Simulated Patch Day Repop's

[guineapig]

I don't really see how repoping all the raid mobs at once without warning is a big deal.

No exp groups ever hang out in Vox or Naggy's lair and you typically have some sort of raid force when you go to Hate or Fear anyway. Basically you are only repopping 2 Dragons, 2 minibosses and 2 bosses. This can be triggered by any one of them spawning, thereby keeping this event truly random.

Technically the spawn variance means that these mobs respawn with zero notice anyway, so what's the difference? The only one I can think of is that they would pop without the poopsockers being prepared for it.

Am I missing something as to why we would have to notify everyone online?

[Shiftin]

I'm pretty sure "minority" is used loosely by rogean. Technically 49% of the server is a minority, but let's not pretend the players in these raiding guilds don't make up a material chunk of the long time and high playtime playerbase of the server.

The crazy CT race last month had over 1/3 of the server's population at the time in fear when CT was pulled, and that was after the 2 guilds who were clearing fear when CT popped had recovered their corpses and left the zone.

The underlying issue is twofold: The current system for repops is not classic, and that in turn is allowing dragon/god loot to enter the world at a much slower pace than it did classically.

[Dr4z3r]

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

No exp groups ever hang out in Vox or Naggy's lair and you typically have some sort of raid force when you go to Hate or Fear anyway. Basically you are only repopping 2 Dragons, 2 minibosses and 2 bosses.

Doesn't CT/Inny popping spawn the whole zone? Or am I just confused?

[Hobby]

Only CT spawns the entire zone

[guineapig]

Originally Posted by Dr4z3r [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Doesn't CT/Inny popping spawn the whole zone? Or am I just confused?

Yeah, it's only CT but the point is currently nobody is supposed to know when this is going to happen anyway. We have a "window" of time, that's it.

I think it would shake up the raid scene in a positive way. Bring a little bit of "skill" back to the "race". These are all things that people claim to want.

[Hobby]

I am a fan of completely random pops..7 day varience. Mob pops, as soon as it dies the window opens again and closes 7 days later unless it pops before then.


But, unfortunately, that might cause too many God's spawning...Potentially having a God/Dragon every single day, multiple times a day.

[Teensy Weensy]

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.

Hence why I recomended a percentage. There have to be some original patch notes so it is possible to tell how many patches happened or at least close. I'm no programmer so I could just be talkign tard here, but couldn't we just see what percentage more pops were on live than on here and just increase the major boss timers by said percentage? Say over a year CT would spawn X amount of times on live. And at max under perfect circumstances on P99 he will spawn 52 times. So on live under perfect circumstances you would have 52 chances + X amount of patch days. Yes I realize it is all ballpark figures, but we aren't trying to reinvent the wheel. Just trying to get as many opportunities as you would have on live. Once again, I am not a programmer, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. Well that's nto true either. But I still think my theory is sound. And for the love of Jeebus don't ever tell anyone what the timers are. Let's actually race to mobs instead of getting out the poopsock.

[Nealio]

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

Raiding guilds are still the minority compared to the rest of the server and we aren't going to inconvenience the masses to appease you.

All I see here is a lot of double speak from Rogean on the issue. Please do not misunderstand, I am grateful for the hard work and effort put into the project, but this is a glaring issue wiht an apparent large number of players.

Raiders who might be inconvenienced by a change in the status quo by your own admission are a minority, and you want more players. Yet you turn around and say you are not going to alter anything to inconvenience the masses? The masses are inconvenienced by this supposed minority.

Instead of just popping in at random and defeating everyones suggestions flatly, is there a current roundtable discussion amongst the "dev's" to resolve this issue?

[Trystych]

"patch day spawns" weren't always for announced patches, if your particular server took a shit and came back up, blammo loot bonanza. It doesn't have to be an announced or regular thing, nor would it require the server to be down for x hours or even minutes to accomplish. The randomness of it at times was part of the beauty, the known tuesday the whatever is a patch was also time for high alert.

To prevent abuse, it could be a completely manual script, so that intentionally crashing the server would not spawn anything. Being a script, it could also be limited to raid targets in particular, so xp groups would work as it is now (not classic, but a hell of a lot easier on the guides). Server goes down and right back up, quick break out the trackers and see if targets are up! While those at xp camps still have their broken camps but have to resummon pets and reform groups.

I'm not suggesting that it something like this would have to follow a WoWesque set schedule of every tuesday being a patch, but for an actual server update or Rogean bored / drunk and looking for lulz...do it up.

