Whether there was a patch or not, there was hardware maintenance every week on live. This brought the servers down every Tuesday and reset them every week which is why dragons were on 7 days spawn timers; to ensure they were only seen once per week. Every Tuesday afternoon the rush to take down dragons began, and by Friday the planes were all cleared.
Maybe things were different on other servers (just throwing that out there because anything is possible) but that is how it was on Rodcet Nife.
Why is it that Rodcet Nife with a population of 800-900 at peak time (circa mid to end 1999) could support 5-7+ guilds accessing the same number of raid bosses that this server cannot with its 600-700 population?
Why aren't there safeguards against afk camping like there were on live? 5 minutes of being afk and the toon sits down (that was usually our first clue no one was at the keyboard), soon afterwards the toon gets disconnected from the server. Seems a simple fix and would help promote a more healthy environment. Won't solve all the ills but is a step in the right direction. Simulate weekly server resets and add that to the respawn x + y variance and it's a big leap.
example: Every Tuesday an algorithm decides when the reset occurs to simulate the variance associated with how long the servers were down on Live. This was typically 3-5 hours starting at around 11 am EST. So on this particular Tuesday the algorithm random'ed a 4 1/2 hour server down time. BOOM! POOF! At 3:30 pm EST the spawn timers start ticking down for all raid bosses server wide. Now the dragons eventually had a 2 day variance added to their spawn timers (dont remember exactly when this changed nor do I care as it really isn't relevant. whether it was classic or not it, it was the best fix for the situation and is precisely the situation we have on P99). So now Naggy can spawn at any time between 3:30 pm EST Tuesday and 3:30 pm EST Thursday. So I wanna get 15 of my guild members and camp Naggy for 2 1/2 days (2 1/2 instead of 2 because I have to start camping him early to 1)beat everyone else to the camp and 2) I do not know exactly when the servers will "be up"; ie when the random spawn timer starts ticking). Fine, we can do that. However we had better be prepared to sit in front of our computers the entire time because if we afk for 10 mins we are disconnected, or have a large enough guild of dedicated people that we can keep him perma camped for 2 1/2 days around the clock in shifts. But wait! Damn it there are other bosses out there, not just Naggy. What oh what will we do this week?
Let the races begin...
Why is that so difficult? THAT is live emulated pretty damned perfectly.
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