IDEAS FOR RYZOM

For god sakes Daomei not this again. We can all read on the previous topics- you don't think camping exists by either alts or people time camping. We get it. However many people (myself including) will know many many guilds and players who have done both in the past and most likely the present. The fixes proposed (truly random timer + more spawns) would completely remove both types of camping and then no more need to worry if people even camp- they wouldn't be able to!

Removing camping benefits those who scout regularly without camping and this, in my opinion, is a good thing. It rewards those putting the effort in. It also means anyone has a chance to stumble across a boss whenever they enter a region- I believe this is also a good thing adding more variability.

Virg, and others.

It is possible for the timing to be random and still be semi predictable. One is if the programmers wanted to make it so. It is possible to make it random and yet have it so that the randomness has a pattern. Consider the 24 or 36 hour down time of the boss mob. For the example below I am going to assume that it's 24. This is not knowledge on my part, but makes it easier to write the equations.

T(0) ==> time the boss dies
T(1) = T(0) + 24 ==> least amount of time until respawn. No need to check for boss.
T(2) ==> The time the boss respawns. If Daomei is right, that is an additional 36-48 hours. Therefore we have a new definition of T(1).
T(1) = T(0) + 60 ==> least amount of time until respawn. No need to check for boss.

Now, consider the next 12 hours. And different ways to calculating spawn time "randomly".

T(2) = T(1) + RAN(0|12) ==> It will spawn on one of 13 random hours from 0 - 12, but each of which is an integer number of hours from the time of death. Only need to check spawns once an hour.

T(2) = T(1) + RAN(0|720)/60 ==> It could spawn at any minute in the 12 hours of the spawning period. Need to check continuously.

I suspect that the first or something like it is the algorithm. Individual numbers might vary (it might be on the half hour for instance). I don't know them. The calculation is still random, though.

Speedy scouts vs. campers? What's the difference? Effectively they give the same results. ( I have a lot more admiration for the scouters, of course.)

You still have to assemble a team and get it to the spot despite KP (in Prime Roots) and other aggro before you can kill it. That isn't necessarily easy, especially if it spawns at a time when you are asleep. (You have to sleep sometime.)

Yes, the programming could be changed. What would be the consequences of changing it, and changing it in what way? We already have several spawn spots for many of the boss mobs, would adding more spawn spots be more equitable or not than increasing the random time window or converting to minutes? I don't know.

-- Bittty

P.S. I guess I'm a part of those "circles" that Elvanae mentions, since I get invitations to join a boss team three or four times a week. It's not always the same people inviting me so I must be in several "circles". I suspect I got there (and so did a few other of my friends) because I'm on at an odd hour and because various people know that if I come to help I will follow the orders of the leader and blast, heal or hit as needed. (Or maybe they just love seeing me run across Nexus and Wastelands to get to SC because I don't have any tp's in PR. )

I don't doubt that there are guilds who wouldn't ask anyone but guildies, or faction cohorts. That's their right and I won't know if it's true because I won't be invited. That's all OK with me.

Thanks for your comments, Bittty. My personal guess, though, rather is that bosses spawn according to the second equation. Granted, I am not sure about, as not me, but the player I was hunting with held the records (it was Darlarian who, sadly, does not play Ryzom anymore) during my daily boss hunt times. But as far as I understood, Boss spawn had to be expected anytime after the end of grace period, not just hourly. My own far more limited observations corroborate that. I still believe that the minimum respawn is 36hrs rather than 24, but the available data do not allow me to decide about.

Ok, I feared that. So, not again, Virg.

I never said that there is no camping, but two things:

First, there is and was no camping epidemic. Camping did occur all times, even when it was forbidden, and it did not spread excessively after the ban on it was lifted. I corroborated my point by my patrolling experiences.

Second, some camping may have occurred, and friends pointed me to, in wastelands in particular during times when KP had not yet returned. I always advocated return of KP, less because of boss camping rather than because of sup and exc spot camping and tracking spamming. Many of my sup mat I owe to the return of KP.

I followed the proposals for changes in boss spots, number of bosses etc., and commented on. One may reread my comments.

The point of removing camping is that when someone goes on a boss scout they have an equal chance of finding a boss as anyone else. I have not been active recently due to work but when I was in Asylum I knew of at least 6 guilds that time camped- all in varying degrees. The point is it gives an advantage. Instead of checking all bosses regularly, check the ones you know are going to spawn within the time window more frequently. As for alt camping I did see a camping alt very recently.

As I have already said- I like the thought of increasing the chance of anyone finding a boss whilst doing any activity. Increasing boss spawns to 10 would give (partially) the same affect of a boss spawning anywhere. This also means more chance of a boss spawning in an aggro area- which I think is a good thing. Bosses are far too easy to kill these days. Yeh sure there are KPs but they can be handled by relatively small teams with easy.

