Project 1999 Would Be More Classic If It Removed the Plane of Hate Safe Spot

[loramin]

Let me start by saying, I don't know if there ever was a safe spot or not in Hate during classic. I've tried to look on the Wayback Machine at sites like Allakhazam and Caster's Realm, but there is no mention by anyone of such a safe spot. The closest I could find was:

The Organ Hall its self is fairly safe

... although I did find this gem:

It currently can only be reached through a wizard gate spell. Rumor also has it that you may someday be able to reach the plane through the spectre tower in the Middle of the Oasis of Marr.

:D Anyhow, I assume the safe spot was added based on Al'Kabor data or some similar source.

But whether or not a safe spot existed on live, my argument is that it shouldn't exist on P99, for the same reason ToV dragons are rooted: having the safe spot leads to incredibly unclassic behavior.

In classic, guilds raided Hate. Period. No one ported up for a quick mini kill, because no one had trackers to know when minis were up .. and certainly, no one was soloing Hate!

All this unclassicness could be eliminated with one simple fix: adding a spawn near the pillar. No more unclassic Hate trackers, no (even more unclassic) solo hate farmers, just guilds clearing Hate ... and then doing it again three days later. Classic AF.

C'mon, Nilbog, you love classic EQ, right? Don't you want to see classic Hate raids, instead of Enchanters selling Earth staffs and guilds ignoring 95% of the zone? Literally one mob, that's all it would take.



P.S. And yes, as a Mage who has been tracking in Hate as much as I can for a year now (and is still epic-less), I fully understand this change would ultimately result in less earth staffs (and necro books) dropping. I certainly wouldn't complain if you upped the named spawn and/or drop rates a little to go along with change ;)

However, even without such an increase, this change would be better for players like me, because the staves which do drop would go to the guilds that earned them by raiding Hate ... vs. now, where a lot (perhaps even the majority?) go to whoever buys them off soloing Enchanters.

Make Hate Classic Again!

[Dolalin]

Here's a very good PoH guide from 2000.

I don't have time to interpret all these maps with spawns etc but if someone else does it might have some clues.

https://web.archive.org/web/20001017124739/http://www.drawmjil.fakta.se/oc/guides/ipren2.htm

[magnetaress]

Also proof mobs had different magic resists in there :)

[loramin]

Here's a very good PoH guide from 2000.

I don't have time to interpret all these maps with spawns etc but if someone else does it might have some clues.

https://web.archive.org/web/20001017124739/http://www.drawmjil.fakta.se/oc/guides/ipren2.htm

While it doesn't say so explicitly, it does seem to suggest the "safe spot" (the "pillar of faces with flames in their mouths") wasn't safe (as apparently mobs stopped by it in their pathing route):

They like to stop on the S wall beside houses 2, U, and T, near the NW corner of house C, near the opening between A and C, beside house 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, and 2, and near the Totem (the black dot between house 3 and 5. In-game, is a pillar of faces with flames in their mouths).

[Dolalin]

Yeah I'd guess there's a good chance that at least the roamers on that path would end up in aggro range of the pillar. Maybe I'll do some more searching.

[Dolalin]

Lots of results for safe spot in PoH but they all refer to a spot on the (West?) Wall.

https://search.eqarchives.org/search/?q=%22plane+of+hate%22+%22safe+spot%22&s=1&view=list&zoom=years&synonyms=0&stemming=0&operator=AND&path%5B0%5D=home%2Fdsanftenberg%2Feq-archives%2Fwebsites&f_path_facet_limit=60

People would port up invis, run to wall, die, be dragged to this safe spot and then rezzed up.

This aligns with my memories of PoH raids in classic, heh.

[ricquire]

The well is not the only safe spot in zone. You have just not embraced Innoruuk fully.

[Rygar]

West wall was the only safe spot I was aware of in classic, but it was "semi safe". Meaning top floor mobs could agro and cause a camp out.

It was always a clusterfuck tho, unsure what idiot was too high or low on wall. So may have been perfectly safe if you were in the sweet spot.

Unsure if there were truly more safe spots or not, people just followed a tried and true formula of camping out at west wall, clearing nearby houses, moving to maestro chapel when clear, pull from 2nd floor, move up, etc.

