Place holders / Bounties/ overland weeklys

The items dropped form overland Place holder mobs are intended for the bounty merchant at loda kai island .
These items are collected in groups of 2 each( 4 total ) for a bounty , which you can then take to a fire pit or "spawner" to spawn the name for the bounty. This mob is a "challenge mode" grade monster , meaning you need a full group of people in RAID gear for a chance. If you fail to kill the monster in the 1st pull it resets and you lose your bounty needed to spawn it . The spawn times for these place holders and overland solo nameds have been raised to a ridiculous amount and the fail condition tied to the "Challenge monster" is a very obvious time sink.... ( which i know you need sometimes). Im not sure why near raid level content was tied into solo content. Problem two : AFK PLAYERS SITTING AT THE NAMED SPOTS HOLDING THEM HOSTAGE FOR LITERAL HOURS ! I'm assuming their merc keeping them alive also registers them as active and keeps them logged in.

Sync = to synchronize things so they happen at the same time.

Sink = something into which things disappear, i.e. a time sink, which sucks up all your time, or a kitchen sink, where water flows through and never returns.

It's around a 50 minute respawn, yeah, there's going to be "Afk players"

aka players surfing the web while they wait for some year 2001 level camping.

Well I am already surfing the web for a game that I can enjoy instead of where I pay a monthly fee to camp a mob for hours on end for nothing but another hour of camping,

It's longer than 50 minutes, I timed one of the EC at 1 hour and 4 minutes. After 3 ph spawns almost 3 and a half hours I gave up on completion of the solo weekly.

I believe they set it up this way to discourage camping the names. I get the best results flying through the zones checking to see if a PH or name is up, and slaughtering them when they're up. I check back at least daily, or if I'm on longer, maybe a couple of times a day. In between I do Other Stuff.

I don't know what most people are gonna do with the bounties anyway, because I hear they'll be Challenge Heroics that need a good group.

They could have just removed Placeholders - kept re spawn time at 20 mins for Names and Added the new items to the heroic encounters that already need a group to do. It would have kept the Bounty monsters linked to " Group" content instead of making solo players have to fight for basic weekly updates .

Yeah spawn rates need to be increased for sure, and frankly i think it's dumb that you need a fully geared group in order to take out a bounty. Frankly this weekly system is starting to kill my desire to play the game

There could be a few fixes to make everybody happy.
(1) make the bounty items tradable on the broker
(2) make the items drop in heroic content and remove the placeholder
(3) make the place holders pop more often, and make it to where the boss pops after placeholder death instead of 3 and 4 kills of the place holder.

In Bol I would do the weekly on all 18 alts, but this xpac I just do the weekly overland on my main, because of the time investment that it takes killing 5-6 place holders to make the boss pop.

Not everybody is afk camping, Somebody drops by and finds me at a spot, I will say something as I want to kill the boss, I could care less if they have the placeholder. So just send an invite pull up a spot. Sometimes grouping is preferable I don't have a problem grouping and letting them have the bounty item.

Honestly I wish the devs would consider this because right now they pitted solo players against the raiders.

If that was the intent, it was poorly implemented as "camping" is exactly what's going on atm in the game. And it's not just one person, it's several at all the same sites; instead of dueling banjoes, you have dueling players. I was doing drop quests on an alt yesterday and I can't tell you how many people I flew over in a number of zones obviously camping for spawns. Reminded me of ants on a picnic basket, haha.

BOL has it right. Basically... no placeholders.
Never understood the campers though... the rewards don't justify the camp really... but I guess if they have nothing better to do...

Exactly!

To play Devil's Advocate, camping can be a way to make small progress on something while your main focus is elsewhere. I was glued to the TV Saturday night watching the Gonzaga/UCLA instant classic in the Mens National Semi-Final of March Madness. I wasn't sitting on a spawn point, but had it within line of sight and checked it during breaks in the action. Substitute any real world multi-tasking activity in for watching basketball and it works the same. Not being able to/inclined to pay full attention while doing an instance, camping is a way to maybe get lucky while concentrating elsewhere

That's great if you want to so something else.. not so great when what you want to do is actually play the game..

You are right.

Camping as a concept has existed since Vanilla EQ2. Most MMORPGs have some form of camping. It's kind of strange to be having this debate.

Unfortunately, EQ2 culture has dramatically changed since like 2012-2014 to the present where modern EQ2 players want the fastest route to min-max. It's really a bit tragic.

The journey should matter.

It's why I usually keep an extra slot open for new characters and run a character from lvl 1 to lvl 80 doing the original content. SOE had it right, originally, on how they setup the interaction between NPC's and characters. The conversations were area relevant and usually a tad humorous.

Now... it's almost like... you meet a god... then you click to talk to it.. and it says... 'sup bro...
I mean... for us RPG people... lol... it's terribly out of sync. And... I'm still unsure about if I like that they made Queen Antonica into a... I have no word for it...

There is nothing fun or engaging about doing the new weekly overland heroic quest. It has become extremely difficult to find either the named or place holders up. I am not a camper. I dislike campers and camping for drops. Yesterday I flew to every named spawn site only to find every single one of them in every zone camped by somebody. People are not just camping the named now, they are also camping the place holders. Whoever thought this would be a good thing for players is insane!

A while back, they deliberately REMOVED camping. For example, in my early days playing EQ2, I camped Rama'nai in Commonlands for a WEEK to do the Lightstone HQ. Now you can kill Rama'nai OR his PH and get the update.

Why has that approach changed, is what I want to know?

They are not camping for the named, they are camping for the PH drop. The named drops nothing they want since they are usually raid geared players. The only one that wants the names is the players doing the Landscaping quest and they cannot get a shot at it so that is just another thing that they can no longer do.

This system is so ****** and takes away any pleasure in playing .. I canceled my subscription.