Daomei your statement of "there is no camping epidemic" is entirely based on you running around PR whilst not looking for bosses. Camping alts log in and out within 10-30seconds. You go work out the maths of the chance of you running into them but please don't post on here. I am not continuing with this discussion with you- stopping right now.

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What I want to know is would it really take that much effort to add new spawns for the boss? Would it be that much effort to change the equation of the spawning time? If not just do it- removing camping completely- then we can be done with this. I gave up arguing this point ages ago as people wanted proper scientific methods to prove my statements and frankly that is just way too much effort.

Make bosses truly random. It will benefit everyone except campers. Job done.

I won't discuss the whole stuff again and again. Yet some comments about the
I measured the time it takes to start a character from the character selection screen, on a fairly strong box for Ryzom needs, with no other task running. Before, I measured the time for startup and typing password until char selection screen becomes available.

Startup of the client took about 7 seconds, from typing password to character selection screen other 7-15 seconds depending on typing speed etc. - let us assume 15s as a reasonable minimum.

Startup of the client took 42s from clicking at the selected character to full appearance of the inventory. The character appeared 18s ca. after startup (would be visible to others, now), 5-7s later, the whole environment, buildings, mobs etc. were completely loaded, only now one would be able to spot a boss, the KP, or whatever. Further 5-8s later, one would be able to enter commands such as a search macro. And it took further 10-12s for the login sequence to finish (all values can be assumed to significantly increase on a weaker or highly loaded box).

Logout time calculation is easy: it is 30 seconds no matter which method is chosen, hitting alt-F4, clicking, or killing the client from the OS. Only after this period, the character would become invisible. Noteworthy, the person steering the character would have an advantage when aborting the client only when logging on a different account, afterwards.

So every character, even if logged in and out in utter hurry, will be visible during a period of 45s at minimum. Taking in account human imperfection, all will take much longer on average, surely a few minutes. Such elusive logins would be visible to a patroller as a blue dot at a boss spawn. Me, as a curious person, would hit my "/who [newline]/who gm" macro key to look who is around.

I cannot rule out that the mysterious in-out camping alts have been used here and then, as nonexistance is nothing provable, logically. But I roamed the areas in question so long and so often that evidence of absence cannot be discarded as absence of evidence.

So I ask myself why I never saw such a camping alt. Sure I saw characters, here and then, who may or may not have been camping. Yet I recall a fellow player who was waiting for the night at the exc moon spot and got aggro dragged onto him by a passing character on mountback, who later apologized to have believed he would be camping. Such misconduct demonstrates the harmfulness of camping hysteria.

Yes "log in" campers exist...but camping is not the reason you find it hard to find Bosses....We find many Boss without use of camper and beat many that do. An "equal opportunity for finding" cannot be created for Homins unless they apply an equal effort. Regions are scouted very regularly with occasional lapping times from competitive groups. Increasing Boss spawns/time with not change much as most regions require a full trek anyway to see 4 -5 spot. . I like the idea of Bosses spawning in different racial regions....would be fun for crafting^^ Perhaps have the Boss and guards be a mobile unit like KP...hate to admit how any times i die trying to catch a named simply because it is fast and dance through aggro....

just get the devs to get a more complex spawn time whatever for all the bosses, more spawn locations and problem solved. also gets the hunters who track the bosses more fun to actually look for the bosses.

Also liked talks idea of making them mats for sale.
t

dao: i personally can log in 4 accounts at ONE time, hit my boss macro on each one, and log them back out in less then 3 minutes.
as for how long it takes to load and all that, it really doesn't matter about load times, with a powerful computer you can have clients waiting for the click in the background (have 32 clients running waiting for the "log-in" click), and if each client is a different account, the 30 seconds we're forced to be online even after a "quit now" doesn't apply to the speed that we can connect the next set of accounts. (note i tested this with 4 freshly made silan accounts that i made in less then 3 min, and it only took me about 5 minutes to get them to the mainland. they don't have to level skills, there's a real toon someone's playing waiting to escort them to the correct spot.)

it's likely that someone that's truely dedicated to camping would have an account for each one of the campers. and those are things your not accounting for. there are far to many unknowns to prove much of anything about camping or what campers think of as the best way (it's my hope that i didn't just give any of them a new idea).

however, as i've said, more spawn locations, perhaps a more random system of selecting the random time before respawn. (the merchant idea is still valid as well, since that would be the only true way to give everyone an equal chance at the best gears)

Block F2p from PR and q250?

