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Old 04-01-2012, 10:30 AM
username1337 username1337 is offline
Aviak


Join Date: Feb 2012
Posts: 73
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Splorf22 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
Note: I don't think this is a legitimate solution, I just think its kinda cool.

I feel that the fundamental problem with the P1999 raid scene is too many players. If every mob's spawn time was known in advance, 4-5 guilds of 200 players total could easily show up. This created a no-fun environment where said raid mob popped, was immediately one-shotted by hundreds of players, and then the GMs got to sort things out and award loot. To avoid this, the current system of variance was created. The primary purpose of variance is get rid of as many players as possible. By spreading the mob's spawn times out, only the most unemployed, err dedicated players would spend hours tracking and being willing to log on at a moment's notice at 4AM.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that EQ is just not designed to handle players racing for mobs. Think about Nagafen and the fire giants: if your guild straightforwardly kills them, the next guild simply leapfrogs you. If you train stuff around its quite hard to not randomly wipe the other guild.

This leads very straightforwardly to an obvious question: How can we make the EQ endgame PvE again? Since we currently have a huge and well equipped player base, that would mean that all the mobs would have to get a substantial boost. So, the most unclassic raid scene fix ever: When every raid mob spawns, it gets a 10 level and 250% hp boost, decreasing by 1 level and 25% hp per hour. So Trakanon would spawn at L75 with about 200k hp; after 5 hours he would be L70 with 120k hp, and after 10 hours he would be "normal" at L65 with 32k hp. To compensate for the increased difficulty, each raid mob would have additional items added to the loot table which would be removed as time went on, so if you killed trak at L72 you might get 4 BPs and 5 teeth, at L68 you might get 3 BPs and 4 teeth, and at 65 he would be back to his normal loot table.

Obviously the numbers could be tweaked; it might be cool to tweak the "guardians" of raid mobs as well - it would be funny if all the fire giants were suddenly L60 and hitting for 300 for a few hours after Nagafen spawns. And if you are paying attention you are realizing this is basically a version of instancing.

Anyway, I don't think this will or should happen, but there are two cool things about it: this scenario would really encourage players to work together rather than fighting each other for the scraps, and I think there would be some pretty epic zergs [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]
Great idea. A suggestion to further refine the idea would be to combine this with simultaneous respawns and you basically have a dozen nearly impossibly hard mobs to kill up all at once. You could also add any number of further tweaks like giving any player involved in a raid kill a small lockout (like 24 hours) on groupings of raid targets after downing a raid target. To further add to your harder mobs dropping more loot - the less players in the encounter then the more the loot the mob will drop. A combination of all these tweaks would:

1) Reward skill over time commitment - rewarding guilds with more loot that use the least numbers and engage the hardest version of targets.

2) Increase the challenge factor to trivialized content.

3) Open up the arena for more guilds to compete by remove some emphasis from mobilization (which let's be honest is the biggest barrier to entry due to not everybody playing 24 hours a day or being able to answer a batphone at all hours of the day/night)

The fundamental problem you're hitting on is part of a much larger problem with P1999 and the so called "Classic" experience and that is we aren't in the years 1999-2000. We have wikis and allakhazam and countless forums to tell us everything about the game. We "know" about hybrid penalities and how to maximize experience gain. Quests and most particular Epics have been reduced to following instructions. Heck even though maps are disabled we still have maps for every zone if we get lost.

It's sad, however, that the main reason none of these raid-fixing features, however well they may fix end-game raiding, will never be implemented is because P1999's goal is to recreate classic mechanics and not the experience, which is are two different animals altogether. Until server devs wake up and acknowledge that P1999 is far from Classic and tweaking the game with non-classic mechanics will actually increase the classic feel then week after week we'll continue to see the same messed up raiding scene.

Hopefully the few new tweaked classic servers that will be rolling out this year will provide some competition for P1999.
Last edited by username1337; 04-01-2012 at 10:32 AM..