Zone ZEM's

thesoundofmerk · #1 01-18-2020, 01:31 PM

Could anyone clarify properly the ZEM's of zones? They don't seem to match up with what is currently on the wiki, and I am just curious what the real ZEM's are. I realize on live, I for one did not even know about the ZEM's existance, so maybe it does add to the mystery, but I mostly am just Curious! Thanks in advance!

DMN · #2 01-18-2020, 01:37 PM

No one knows what the actual zone ZEMs are (outside of some people on P99 staff).

thesoundofmerk · #3 01-18-2020, 02:02 PM

How about just a general list of the highest? I kind of figured no one actually knew, but still was curious on any info about them. I am not one to hoard into high ZEM zones either, Usually I won't even bother, I find i gain higher XP killing in regular zones then waiting around or fighting for mobs and groups. It is more of a curiosity if anything. thanks for the response!

cornisthebest · #4 01-18-2020, 02:06 PM

Crushbone, Befallen, Sol A, Upper Guk, and Highkeep are all zones that I have personally experienced as high rates. on p99

thesoundofmerk · #5 01-18-2020, 02:09 PM

How about city zones? Felwith, oggok etc?

ErlickBachman · #6 01-18-2020, 02:35 PM

Cities in general usually carry a higher ZEM as they did on the live servers back in the day.

astuce999 · #7 01-18-2020, 09:31 PM

It's not classic, but it feels like currently the ZEM's are taken from this DB:

http://wiki.takp.info/index.php?title=Current_ZEM%27s

cheers,

Astuce

loramin · #8 01-18-2020, 09:44 PM

Nilbog called me out recently when I said he didn't want classic ZEMs.

Now by "call me out" I mean he made a (literally) one word post, with a question mark in it, so it's not exactly the strongest sign possible.

But when you combine that with Dolalain's recent classic ZEM research bug thread, I wouldn't be surprised to see more classic ZEMs coming soon. In fact, I'd be more surprised if we didn't.

BlackBellamy · #9 01-19-2020, 09:11 AM

I feel the ZEMs published on the wiki are not accurate. I mean like yeah, Upper Guk is a ZEM powerhouse, but I feel some of the others are a bit off.

loramin · #10 01-19-2020, 11:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BlackBellamy [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I feel the ZEMs published on the wiki are not accurate. I mean like yeah, Upper Guk is a ZEM powerhouse, but I feel some of the others are a bit off.

In theory (and I'm no classic research expert, I just parrot what I read) the wiki ZEMs are the EQ Emu ZEMs, and those in turn are the actual, classic, ZEMs.

As I understand it, way back on live people figured out how to throw a packet-sniffing program (ShowEQ) in the middle of the EQ traffic, to see what was going on. This let them do all sorts of cheat things like see that the rare NPC across the zone was up, and had that rare sword in his hand, because the EQ server gave all that info to the client (expecting it to hide most of it from the user) ... which is why ShowEQ was banned on live, and is prevented from working here.

That program also let player see the exact numeric amount of experience a mob gave when killed, and since all mobs of a given level gave the exact same XP (modulo their ZEM), if you could see how much they gave in a particular zone, you could work out that zone's ZEM with just a tiny bit of math. And since players (even back then) wanted to re-create the game, they went around killing stuff in different zones and recorded the XP they got, effectively determining the classic ZEMs for every zone.

But, as you noted, P99 doesn't always have those classic ZEMs, and the wiki has warned as much on that page (since 2011!) However, when I recently repeated what I've been told for years (that the P99 ZEMs have been unclassic on purpose this whole time, to create ZEM "mystery"), our beloved Nilbog called me out.

Unfortunately he only spoke a single word (the dude is not a fan of talking), so he didn't offer any alternative explanation for why P99 has had unclassic ZEMs since 2011 ... but the important thing is, he did speak, and even if it was only a single word, it's more than he said on the matter in over half a decade.

So whatever the reason is that we've had unclassic ZEMs this long, despite the EQEmu community seemingly knowing the exact classic ones that whole time ... Nilbog at least seems to be interested in correcting it now, and given the recent dev interest in Dolalain's classic ZEM research thread, my advice would be that everyone ...

[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]