I am in the process of running about 20 toons through the Stonebrunt Highland's quest line. I am sure someone changed the quests, that require a certain number of items from a type of mob, with the best of intentions. However, the result is two extra keystrokes, per mob, and a break in the immersion in the game. Having to stop, in the middle of a fight, and click a box to say you understand you just looted an item, makes it hard when you are in the midst of battle with several mobs. Due to the dense spacing of mobs, in the zones, it is pretty hard to just pick off the mobs one at a time so you can click to say you got your item. I have loved the Stonebrunt Highlands from my first time there. It is a fast-paced zone with lots of good content. It is a shame to ruin that with the new loot windows. I sure hope you change it back soon so I can continue to play in this zone.
Unfortunately, due to the age of the zone in question, they're not likely to revisit such a thing, especially with no real detail to speak of.
It turns out that the loot change came from the update. It reset my looting options for some reason. I've had to go back and change them as I play a new alt. I could do a file check but I never think about it before playing.
My loot options have been reverting on test to "free for all" and the auto loot option being turned off almost every time I log off on Test for a few days now.
I've always had issues with my personal loot options going from "auto-greed" to "none". And if I bring up the group window, it says I'm still in "auto-greed" mode, so I have to set it to none, accept that, and then set it back to auto-greed and accept that. The personal loot option I put in the ALT-O options window (under default group options) never sticks either, but at least when it puts me back in "none" mode on its own it shows up as "none" there. And it hasn't yet randomly set me to auto-decline. I haven't had issues with the other loot options (free-for-all vs lotto vs nbg), just my own looting option.
I know you are both experienced players, so this may or may not be applicable in this instance and you probably already know this - but I thought I would mention it, especially since it's happening on test and they could be playing with this as some part of a change to the group functions or overall UI. Plus, other people do read through the posts, so if this helps someone else who is frustrated by this, then that is a good thing. Remember that using your mercenary counts as being in a group - so if your default group loot settings are changed to be different than your solo ones, they will take priority whenever your mercenary is summoned and active. This is a particular pain and isn't very intuitive at first to most people. When I first got the mercenary feature, I had to tweak my default group settings several times until I was happy and it wasn't constantly honking me off with messages and modal dialog boxes about loot that is "contested" against my "group" of myself and only my mercenary. Dismiss the mercenary, and it stops miraculously, and then reoccurs the minute they are summoned. I now keep my default group loot settings very lax because of this - I don't group with others very often, so it isn't an issue to be able to set it that way and not have to worry. For people that do group frequently, I am sure this is a pain point. If you are seeing behavior where your settings are actually changing without you changing them, definitely /bug it so someone can squash it. That shouldn't be happening, and there are a couple of different reasons why that could be happening - some are client side due to folder permissions restrictions based on where EQ2 is installed or the patcher overwriting a file every time it loads, but others could be server side.
This happened to me after a Friday night update. I thought they were trying out a new looting scheme which is why I wrote the post. It wasn't until I slept on it that I realized they might have over-ridden my options. That occasionally happens so I checked, the next day, and found my options, for looting, had been changed. I tried to find the post but couldn't remember which forum I'd posted it on until I saw the alert that Deveryn had found it. Since someone had actually read it, I figured I'd better set the record straight so people wouldn't think this was a change being tested. .
