Simulated Patch Day Repop's

[guineapig]

The point was to guarantee that no guild could monopolize all raid content.

The method would be that each raid boss, when spawned would have a chance to spawn all other raid bosses. The % chance of this happening can be open to debate.

This would ensure that raid guilds still had to use trackers (instead of simply camping a target 1-2 days before you know it's due with 15+ people).

It would also ensure that on these "special days" a raid guild would have to decide which 1 or 2 targets they are going to go for, leaving the other targets up for grabs for the other guilds on the server.

End result: More fun for everybody.

No actual patch of any kind is necessary to relive the classic experience and the simultaneous pop of all raid bosses once every 12 days or so (arbitrary number) would not be tied in any way to the server being brought down. ( On a side note, back in classic, patch days happened at least once a week.)

[President]

Ginea had a good idea that each boss spawn could have a chance to spawn others, but I still think simulated (thats the key word there... Rogean) patch days, while removing variance would be necessary.

Back on live, a patch happened, everyone got on and raced to the other bosses. If no patches happened during the next week, then all the week long spawns happened within the same time period, making it near impossible for a 15 man poopsock to take out all bosses.

-->simulated<-- key word there. It's been brought up before a script could do it.

[Lazortag]

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

I didn't read pretty much any of this thread, but I will say:

To simulate a patch day respawn, you actually need to have.. a patch day.

We don't have patch days.

I'm not sure if this is supposed to be facetious or something, because I know you said earlier in another thread that it was possible to respawn raid bosses and reset their spawn timers upon putting the server up. The real concern, I believe, was that we patch more often than live (in addition to the fact that there would be ways to abuse the new system, but they seem easy to solve for).

I'm pretty sure that the whole point of this thread is to deal with the disparity between the number of patches we have on p99 compared to Live. We don't necessarily have to have it so every patch causes raid bosses to repop, but we could "simulate" the way it was done on Live in various ways. One that I suggested is to have a proportional number of patches cause raid mobs to respawn, ie, supposing Live had 1/4 as many patches as we did during the Classic-velious era, then we could have patch day repops every four patches. This would be the most classic solution by far, and would still require guilds to keep up to date on p99's recent patch history to deduce when the next patch is going to be a "repop patch".

The only concern then would be, what happens to the variance? Well as president has implied already, this is actually a perfect substitution for the variance. It's also meritocratic in the way that the variance is supposed to be (except it doesn't benefit cheaters/exploiters in any way), because patch days are unpredictable, and so it becomes a race to whatever raid mobs have repopped, and no guild can possibly poopsock all of them at once. It's ridiculously rare on p99 to have all raid mobs be up at the same time with the variance, but with simulated patch day repops, it would be guaranteed to happen fairly often. As for the rest of the mobs on a static timer, well, guilds can sort that shit out themselves, they can negotiate a rotation, they can roll over it, or they can even poopsock it if they're that desperate. But at least poopsocking ceases to be a guaranteed method of getting every raid mob under the new system being proposed, and that's a good enough reason to support it.

TLDR: Basically, both systems allow for some kind of meritocracy, but one benefits cheaters and isn't classic, while the other is classic and does not benefit cheaters.

[Daldolma]

IMO, any solution that eliminates the practicality of a raid-force waiting on a mob to pop works for me. Don't care if it means a gigantic variance for every raid mob, a simulated patch day, PvP raid zones, or whatever other idea anyone comes up with.

What kills the end-game is the fact that certain guilds amass to park 100 people on top of a raid mob's spawn point before it even pops. Any solution that would make it impossible to predict the pop time is what I'd want. Variance can work, if it's big enough. If you've got Vox, Naggy, CT, and Dojo all with open windows, the practicality of poop-socking is eliminated. Guilds can either compromise or race. That's the way it should be.

[Akame]

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

Variance can work, if it's big enough. If you've got Vox, Naggy, CT, and Dojo all with open windows, the practicality of poop-socking is eliminated. Guilds can either compromise or race. That's the way it should be.

The practicality of it may be eliminated, but with nothing better to do at level 50 they will still do it. I would actually be in favor of smaller variance and shorter spawn times to make up for the lack of patch day re-spawns. If it's 1 spawn on patch day and then 1 five day reset, with another patch day two days later to restart the cycle... That's 2 boss spawns in a 7 day period.

On P99 that could look like bosses on timers of 3.5 days with a 6 hour +/- variance to give some benefit chances to the euros, that fixes the number of bosses in a 7 day cycle though it still wouldn't give you the server wide bum rush to the bosses, but nothing comes to mind to make such a feat easy on this server.

[guineapig]

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

IMO, any solution that eliminates the practicality of a raid-force waiting on a mob to pop works for me. Don't care if it means a gigantic variance for every raid mob, a simulated patch day, PvP raid zones, or whatever other idea anyone comes up with.

What kills the end-game is the fact that certain guilds amass to park 100 people on top of a raid mob's spawn point before it even pops. Any solution that would make it impossible to predict the pop time is what I'd want. Variance can work, if it's big enough. If you've got Vox, Naggy, CT, and Dojo all with open windows, the practicality of poop-socking is eliminated. Guilds can either compromise or race. That's the way it should be.

We already have variance, it's just hasn't been much of a deterrent. Unless you have code implemented to cause multiple raid targets to spawn at the same time the odds of it happening by chance (from variance code) is practically nill.

In other words, giant guilds and/or zerg forces that tend have 50+ people online at all hours of the day will always have a chance to lock everyone else out of certain content permanently.

And I will say it one last time: This is what all guilds had to deal with on live. Nobody was able to have a monopoly because they had to pick and choose targets on patch days.

[President]

If the GM's would write a script, or allow someone else to write a script to simulate patch days the rest could almost all be handled by leaders/officers of raiding guilds.

As it stands now the raiding scene isn't even remotely close to classic. And this is going to get even more apparent when people are attempting to get VP keys off a 7-9 day trak spawn since I rarely notice variance occurring early.

[Mardur]

Put the variance on the simulated patch. Every 20-30 days or so a patch simulation happens, and a serverwide message goes out (since back in classic you'd obviously know when there was a patch). The simulated patch days could be long like that, since stuff would generally be all spawning again at the same time anyways if variance was removed.

This discourages poopsocking, encourages quick mobilization, and encourages raid mobs being split across multiple raid guilds.

Sounds like the best solution to me.

[Hasbinbad]

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

I didn't read pretty much any of this thread, but I will say:

To simulate a patch day respawn, you actually need to have.. a patch day.

We don't have patch days.

No silly, you don't. What you are suggesting would be "patch day respawns." What has been suggested is "simulated patch day respawns."

The difference between the two concepts is simulation, which is why they used that word.

[Icecometus]

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

I didn't read pretty much any of this thread, but I will say:

To simulate a patch day respawn, you actually need to have.. a patch day.

We don't have patch days.

That is why they must be simulated. How long was the average time the servers would be down for a patch? 3 or 4 hours?