Earthquakes

[regandna]

All of these 3-5 week earthquake timers is BS. You are killing the life of any smaller raiding guilds, as the big two (sorta now three) are, and will be, the only guilds to get 90% of the kills due to the quakes being on bad timers for 4 weeks. This trend only strengthens with less earthquakes. Please start adding more quakes in. This is ridiculous!!

Thank you!

[Danth]

Earthquakes or lack thereof don't kill guilds, the Pixel Sickness kills them.

Danth

[White_knight]

Earthquakes or lack thereof don't kill guilds, the Pixel Sickness kills them.

Danth

:D

[Trexller]

Yeah P99 mobs are in open worlds (NOT INSTANCES) and are targets of opportunity.

If you want to kill a mob you have to be able to muster the appropriate force faster than any other guild.

Small guilds will always get the shaft in that regard. It's not an insult, its how things were in the days of EQ classic live.

Around here the pixels will always go to the guild with the fastest zerglings, regardless of when earthquakes occur.

[xdrcfrx]

quakes provide opportunities to the guilds to kill targets that they otherwise can't, which is nice. They also help keep spawn timers stacked up, which is also nice. Today is 7/11/20. There has been - one - quake is just about the last 90 days, counting from the 4/19/20 server reset at 3am which respawned everything.

That seems very low. used to be 1-2 a month.

[Fammaden]

The official approach was supposed to be randomly as few as zero to as many as four quakes per month right? So its not impossible to have so few.

We all want more quakes. It would be nice if every respawn was a quake. Hell, put the quakes on a 16 hour window, and then do random quakes in between the weekly one. I'm guessing at this point our best chance at seeing the raid respawn paradigm revisited is if it has something to do with the raid meta on green.

[pogs4ever]

have you tried donating?

[MaCtastic]

have you tried donating?

I hear this works.

[Trexller]

Trexller tells you, '>> Tough love incoming <<'

If you know when the earthquake is coming, or even a long window for an earthquake, the entire purpose of quakes is gone. done. That would be Rog-Bog feeding you free spawns.

If your guild cannot get its members to the kill spot in less than 30 min (thats generous), then your guild just has issues. I would suggest batphone drills (seriously its been done). If you aren't requiring members of level who are online to attend raids, then you are screwing yourselves. You can't be a casual raiding guild and muster a force of 40+ in 20 min. It just won't happen. Ever.

Anytime ive been in a less-than-tier-1 guild, the biggest problem i saw, everytime, was the time from raid call to mob engage. I get so sick of being the first person in zone everytime, even before officers. I'm able to get anywhere in norrath, from anywhere in norrath in less than 15 min, average 10, porting class or not. WC caps, Thurg gate pots, OT hammers, Gate pots from potion vendors, shaman made port potions. Theres no excuse for taking longer than 20 min. If you cannot find a port, that is a problem with you. I honestly don't understand what takes people so damn long.

Raid call on a contested spawn does NOT mean any of the following: Go there after you find a group replacement, finish your quad, make some food, rub one out, change the laundry, take a shower, or whatever. Yeah EQ is just a game, you gotta deal with RL sometimes. but that's gonna eat away your response time. Time waits for nobody.

Tier 1 raid mobs are a race for FTE. Tier 1 guilds take a lot of shit for being assholes. Alot of players just seem that way due to the laser focus on getting shit done fast and smooth. So your cleric ghosted your group for a raid, they aren't an asshole, (well maybe not for that reason) thats what it takes to be competitive on P99.

TLDR: If you can't engage a tier 1 mob under 20 min from its spawn time, you lost it. Reflect on your failings and improve. Response time is the difference between pixels or no pixels.

[Jimjam]

To paraphrase the almighty Ruffel, "Nobody deserves [earthquakes]."

[Dogma]

Game should have simulated 2-5 hour downtimes too.

Gotta get classic.

[Trexller]

this ^

verant/SoE often had servers down alot longer than 5 hours. I remember many a boring night on the couch, getting up to try and log in every 15 min. I needed more to do as a kid.

[ScottBerta]

This game has always benefited people who don’t have a lot of RL obligations.

[Tobius]

Yeah P99 mobs are in open worlds (NOT INSTANCES) and are targets of opportunity.

