Static Dungeon Spawn Time Discussion

[____________Meligant]

Let me just say. I support 95% of what has been posted here. So instead of repeating what so many of my fellow players have said, i'll just bump the post with a, "I support camp-free AO".

[Nikki.]

First off Cosmik, what are you smoking??? Whatever it is, it is giving you brain damge or alsheimers. We have been YELLING AT THE TOP OF OUR LUNGS FOR YOU TO STOP THIS MADNESS!!!!!!! We hate camping are you getting it into your heads???? Making things spawn longer doesn NOT give you more content. Anyways I'll get on to things you should ALREADY know but somehow keep asking us, yet NEVER listen.

SO!

First you have to look at how you introduce content. You have to keep up with other games so people dont switch over to your competitors. This means making the game more FUN. The thing is you are introducing one new item as fast as your competition is. The problem this creates is they have MORE to start with since they have been around longer. It also is a problem because when they introduce a new item it is 40x more than your one item, by default. This is because they split up the people into different shards/servers. So you add ONE Tarasque and they add FORTY Tarasque's. You Add ONE Mantis Queen and they add FORTY Mantis Queen's.

You have to Understand that EVERYONE is one ONE SERVER! That means you need so much more content than your competitors.

NEXT!

You spend TOO MUCH TIME ON ONE BOSS! Every time I talk to a dev, designer or world builder they all say the same thing. We are tweaking it until we get it right then we can move on to new things. This is so much crap. If its not as strong as you wanted then WHO cares. Go on and make a new mob and make it HARDER. This gives more content. Tweaking a mob gives NOOOOO content to us. Stopp pusy-footing around and start adding stuff instead of trying to make one perfect creature. It will NEVER happen, either we will always get wacked or we will always wack it. There really is NO balance to it.

THEN!

Look at ALL current Mobs ONE last time. Up everyone of their attacks and Hitpoints. Make them ALL harder to kill. Everything should be atleast as hard to kill as Colonel Kaehler. You need to make sure ever mob spawns some type of item EVERY TIME! I am tired of this crap of having to kill a mob 50 times just to get the 1 item that spawns on it. We could care less how rare you want things. No one is b1tching about rarity. All they want is CONTENT! Worry about rare things 2 years from now when we have plenty of things to do already. EVERY item that spawns on a mob should be USEFUL. I am tired of weak items being on a mob. Heavily padded overcoat is no better than a primus coat. The only reason people go after it is because there is nothing else to do. Its NOT better in anyway.

ALSO!

Increase spawn times of ALL Bosses to no longer than 1 hour, but better at 30 mins. No one is complaining that Nelebs coat is too easy to get. So why cant you accept that 30 mins is a perfect time? Outside mobs should have random spawn points and roam. There should be TWO loot tables to every mob. The normal loot table that spawns the same loot for that specific mob and a special loot table that is the SAME on all boss mobs. The special Loot table would have a Large pool of special items, with VERY rare occurances of showing up. They should be GOOD. It doesnt matter if you kill OWNZ the Leet in Tir county or Tarasque the Dragon you have the same chance at getting that special loot off of them. Also Mission Bosses should have the special loot table added onto them.

DON'T FORGET!

If the item was made for a specific profession as a FIX to them then the item shouldnt be next to impossible to get. I am tired of no one getting the Engineer warp, Nullity2, GA4, Crat Suit and other things. Look at the numbers. If you are only going to make .001% of your player base happy then what is the use of even doing it?? Seems like a waste of time to me. If I was doing something I would be trying to make 50% or more of the playerbase happy. Seems like a waste of time to ALWAYS be focusing on such a small percentage of people. Make us happy and we will continue to play forever. Make us pist and we will leave at the first chance we get.

REMEMBER!

Faster Spawn Times
More content
More Items
Dont get sidetracked with one Mob/Quest Stopping new content
Dont make Profession fixes rare
Two types of loot tables
STOP CAMPING!
Am I forgetting anything?