In p99 with CSR corpse summons to EC there is no fear of your gear rotting, so folks bound to find more safe areas that probably did exist in classic.

Would be more classic to no longer restore corpses (i'm not aware of this being a process or even a command on live for guides). #BringBackRealDeath

[loramin]

I found another great/detailed classic Hate guide, https://thesafehouse.org/forums/forum/everquest-wing/library-read-only/2968-book-of-knowledge-guide-to-the-plane-of-hate ... and again, no mention of a safe spot.

But again, whether there was one from the start, and just no one knew it during the classic era ... or there wasn't until later in the game ... the net effect was the same: no one playing classic EQ ever tracked hate, and certainly no one was soloing hate minis on their Enchanter.

Once, a long time ago, you promised (http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/showthread.php?t=29619):

The Plane of Fear will own you in the face,

Please, make the Plane of Hate do the same ... as it did in classic :)

[mycoolrausch]

The zone is huge and multi leveled. The chance there wasn't a single pixel of no aggro spot is nil imo.

Some random square-inch aggro-free spot would have been completely useless to anyone outside of p99's raid meta and they would have had zero motivation to find such spots.

[mycoolrausch]

Also a great deal of the cheesing comes from the mobs not seeing invis, which can only be blamed on whatever drugs the classic devs were on. I'd love to see that nerfed but it's very unlikely since it's very not classic.

[Jimjam]

We can see from really notable mobs in well explored zones like Quilmane and Cracktusk that spawning and pathing for any and all zones is a best guess attempt based on incomplete data that is rarely an exact fit to classic. We can be assured that any individual inconsequential mob, like a hate trash, is unlikely to be an exact fit to classic spawns and paths.

The consequence is that safe spots in p1999 are an emergent thing that don’t necessarily reflect the ones from live. I don’t think this is a terrible thing - finding undiscovered safespots was classic - except perhaps when it fundamentally changes the game play of a zone (perhaps in the case of PoH? There was apparently the west wall spot in classic (maybe commenters are confusing hate and fear) and maybe others, but these were used to congregate not park toons).

[Fammaden]

As long as the minis are solo/duo killable, the farmers will always innovate faster and operate with greater efficiency than you and your big target raid guild. If you nerf this, they will find a new spot, and a new way, while you've only compounded your own issues for tracking the mob for yourself and your guild.

You are essentially arguing from a "you can't prove a negative" fallacy. Just because no one mentioned the pillar being safe to camp out/log in doesn't prove a mob should aggro the spot. The burden of proof is on you to find evidence that its an unsafe spot, not just lack of evidence.

Its a slippery slope path, much as I do appreciate your frustration with this aspect of the magician epic this is not a good faith proposal.

If you want to advocate for non-classic mechanics changes to the minis similar to how they have implemented rooted dragons and other non-classic adjustments to address non-classic behavior, then fine. But don't frame it as a bug report, its dishonest.

[Jimjam]

I think you are projecting motive - Loramin was pretty clear in acknowledging nerfing the safe spot would hurt guilds more than farmers as well as introducing less mini loot to the servers overall.

I wonder if a change would make more classic behaviour for guilds? Currently a guild member pops on to a tracker to decide whether it is worth going to hate. I don't find that entirely classic - I suggest a more classically aligned behaviour would be for guilds to prearrange a hate night, port up and try their luck / rotate spawns ready for their next visit.

Obscuring/rearranging safe spots would encourage guilds towards that model of visiting Hate (until a new safe spot is discovered) ... or maybe just completely dissuade them from visiting at all? Either of these situations seem more classic than the current.

[Dolalin]

I'd suggest the best way forward is to look at mob placement and roamer pathing and make sure it's as correct as it can be based on the info we have, augmented with how things are on Live, which can often confirm classic sources to such a degree that you can more or less just copy the pathing directly.

[loramin]

I wonder if a change would make more classic behaviour for guilds? Currently a guild member pops on to a tracker to decide whether it is worth going to hate. I don't find that entirely classic - I suggest a more classically aligned behaviour would be for guilds to prearrange a hate night, port up and try their luck / rotate spawns ready for their next visit.

