NPC Spawn Issue: City Guards Should Be Quick Spawns Until May 2000 Era

[uygi]

May 12, 2000

Newbie Guards
As we are sure many people are aware, there are guards that exist specifically for the purpose of giving new characters a place to run in order to be saved from a certain death. However, as many people have mentioned, these guards are frequently either dead, or engaged by players choosing to hunt them. This makes things very frustrating for newer players, and with the large influx of new players due to the release of EverQuest: The Ruins of Kunark, we decided that a change was warranted.
Though we do not have a problem with players choosing to hunt guards, the newbie guards themselves, specifically the ones at the gates of cities and in the vicinity of newbie zones, need to remain alive under most circumstances. To that end, we have buffed up these newbie-protecting guards, made them immune to magic, and given them some pretty good healing properties, in order to make them less attractive to people hunting them.
In addition, though we have left the guards inside cities as-is from the perspective of power, we've also found a problem with the respawn rate. Previously they were typically on a six-minute timer, making them spawn much faster than an equivalent NPC would in a dungeon. We have normalized the respawn time of guards inside cities to bring them in line with dungeon NPCs.

[uygi]

Gate guards should also not be buffed until this era, but I don’t engage them so not sure what their current green/teal state is. My irrelevant opinion is the game is better off with buffed up gate guards...

[skorge]

This has the potential to be huge, as it opens up more camps for the server. I hope the devs address this or at least fix it for Green 2.0.

[uygi]

The change happens 13 months into server timeline, we're just barely past release day still. Green 2.0 talk may be a bit premature [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[uygi]

Any word on this? I was hoping this would be an easy fix [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Tethler]

Does Highkeep count as a "city"? Cause, ...lol

[cd288]

I would doubt they make this change. I don't think they're going to spend time on coding this change so that people can farm plat and XP off city guards way faster.

[uygi]

I believe it would just be a rollback to early blue, I suspect it's minimal coding.

[Glasken]

Any update on this, big H.?

[Castle2.0]

MAY 12, 2000

increase gate guard stats, increase spawn time of city guards from 6 minutes to 20 minutes (nerf guard hunting)
Source: http://wiki.project1999.com/Patch_Note_Sources

This change didn't happen until Kunark. Guard hunting was a part of classic.

Let's revert guards back to classic state - 6 minute pops. Unsure if stats are classic because I don't know how to tell except some guards seem to resist a LOT, while others seem to be like normal mobs at that level.