I'm not privy to the number of petitions during the database crash several weeks ago for guild vs guild drama and if it was higher than average, but both the guilds and GMs on this server do an awful lot of bitching and moaning about competition. It's said that the CS staff does not want to deal with these types of disputes, yet guilds are expected to submit petitions, screenshots, and videos for the staff to deal with. IMO they like the drama, or they just wouldn't deal with it and leave players to make their own agreements. On live GMs didn't watch guilds raid for shits and giggles, they were busy answering petitions of the non-raiding majority, if some guild got trained or KS'd there were no hard logs to prove it, it was frontier justice where the ramifications for that was the golden rule coming back to bite you in the ass.

There have been several different rulesets here to alleviate drama, and an option like patch simulation has not yet been explored. Multiple targets at a time would keep guilds out of each others paths until targets dwindled. And flash forward to a spawn variance later with every window being open, how are you effectively going to poopsock it all short of getting lucky?

Last time it happened during the database crash, only 2 guilds walked away with the kills but it could have been different if the less dominant guilds were in better practice and didn't train each other. Nobody even attempted to get a dracoliche kill until all other targets save sky were exhausted.

The potential for 5 nagafens in a week was an unlikely possibility on live. Given how long classic has been around here, clearly getting more of this loot into the system isn't necessary, but zomg everything is up move quick and kill as much as you can is fucking fun for everyone who wants it to be.

At present IB and DA are quite capable of splitting the kills every week, and will continue to do so. The best shot other guilds on the server have would be something like this, which is why you see these people posting here wanting it so bad. It certainly wouldn't benefit me, but I post about it anyway because it is part of the classic experience, and I'm all for that.

**Speaking of classic, even though the xp is terrible in skyfire and I wouldn't likely do it, shameless plug to fix chromodracs; 200 yard dispel range is not supposed to be implemented until oct 16 2002. Read and take note of about face on aforementioned date: http://www.graffe.com/forums/showthr...l=1#post120495 many more links supporting this are available.

[Dumesh Uhl'Belk]

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

Then it's not a simulated patch day... It would become a ... well not even simulated.. it would basically be every mob in the game randomly respawning at the exact same time... and is always unannounced ahead of time.

Ok, thank you for the full response. I now see that you and I had very different concepts in mind when reading the phrase "simulated patch day respawns." So, let me discard that nomenclature and just tell you what I was thinking about.

Here is my ideal situation.

I am thinking about a script that can run in the background. It should have maybe a 3% chance of triggering each day at noon eastern, but not unless it has been at least 8 days since it last triggered. When the script triggers, it should do the following:

1. changes the server MOTD to some text similar to "Fake Patch Day Tomorrow - Not really a patch, we're just respawning the raid mobs, haha"

2. the following morning at 8am eastern, it will broadcast "Fake Patch starting, estimated raid mob repop is XXX" where XXX is a value between 2 hours and 12 hours and change the Server MOTD to "Fake Patch is underway, estimated raid mob respawn is YYY" where YYY is 8am eastern + XXX.

3. the script will decide when to do the respawn and that actual time will be XXX +/- 2 hours. 15 min before the script is going to respawn the raid mobs, it should broadcast a message in all planar zones and other zones that will have mobs respawned (sol b, permafrost, kedge, west freeport), that "Zone will be repopped by the Fake Patch in 15 minutes". Then, at the time dictated by the script, the planes will be fully respawned (including the 7 day spawn of the Noble Dojorn). Vox + ice giants, Nagafen + fire giants, Phinigel + swirlspine guardians, and Sir Lucan will respawn and thus reset their spawn timers, and a server broadcast will go out saying something like "Fake patch complete, enjoy your raid mobs."

Also, unrelated to the script, all those raid mobs whose spawn timers are a multiple of 24 hours will have variance removed and instead have a flat 6 hours added to their spawn time.

With a full repop it would be pretty dangerous in most places to keep your raid force in the plane through the respawn event, although the non-kos islands in sky would be an exception.

This proposal will result in about a 10% chance of having 2 or more patches in a month, never closer to each other than 7 days, ~ 60% chance of 1 or more patches a month, and an 84% chance to have at least 1 patch per 60 days.

Obviously, the specifics for the chance this can happen could be altered to the developers' taste or to try to match classic patches as closely as possible if someone wants to do more research on exactly how often they happened.

My SQL-fu is perhaps not up to the task, at least not without some reading and research which I admit, I do not have the time to do currently. Perhaps someone else in the community would volunteer to help the developers code this?

In closing, I believe this proposal will have no impact on the casual playerbase (besides a few lines of text in their chat window ever couple of weeks). This proposal will also mimic the classic patch day spawn races. It will allow for the simultaneous spawning of enough targets to make it much more difficult for a single guild to monopolize. It will reduce camping by making the next spawn time a known time for people and groups that do their scouting. It will also rotate the spawn times through the time zones so that they do not favor one group of players over another based on geography.