Found some relevant information on this, straight from the horse's mouth (Gordon Wrinn):
https://web.archive.org/web/20010822...ve/arc56.shtml
Quote:
Deity Spawn Times
[Quote from original post: Diety Spawn Times. Can they be randomized?]
Aside from initial spawns that occur once the servers come back up, anything with a spawn time of over two hours receives a random modifier to the spawn time that could cause it to spawn sooner or later than when expected. The modifier is percentage-based, so that the average spawn time (based on large numbers) is roughly the same as when they were spawning after an exact interval.
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https://web.archive.org/web/20011027...ve/arc44.shtml
Quote:
Downtime Affecting Users Across World
After having addressed many times I wonder if I should keep trying or give up, but I'll give it another short:
EverQuest is played all over the world. ANY time that we take the servers down will be SOMEONE's primetime. We try to take them down when the fewest number of people will be affected, that will mean taking them down during off-peak time for the America's.
It's a matter of math. How can we affect the fewest number of people possible? If *peak* was at 4am my time and the low point were at 8pm, we'd take them down at 8pm even though it was primetime here.
I realize as an off-peak player you don't like this, any more than Americans who play during off-peak like it, but until peak time moves to a time other than the time it is, our scheduled patches will be in the general viscinity of when this one is taking place. I'm sorry, but there is really no other option that makes sense. I've seen people argue that we should stagger patch times so that it falls in someone elses peak every time, but that does not meet the goal of affecting the fewest number of people possible.
Now, that said, no spawn is "exactly 7 days", nor is it exactly "three days". Any spawn over two hours has a +/- modifier that adjusts its spawn time. That means that the seven day spawn could very well pop up anywhere from six to eight days after it was killed.
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It's plus or minus a percentage of the total spawn delay. That means that a two-hour spawn would have a variation of minutes, whereas a 7 day spawn could very well have a variation of days days.
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Whether or not you take the 6-8 days of variance for a 7 day spawn as gospel is another conversation, the other conversation being do spawns over a certain amount of time (2 hours per Gordon) have variance? Is very possible no one noticed the 2 hour timer due to miniscule repop variance.
If this were true, then one would expect the planes / NToV trash clears from back in the day to stagger on repopping. I'll see if I can dig anything up on that.