck around after your first "unintentional" bait n switch. (Full disclosure: I was not one of those loyal customers. I decided I had been drug through the mud enough. I'm back to give them one more chance. So far they're messing it up )

Honestly I have nothing left to say about this change what won't result in a forum suspension. So lets go with this:

(the short (here) was far better then the resulting tv show)

That was Sony. Don't try to give DBG credit even for that much.

Sony did these way better. Sleeprs and Fippy were the best TLPs. Bring back corpse runs. Corpse runs would solve a lot of these shenannigans. Wanna train someone? better not die.

Fippy would have been fabulous without voting. But there were no corpse runs on Fippy. We don't have time for that!

I talked against the change to pick zone. But in a way I can see there point, eating a lot of resources on so many instances.

Also, I am pretty sure there a number of people WHO is abusing them to run afk teams. And with locked zone, nobody can report them in.locked place where they can afk box..

So for that point, its a good thing.

It's hurting the casuals, not the farmers. The farmers will just move into the base zone and take the camp. That was the WHOLE point of picks wasnt it? Everyone cried the box crews are farming everything, do something DBG! So picks came. Efreeti comes to mind, camp was rarely open but having extra picks made it bareable, helped combat the prices the farmers put out, more supply.

I've been noticing a lot of issues with picks closing and forcing people to take over others camps. I'm not going to lie - I did it to someone else, that just seems to be the nature of the behavior you're forcing here. The people were extremely upset and attempted to train us, I wasn't upset they tried to train us...their frustration was defiantly justified.

This should be Standard Operating Procedure.

If you get locked out of a locked zone, go to main and take the same camp. There are no camps anyway, right?

When the current campers complain, tell them quite simply: "Hey man, I sympathize, I really do. Don't yell at me, I'm just playing the game DBG has now *thrust* upon us with these fascist pick changes. Go yell at them. Make them change it. If they won't, vote with your dollars and quit. Either way, this camp is now mine, because it's not my fault that DBG forced me out of my own camp, and I'm here to play, same as you, and as you know there are no such things as "camps" anyway. Oh, and don't train me, that's illegal and a bannable offence, and I'm recording, as that is what this game has now come to."

If enough people do this, then one of the two following things will happen:

1) population reduced to the point where competition is no longer an issue

2) DBG reverses course on this *moronic* change

Either way, problem solved! ;-)

The pick changes are for server stability and nothing else. When the population spiked at POP launch the number of pickzones spawning reached a threshold where it started causing all of the server crashes we saw those first two weeks. The /pick changes were done to limit the number of pickzones spawning and keep the server from crashing.

Phinny is the most populated server EQ has ever had and this wasn't the first time the population has broken something (/bazaar anyone?) and it won't be the last. But by all means, ignore this and continue with the theories about cost cutting and TLP testing because I find them to be quite entertaining.

Can't Even get a group now days leveling, Normally PLVL groups 1-55 zones...