EZ Server

T7

Several people brought to my attention how fast essences were in T7 by adding last 2 bosses in the chain to have 100% chance to have essence, so I've edited it to be a rare chance instead of 100% chance. The regular essence boss still drops 100% chance in T7.

T8

Edited final essence boss to drop 3 random types of Veeshan scales. You might get one of each or maybe some repeats, its all chance. This should help make things faster for both UCv3 and for Epic Augs.

PvP

Players that zone out of the pvp zone will no longer have the graphic bug of red name until their 2nd time zoning. Should now have a blue name immediately after having left a pvp zone.

Also players that camped out in a pvp zone, will have a blue name when they come back, and turn red again after 30 seconds. This allows players to zone in and get situated before getting attacked.

Platinum

I need to figure out a system for how much money drops per tier. As we already know, its pretty random and some zones have better rates of platinum than others. Already adjusted npc levels to be 1 level higher than players in current tier. So will do something similar for the plat, make a system or method for it, that gives better and better money per tier. Haven't made it yet, but thinking on working on that soon.

Suggestions

Still have a bunch of emails in my inbox to catch up on, mostly suggestions. I also see the post players are making with suggestions. Will work on them 1 by 1 as I can.

Thanks for feed back as always.

Maybe a new aug type like an upgraded leaf, in tier 8 or 9

Leaf mechanic but for HR

New Leaf 10 caps at 25 HR

New REcipe that combines old leaf 10 + new leaf 10 to be a 50k 50HR aug combined. Bonus for farming both.

Still a boat load of farming, but will make up for the decrease in HP when UW gets changed.

Thanks for listening... some great ideas out there :)

how about instead of a random rng plat drop in the tier have a set gem that drops, upon clear, that way you know you will get xyz per tier no question.

for instance, you clear T5 completely and a gem collector spawns, you kill him and he will drop a gem for T5

examples starting at T5

T5=850k gem, spawns off white body (killing all coral is most of the zone??)
T6=1.2 mil gem drops off OMM chest
T7= tricky due to respawn ????? maybe a random trap gem collector spawn that will drop a 400k gem, spawns with current trap spawn maybe, or just add to Wraith a 300k gem, something like that?
T8=drop off Vulak (already suggested) 2mil plat gem

I think this would simplify the plat drops

So if you dont  clear zone you get nothing?
No Thanks.

Agreed, being forced to clear a zone for any plat is not a good idea, plus if everything is guaranteed at the end, that eliminates a big thing that EQ has always been about, the RNG.

Yes, at times it really sucks, but that is part of what makes finally getting your item/essence/etc rewarding.

For plat, why not make a tier specific money bag? What I thought about while at work:

Remove all coin from T1+ mobs, make bags stackable.

Tier 1:      (5k)   Tiny Plat Bag. 20% drop off trash, 10% off bosses, replace gems in chest with Tiny Plat Bag.
Tier 2:      (10k) Small Plat Bag. 20% drop off trash, 10% off bosses, replace gems in chest with Tiny Plat Bag.
HOH:        (25K) Plat Bag. 20% drop off trash, 10% off Shadow.
AirPlane:  (25K) Plat Bag. 10% drop off bosses
Tier 5:      (50k) Big Plat Bag. 20% drop off trash, 10% off bosses, 50% off White
Tier 6:      (75k) Large Plat Bag. 20% drop off trash, 10% off bosses, 100% off OMM
Tier 7:      (100K) Giant Plat Bag. 20% drop off trash, 10% off bosses. 100% off Greed.
Tier 8:      (150K) Enormous Plat Bag. 20% drop off trash, 10% off bosses, 100% off Vulak
Tier 9:      (200K) Hunter's Wallet: 20% drop off trash, 10% off bosses. Lore for Hunter's Wallet should be: "It's the one that says, "Bad Motherf-er"

The 10% off bosses could be left out, just thought it could be a nice surprise/bonus.

