Playing EQ Phinny server right now they have a feature of offering different "live zone" picks that balance the number of players within a zone. This never happens unless the original zone exceeds a certain number of players. I have to tell you, this works excellent and still has a "live" feel to it. It allows you and your group the potential to camp certain areas without overpopulation issues. I think we all can agree that waiting around or running around trying to find something to do with your group is a pain in the rear and wasted time we all hate to experience with our tight schedules. Even within these extra duplicated "live" zones you still have competition, just not as rediculous / impossible if not for this feature. This also plays a large part of guilds being able to plan their own raids accordingly without one guild locking it down over and over and over...
I do not see a better solution that still offers a "live" feel and controls overpopulation of a zone.
Pyye said:Playing EQ Phinny server right now they have a feature of offering different "live zone" picks that balance the number of players within a zone. This never happens unless the original zone exceeds a certain number of players. I have to tell you, this works excellent and still has a "live" feel to it. It allows you and your group the potential to camp certain areas without overpopulation issues. I think we all can agree that waiting around or running around trying to find something to do with your group is a pain in the rear and wasted time we all hate to experience with our tight schedules. Even within these extra duplicated "live" zones you still have competition, just not as rediculous / impossible if not for this feature. This also plays a large part of guilds being able to plan their own raids accordingly without one guild locking it down over and over and over...
I do not see a better solution that still offers a "live" feel and controls overpopulation of a zone.
EQ2 had similar to this if memory serves. A zone would stay unique until the population hit a cap then another version of the zone would open. Instancing yes, but limited. It was, however, very easy to game the system and get an empty zone all to yourself. If the developers have created enough equivalent* content within a given spread of levels any instancing, no matter how limited, shouldn't be necessary.
*When I say equivalent, it's not just the difficulty of the areas which needs to be similar but also the spread of drops. If you looked at SolB and Permafrost, clearly SolB was the better content in all respects. Heck, even PoHate (once cleared of bosses) was a decent XP zone for a solid group. The same could not be said of PoFear or Sky.
That sounds very interesting, but what happens if you have an over world boss in an exp zone? A raid zones in and suddenly everything goes wonky. I mean I agree trying to find something to do is no good, but I do also miss the days when zones like Oasis had 100 people in it and it's own vibrant sub community. I do think this is a good middle ground for non raiding zones though.
Arksien said:That sounds very interesting, but what happens if you have an over world boss in an exp zone? A raid zones in and suddenly everything goes wonky. I mean I agree trying to find something to do is no good, but I do also miss the days when zones like Oasis had 100 people in it and it's own vibrant sub community. I do think this is a good middle ground for non raiding zones though.
Well, special zone cap exceptions could be put in for groups of players. If you're all in the same raid, for instance, you could add a snippet of code that makes your 24 man raid only count as 4 players (one per group, if the group size is 6) towards the effective zone cap.
Arksien said:I think a big point was brought up here with instance vs. Open world raid bosses. The big problem with EQ was that there was a finite, predictable (and often concrete) spawn timer for every mob. If X guild killed a dragon Thursday at 8pm, all they had to do was show up Thursday at 7:50pm the next week and wait 10 minutes for the mob to pop. Other guilds only stood a chance then in they learned guild X's raid schedule and tried to compete, or guild X was bored of that mob. If they were the top guild, they could just setup a rotation where they knew who got what. If there was a variable respawning time, this goes away immediately.
Then you had mobs like Stormfeather. Set spawn timer with chance to skip, but guaranteed spawn within 36 hours...so people actually sat there and camped it for up to 36 hours... none of that in this game please. Make "rare" and "raid" mobs on long, unpredictable timers so there's no fruit in camping. Also, a diverse spawn loc so even if you wanted to try for luck, you'd never know where it's spawning.
Hell, why even bind a mob to one zone? Imagine if big raid mobs could walk through several zones, spawn in many parts of many zones, and had a variable spawn timer? This adds the competitor back in.
Instancing was a lazy fix that has been overly abused in every game since PoP EQ, driven into the ground by WoW, and ruined gaming ever since. I think there ARE solutions to it, such as what I said above, AND ALSO by having a variety or raid content where there isn't just "one final boss."
In velious, there were 3 potential raid routes. This meant that until Sleepers tomb, some guilds might strive for Veeshans, some might strive for Dane, and some for AoW. If different guilds aren't even agreeing who the raid boss is and who is their ally, then they're not competiting for pulls AND the timers are variable.
That's a fun, interactive world. None of this "everyone gets a chance, and we also have an easy mode if heroic is too hard for you" instance stuff.
I can read some of these posts and know you're talking specifically about P99 raid situation, and if I had to change 1 thing about raiding there, it would be to make raid targets untrackable, and to make it nearly impossible to view their spawn locations without a raid force being present. This would alleviate nearly all instances of "poopsocking" and would keep the competitive nature that we want, without adding instances that destroy community and eliminate a virtual world. You may still have guilds of people sitting on spawns of mobs waiting for them to pop, but if the timers were completely random this would relegate that guild to simply trying to control 1 target, while everything else is available to other guilds.
The 3 potential raid routes in Velious, Dwarf/Giant/Dragon was a really slick idea as well, however it was still possible for a very hardcore guild to lock down all 3, which should never be possible.
