Possible solution for ST key bottleneck

[Harney]

With the server population reaching over 100 during peak hours and more people than ever before being able to kill the ST key dragons and needing the keys, it's creating a huge bottleneck. Progeny, We die alot, Fusion, Evolution, Dinodeeps all can kill them and need them to key members, that's 5 active ( maybe with the exception of progeny ) raiding guilds.

One thing that EQ live that I'd like to suggest, is to allow st keys to drop off of raid bosses higher than tier 3. If a guild can go to air and wipe out the avatars, it's obvious they can kill the st key dragons ( and quite easily ). This needs to be done in an instanced zone so that each guild has access to them ( or I would've suggested Fire ).

I'd like to suggest that an st key drop off of each avatar in PoAir. That way a guild can key members for sleepers to back-gear without competing with the new people on the server taking away from their rate of progression. Evo / Dino can and do currently kill avatars, and Fusion is ( looking at their magelos ) probably capable of doing them as well. Flagging for Air is pretty easy, as it's a 1 day spawn and if another guild is killing him, it shouldnt be a problem to flag stragglers from another guild.

Thanks for reading, and I'm open to any feedback on the matter.

[Rerfu]

I was thinking somewhere along the lines of Task to kill Vulak + Ancient Frozen Blade and that would be the new key quest but I never fully realized the idea. And, of course, that opens up a can of worms with needing Dain contested 3d spawn.

But, killing T5 raid bosses to flag for a T3 zone doesn't seem right. You almost need the Augments from the T3 zone to even kill the T5 bosses. So that solution would only help for back flagging and not even address the fact that server population has went up 5x since we started.

[Harney]

This post was more along the lines of attempting to allow guilds above t3 to backflag without cockblocking the people who are trying to break into st as a guild. I realize that the server population has gone up and that the mobs are more contested, but really.. evo, dino, and fusion are all air flagged, so it is backflagging for them. If avatars dropped st keys, I doubt any of us would need to take the 4 st key dragons away from the people who can't do air.

[Lochrin]

Bottle necking... either by accident ( huge guilds perma farming flags to get others/alts in) or on purpose (fires of heavens keeping mith marr/saryn perma farmed to stop progression flags, for 9 months, for example) was something that frustrated many folks on live.
Being a better server than that, and the willingness of staff to talk about issues, I'm sure they would agree on not letting bottle necks stop lesser guilds.

I agree: a backflagging method based on a forward event (so a t3 flag from a t5/t6 zone) would not only leave certain mobs free to newer guilds coming through to attempt, without having to rush fights because another guild in waiting for a fail to flag a few alts.. but also gives the new guild as a whole a self worth thing.

[Rerfu]

2nd post clarified it, I'm on board with this idea. No one is doing blocking intentionally.

[Tyler]

Im leaning more towards boss kill. Let's say you kill Sleeper himself. In addition to his loot, he drops 1 or 2 tokens. These are not no drop. You can then hand the token to recruit A who runs to Quest NPC B who gives you the Sleepers Flag.

Same for Vulak backflags for ToV, Xegony backflags for PoAir etc.

[Harney]

I like and approve. Droppable tokens are win

[Tyler]

Will go live very soon. Lillu is already setting up the NPCs. I created the Tokens.

Each boss will flag you for his own zone and all zones before. 2 tokens will be dropped each boss kill.

Example : Kill Vulak, only flags you for ToV. Kill Sleeper, flags you for ToV AND Sleeper. Kill Xegony will flag you for ToV AND Sleeper AND PoAir.

Epic 2.0 will still require you to go through all this stuff though. Although 2.0 will be most likely changed in the near future also. Too many guilds now chasing the same mobs.

[Lochrin]

Epic 2.0 will still require you to go through all this stuff though. Although 2.0 will be most likely changed in the near future also. Too many guilds now chasing the same mobs.

As an alternative to guilds headhunting the same boss mobs.. coudl the 2.0 line involve an instance session(s) ?
So if the mob you need to collect the piece from isn't up in the game due to timer .. you could hail (for example) Dains ghost in icewell, be sent to an instance of Great Divide: The Defense of Thurgadin, have to find and kill 4 storm giant mini-bosses to collect the shattered anvil pieces. These go in a forge for a combine to make.. dains anvil.


Or is this alot of work?