If you want to kill a mob you have to be able to muster the appropriate force faster than any other guild.

Small guilds will always get the shaft in that regard. It's not an insult, its how things were in the days of EQ classic live.

Around here the pixels will always go to the guild with the fastest zerglings, regardless of when earthquakes occur.

The difference is, in Live, more expansions kept coming, which meant smaller guilds at least had a chance to do more content and the lower stuff was abandoned.

The levels of players was less top heavy in classic, and people did stuff other than levelling more often.

[Ripqozko]

Earthquakes suck, no more earthquakes

[Trexller]

The difference is, in Live, more expansions kept coming, which meant smaller guilds at least had a chance to do more content and the lower stuff was abandoned.

The levels of players was less top heavy in classic, and people did stuff other than levelling more often.

Expecting P99 to play like Live is your first mistake.

There won't be any P99 expansions after velious which is years from now anyway. After xpacs came out on live, small guilds would kill a previous raid boss a few times just for fun (after they geared up from the new xpac).

Expansions post-velious always brought group loot that was on par with the previous expansion's raid loot. with few exceptions (a couple items in raid velious are better than luclin group loot etc) After luclin every xpac meant you re-geared up really fast.

Trying to compare your experience on live servers with P99 is apples and oranges, Live is only everquest in the sense that it keeps on going, after about 2005 it became a blend of every popular MMO. "They can do that on AoC and WoW? ok we'll add it to EQ"

You're not gonna have the experience you described on P99 due to the fact that new content like luclin+ isn't ever coming.

If you want a real hardcore raid experience that you can take 6 hours mustering and preparing for, try to kill an NPC guildmaster. But you won't do it, there isn't any loot. There are plenty of "God Tier" mobs around, they don't drop any loot tho.

So you're back to your tight-knit guild of cool friendly folks. Things aren't horrible on blue with such a wide range of targets. Keep logs of mobs you won't get a chance to kill. Vulak, AoW, CT etc. You can expect Riot and AG to be busy flaming each other during the windows of those mobs. Compare this to a list of mobs Riot/AG isn't gonna make a mad dash for, such as kunark dragons, demi-gods, Vindi (24 hour spawn, basically welfare pixels). One day it was just me in skyfire and Talendor was just taking a leisurely stroll as if he didn't have a care in the world.

Smaller guilds just can't compete for tier 1 mobs for the simple fact that they are smaller guilds, and Rog-Bog will not make earthquakes more common or even predictable. So you gotta work with what you have, or give up your small guild mentality.

Tier 1 guilds are a collection of people with no lives, no responsibilities who are instantly responsive to raid calls. Now I'm a broken record.

Time and Tides, they wait for no man.

[sydbarrett25]

Sirken once spoke in a stream that they had to physically depop doubles of each raid mob for an earthquake to happen. I dont know if that was ever fixed for this stream was two years ago. Anyways, that was during the time where there were more quakes more frequently.

[Arvan]

Yeah P99 mobs are in open worlds (NOT INSTANCES) and are targets of opportunity.

If you want to kill a mob you have to be able to muster the appropriate force faster than any other guild.

Small guilds will always get the shaft in that regard. It's not an insult, its how things were in the days of EQ classic live.

Around here the pixels will always go to the guild with the fastest zerglings, regardless of when earthquakes occur.

Incredibly wildly maximally incorrect. In this era of EQ one or two guilds only could kill the hardest bosses and lots of weeks many raid mobs were just up with nobody to kill them until they finally got around to it on a saturday or whatever.

What we have here is not “how it was” even in the slightest. Most people were still trying to hit 50 at this time on live. On p99 most people are working on their 2nd or 5th lvl 60

[Trexller]

I dunno what server you played on, mine had 3-4 major guilds in the kunark to velious era... they kept Tarew Marr squeaky clean.

Enlightened Dark
Enrapture
Black Company
House Arcane
and "Let them weaken it" zerg guild Clan of Shadows

[xdrcfrx]

1: Quakes are fun. the mad chaotic dash to get mobs while the clock is ticking is maybe the most fun to be had on blue. P99 is supposed to be fun, yeah?