There's no need to wonder: just read any classic sources and it immediately becomes apparent that tracking Hate and porting up to kill one mini didn't happen. No guild was tracking Hate on live 1999-2001, and I challenge anyone who believes otherwise to provide proof.

Enchanters soloing the pivotal mob for the Mage epic, or the Necro epic 0.5, is even less classic. If anyone can provide proof otherwise, I will record myself eating a sock and post it here.

So we have a choice between ending two things that never happened in classic EQ, both revolving around pivotal class items ... or maintaining a safe spot no one can even prove ever existed.

If our goal here is classic EQ, it seems the choice that makes guilds classically have to raid Hate (and then repeat every three days) is the superior choice.

[Vsai]

My classic experience doesn't align with this at all. The reason guilds rarely got involved was because hate was a farm fest. At 46 new alts would get ported up and sit on the safewall which was easy to get to because 10 people would be up there soloing. When a mini popped on the first floor these unaffiliated soloers would kill it and see who needed what. Druids, mages, shamans, enchanters - leveling toons, would be there soloing about 300-500 range away from safe wall. Trash was down, people would be waiting for repops. I never saw anyone approach the second floor without a guild there, but first floor was safe and minis that spawned there were killed very quickly without the need for a tracker. No one even ported up with a wc cap or portion, porters were always there. As for people soloing on P99, it's a forever box with nth degree a-type personalities investing years of their spare time to do things like solo things that would be unthinkable classically. Nature of the beast.

[Croco]

re: Loramin

Just because something did or didn't happen in a live environment that was never stuck with content even a fraction as long as p99 has been doesn't mean it wasn't possible to do so. And since you can't prove the possibility or impossibility of it there seems to be flimsy reasoning at best to change it just because you have a hardon for making things harder for people for a perceived difficulty in your faulty memory of something that happened 20+ years ago.

Classic is a sandbox, a snapshot of how the game functioned at a certain time. Once you start trying to force an experience on people based on your specific point of view or perception then the server is no longer classic. Your point of view of how things might or might not have operated when you have circumstantial evidence at best is a very poor way to run the project(no one realized how important documentation of how the game worked would be back in era or everyone would've documented EVERYTHING).

[loramin]

If the goal of P99 isn't to recreate the EQ of 1999-2001 (it's just to create a sandbox of the rules, as you say) ... why are the dragons rooted here? They weren't rooted in 1999-2001.

I would argue that not rooting them trivialized what should have been a pivotal classic EQ experience: it went against the goals of the project. Thus, the staff did the most classic thing possible by doing something that was literally unclassic (rooting them).

I would similarly argue that making guilds have to raid Hate ... as countless classic sources show, that's what people did back in '99-'01 ... is worth eliminating a safe spot (that no one has shown to be classic either).

[loramin]

P.S. I should also note there's a compromise option, though I personally don't like it as much.

If Hate had a safe spot ... but if was far away from the minis ... that would at least eliminate solo mini farming, while still allowing Hate tracking.

But again, I really think our Hate, which is about tracking 24/7 and then bringing up a force to kill one NPC, is as unclassic as training the TOV dragons. Eliminating safe spots entirely would have zero effect except to force classic EQ to be played on our classic server.

[Chortles Snortles]

i can't get my mage epic so let's make a bug thread
(lol)

[Croco]

If the goal of P99 isn't to recreate the EQ of 1999-2001 (it's just to create a sandbox of the rules, as you say) ... why are the dragons rooted here? They weren't rooted in 1999-2001.

I would argue that not rooting them trivialized what should have been a pivotal classic EQ experience: it went against the goals of the project. Thus, the staff did the most classic thing possible by doing something that was literally unclassic (rooting them).

I would similarly argue that making guilds have to raid Hate ... as countless classic sources show, that's what people did back in '99-'01 ... is worth eliminating a safe spot (that no one has shown to be classic either).

Everything staff has done that has gone away from a 1:1 classic sandbox is against the project. They should reevaluate their life choices, but it doesn't mean we should keep making unclassic changes in service of pushing a specific idea of what one person feels is classic. Create the 1:1 sandbox and let emergent gameplay happen.

[Fammaden]

Emergent gameplay that pisses off other players is totes classic.