The case for overland "open tapping"

Anyone who tried to do the a certain questline last night on Beta has once again experienced the joy of griefing. The questline begins with a cryptic request for a mob that spawns in two or three places. Until you kill that mob, you can't continue the questline.

(spoiler with details below, select it to see the white text)
I'm talking about the Pariat questline where you are told to find a specific scorpion. That one is spawned, so it isn't trackable or even present until you either stumble on it, or eventually you figure out where it spawns and you can camp it. However, camping doesn't seem to help because of griefing.

The only way to reasonably start that questline now, is to make a macro to target the mob which has the unwieldy name of "a recluse bluffstalker."

The issue isn't limited to Beta though. Having the experience of somebody swooping in and stealing the mob you're camping is a worldwide frustration. It's made possible by the "encounter lock" mechanic.

Another game I play has something called "open tapping" and it works like this... when playing in an overland zone, you don't have to be grouped to get loot from the same mob or get credit for killing the same mob as some other player. Just hit the mob once and you get credit and/or drops from that mob. Duplicate prizes awarded if it's a named. I can't see a problem with that coming to EQ2, can you? The PQ's already work like that.

Does anyone really care in a fervent way for the overland drops? Most of the time in Obulous Frontier the names are killed for the weekly quest and you see an unopened chest where the mob used to be. People don't even bother to transmute the loot.

Maybe there's a negative I can't see and someone will point it out. But it seems like a better system than making macros for mobs that don't repop fast enough and there aren't enough of them.

And yes, I reported two people yesterday. It was probably the same person with multiple alts though... because I can two-shot just about anything non-heroic, and they were taking like 30 seconds to kill it. Which tells me they didn't even bother to fix their AA's, and their purpose was just to grief. The same names did it over and over. It was intentional, and timed perfectly. The mob was hardly "up" by the time they already swooped and hit it. My proximity to the mob made zero difference. Continually casting an AoE made zero difference too. They can't be doing it for the loot because there isn't any, other than body drops.

I stood there and watched for about an hour, confirmed two of their names did it multiple times and reported those (but there were others who may not have been girefing). I tried to create a macro, but had no luck possibly because the name has spaces. I have invisibility vision so I could see about 4 people hiding in grassy areas within ranged attack distance, etc. One issue seems to be that it no longer works to AoE, or at least it doesn't work on that mob. They also, had "invite to group" turned off. I assume if they needed the mob, they would've just done the reasonable thing and formed a group. At the moment that's the only way to get credit if encounters are locked and more than one person needs credit.

Open tapping would mean I could just hit the mob and get the credit also. Can anyone explain the downside of overland open-tapping?

the key to stop griefing for quest mobs like that is, make the mobs require some flag for the player to spawn them and only the player that has spawned the mob can see and damage it.

in this way you could have 2, 10 or 20 people in the same area getting their update at the same time, without being able to steal other people's update.

you'd be able to see the mob you spawned, but not any of the same type that someone else spawned, unless you were going as a group update in which case you'd all see one mob and all get the update from it.

Not sure what's harder/easier, but either way, it would be fixed.

the way it works now is if you've progressed long enough you can see specific trash mobs (or the opposite) for example in the mushroom area on the south west shore in thalumbra, if you've unlocked the quest series near the rare merchant the cepholex are invisible and non agro to you, but if someone who isn't at that point is attacked the agro mob becomes visible to all in the vicinity.

Depending on quest that could also mean someone else could fail the quest for you by getting killed, or you die because you were not ready and fail the quest, or someone kills the mob before you have all the requirements for some additional achievement (like number of mobs killed before you finish off the named) etc. That happens in another game I've played.

I'd just like to see DBG Drunder people who pull stupid stuff like that. On Beta? REALLY?

I just gave up on this quest for now because I just never saw this mob. I really really wish they would do away with these bottleneck quests - at least when this bottleneck is a starting quest, in that case for this faction.

So I had my share of frustration with this quest, but the suggestion you made strikes me as un-everquesty, that I'd rather not see this introduced. Everquest 2 was always a game of competing for mobs. In public zones you raced to the names with some other groups competing for them also. Sometimes they wiped, sometimes we did because of too much mobs pulled in the haste... oh the memories. In a sense this was community building because you met a lot of nice and a lot of bad people because of that. And I really would like to keep it that way, even though it might bring the worse out of some people.

Anyway, I would like to see the quest design changed because bottleneck quests just grind my gears. Let me slay 50 of these scorpions till it pops for me, I don't mind. But please don't let 50 people run around searching for one special scorpion, that's just pure frustration.

For the record, that's not how the quest works. You wander around and a mob pops on you... 2-3 times.. and then the special one pops on you.
A 'simple' fix would be to have the mob locked to the group/person it spawned on and not be able to be 'stolen' by anybody else.

Make sure that you guys report this issue on the appropriate Beta forum also. On release day, mow many thousands of people are gonna be stuck at this point? For ToT, I know I gave feedback about quests where there weren't enough of the mobs needed even for one person with no competition, and the devs responded by making more of the critters available.

Thank you for clarifying, Mermut. I got this message once. I didn't wander off too far but never got this message again. I stayed in the sandy area where the scorpions are, but roamed all of it for a considerable length of time. I will try again later. maybe I it will work for me then (there is hope).

