The respawn changes have some large mechanic issues

With this release the change of resource spawning has a couple of serious problems that some will consider exploits, others will consider workarounds but in general will cause issues for the community.

Currently everything drops to 1/8 respawn rate if it is a solo/party instance, this includes mines in addition to normal scenes. By itself this leads to a severe reduction in gold and silver available. By itself this is an economic issue that affects the health of crafting, especially now that there is a push to start to decay gear out of the system more effectively.

The larger problem though is how easy it is for players aware of how instancing works to abuse this. The first workaround (and the easiest) is alts. Players can simply park alts at zone in to affect the rate of spawn, many players have multiple accounts so this gives them an advantage in SPO/FO (I have not tested if the bug that stops node respawn when multiple people are in a mine is fixed though). So now there's a distinct advantage to have alts in a zone, the changes to party exp actually benefit this since they can get full exp with their alts in their party as long as they keep them at the zone and out of exp range.

The other way to abuse this and allow much faster resource gather/exping than intended is to simply reset the instance. All you need is a friend or another account to force an instance reset and it only takes a zone out and zone in as far as time is concerned. This means that those willing to do this will have an advantage over all the players that don't know how to reset an instance. This works great for gold/silver in elysium and etcter, especially for higher level folks who can easily clear the mob respawns.

I think scaling the respawn differently would be one way to mitigate the first issue. something like 1/4 for 1-2, 1/2 for 3-4, 3/4 for 5-6 and full spawn for 7+ would help though I think a better breakpoint is 1-3 as in my experience that is the most common number of accounts folks have.

For the second issue outside of just exempting inherently solo/party zones from the change and tweaking their spawn rates in a static manner I don't know how to correct that without reworking how instancing occurs for zones which seems to me like it would be a very large amount of work.

@Chris and @DarkStarr am I over thinking this and worried about nothing?

 

On paper I'm very against this proposed change. To the point the if its implemented, I'm probably gone unless its removed.

Having said that I tried deep ravens wood solo and didn't see much change in the spawn rate, I went to try my other usual mob grind spot (serpentspine I believe) but the bug with mobs with pole arms makes it impossible to play for the time being.

The issue is, the zones aren't large enough to support a group, and they don't take long enough to clear by a solo player. There also aren't enough zones to just "move on" when you are done.
This is at the high end, there were already only so many things I can do at AL 75 or whatever I'm at that aren't instant death and few of them produced much XP.

 

I believe this is the fundamental flaw to this change. I have tested this, so it's more than just "on paper" for me, but my ability to gather ore on QA is ~1/6 that of live. I'm with you that, if it is implemented, I will stop attempting to play until a change is made to better balance this mechanic - It just wouldn't be worth my time. I'd log in occasionally to tend to my town, but as a gatherer / crafter that spends most of his time making items to give away, there's absolutely no way I'd even bother at the rates I'm experiencing on QA.

 

I agree with everything in this thread.

 

Agreed as well

 

ITYS

 

Agree with most of point exept 2 :

i dont have 7 alt chars and 7 PC

Mining is not the problem, you can walk from mine to mine and claer all. you get 1k together of all sorts probably but not from one sort of ore.
And if youre ready with you can start again.

 

That's not as efficient. I was doing that earlier and would get roughly 40 ores / hour, compared to the ~25 / hour I get sitting in a mine waiting for the hour long respawn. That's still 1/3 the ore I get now. Additionally, I can't target specific ore. I like copper and silver, so I mine in Verdantis. To move to another mine, say Elysium, I no longer get copper. Even then, I'm still getting 1/3 in QA using this method than I get on live now, staying in my mine of choice.

The most efficient way to mine now is to have an alt in the mine shaft. Have them log in, group with them and enter their instance. Then have them leave the group while you spend the 20 minutes mining that instance. Then have them log back in to their fresh instance, group, and repeat the process. Otherwise you are seeing at least a 2/3 dip in your ore collection.

 

Thats clear that is not efficient, but the intention of portalarium is a goldthink and i mean i read somewhere that they find its to easy to get the best equipment in the game.
Now i can farm easily the materials for 2 crit armor sets a week ( for 700 meteoric ingots a.e.). And The armor helds for 3 month. The dumbest thing on this is, for normal mob hunting i need no special amor, a breast plate is enough, rest doesnt matter.

[/QUOTE]

Yes and thats why Portalarium should better 1/8 the nodes, not the respawn. but a mine with 3 nodes in is not a mine for me.......

 

It's not really easy to get the best gear in the game. It's easy to get non enchanted gear that you want. It's easy to get 2/2 gear. It's much, much harder to get more than that.

