The mechanic of requiring the use of the red exit to receive any XP or marks needs to be removed. It uses punishment rather than incentive, producing a negative gameplay experience, it negates all the work of someone who crashes or goes LD part way through a dungeon, it makes adventurers more hesitant to run unfamiliar or larger dungeons, and it promotes poor dungeon design. I can understand wanting to encourage people to finish the map, but there are a hundred better mechanics for doing so than negating your entire reward if you leave by any means other than the red exit. Regardless, no matter how you exit the dungeon, you ought to be given your pro-rated marks to that point and earned XP, whether you use the green entrance, /house, crash, go LD, or use the red exit. The worst of this is that all those who LD or crash or have the server crash when they are running a dungeon get kicked and get no reward. They end up losing all their progress on the dungeon and gain nothing. The current mechanic also means adventurers have to really trust the builder to put the exit in a reasonable location and not behind a wall of obscenely overpopulated mobs, etc. (or sometimes just behind a wall... uhg...) For me, personally, this means I no longer run any dungeons in which I cannot see the exit from the entrance. I zone in, kill whatever aggros at zone in (uhg -- hate this), look around a second in 3rd-person, and if the exit is not in sight, I zone out and won't run the dungeon. I've been burned enough by dungeons longer than expected, real life interruptions, or really poor dungeon design to prefer to cut my losses and just find a different dungeon to run. If I can see the exit than I always know I can claim my marks at any time if I must. That also means when I build a dungeon I always have to put the exit at the entrance and then folks have to jog back through a whole empty map to exit with their marks & xp. But at least they don't lose everything if they have to leave early. It's this simple: while I can see a reason to give incentives to run the whole map, the current scheme of punishing people by yielding zero reward for running half a map is unreasonable. It punishes people unduly for technical issues, makes adventurers even more risk-averse in choosing dungeons, and fosters sub-optimal dungeon design. If running whole maps is the goal, it should be accomplished via a bonus, not as pre-requisite to any reward whatsoever. In the meantime, I implore all my fellow dungeon builders, please put the exit at the entrance until this gets fixed. I know it's lame, but it's the only way to build player-friendly dungeons until the devs get this mechanic repaired. I also know it doesn't fix the whole situation, but it at least ameliorates the problem somewhat.
Interesting, I can see where you're coming from. When I start designing dungeons I'll keep that in mind. Do teleporters work in dungeons? If so, I'd put one at the end of the dungeon, and one at the beginning. But the one at the start, I'd float it up in the air so you cannot get to it to transport to the end of the dungon, only from the end to return to the zone out.
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I've just spent the best part of 45 mins running a player dungeon on Everfrost and was approaching the end room, and momentarily went linkdead (literally around a minute) only to find myself unceremoniously dumped back at Antonica Docks upon logging back in from character select, without any reward for my time. Not a happy bunny! Some kind of solution needs to be found for this, one way or the other. Is it because the maps in use have just been clipped off existing EQ2 dungeons that were pre-persistant instances coming to EQ2? If so, and if the dev team aren't going to rebuild those zones (as I understand pre-persistant instances would require a total rebuild from the devs to make them persistant and save progress), then really you need to find a way of rewarding the player with something somehow. And try not to use any old pre-persistant maps for future Dungeon Maker dungeons if you are not prepared to fix them. I have mostly enjoyed the few hours I've spent running Dungeon Maker dungeons, but really don't appreciate having my time wasted like this. Not overly enthused about spending any more time in Dungeon Maker if there is the potential to have 30-60 minutes go down the drain with no reward just because of a momentary network blip which we are all subject to once in awhile.
Thoreandan@Everfrost wrote: I doubt that's the problem, I'm sure they just cut and pasted parts of the layouts of these zones, so whatever conditions that zone has in the game wouldn't affect the DM map. Also, some of the maps are from contested zones anyways (Crushbone Keep, Chardok, etc.). I think that it wouldn't be too hard to save the instance for you if you crash or log though.
I just spent 4 hours clearing an 865 token dungeon last night. The creator put the enterance and exit portals right next to each other. I exited through the green portal and got NOTHING. Pretty much killed it for me.
With updates to DM supposedly coming this month, I think this topic needs a bump. This is really a critical quality-of-life issue: the fact that if the client crashes (not uncommon) or your connection drops (common enough) means that you get no experience nor marks from the dungeon is honestly untenable. Players will just sink their time into safe aspects of the game rather than run the risk of ultimately achieving nothing.
I'm torn on this, although I can see the OP's point and, in fact, I've been burned myself. My dungeon is one of the shorter ones, and is fair and square but with the exit at the end. I'm not likely to unpublish and change the exit position at this point. There's something "right" about the exit at the end. However, I think this is an issue to be thought about more. Pro-rating for XP and marks is all well and good, but then what do you do about rating the dungeons. If someone can just step inside and then rate, it allows for artifically bumping up someone's dungeon. If they can't rate, it might mean the rating system doesn't get used if it turns out most people just go a ways in and then leave. Maybe the system could be something like you get Xp and marks as you go along, with a bonus when you finish that depends on how long the dungeon was you fought through. I say this becuase otherwise it wouldn't be long before people popped in and out of the dungeons with adjacent entrances and exits just to get a bonus. On the whole, as a dungeon goer, I don't mind going through the dungeon to get my xp and marks. Its an incentive, to be sure. I can even live with getting burned now and again. However, as a dungeon designer, I'd hate for this to be one more thing to turn people away from playing player dungeons.
