Yeah I'm not sure where he was going with that. I would agree if there was actually mystery, but there isn't. It's all known. Weird statement to make I think.

Honestly, I don't care whether or not you like me bringing up topical information in a public discussion: I'm going to do it anyways.

The ZEM thing long predates me. I've only been here about half a decade, and it was in the wiki since before that. I'm entirely too lazy to do so, but I'm sure if you wanted you could check the wiki history and see who added it. Or you could go through the old forum posts where it's been discussed many times, because it's not like this is the first time anyone's thought to talk about ZEMs.

But just because you gained part of a level in a handful of zones and went "yeah these feel about right", that does not in any way disprove anything I've said. For one thing, it takes far more work than that to determine ZEMs, because there's so many other factors. For instance, a zone might have lower HP mobs, for their level ... which will make you earn XP faster there, but have nothing to do with the ZEM. You have to properly isolate all of those, then earn enough (to be statistically significant) XP in two places.

We do have a very good idea that certain zones are off though, like say Kedge, which by all reports has a lower than classic ZEM. In fact, while I think this happened before my time, it apparently once had a classic? (higher than classic?) ZEM, and for some reason was specifically changed on Blue. Again, if you read the forum history, this has all been discussed before.

So while I can't point you to an exact quote from Nilbog, it's the long established consensus here that P99's ZEMS are A) deliberately not known and prevented from being known without great effort (ie. no ShowEQ), and B) presumed to be a mix of classic and unclassic.

Until you've done the painstaking research to prove otherwise (and it will be painful without ShowEQ), or found a quote from a developer here saying otherwise ... maybe don't attack people who seem to know what they're talking about and are just trying to share relevant facts?

Stop using it has to be classic as a way to hand wave excuses! There are plenty of things here that are not classic and if they made some small changes like bumped up runny eye and CT zem it would do amazing things to spread out the server and actually in the spirit of classic promote exploration!

Classic is so critical here they literally have the word in the upper-left corner.

If you want to understand the limited number of exceptions and why they exist, see http://wiki.project1999.com/Non-Classic_Compendium ... but there very much is a "method to the madness".

So while I completely sympathize with your viewpoint, and on Blue I think custom ZEMs might be a great idea ... especially on Green/Teal, classic really isn't any kind of "hand wave excuse": it's the entire point of everything.

I deleted the rest of the post from this quote because it wasn't really relevant to what that other commenter and I were saying. He and I weren't talking about if the current ZEMs are classic or not, etc.

We were talking about your earlier "mystery" statement. There's no mystery on P99 since, like I said, we all know which zones have high ZEMs. We might not know the exact values for them, but we know which ones are higher (and which of those are significantly higher) than other zones. There's no "mystery" going on here.

As far as your other point about mob HP, it's not relevant really. Sure, you will kill things slower and therefore get less XP per hour, but that's not relevant to how much EXP each mob gives. We're not talking about how efficient a zone is for killing mobs, we're talking about the amount of EXP you get for a mob in one zone versus another. If I go to Befallen and kill a mob and then go to Oasis and kill a mob of the same level, I get more EXP in Befallen.

I'm going to try to make a few points that hopefully you can address - why did guk frequently have 80 players while ct had usually 5 at the beginning of green? From personal experience, as well as the vast majority of the playerbase's experience, you get more exp per kill in guk than ct. On the wiki, guk is stated to have 150 zem while ct is stated to have 85 zem.

What basis do you have to think guk does not have 150 zem and ct 85 when looking at the in game evidence? What basis is there to think the staff changed the zem of guk and ct when the only thing that has ever really been talked about was kedge keep being previously nerfed?

I really don't want to debate you on this because the core problem is that some zones have better zems and they are overrun with players. This is the problem that most people have - the "mystery" aspect has nothing to do with that. The mystery of zems is not why guk is packed and permafrost empty. If something is better exp the playerbase will figure it out and go there.

The reason I say it's derailing the topic is because the core problem is that the player base has figured out the best zones(which basically all correspond to the wiki zems) and overcrowd them.

And the reason I think it's relevant is that if the devs aren't even going to change the current ZEMs to classic ones (when the word "Classic" is etched in the upper-left corner), then your chances of getting custom "get people to less populated zones" ZEMs are not high.

But I'm not trying to silence you or anything, and personally I think that game design-wise, adjusting ZEM based on usage is obviously a superior system. I'm just saying ... lots of stuff in classic was sub-optimal, game design-wise. But ... as later MMOGs found out ... some of the stuff that seemed sub-optimal was actually secretly good. That "secret sauce" was missing in modern MMOGs, and that's why we all play here.

When you start trying to tease out what is "part of the secret sauce" and what should be unclassically improved, it turns out to be a lot harder than you think. And that's when you don't already have a pre-stated goal, as this place does, of doing exactly the opposite.

So I'd be in favor of rotating ZEMs ... on Blue, because I think it should be the "classic plus" server. But on Green/Teal, the "classic" servers, I think classic ZEMs make the most sense. Either way, my opinion doesn't really matter: R&N's does, and they have much stronger feelings about classic and how they can make this place the most classic it can be, to them.

Dev posted to confirm the unclassic ZEM bug report. Prepare your butts.

A ZEM overhaul is badly needed... but I don't think anything will change. People have been asking for this for many many years.

https://i.imgur.com/5Ui3GyR.gif

Holding on to ... hope.