Zone ZEM's

[thesoundofmerk]

Could anyone clarify properly the ZEM's of zones? They don't seem to match up with what is currently on the wiki, and I am just curious what the real ZEM's are. I realize on live, I for one did not even know about the ZEM's existance, so maybe it does add to the mystery, but I mostly am just Curious! Thanks in advance!

[DMN]

No one knows what the actual zone ZEMs are (outside of some people on P99 staff).

[thesoundofmerk]

How about just a general list of the highest? I kind of figured no one actually knew, but still was curious on any info about them. I am not one to hoard into high ZEM zones either, Usually I won't even bother, I find i gain higher XP killing in regular zones then waiting around or fighting for mobs and groups. It is more of a curiosity if anything. thanks for the response!

[cornisthebest]

Crushbone, Befallen, Sol A, Upper Guk, and Highkeep are all zones that I have personally experienced as high rates. on p99

[thesoundofmerk]

How about city zones? Felwith, oggok etc?

[ErlickBachman]

Cities in general usually carry a higher ZEM as they did on the live servers back in the day.

[astuce999]

It's not classic, but it feels like currently the ZEM's are taken from this DB:

http://wiki.takp.info/index.php?title=Current_ZEM%27s

cheers,

Astuce

[loramin]

Nilbog called me out recently when I said he didn't want classic ZEMs.

Now by "call me out" I mean he made a (literally) one word post, with a question mark in it, so it's not exactly the strongest sign possible.

But when you combine that with Dolalain's recent classic ZEM research bug thread, I wouldn't be surprised to see more classic ZEMs coming soon. In fact, I'd be more surprised if we didn't.

[BlackBellamy]

I feel the ZEMs published on the wiki are not accurate. I mean like yeah, Upper Guk is a ZEM powerhouse, but I feel some of the others are a bit off.

[thesoundofmerk]

All of them are a bit off for the most part, city ZEMS are much higher then listed in a lot of places, or at least they feel that way

[zula]

I like how P2002 (now wayfarers haven) handles ZEMs. There is a publicly available list of ZEMs and every now and then they mix them up so people aren't just in the same zones all the time.

[Phaezed-Reality]

I can see the ZEM's just fine? https://i.imgur.com/GO8raio.jpg

[loramin]

I feel the ZEMs published on the wiki are not accurate. I mean like yeah, Upper Guk is a ZEM powerhouse, but I feel some of the others are a bit off.

In theory (and I'm no classic research expert, I just parrot what I read) the wiki ZEMs are the EQ Emu ZEMs, and those in turn are the actual, classic, ZEMs.

As I understand it, way back on live people figured out how to throw a packet-sniffing program (ShowEQ) in the middle of the EQ traffic, to see what was going on. This let them do all sorts of cheat things like see that the rare NPC across the zone was up, and had that rare sword in his hand, because the EQ server gave all that info to the client (expecting it to hide most of it from the user) ... which is why ShowEQ was banned on live, and is prevented from working here.

That program also let player see the exact numeric amount of experience a mob gave when killed, and since all mobs of a given level gave the exact same XP (modulo their ZEM), if you could see how much they gave in a particular zone, you could work out that zone's ZEM with just a tiny bit of math. And since players (even back then) wanted to re-create the game, they went around killing stuff in different zones and recorded the XP they got, effectively determining the classic ZEMs for every zone.

But, as you noted, P99 doesn't always have those classic ZEMs, and the wiki has warned as much on that page (since 2011!) However, when I recently repeated what I've been told for years (that the P99 ZEMs have been unclassic on purpose this whole time, to create ZEM "mystery"), our beloved Nilbog called me out.

Unfortunately he only spoke a single word (the dude is not a fan of talking), so he didn't offer any alternative explanation for why P99 has had unclassic ZEMs since 2011 ... but the important thing is, he did speak, and even if it was only a single word, it's more than he said on the matter in over half a decade.

So whatever the reason is that we've had unclassic ZEMs this long, despite the EQEmu community seemingly knowing the exact classic ones that whole time ... Nilbog at least seems to be interested in correcting it now, and given the recent dev interest in Dolalain's classic ZEM research thread, my advice would be that everyone ...

https://i.imgur.com/JU9dxm5.gif

[DMN]

Don't nerf the ZEMs till my cleric is 35 damn it.

[Dolalin]

Very close Loramin.

Many ZEMs were gathered manually from late 1999 and onwards by working out the math from the XP gain #s as people killed mobs. But a comprehensive list was included into the client memory in 2003-ish and the ShowEQ guys used a debugger to dump the entire list of values circa that moment in time. That list from 2003 is the source of all the 'ZEM lists' we have today, basically. That's also why ZEMs are so different from classic.

Here is the thread on the ShowEQ forums where they started compiling the comprehensive list for the first time.

http://www.showeq.net/forums/archive/index.php/t-3686.html

And another with more info on how it was done:

http://www.showeq.net/forums/archive/index.php/t-3658.html

The reason these ZEMs (especially for the low level dungeons) are wrong for our era is because of this patch in early 2002 which raised them:

https://www.project1999.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3053438&postcount=30

So that's why you have people in the ShowEQ thread all like "OMG crushbone zem is 160? I never knew!", because the knowledge that it used to be standard 80 had been lost to time:

https://www.project1999.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3042424&postcount=14

[DMN]

If they go back to old school ZEMs people are going to seriously feel the burn grinding for levels. I hate to say it, but it might even chase some people away. I had a troll Sk back in the day and shit was pretty brutal. play for an hour in a hell level and can't even tell if bar moved.

[loramin]

Very close Loramin.

Many ZEMs were gathered manually from late 1999 and onwards by working out the math from the XP gain #s as people killed mobs. But a comprehensive list was included into the client memory in 2003-ish and the ShowEQ guys used a debugger to dump the entire list of values circa that moment in time. That list from 2003 is the source of all the 'ZEM lists' we have today, basically. That's also why ZEMs are so different from classic.

Here is the thread on the ShowEQ forums where they started compiling the comprehensive list for the first time.

http://www.showeq.net/forums/archive/index.php/t-3686.html

And another with more info on how it was done:

http://www.showeq.net/forums/archive/index.php/t-3658.html

The reason these ZEMs (especially for the low level dungeons) are wrong for our era is because of this patch in early 2002 which raised them:

https://www.project1999.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3053438&postcount=30

So that's why you have people in the ShowEQ thread all like "OMG crushbone zem is 160? I never knew!", because the knowledge that it used to be standard 80 had been lost to time:

https://www.project1999.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3042424&postcount=14

https://i.imgur.com/3cvovx7.gif

P.S. I edited http://wiki.project1999.com/Non-Classic_Compendium#Classic_Environment to link to that post, as it just explained the whole situation perfectly.

[Tecmos Deception]

If they go back to old school ZEMs people are going to seriously feel the burn grinding for levels.

Just as Brad intended (probably).