Zone ZEM's

[loramin]

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 ...

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