Question On Swarming
 

I was discussing swarming with someone, and he told me it’s now considered “zone disruption.” As a bard who plays six level 60 bards, I just want to say I’m truly sorry on behalf of all the bards out there who don’t care about other players. Too many of them power-level people with reckless swarms, causing others to die in the process. It’s disgusting how selfish some have become.

If I were to power-level someone in a dungeon, I would invite anyone who wanted to join so everyone could benefit — because that’s what a decent player does. This game is over 20 years old, and yet some people are still so obsessed with hoarding items and gear that they’ve forgotten the most important part of EverQuest: the community.

Now, what I’d really like to understand is this: what exactly is considered swarming? I’d love a clear definition. If I run one or two mobs in circles and AE them to death, that’s just kiting. Four mobs is quadding. So at what point does it officially become swarming? Is there a specific number of mobs?

Also, the bard’s level 54 song is an AE slow/snare, and I use it often for crowd control. What if I were running 20–25 mobs in circles with that song, but my group was killing them off one by one — would that count as swarming?

Again, I apologize for the behavior of selfish bards who give the rest of us a bad name. Thanks to them, bard abilities keep getting nerfed. They don’t care, though, as long as they get what they want. Bastards.

2. Definition on CHATGPT

Amount of Mobs That Crosses the Line
There’s no official “hard number,” but the community and dev stance generally goes like this:

1–4 mobs = normal play (single kiting, quadding, or AE crowd control).

5–15 mobs = advanced AE kiting, still considered normal depending on context.

20+ mobs consistently, especially in dungeons = swarming.

Zone disruption happens when your swarm makes spawns unavailable to others or causes deaths/lag to nearby players. That’s the behavior GMs targeted when they started calling it “zone disruption.”

Your Level 54 Song (AE Snare/Slow)
That song is legitimate crowd control — it’s designed to hold multiple mobs while your group kills them.

If you’re rounding up 20–25 mobs, snaring them with your level 54 song, and then your group kills them one by one, that’s not swarming. That’s just AE CC and group tanking-by-kiting.

It becomes swarming if you personally kill them en masse with AE DoTs/procs, not if your group is breaking them down.

This post details the change and has an FAQ and may answer some of the questions

https://www.project1999.com/forums/s...d.php?t=437035

So what you're saying is, the playerbase as a whole shouldn't be punished for the actions of certain specific players? And instead those certain specific players ought to face increasingly severe punishments as a deterrent? This only stands to reason. The game ought to allow for varying playstyles, as long as the individuals involved are not interfering with others, but offering a compromise or a solution when interference does occur. That is part of the social game. Preventing one, removes the other. Example...

A small number of raiders wanted to play EQ their way and staff went out of its way to ensure that was possible, announcing it in so many words, even though these players were actively disrupting zones full of players in the process. Despite these strategies having resulted in complaints and petitions, it was still endorsed, condoned, even celebrated as new and creative (even though it was done in classic), all part of legitimate gameplay, experimenting with low numbers.

Meanwhile, a larger number of individual players AE kite, disrupting fewer players in the process (xp zones are virtually empty nowadays), yet aren't allowed to experiment and play EQ their way. An entire class has been prevented from making use of its designed features while soloing, at a time in the server's history when there are fewer groups than ever.

Players have long been allowed to take mobs from bard kites exceeding 4 mobs. Then, dots were even made to have a 25 mob limit. Now, the number of zones has been restricted.

The reasoning behind the most recent rule change isn't logically consistent. It is however consistent with the history of the server. Example... Both nec and shd have had an unclassic feature working against their design, with lifetaps seeing 100% resists by all but a few raid targets. Why? Because, long ago, certain raiders were experimenting, playing their game, hooping down raid targets.

The antosocial, extreme end of raiding and soloing just has not been punished adequately enough on an individual level. Instead, the general community and the classic game itself has been made to adjust.

I cannot, for the life of me, decipher whether or not you are for or against bard swarming.

But agreed - the petitions around swarming on Green usually centered around 4-5 players - Repeat offenders.

It was in the same zone, typically - City of Mist.
And it was usually to serve the same purpose - PLing guild bots.

Basically these bards decided that their guild bots were more important than the 12-24+ players in the zone: who were grinding, trying to exp one mob at a time.

They would constantly (and incorrectly) quote the PnP saying things like "It's an outdoor zone, so you can only claim one spawn technically", when you would ask them to leave your group's camp on the 2nd floor, moat or arena alone. (City of Mist is outdoors, but it doesn't qualify as an "outdoor zone" because the spawn timer is longer than the typical 6:40 found in "true" outdoor zones)

Because of these few players - now every bard is scared to swarm in any zone. The server adapts to the sweatiest, rudest players - not the other way around, sadly. Such is life on p99. Maybe one day Rogaen will give up this project and we can all be free from our self-inflicted prison.

would you expect anything else from people playing in 2025?

From their standpoint if dungeon kiting generated too much bullshit for them I can understand they're nipping it in the bud. If they start making convoluted rules about when you can do this and when you can't do that then there's always going to be an elf lawyer who will try to justify how it is ok to be a fucking dick to everyone. So they make a broad rule and that's that; nothing to argue about when there is no nuance. So you stop the flow of complaints AND you also don't have to deal with assholes who'll argue you to death how the zone shouldn't be technically considered a dungeon or how it wasn't actually swarm kiting they were doing.

To answer OP's question if you're swarm kiting for the sake of swarm kiting I think it is usually pretty obvious. If your group got trained and you're running the adds in circles while your group picks them off then I guess it is alright. I've seen people do this in Velks, seemed fair game to me. If it happens every pull then I guess it becomes a different story. Seeing how little manpower they have to manage CS I don't think they actively monitor bards in dungeons but I'd make sure if I chose to do "swarmkiting adjacent actions" in a dungeon I'm not giving anyone a reason to report me.

P.S. what the fuck is chatgpt supposed to know about any of this, I'd like to see a bard argue they weren't swarming with 15 mobs on them. Use your brain.

Ennewi is just whining because they can't go swarm in Velks or CoM anymore

Any Bard who wasn't disrupting those types of dungeon zones wouldn't care about this rule at all. Know why? Because there are still plenty of zones where Bards can swarm kite.

Certain dungeons were just the easiest and most convenient for certain Bards to swarm (i.e., the Bards who are swarming to PL guild bots or otherwise being paid to PL people). You can always tell who those people are because they get furious about the dungeon swarming ban. Ennewi is clearly one of those Bards.

As for OP's question, there's no set number necessarily, but I would expect that anything above 4 mobs would get scrutinized.

It should be allowed to swarm in dead zones/areas and if that content isn't being utilized then who is going to complain anyway. Just stop doing it if a group comes and wants to kill things in that area.

That behaviour can kill zones though and you'd also have people argue over what is a dead zone. "stop doing it when a group comes in" is exactly what wasn't happening and lead us here.