Ancient Cyclops in Sro

[forensic]

So to all the budding rule lawyers... what's the lesson in this thread?

When you're a lawyer, the most important thing of all is to know how the judges work. The judges in this situation seem to be mainly interested in who aggro'd what first and how many minutes elapsed. They piece together their view of the situation based on those minutes.

I'm guessing it's not easy to query the logs they are looking at. It's probably pretty tedious and so they've created rules to simplify what they need to check. If the server does keep track of things like how long a player has been camping in a zone, or the /locs of players as they move through the zone, it's not a high priority to check those datapoints probably because it would be a massive pain in the ass and a waste of time.

So anyway FTE aka aggroing is everything. Making something spawn by killing placeholders is absolutely a sucker's game because it's so hard to prove that you were the one camping it and doing all the work to make it spawn.

Since FTE is given all the weight, the ideal strategy is indicated: camp stuff broadly. Don't camp 1 mob for 20 hours. Instead, get to a higher level, get a go-to travel helper, and learn to check every camp. If the spawn is up, kill it. If it's down move on to the next one.

Sitting at one spawn for 20 hours is for suckers. You're just asking to get kill stealed because all that matters is FTE.

The pro player here would quite simply know all the valuable spawns in all of the zones, and as they pass through zones would check each one. When they see a spawn they engage immediately and hope for FTE. If the ruling goes your way, you got some great loot at cheap prices. If not, it's not much of a loss.

I've noticed a lot of 50+ players actually doing this. I was camping the Gaz Squire at level 17 and if I died or left the camp for any amount of time at all the placeholder or gaz squire would get killed by high levels who were just passing through the zone checking, not staying for more than 5 seconds. I also learned that when you camp something you can't be invis. My tendency was to want to use Dark Elf Hide to avoid getting aggro. But then the level 50s that pass through to check the spawn don't see me and claim innocence when they engage my mob.

Since I was killing mobs that were very close to my level I needed time to buff up, med, charm a pet, and carefully control the encounter. They could just run in and start bashing and kill the mob in 5 seconds. So the mob dies, I turn off invis, and the mob doesn't have any loot so the person says Oops sorry didn't see you there and runs off, since they were just passing through the zone anyway and don't actually want to camp this.

Anyway the lesson is that camping a single spawn is for suckers. Cast your net widely and camp tons of things at once. Know the timers they are on and return to check on them regularly. You may lose out every once in awhile but even if you do it was no big loss because your investment was low.