Sara Dreygon, for example, hundreds of swords and suits of armour left over from attempting to get just that.

Consider that it takes 14 hours to gather the basic bronze, non enchanted, non masterworks suit right now on QA. Then determine you want it exceptional, that means a non-enchanted, non-masterworked exceptional suit can reliably take 56 hours to craft.

Next, let's look into enchanting. At 110 enchanting, Sara has an 18% chance to blow an item up getting two enchants. Then he has a 30% chance of getting the enchants he wants. That's 24.6% chance of getting the enchants without blowing it up. New we are looking at 227 hours of mining for that suit.

Next is the masterworking. Because he wants specialized and non-specialized masterworking, he has me masterwork it first for the 60% I can give him the masterwork he wants. Then he masterworks it for his 30%. That's 20% of the suits having exactly what he wants. Note, this is subject to the same destruction odds as enchanting, 82% chance of success.

Now we are up to over 1,135 hours of mining to get exactly the 2/2 suit of exceptional armour that he wants. Do you honestly think that's too easy? By the way, this number is literally only the time it takes to mine the copper, tin, and silver. It is ignoring the time for gold ore.

EDIT: Let's look at the math for a 2/2 suit that accepts any masterwork or enchant:

25 copper ore per hour, 288 copper per suit. 288 / 25 = 11.52, but from my experience you will need to mine a bit more for tin. Let's say you have tin and use the 11.52 hours for a bronze suit.

25% chance of exceptional with grandmaster rating and prosperity tool. 11.52 / 0.25 = 46.08 hours for an exceptional bronze suit.

95% success for the first enchant at 110, 87% for the second. 0.95 x 0.87 = 82.65% rate of success. 46.08 / 0.8265 = 55.75 hours for an exceptional 2 enchanted suit, ignoring which enchants ate available.

Next at 100 masterworking the odds of success are 95 and 83. 0.95 x 0.83 = 78.85% chance of success. 55.75 / 0.7885 = 70.70 hours for an exceptional 2/2 suit without a care about what is on it.

Again, this ignores the extra time it takes to mine the gold ore for enchants.

Realistically, this change makes it so a player is facing two full-time work weeks in man hours for a single 2/2 exceptional suit.

 

@Rosemourne thx for clarification with the numerbs.

 

(quote trimmed)
And that suit will last ~2 months with decay so someone has to be back in those mines for another 2 weeks in a couple months.
In the process of making that one good set of armor there are also three sets of normal non-masterwork un-enenchanted gear to dump. That is what I expect most people will be wearing, or they'll switch to cloth.

 

No game mechanic should ever force you into a specific build against what you want to play. This right here speaks volumes.

 

Thank you for the update Chris! I do support the intent of the change and hope to see something in the future with some tweaks.

 

A wise choice. A better approach would be to scale the spawns up from where they are today depending on number of players in a zone. I can already pretty handily depopulate most of one solo.

Reward group players. Don't penalize solo ones.

 

Thank you Chris,, I think rewarding players that stay in MP mode is better than punishing those who choose to remain ( or have no choice ) in Non- MP mode.

 

Thank you Chris and team!

 

yea a huge thank you

 

You really have to find a way to reward group players. Just dropping spawnrates to 1/8 for solos and leaving it at 8/8 for MP with the current zones we have would have been indeed bad.
We also need other/better and more zones for FPO and expecially MP group play.
Some more Dungeons like The Rise (but also for lower leveled characters) wouldn't hurt either.

Maybe create a Zone with tons of Trolls and/or Dragons & Elementals (Destard anyone? ), lol dunno.

Currently just 1 Player with an ADV Level of 90+ can wipe out almost any T5 Zone in an timeframe of 30 Minutes, give or take a few (depending on the zone).

Oh and work on the loottables finally so we have some feeling of progress.
Currently it makes no real sense to hunt in The Rise (just an example), i am better off hunting in easy mode T5 Zones. Which makes me sad, i wish there was a real need or just any purpose (like better, rare loot drops and so on) to hunt in the harder Zones. I mean 4k xp per mob in The Rise is just meh, they have tons of health, why should i hunt there? For xp? meh... i would need a group, and if i group up i get less XP and nothing else since the loot/reward is always just the same.

No feeling of progress, which is sad.

Why can't we add magical weapons and stuff to the loottables like in Ultima Online?
They don't have to be better than crafted gear, but atleast it would upp the fun of looting corpses, chests and crates.

Most people enjoy looting and finding random stuff. Like i said, doesn't have to be "uber" stuff, just stuff.