[Dolalin]

02/19/02

In article <fn757uggetf7m2044vu52vvu5arfuir6c4@4ax.com>,
bizbee <tub...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>Yn erthygl <Wvpc8.6$0C1...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net >,
>sgrifenws "Max" <max...@portvista.com>:
- show quoted text -
>The spawn rate seems to be related to the number of people hunting
>them... when there's no one around, there don't seem to be many
>giants, when the area is crowded, they're all over the place. I don't
>know if this is true, just an observation.

Basically everything that wanders around on the top of the hill in the
middle of the Hill Giant valley (Rathe Mountains) is a Hill Giant
Placeholder. Basilisks, lizards, giant skels, cyclops... If somebody
kills those, there will be plenty of Hill Giants spawning. If nobody
is killing those, then the Hill Giant spawns will peter out.

I spent some time there with my level 60 ranger leveling my low-40's
druid. I just wandered around on the top of the hill killing
everything that moved, and plenty of HG's spawned. Plenty for me and
for the other hunters in the zone.

As I recall when we used to hunt there in my 30's-40's, it was a real
pain to try to kill the basilisks and lizard men, because they would
run and randomly teleport around the zone. I think the pathing in
that zone has been fixed since then, though, since I didn't have any
trouble (granted now they don't really have time to run, since they go
down in a couple swings ;-P

Anyway, the HG spawn rate isn't really a function of how many people are
hunting them, it's a function of how many people are killing the
PH's....

Nancy

--
---
Nancy Durgin
Stanford University
n...@cs.stanford.edu

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt....g/tw-ZcQJMDzsJ

This next one is somewhat out of era but it's a lot more specific:

11/16/04

Hill Giant Placeholder Theory *PROVEN*

Ok, so I logged into EQ and lo, me and an idle bazaar bot are my guild,
nobody is anywhere... things to do on a VERY quiet day?
I couldn't resist! Having not been there in almost a year, I galloped to the
rathe mountains, and naturally found myself the only person in the zone. I
was able to make the following unhindered observations:

* About 6 HG's were up
* After killing these, and not killing any placeholders, the number soon
went down to one spawning every few minutes.
* A small amount of PHer death resulted from the guards and from the
occasional stumbling of myself onto a KOS mob.
* This respawn rate was maintained for about 30 minutes until another player
logged in, a 41 ranger who I will subsequently refer to as 'the noob'

I explained the plan to the noob, who was most appreciative of being awarded
loot rights on all the fallen HG's and happy to contribute. At first we
avoided killing any PHers and the spawn rate remained low. Then we changed
to whacking everything in sight.

* within perhaps two minutes of this behavioral change, I was fighting 3
hill giants and could see another on my screen.
* Continuing to slay PHer's and HG's, I observed that I was continually
fighting more than one hill giant for about 10 minutes, at which point I
realised I had slacked off on the PHer's and the noob wasn't killing any.

At this point I communicated to the noob my plan to cease PH killing

* Within minutes there were no HG's up. After a little while 3 spawned and
were killed, then 2 a few minutes later, then 3 a few minutes later, then 2,
etc

The only weird part seemed to be that with two of us in there, neither
killing PHers, we seemed to get HG's in pairs more than the singles I had
been seeing, however I think this is more likely an illusion due to the fact
that the ranger had track, and so I became a aware of giants that I might
ordinarily have missed.

The reason, I imagine, why if you go to this zone you will see a couple of
hill giants up even if nobody's been there for days, is that a certain
amount of spawns will pathe through the guards, who will kill anything
except basilisks (non kos to them), hill giants and cyclops, (they are
killed by these). So that after a period of time all the spawns that pathe
through the guards will be basilisks, hill giants, or cyclops.

So anyway, for those of you who argued with dickheads for hours on end that
killing PHer's was the right thing to do, YOU WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG. No
surprise there.

The staggering thing is that those of us who did slay placeholders were,
with 100% certainty, lining the pockets of those who did not.

This completely irrelevant study has been brought to you by Kuloth -
answering the questions nobody is asking!

Cheers,
Kul

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt....8/OKImgXkq0ykJ