Instancing & Faster Repops: Why both would be bad for P99

[Zorlon]

A a foreword, my opinions are based on actual experience with both Raid Instancing and Supercharged Repop times. Faster respawns on Ragefire where I was with the top guild Twisted Legacy, and raid instancing with Asylum of Shadow on Phinigel.

Project 1999 only continues to exist today with a strong population because of the scarcity of content and items entering the world.

The success of Phinigel rests solely on the fact that there is content after Velious. The game keeps moving forward and keeps players engaged and chasing that next big number. If Phinigel stopped at Velious like P99 did, it would already be an underpopulated server.

Raid Instancing wouldn't work on P99 in the long run. For the first few months it would be amazing and everyone would be creaming their pants but I promise, no I guarantee, that this server would actually "die" within maybe 1 year tops of raid instancing implementation. I put die in quotes because while I realize people would still play here, and that a Velious Locked Raid Instance server would be really amazing (for a while), you would actually just get geared and beat the game too fast and we would lose too many players to burnout to sustain a healthy population. The 10th time <Guild> downs Vulak, along with the other 12 guilds that did so that week, would put into perspective just how "done" the server really is. When you get your 6th piece of Vulak loot in as many weeks and realize that's it - there's no more - I don't get to take this shit to the moon and fight even tougher shit now - the reality might actually set in. Right now, however, there is a carrot to chase and that carrot will be there for a very long time so long as the admins of this server continue to manage it as such.

As far as Faster Respawns go, let's take a trip back to Ragefire when the "Mitigation of the Mighty" buff was added to all raid bosses. If you're unfamiliar with what the "MOTM" buff is just take 2 minutes and google it. One function of that buff reduced the respawn time of the raid mob that had it. Now I do not remember what the Classic raid mobs had for reduction, but it was pretty significant, like half. I do remember however what Trakanon's repop was. His window started only 18 hours after he was killed with a maximum 12 hour variance. So yes, Trakanon spawns every 18-30 hours.

With that fast of a repop, surely everyone on the server would get a chance to raid.....right? WRONG. My guild still killed Trakanon (and EVERY raid encounter) within 20-30 minutes of spawn to dead on a 24/7 Batphone. The only guild that was able to get ONE Trak kill was the EU guild that pulled some nice tricks using the /pickzone command. That happened exactly once. It wasn't until Phinigel was announced and the vote to open Velious early failed that people stopped logging in and the rest of the server was able to start actually playing the game. The fast respawns allowed us to gear out so heavily and so fast that the next best guild could not possibly have ever won a DPS race even with twice the numbers (and that happened more than a few times).

Faster respawns will not fix the raid scene, rather, it will make it much, much worse. The top guilds will still continue to devour the content just as fast as it spawns. You will not burn the hardcores out. They WANT to poopsock, race, and compete. That's their game. Everyone on Ragefire told us that Twisted Legacy would burn out after a month of killing Trakanon every day but it didn't happen. If Phinigel was never launched we would have went into Velious as the only guild on the server that cleared Kunark in era unless we gave the EU guild a pity clear just because they were pretty good sports about allowing us to take a shit on them every single day. If you think there is even a lottery ticket's chance of that not happening here then you're very, very disconnected from the reality of the situation.

With all of that said, I'm not here to offer some grand solution of what this server should or should not do. I do not currently raid here so I have no horse in the race. I do however see people crying about the raid scene multiple times a day and the two most popular "fixes" that people come up with are Raid Instancing or Reducing Repop Timers and I wanted to share my opinion about the subject.

So to conclude, through my experience, I do not believe either system would offer a healthy future for this server.

Thanks for reading.