Zone overpopulation

[Drathen]

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

Maybe players should nut up and try out different zones? I've noticing the Hole and Chardok are getting more exp groups, but they could both support way more. Great alternative to KC/Seb

That's the whole point of this post is people should spread out and to help that, up the xp in low pop zones. That's it.

[bigjeff100]

Just get rid of XP modifiers.. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[TripleLegit]

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

That's the whole point of this post is people should spread out and to help that, up the xp in low pop zones. That's it.

I’m with you man. I wish there was more of a variety in the leveling path especially at the lower levels. But it doesn’t seem like xp is necessarily the prime factor. A lot of the places with dope xp get ignored for easier traditional zones. I’d love to have more experiences in zones I’ve never really gotten to explore just because of the whole golden road mentality.

[Teppler]

Isn’t the ability to kill faster in an unpopular zone a kind of exp modifier in itself? I think this problem fixes itself. Go to a different, unpopular zone and you’ll have more opportunities for kills and exp.

[Drathen]

I'm just bewildered why there is so much push back on uping xp in a few zones.

[rekreant]

Because it isnt classic. The classic experience was knowing the zems (which eventually switched frequently) and xping at the most xp rewarding spot. In a game where it takes hundreds of hours to max lvl you really want to take any advantage you can to make it quicker.

[loramin]

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

I'm just bewildered why there is so much push back on uping xp in a few zones.

Maybe because it flies in the face of everything the volunteers have been working on for over a decade, asshole?!?



Just kidding (and having fun mocking forum responses) ... mostly. Here's the thing: you are far from the first person to suggest this idea. Like, if you did a Google search (don't use the forum search, it's awful), and you found the time before the time before the time before the previous time someone suggested this, you probably wouldn't even be back in 2014 yet.

There's a reason it keeps coming up: it's a good and logical idea. And there's also a reason why it will never happen: it's not how classic EverQuest worked. Modern MMOGs came up with lots of great ideas that made MMOGs better (see WoW PvP vs. Red). But in the process, they also lost some of the "secret sauce" that made EverQuest magical.

Project 1999 is all about re-capturing that secret sauce. That's already hard enough as it is (they don't have perfect info about classic EQ, they can't charge for accounts, everyone has internet connections that are 100x faster than they were in '99, etc.). They are not going to further risk losing more of "the sauce" by further diverging unnecessarily from classic EQ, no matter how good of an idea it might be to do so.

BUT, there is a small ray of hope here. The staff will never implement "hot zones", or any other modern MMOG concept. However, the project has a dirty secret: it's ZEMs aren't classic either! The classic ZEMs were fairly well-known (they're built into the EQ Emulator software), and of course the vast majority of live players did not know zone ZEMs (although a few cheaters who used ShowEQ did, and that's how everyone now knows the ZEMs). So the devs decided their own custom, but unknown, ZEMs were more classic than the actually classic, but known, ZEMs.

The P99 staff blocks ShowEQ here, and they've never revealed the actual/altered ZEMs for zones, so all we know is that some are still the stock EQ Emulator ZEMs, and some aren't. So while they'll never announce "we're upping the XP for these ___ unpopular zones" they could do so quietly behind the scenes. In fact, for all anyone knows, they've been doing that for years, and they've just been subtle enough about it that no one has noticed.

But then again, maybe they haven't and ZEMs have been fixed in place for years. Even if that's the case, you can't really fault them. Again, this project is about re-creating classic EQ, and classic EQ had unpopular zones with crappy ZEMs that (virtually) no one went to also. If those zones were more popular in live, it was because of general player ignorance of how things like ZEMs worked, and that's another one of those unclassic factors (far greater player knowledge) that the staff can't do anything to fix here.

[aaezil]

If you go and look theres dozens of zones throughout the level ranges with 100s of mobs sitting up 24/7... zone overpopulation is just a result of lazy/uncreative players.

[Danth]

Classic EQ was 40 people in unrest, 70+ in lower guk, and killing a half dozen mobs from your round then waiting 20 minutes for them to spawn again. That was a big part of why leveling was so slow. P1999's population has never at any point reached the levels of the most popular servers from the original game.

If you're level 15ish, where are you going that's so crowded, anyway? You have access to some areas in the faydark region, the deserts of ro/oasis, the plains of karana, and numerous other regions besides, not even counting the various low-level dungeon zones.

Danth

[Muggens]

Dude has max lvl of 15 and is complaining about zem...