*Values and/or percentages probably needs to be tweaked as I don't know the current drop rate for bags. Change the 20% to whatever the current drop is and change the 10% to whatever is half the current bag drop rate.*

t5 is really random. some poeple may be just looking for a few named and just killing those triggers. then yes, they would just the random few plat bags. the people who do whole clears and get a little something for it seems fair. and off of white, or have white's death triger a GC or similar seems reasonable. its not necessarily whole zone, but forces you to clear mobs from all corners.

t6 already has a decent bonus at the end. do a full clear and get 5x76k, an essence, book, and the augs. depending on the intended amount desired to drop, could take all the plat bags out, and just have 1 800k gem ( or whatever value) on the OMM chest.

t7 how about somehting like 4th Greed spawns the GC with 3 500k gems ( or whatever value) to account for the randomness. the traps are VERY random.

t8 of Vulak is just more of the same.

having  gems/plat drop in t8 just needs to happen some how.
adding in something to a full clear would be a good way to get people to help you clear zones, makes more consistent. we understand Hunter is trying to get plat out of players hands. But i usually run nearly  broke all the time. have resorted to doing ucv2 runs for friends to to drum up some plat. Right now t5 is somewhat variable, between 200-450k per full clear. HoH is pretty steady at about 200k per full clear. t6 has a little randomness of between 750k-1.5m. have heard numbers for t7 as high as 1.5m for full clear, but personally i usually see 8-12 plat bags (600k-1m).
Of course there is always outliers. you might get lucky in t6 and get 1.5m or same for t7, but these are the median wages.

so as it stands right now, i do 2 clears in t8 (about 4 hours), then do 3-4 t6 runs (3-4 hours), then spend half an hour or so farming SLS, just to upgrade ONE aug. not saying that's good or bad, just is.

In terms of gold, I think t6 should be the barometer.  It's the right amount of plat at that time of progression.

Add more to later tiers and balance out the lower.

I'd like to see OMM restriction reduced from depop if not full clear to possible a limit of 10 mobs(train rule) summoned

Just in case you miss 1 mob you can have it be summoned.

New train code should prevent abuse.

Hunter already agreed to have a look at removing the depop completely, since jail awaits anyone pulling him with too many mobs up.

You could always make the no-trade crafter gems/bars drop.

Those are pretty much the main reason we all need pp, right? I could use about 20 magic blue diamonds.

I want to point out the obvious here: nobody is paying pp for anything in auc right now. The only pp sale I was able to do all weekend was for some SLS's. Essences would not sell for pp.

The current economy seems based around trades of essences and SLS's.

I Like the idea. Not sure im in love with it just yet. So maybe have 3-4 MBD drop off Vulak. then there would be no real concern about needing to drain plat from the economy, it would have never existed in first place.

should be a break over point. so like leave the plat bags in T5, but maybe 1 MBD from White. then leave the plat bags from trash in T5, but change the chests at end to drop 2 MBD, and so on.  Should still be a way to farm cash if need be.

And this should play nice with dbl loot.

I guess one thing I'd like to know is:

How much time should a competent player, assuming he knows what he's doing, take to grind out the value of 1 MBD while in T4, T5, T6, etc. respectively? I think the answer lies in Hunter's answer to this question.

Can we assume a T6 geared player should be raking in MBD's faster than a T4 character? Maybe Hunter doesn't want us to.

Rate of pp being dropped in T6 vs T4 ought to be proportional to how long Hunter wants us to grind MBD's in each tier.

Watch what happens in this use case scenario though:

Player A is T1 geared
Player B is T7 geared

T7 Player B could probably get enough plat for a MBD in about 2 hours of farming in T7, gathering the plat bags (assuming 6 box army with gear that is 'ok' for handling T7).

Player A could go farm SLS, sell them 250k a pop and have enough plat for a MBD in 45 minutes or less.

Therefore Player B has no real advantage over Player A despite being far more advanced.

All I'm asking is are we ok with this scenario? No judgement from me.

there are 2 problems with your thought experiment.
first: if player B does not buy the SLS from player A, A is sitting on merch that has no value.
second: the idea that Plat is the end goal. It is not. Plat is used to get things that are the end goal. usually some part of the trinity plat/sls/essence to make a strike aug.

And yes we all know player A can farm SLS and sell for plat. problem now is, it is such a horrible experience farming them, that the market has dried up. i bet if you had 20 SLS for sale for 500k, it wouldn't take you 2 days to sell out, the market is that bad.

If he changes some number of dropped plat bags out for a close equivalent of  MBD, the end goal would still be achieved ( for the most part).

not trying to be argumentative, playing devil's advocate. However, one of the things working for us in this, is that hunter wants to reduce the ingress of plat to the economy. converting some things over to a nodrop form fulfills that without an absolute lost in value to the player.

so in myt example if he took the 5 plat bags off of the chests at the end of t6, and maybe reduced the rate from the rest of t6, this would work out the same.