2: Quakes are healthy for the server, because they provide a means for guilds that aren't riot to take a stab at targets that are otherwise engaged within seconds-to-minutes on natural respawn. For the folks who tout competition as the be-all end-all of everquest, shouldn't you be in favor of having an environment where people actually feel like competition is possible.

3. Quakes help keep spawns bunched up, and keeps that bunching centered around different times, which is also good because it forces guilds to prioritize targets, which in turn creates opportunity for others. The many weeks where spawns were spread out over all 7 days of the week were awful for nearly everyone.

4. Quakes help keep the timers for certain events, like ring-roll, moving around. Not going to lie - 60 days of ring roll at 3AM eastern was bad; another month with it in the middle of the afternoon is not much better. On this same point, quakes also help prevent drift and the resulting terribleness with these events. Gloradin pop is more than an hour after roll right now, but we can't change the time. A quake would help alleviate this.

5: The rate of quakes seems very low. I know that they switched from a set number per month to a range because people would be camping the quake repop at the end of the month if it was still due. But we've have 1 quake in the last 90 days, and 2 in the last 120. If quakes are meant to simulate server repops that happened back in the day due to patches, maintenance, etc., well - surely those were happening more often than 3 to 4 times a year.

[Fammaden]

2: Quakes are healthy for the server, because they provide a means for guilds that aren't riot to take a stab at targets that are otherwise engaged within seconds-to-minutes on natural respawn. For the folks who tout competition as the be-all end-all of everquest, shouldn't you be in favor of having an environment where people actually feel like competition is possible.

Small point of contention here, I feel like its the old AM crew that always spouted the "competition" line and just used it for whatever suits their purpose half the time. Riot seems to simply just go after whatever benefits them the most rather than claiming "competition" as some meaningful goal in and of itself. Which I'll give credit for the honest approach but it still is the same end result. Not sure Riot really cares about the competitive atmosphere and would probably be quite happy if windows had a seven day spread all the time.

But good points, you pretty much summed up every reason why quakes are good and are maybe the simplest and best approach to the P99 raid meta.

[xdrcfrx]

Small point of contention here, I feel like its the old AM crew that always spouted the "competition" line and just used it for whatever suits their purpose half the time. Riot seems to simply just go after whatever benefits them the most rather than claiming "competition" as some meaningful goal in and of itself. Which I'll give credit for the honest approach but it still is the same end result. Not sure Riot really cares about the competitive atmosphere and would probably be quite happy if windows had a seven day spread all the time.

But good points, you pretty much summed up every reason why quakes are good and are maybe the simplest and best approach to the P99 raid meta.

That's fair - although (not to get too into the weeds) I feel like the AM's that touted competition were only in favor of it insofar as the competitive meta benefited them. Like other competitive, zero-sum, environments the incentive for any discrete actor is to eliminate rivals and monopolize opportunity. In the real world, we deal with this (in the context of say, commercial activity) with anti-trust laws that prevent one entity from crowding out others and stifling competition. Not really a great way to translate that to non-instanced MMO raiding, I don't think. But, of course riot would be happy with spawns spread out over the entire week. If they don't have to stop and think twice about clearing in towards Dagarn or Feshlak, for example, because maybe something else will pop that they want more, or that will otherwise impede them, then they'll go for (and win most of) everything. I suspect that they loved the month+ of spawns on all 7 days of the week.

Anyways, those are just my thoughts on why more quakes would be good. Don't need to be weekly or anything like that. 1-2 a month seemed like a good number. Maybe we're all just falling prey to the gambler's fallacy, and it's truly just the rng has decided a couple months in a row on few/no quakes. Could be that we'll have 2-3 a month for the next few months, and we'll all forget about the Great Drought of 2020. Who knows?

[jazzman_so_fresh]

What's a gate pot from a vendor??

[Baler]

What's a gate pot from a vendor??

https://wiki.project1999.com/Vial_of_Swirling_Smoke

[jazzman_so_fresh]

Says can be made via alchemy. Can't find the recipe on the wiki. Is this true?

[Baler]

Says can be made via alchemy. Can't find the recipe on the wiki. Is this true?

Where do you see it say it can be made via alchemy.
No, it can't be, same applies to the other vendor potions if I recall correctly.

[jazzman_so_fresh]

Thx.

I saw the thing about alchemy on the red dragon scale armor page