Having done this series twice, first on a beta buff then on a copy that finally made it over, standing at the spawn point doesn't spawn the last mob you need.
However it is a bottleneck and I will post in beta my findings.

I didn't stand around, I went all over the sandy scorpion area obliterating them - since the quest mob didn't spawn for me yet I have no idea where its spawn point even is!

I've not been on beta yet, so I have zero experience with the specific quest you guys are talking about, BUT EQ2 has a history of having some issues with mobs spawning and still being 'stolen' (even by accident) by other people. You can see it in action during NOTD actually. Digging up graves you sometimes get a mob spawn, I've had someone else's mob agro on me while more than one of us were digging at the same graveyard multiple times thus far in the event. With the skeletons you spawn by kicking the bones on Nektulos beach, sometimes they'll spawn as someone else's instead despite you triggering it. Sometimes you'll be fighting your skeleton and someone else's will pop to you, even if you are well out of normal agro range.

In theory it's a good system, in practice it doesn't always seem to work. If they do make it work consistently though, this would be the best way IMO to handle quest spawns.

Just getting practice and macros ready for KSing on live starting from the moment the servers open. THEN they get to flood the forums with complaints about 'whiners' and 'fanbois' and under-geared questers.

Hope this gets fixed as this alone will drive people from the game. Oh! Maybe that's what the grief gangs are planning.

All they need to do is just make those quest-required mobs instanced, so only the player which needs the mob, can see it while others don't. It's already working like that with Obulus Frontier key quests, especially the ghosts & goblins key quest is a good example there - you can't really do the quest in a group, because only one of the players will see his mobs, and only you will see yours.

Yeah I mean, if I spawned it, then why can someone else even see it? but even if they can, how come it didn't engage me immediately? It's not like we're talking Raid mob here. I've been creaming the mobs, but I consider that I'm a dps class, so maybe other classes would feel differently. There is also a tradition of having the red text appear "you are being attacked by (name of mob)"

I'm also wondering why it doesn't work to AoE repeatedly either. That was the "fix" for stealing mobs in many dungeons in the past. You just had a warlock do cataclysm over and over until it popped. The chances of someone stealing it were very low. Except I know my Cataclysm would've hit the mob, but it didn't somehow. Like the mob was immune for a few seconds, during which time the griefers had a chance to swoop and hit.

@Duffy: while I also remember the contested race in places like Skyshrine etc, I can't say i enjoyed it ever. I just prefer win-win situations over zero-sum. However let me remind you that I said "overland" open tapping, not dungeon. Skyshrine contested was a heroic dungeon. Ditto High Keep (HKC), etc. Obviously people enjoy the race, so I'm not saying don't have one. Just why overland too?

Contested mobs are ok for games designed to be played that way. EQ2 launched with locked encounters for a reason.

Honestly, though, while I imagine this is annoying now, it won't matter a month or three after launch when the rush is over and there's virtually no one around to jump someone's kill.

It is probably because I generally see what you describe as 'win-win situations' (like tap mob, get loot/kill credit) as something which takes away from player interaction. Even though I enjoy solo play like everybody else even in an MMO, I don't want to see everything taken out of my hand. If something like this 'tapping and get loot/kill credit' gets introduced I am afraid that the next thing people would ask for is personal loot in group dungeons because there was a person once who needed something he or she couldn't even use etc etc.

Let ME deal with that. Don't take interaction out of my hand, don't try to regulate everything which could lead to a situation where someone could misbehave and I would have to deal with that. Of course I get mad when someone kills a mob which spawned for me, but actually this isn't often the case really. Also for loot, there might be some bad apples who need on everything, But in Everquest 2 that is not genereally regarded as normal behaviour and that IS because player are allowed to deal with these bad apples. If interaction is taken away and a game will regulate everything for its players, then its playerbase will never develop a conscience of what is considered bad MMO etiquette. Everybody will be a bad apple of some kind because everybody will look only for himself. It's probably just me, things like tapping-get credit or personalized loot just have no place in an Everquest game and the introduction of something like that in the PQ is meh for me.

With regards to this quest, my char had to delete it and start over because the scorpions just wouldn't spawn. After starting over, they just did what they were supposed to do and I could finish the quest with no problems. Even though there were some people on the same quest I didn't feel like I was competing for 'my' spawn.

Yes, I very much enjoy this feature in WoW. Made it very nice running the world quests.

I have had the misfortune to aggro someone else's mob, on beta, several times. This was due to the program hanging up for a couple of seconds and next thing I'd land on a mob someone else was waiting to kill. I also had it happen to me several times but I didn't think anyone was doing it deliberately.

For me, at least, PoP tends to sputter due to the high volume of players testing beta. I don't have the problem on IoR but I often have it on Maj'Dul during prime playing hours.

I have been very frustrated by the KA overland quest that require me to kill 5 named mobs. There is so much competition, between the daily objectives and the KA quest, that I sometimes get so frustrated I just log off and go do something else.

So I am all in favor of making quest mobs invisible to others, not in the group, so that no one accidentally, or deliberately, steals someone else's mob.

And when are our characters going to get copied to beta?