[Oncidium]

camping is a waste of time i rater go off to a preschool and watch the little girls play... er i mean learn. i spent 6 hours camping for nullity all i have to say is waste of time.

[____________Strycker]

1. CAMPING IS ALWAYS BAD. Use any means necessary to avoid camping.

2. Mobs which drop nodrop items should respawn quickly. The 18+ hour cycle on important mobs is insane.

3. Some if not most static dungeons should be mission-type dungeons, with no more than one team at a time in an instance, but an indefinite number of versions of the dungeon to be made available. The means of implementing this is left as an elementary exercise for the developers. Perhaps Camelot could be an exception to this because of the PvP features... but this leads to the two or three dominant guilds hogging all the special items, which is BAD.

4. There is absolutely no excuse for having to camp quest NPCs. This is an absurdly inane concept. Of all the forms of camping, camping for Alvin is the stupidest and most frustrating.

5. In general, i think it's fine to require teaming to acquire unique or special items. IMO, it's stupid to require players to be members of major guilds to acquire them. In effect, the majority of players are currently excluded from ever getting the best items in the game, even if they are members of high level teams.

6. All of the unique items in-game should be alternatively available as special mission rewards from unkillable quest NPCs. These quests should be devised in such a way as to avoid camping. The quests can be arbitrarily difficult, but should be accessible to 6-player teams of the appropriate level. It really should not be hard to come up with some reasonable quests. After all, MUDs since the 80s have had these features, with far more complex and interesting implementations than have been seen in any MMORPG. I assume Genesis is still up somewhere in Sweden (?) -- have one of your devs take a few days off to spend some time over there....

[_______________Intra]

increasing the spawn time will not stop people from camping. it will just make them camp lomger until they get the item they want which means players will get very annoyed. they wont stop camping, they will just get more angry that they cant have the item.

do what has been suggested by the posts here.

I also agree with the the suggestion that the best loot should not be found on MoBs but should be made by the players with high skills.

people want to have fun in a dungeon, want to enjoy what the devs have put time and effort into creating, not curse the walls becuase we have been looking at them for so long trying to get an item they want.

[____________Isembard]

Think all I'd have to say on this subject has been said quite clearly in the foregoing posts .

One thing I loved about AO when I first started was the fact that there was no camping for Uber items (with all the evils that brings - pharming, blocking, ninja looting, ksing, etc), something that was/is the bane of EverCamp.

One of the prior posters put it very well: "Uber items, which require you to camp, do not exist for me."

Nice tradeskill only items - I like, but make them No Drop/unique (or the production lines will be churning out thousands) - or make at least one component only available from RANDOM mobs (found my first Carbonrich rock yesterday - woot!).

[Ditka]

Didn't you guys have a thread about this already?
Didn't the entire player base tell you that they'd rather watch mpegs of large dogs ravishing thier mothers than camp?
Didn't we make it abundantly clear?

didn't you just ignore us again?

I'm too disgusted to even go off properly.

This is such a great game, except when you play it.
ALL the concepts are there.
ALL the execution and support vary from nonexistant to negligent.

If you spent half the time nerfing that you did listening to us, we'd stay forever.

It all comes down to this:
FC, you have this concept of what AO is supposed to be like. You built the game around that concept, yuou constantly patch, nerf, and tweak to make it match that concept.

None of us have ever player it. We play a completely different game, we used to like it a lot, but the more you mold it into your "AO concept" the less and less we like it.

You need to get in contact with some serious players. Not all uber, not all newby.
You need to get them to try things for you.
You need to LISTEN to them, because you sure as hell are not listening to us.
You need to beat the devs with large sticks untill they stop trying to remake the game, and start trying to improve the game the players are actually TRYING to play.

I hope you all enjoy this "Concept of AO" you keep trying to make happen. I hope Gaute and all the devs LOVE playing it. Because when you finally get it finished, no one else will touch it. We'll all be doing something else with our money.