I like this idea.  Although why not just add the gem to the end boss instead of to a whole new NPC in the zone?



I will disagree with this statement.  This is NOT eq.  Having a guaranteed chance for x item to drop is a given if you want to look at esse off OMM or off Vulak...or hell in t7 off Sloth...or whatever that demon looking dudes name was.  I think the above stated is a great idea!  It would help from having people constantly refresh the instance because they have a more clear end goal...that in turn helps server resources...seems like a win win to me.

id say if you're going to take the rng out of plat bags then the best thing to do imo is just add gold to the npcs. Maybe not every single npc as having to loot 100s of mobs is no where near an improvement, maybe just mini-bosses/regular bosses or something? you would then get the added benefit of being able to split any profits made with any friends/guildies that you're with at the time, assuming people actually group on this server  ;D

in speaking of T8 itself the issue could be solved by just adding a gem to each of the named that way you would not have to complete the entire circuit in order to reap rewards.

for instance, if you are going there to farm doze for a bp, and do not wish to do the entire zone, just have him drop a gem worth x amount

now, of course completing all named dragons and taking out Vulak would yield a considerably larger prize.

such as, each lesser named dropping a gem worth 85k, totaling I believe 1,360,000pp while the gem off Vulak yielding a double value of 1,360,000 and you would get the other 85k gems so you would end up with a purse of 2,720,000pp for an entire run.

2.7 mil for a full ToV run isn't out of the realm of reasonable.

in perspective you can purse from 800k-1.3mil per T6 run in less than half the time, 2.7mil may even be low, but at what currently drops there, maybe 78k per run?

on the T7 front, I would have the purse tied to the sin chain, adding a gem to each of the sin spawns with a scaling upward value to reward going to the end of each chain.

these ideas, imo, would encourage the completion of each zone for rewards, which is the intent of the zone....right?

I personally like the idea of gold droping off mini-bosses and Bosses. In the case of HoH checking every corpse for 300-1.5k gold is annoy when i am only really there for boss tokens and plat bags just fill my inventory untill I am full and break out my noobie vendor. Just my two cents, either way I will still be around...=)

true, gold or a gem, same thing either way. the jingle would be a little easier to deal with in the inventory.

bottom line is this, people need their cash cow at every level.

players need a place to go to just make some good hard cash. why? they need to make augs, shields, UW's, etc

heck sometimes I wish there was a zone like Pofire dedicated to cash, you get zero cash in Pofire, its for xp, why not have a cash zone where you get zero xp, but you get cash?

this entire discussion can be boiled down to one statement: "We need a way to make hard cash to buy server related materials"

its just a circle, do xyz zone to get cash to give it to the crafter's merchant lol, take money form T6 to give it to guild lobby.

its not like on live where there was an abundance of items to buy and sell with plat, this is a buy from the game situation.

I like Rent's idea but why not use an alternate form of cash for things like blue diamonds and bars for augments.  I believe that LDON put in a alternative coin system which would have no value in pp but be something you could easily use to buy materials without impacting cash flows. 

Someone else mentioned removing gems from T1/T2 chests.  Don't do that please it's the best way to farm for gems to complete the crafters stuff.  Not everyone is T5+ and I would like to keep the game reasonably playable at all levels.

As far as fixes go, lets start here.
T7 the essences were dropping way to fast, since Fixed by Hunter.
T8 he did add the 3 scales.
PVP He also did fix this.
PLAT - was not fixed. PLEASE add the 78k plat bag to each boss in t8, or something similar. T8* plat should be atleast on par with what you could farm in t6.
other fixes... if it does get moved to a data center, can the 50 mob jail limit be looked at again? many people believe it is currently doing more harm than good.
can the drop rate of HP leaves in t8 be looked at ( 1 per clear.. really?)
other stuff about t8 ( hp on the skin weapons, epic needing an essence, and epics .. not so good)

another way to deter SLS farmers in jagged the ancient SUX.
maybe a better way to get around loping, takes forever to run from one end to another.
Whenever management gets going .. some way to donate again.
some have tossed around an idea of a way to trade in ess for lower, or have some zone be able to drop lower tier ess.

That already exists...  Cast succor in your instance to go from one end to the middle...  In pub, use your ring to get to zone in without zoning