Talk: That is exactly my point: I do not rule out the technical feasability. Yet, to do that effectively, one has to rely to botting, otherwise it is ways more tiresome to log in, scan, and log out tens of low level campers, assess the results, and alert boss fighters. If one engages in such foolish and dishonorable business, it will be extremely exhausting to cover a significant number of boss spots.

Every good scouter will scan a region in nearly the same time it takes to log in campers at every spot. AoI can be done in 1-3 minutes, campers won't have scanned half of the spots at the same time. Moreover, the scout would be the first valiant fighter of the boss hunting team, while the camper has to disappear.

In addition, to accomplish that, every camping has the odor of cheating and is frowned upon, does not add anything to skill and experience while scouting, even if not always successful, is fun and a reward in itself. Even if practised, camping is a self defeating activity, and all excitement about is in vain.

Edit:Fine. We are talking about 40 spots ca. in 250 regions, no less in 200 regions where several "valuable" bosses dwell. So you need a full hour to spot them all. A good scout runs all of them in less time, with less stress, and more satisfaction as (s)he is not cheating.

i agree with you dao: those of us that scout and hunt (myself included) get a true sense of reward. i only wanted to offer a thought about speed which it can be done.

pappa: no i don't think blocking f2p's from pr or 250 zones is a good idea, i have a very nice and friendly f2p guild member that i've been taking with on hunting runs through 250 and some of pr, where he's had alot of fun, it might even promote him subbing up, he would miss out on a lot of fun if pr and 250's were blocked to him.

let's all agree that this thread isn't the proper place to keep this going, so the thread doesn't get way off track.

i'm all for more spawn points, even more random times.

Regarding "boss timers", i'll just tell you my most recent experience:

Killed a 270 boss last night, in a bad aggro region, in a team of 6 people. It took us so long (at least 1h) because there was just so much aggro + 3 kp's constantly roaming the area... Not a single scout went in region during the whole time, if someone had they would have found the boss.

So i fail to see the issue you have with timing.. Its common knowledge bosses have a timeframe for spawning, be it 2-4 or 2-5 days... Of course if you know a boss was just killed you won't go scouting for it, the same way you won't look for a named that was just killed or a sup spot thats been dug.

Honestly I feel people are just complaining when they put next to no effort into it.. If you want it.. scout for it.

As for "log in campers", I know they exist, but very often scouting wins over camping.. I've encountered myself in multiple ocasions where the alt logs and finds the boss, yet the scout + team are already there so there isn't much left for the alt to do :)

In all cases this is just my perspective and I hope it doesn't offend anyone :)

I think the frustration here that many peeps are feeling is due to a different mindset. When Boss Hunting was a true "scouting mission", many peeps invested the time as well as they did in sitting and waiting for SNs to pop. Pre-merge however, after a time, there was less inclination for guilds to go back and score the same bosses over and over gain. This was true even to the extent that once a Boss was killed, that group had a real solid advantage over everyone else.

The change to "random" locations was a good one but as we know, the locations are not really random. There's just about twice as many places to look and the change that it might be a different one than ya had hoped for at a given spot. I have stopped bothering chasing them as I don't find it worth the effort. Several times I have been in small teams taking on the boss / named barely standing up with me the tank and healer keeping me up when after a decent amount of time, have some peeps stroll by and nuke the crap out of it from a distance.

But when I did do it regularly (pre-merge) , I found the times, just like the locations, were not really "random"....just like random locations meant 1 of a few possibilities, I found (unless we were just extremely lucky), that the supposedly random times were just 1 among a few possibilities.

But the biggest change is, at one time a guild or group of friends with a certain amount of hi level active members got to the point where all the regulars had their set of HA, a few chosen weaps and were satisfied with that. That opened the possibility that others could get their shot. With fewer peeps chasing, others could actually get home from work and find a few still standing.

In the waning months of the separate servers, I spent a good amount of time at the SNs and more often than not Bina and I were the only ones there. It wasn't that the player base wasn't there, it was that most peeps had a full wardrobe and weapons stash and didn't **need** it. I was working on rubbarn boosted HA sets and other things for player event prizes so I was coming back every season for quite a while....4-5000 sups takes some time :). Several other players also dug and donated mats to the effort.

It would seem that "getting what ya need" is as much of a motivation as keeping it away from others. So in the past, where guilds or groups of friends with limited time availability would eventually "get their shot" after a time, that opportunity is not coming to pass now and I think that's where the frustration is coming from.

Yes certainly the fruits of the time investment at SNs and boss spots should go to those that put in the time and effort, but the question ya gotta ask yaself is "do any of us really **need** a GH full of premium mats that we currently have no immediate use for ?" or would the game benefit from making the choice and saying "I have enough for now, let someone else have a chance ? How fun is Atys going to be when portions of our player base figure they have accomplished all they can and just move onto something else ?