[___________Obergeist]

I hate camping. I despise it. I loathe it, and a few things happened that soured me toward unique mobs and mobs.

-Steps of Maddness. Thankfully, on RK2, you can always get a pretty good shot at getting it. I've been to this dungeon several times over my 103 levels on my main. Not too long ago, a guild mate needed some help getting it. Doing my part, we rounded up some guildmates, and another player from another guild that needed the coat. We cleared out the dungeon, the mobs weren't an issue, just insane amounts of hp... anyway, we make it to Neleb, wax him, and during our kill, we saw two guildless players that had made it to Neleb before us... but the damage output of our team pretty much stole it. Our guildie got it, and then my team stuck around clearing out mobs and let the other two get their turn on Neleb, with us pitching in to help once his hp was under half.

-Tri-Plumo is a different matter. During some early hours before my work started I thought I might as well give him a ring. And sure enough, his ugly three headed figure was there. I went to town on him, and jumped for joy once he fell. Of course he didn't drop the Rust-pitted ring. Since I had plenty of time before work started, I left the comp for breakfest. Returning, I saw that a 121 Fixer, a 115 and a 164 Enforcer pop up there to. The 115 enforcer popped up there, meaning that he was camping that sucker as well.

-If a unique mob has special loot, it should always drop
-I agree with the above posters and the points they put froth. Camping is not my idea of fun.

[________________Caol]

Originally posted by Wolfe
I could go on about this for a long while...

I'm glad you don't.

Camping = Bad.
Get it into yer heads already.

[_______________Wolfe]

This thread makes me feel like spamming.

Add encounters that randomly pop up in almost any location in the world and make them happen now and then, actualy pretty often. Do you remember how the orc camps with those tents sometimes spawned in UO? Make that happen in AO but on a larger scale. Suddenly there is a new threat somewhere, mobs roaming around waiting to be found. Maybe put items on some of them or give the mob army a leader mob that is HARD to kill.

P.S, I want content for all players. Some fool think I only want to see things in the game that "fits" my guild. In reality my guild is capable of dealing with anything Funcom can figure out as content and we will be able to benefit from it better than any other organisation at the time beeing. I however do ask for so much content that there will be more content than the players can saturate with ease. Look at how rediculously little content there is today, players just sit in huge groups waiting for something worth killing to spawn, since no one goes to PvP where it would be fun. Cause PvP where you take risks has no reward.

[Nikki.]

Please dont do dungeon keys. That is the wrong way to go. WHile I Do admit camping needs to be taken out of the end game I dont think it needs to be taken away from the beggining.

This means Give some value to those who want it first. But have it so it evens out to not hard to get after the first month. This was done with SoM dungeon. The time on Neleb was 30minutes and it spawned multiple copies to accomadate the rush of newness.

Well now its not hard at all to get into SoM and get you robe if you want. Still it retains its value because it did take some sacrifice to get.

Dont worry about keeping us from these items because we will ALWAYS make new characters and try and get another. If you make it too hard then it cuts out 99% of the people from getting it because the 1% will almost always be getting the item for either themselves or their alts or to sell.


This is just a boss mob post though, so I will leave out my other ideas that tie into leveling, tradeskills, and pvp

My idea of the perfect game is to have atleast 5 legitimate ways to do everything and have them ALL dependent on each other. So in the end my posts are going to always be incomplete because my vision of games is the same way I see life. Each and everything dependant on another and that there is always another way to skin a bear.

[Nikki.]

Wolfe you are stealing my ideas now :OP


I was the originator of, "I want enough content to choke everyone in the game."

:OP

[gnuman]

Originally posted by Kopo
and I swear I was told in-game by more than one person that not only was that item re-imbursed by a GM, but they got a complete crystal rather than just the disk

Ask the one we bought the 2nd disc from, I think his name is GOA here on boards. It didn't get re-imbursed. But of course - you would never believe that.

