Pets were used to kill Phinny as well I believe. Pity idiot me didnt know this. Dispels knocked EB off (remember everyone didnt know to bury buffs...) and well, you know.

For either wiz staff drop or ranger lock of hair drop.
Phinny still has his staff and the mermaids all have beautiful hair.

I do play on Green, and just got my epic a couple weeks ago ... but I got my staff awhile back (when Castle was still pretty dominant in Hate, though not as much as you say they are now; Diddly was getting more kills than they were I think).

But my point remains: none of it is classic. In classic, no one had "Hate trackers", because no one ... well first of all, 99.9% of the players didn't even have an extra 45+ level character to leave up in Hate, let alone one with track ... but even if they did, they didn't know about anywhere in the zone that they could leave said character.

For all we know, there was no "safe spot by the pillar" in Hate on live, and it's just a fluke of Nilbog's (inherently imperfect) re-creation here. But whether there was or not, eliminating it here would make Hate so much more classic. Instead of tracking Hate (as no one in '99 ever did) we would all have to actually send groups/raids of people to Hate just to find out if Magi or other epic mobs are up. Diddly and his ilk would be eliminated, and motivated guilds like Castle would still get Magi: classic as fuck.

Isn't the point of this place was to bring back the '99 experience?

There will always be fundamental tension between classic behavior and classic mechanics. Like it or not, people know everything there is to know now, and they didn't then. Should devs here implement new rules to curtail every new emergent thing that didn't exist in 1999? Cause then people will call those rules "unclassic" like rooted dragons. Rooted dragons were implemented in response to a behavior that was ALSO not classic.

They are never gonna please everybody.

I have seen zero evidence that the safe spot is classic, in any sense. The moment anyone produces (say) a bunch of ShowEQ captures from 1999-2001, I'll happily grant that this is "classic environment vs. classic mechanics" concern ... but until then I'm just talking about a bug fix.

Our amazing P99 devs remade Hate with with whatever limited information they had available, and they did an incredible job! Like every zone in the game, it feels just like it did on live.

There's just one tiny detail, the absence of a single mob in one spot .... coupled with P99's years of players exploring Hate ... which has transformed one of the most important quests in the entire game (to mages) from something classic, to something not. I think we should fix that.

Anyone who has been in any zone knows the pathing nodes are very different to what they were on live. People seem to think p99 is a perfect copypaste of live, when it is infact just approximation.

The safe spot is certainly an artefact of the arbitrarily best-guessed but wrong nodes.

you don't actually believe just removing the safe spot would eliminate farm crews

Loramin is right, the OG devs would have hated the idea of farm crews and immediately nerfed their ability to farm hate

The OG devs didn't even want agro kiting to exist

Farm crews are an emergent gameplay that is entirely contrary to the spirit of this project

Maybe, maybe not. They would need more people: no more solo Enchanters ganking Magi, with multiple Cleric bots parked nearby for their "girlfriend" to use. Also, there would be a much higher risk of wipes, because the crew would have to break into Hate (and CR after a fail) without a guild to back them up.

But honestly, if a group of dedicated players zoned up to Hate to track regularly, repeated that a thousand times until Magi spawned, zoned up, broke Hate, pulled Magi and killed him ... I have no problem with that. You're basically describing a small but elite guild at that point.

GMs would have messed with the farm crews circa 1999 and let them be KS'd as well

Imagine not having epic yet in 2024

Just try to not become salty and bitter like Ramen over it!