[Valoren]

Another solution is to bombard us with so many dungeons we don't know what to do with ourselves. If they droped 100 different dungeons on us at the same time, with equal quality of loot. I doubt even Storm to handle that many simultaneously. And make the spawn ever hour...

But i doubt they could create all that content... so I agree with most of the posts that what we have now just doesn't make people happy, lack of content...

I think the big problem is they give us 1 dungeon at a time... They are forcing camping for the uber guilds. Do i blame the uber guilds? not one bit. What makes the individuals in those guilds any different from the individuals in the smaller guilds.... nothing they deserve just as much as the little people.... And the longer they make the spawn, the LONGER the uber guilds will camp... Let them get their items and leave, with NODROP it's not like they can give to alt or ebay it anyways.... hehe

And what is wrong with an HOUR spawn anyways? at most you have 24 copies of loot created per day. 24 x 30 = 720 per month, how many users does AO have? Well they brag in the 10's of thousands... so that means over a 1 year period you would have........ 8640 items.... for a playerbase of 10's of thousands.... how is that too much??? i think that is still rare enough....

my 2 cents............

[gnuman]

Regarding the topic it all boils down to the lack of content for highlevel people and guilds. What else are there to do than wander around in these dungeons. I am glad Funcom fixed the spawn of Camelot. People tried to farm the items there. As Cosmik says the good items dropped way too often if you have a drop every 30 minute.

I don't really know how to make it fair for all guilds. Most ideas I have seen either favors farming or highlevels no matter what. And no I don't really think unique items should be available to everyone. Then you could just aswell hand people a bag with a complete set of unique items they can use until lvl 200. Unique items are what makes people unique in some way. Otherwise we just have another primus-alike-fashion trend with the unique-items.

Adding the dungeon with the best drops (Camelot) in Clan-territorie kinda boggles me. It is a pvp-dungeon and Clans have clear advantage in getting people there. It would be like adding a Camelot in 2ho. Such areas should either be in neutral areas or there should be similar areas for both factions to equal out things.

I think PvP-dungeons are fun, but letting it drop many of the best items in the game is a bad choice in my opinion. Neutrals have absolutely no chance going there. How about letting the mantis queen actually drop some good items instead of just the crappy blade and an egg. Neutrals can at least group with Omnis and Clans in Smugler's Den.

I guess we wont see Storm getting GMs to teleport players out of Camelot to get the dungeon to respawn (and thereby help their farming) anymore. Thats the lamest thing I have seen so far. Whats next? Get a GM to teleport all out of Newland Desert so Storm can farm Van Horn?

[Myers]

Most people have got the right ideas. Dungeons should be just for adventure not for the special items in them.

Find a better place for special items, like only being able to make them in tradeskills, or putting them on random mobs accross the planet. Not that you should get rid of special items in the dungeons but you shouldn't worry about them being rare, but as a reward for a job well done. That you now feel satisfied with succesfuly defeating the dungeon.

[__________Blackfists]

Amazing, the only 2 people who like it are Nikki and Wolfe...

Hey aren't they from Storm?

'nuff said


p.s. Just change the name of Shadowlands to Stormlands.

It'll save time that way

bah

[____________Customer]

simple concept:

Players want to be rewarded for their efforts.
If a team makes it through to the end of a Dungeon,
the Boss had better damn well be there. Otherwise,
you have just disappointed everyone. It's called an
anticlimax. It sucks in movies, storys, and videogames.

If the team sucessfully defeats the Boss,
the Boss MUST drop whatever the players are after.
After that, the Boss must respawn quickly.
Camping sucks. It more than sucks. It is totally unacceptable.
It makes players hate eachother. You just spent hours
planning this event, getting a group together, fighting
and dying, and then you get to the end and there are
20 other players there pissed that you showed up.

Most players do not care how 'rare' anything is.
Players just want to be rewarded for their accompishments.
Camping drives casual gamers away because they don't have
the time to compete with children and the unemployed.
And if you can't compete, why play?

I know it's tempting to try and squeeze the most
subscription time out of every shred of content.
But this strategy is totally counterproductive.
For every player who will endure weeks of camping,
there are many more who give up in digust.
To many players, content that must be camped
is equivilent to no content at all because they
just dont want to deal with it. Sitting around for
hours fighting with your fellow gamers and
worrying about ninjalooting is not fun.

Dont say "it worked in EQ", because EQ had almost no competition.
Players have a shorter attention span now and more options.
Go take a look at who's at your dungeons. The same names,
the same guilds, the same 1% of the population.
Everybody else knows they dont stand a chance and would
rather go without the experience and items than suffer the BS.
Ask random players "Have you seen <whatever is in the new dungeon>?"
and the most common reply will be "No, I hear it's totally camped"

advice:
Fun game = lots of subscribers having fun and inviting their friends
Tedious game = a few hardcore gamers play longer, everyone else quits.

[Nikki.]

BAHHHH

I hate when people argue that, "Heck if people have a fair chance to get an item then why not just give it to them at character creation?"

That is the biggest pile of ignorance I see in these games.

Ignorant people seem to only gauge worth on the amount of items that make it into existance. Hey there is only ten rubber bath stoppers made by the Acme Rubber bath Stopper company in 1901 so it obviously must be worth more than my 2002 Lexus.

BLAHHHHHHH

Worth has NOTHING to do with that. How useful it is, the hoops you have to jump through to get it and style. It doesnt matter how many of them are out there in the end because people will STILL Use them.

As for everyone looking alike then maybe that can be the first step in Tradeskills. Giving tradeskills so people can change the looks of items so there are several looks to them rather than just the one. Not that hard to do and not anywhere near what I would do to make tradeskills worthwhile, but its a good first-step.

My previous posts was directed what could be done NOW and the direction Funcom needs to be looking at. I do however have several long-term goals and ideas to make the game better. But no one takes a porn star serious.

BTW NOER it was lame of The Council Griefing the Spawn like that, not that we had to petition to get your spawn blockers warped-out.

BTW Cosmik Idle servers reloading a back-up was always intended. It was the creators of the dungeon that didnt take that into account. We took a feature intended to happen and used it to our advantage. Dont make it look like Storm was exploiting yet once again. I told you guys on the boards here many times that dungeons reloaded after a set time, so dont act all innocent when something happens you dont like. You knew what would happen long ago, it wasnt until The Council started griefing and people started petitioning the griefing did you guys take any action. Then you try to shift the blame onto other people (ie. Storm) by saying we where using a feature never intended. BLAHHH you knew what was going on.

[Nikki.]

Frostmusha

You are an idiot. Where did I say that we liked the longer spawns?????????????????

Where did wolfe say he liked it???? He did say leave the dungeon as it is but spawn several copies of it which does the exact same thing which is lower the spawn time.

We dont want to camp anymore than you do. We want something worthy to do in this game just as much as everyone else.

Not to mention we BOTH said there should be more content than the playerbase could possibly use.

So how is that asking for us to be the only Ubers in the game???? If anything we are ackowledging that we need enough content for everyone because it is the other 99% that keeps us uber in the end. We want you to have as much fun as we do even though it is limited now. Hell we are complaining that if its bad for us then its bad for everyone. We ARE the ubers in the game. If there isnt enough for the few to do then something is wrong because there is STILL the 99% missing out.

We understand that simple concept and have ALWAYS fought to have everything available to everyone. Just give us realistic hoops to jump through and make it something worth jumping through those hoops. Because in the end there are only so many slots you can put things into, so its not like we can use everything. Eventually it will come down to what you have and how you combine it, among other things. And not Just who was the most uber over time.

Ofcourse if we was really as greedy as people say we wouldnt be sharing Tarasque loot with every clanner that shows up. Stop the lies and look at our REAL actions and words.