Ishbu

Ok can someone please tell me what the point of having a lockout on a heroic or solo instance is? I honestly cannot think of a good reason why they should have a lockout timer on them at all.

Lets us the follow zones for an example - Poets Palace, Nest of the Great Egg, Obelisk of Blight, Halls of Fate, Unrest, and Nizara.

Here we have some easy zones, some medium difficulty zones, and some "hard" difficulty zones. I would assume the first fear from the developers about removing lockouts would be a massive influx of worthwhile gear into the world.

Well for starters, there is not a single piece of gear out of poets palace of the nest of the great egg that you will be able to sell for even 1 platinum. There is a chance fabled robe out of nest you may be able to sell looting rights to, but it is so very common already that if anyone wants one, they have it or can easily get it.

Halls of Fate and Obelisk of Blight have a few semi rare pieces of gear that people may want that they would ordinarily have a hard time getting to drop. Ok whats the problem? Its not like doing the zone 5 times is going to make it magically drop. Its not like they just zone in, get the loot and can zone out, they actually have to clear a decent amount of trash to do so. None of the loot in these two zones really matters much at all as there are far superior loots found all over to everything in here.

Nizara and Unrest actually have some very nice drops in them for heroic instances. However, you also need a fairly decent group to get through these zones in any reasonable amount of time. You cannot just zone in and get named after named, it takes a while fighting semi difficult heroic mobs along the way(before anyone says it, the /target BS people were doing is being changed already) and the really nice drops are not all that common, they are few and far between. Using the plasma wand from unrest as an example, if you really wanted one with no lockouts you could go in and clear through the zone all the way to damn near the end of the zone 100 times in a row if you wanted to, until it dropped. That would take hours upon hours of work with a decent group, so whats the problem with it?

If there were no lockouts, it would promote better loot tables for heroic instances in my opinion. There could be some really good items that have a really rare chance of dropping. When I say rare, I mean fucking rare, but that isnt a problem because there is no lockout on success. You could also have your average drops, that have a semi rare chance of dropping and of course the couple of common trash items you usually get.

Now the other problem I see is with people farming master spells. Is this really even an issue? I can run through Sanctum of the Scaleborn from top to bottom in about 15 minutes and get an average of 4 or 5 named mobs. These drop masters spells as often as anything in any non raid isntance I have ever done (and Ive done them all plenty of times). On top of that, do a search on your server's broker and count how many level 61-70 spells are actually missing from it. Its very very few, so its not like these are overly abundant to the point of being the norm already.

The one exception to this is Poets Palace. A different tier of masters drops here as opposed to the other zones I have listed for my examples, yet the master spells dropping in there are still for the most part very desirable. Personally I consider that a reflection of a poor game mechanic than anything else. And even still, its not like you zone in, loot a master and zone out, you have to do 3 seperate ring events and wait for randomly opening and closing doors to progress through the zone. In fact, instance would allow you to zone, kill a handful of named and get out, there is always trash or other objects in the way.

Thats the negatives and problems I can see from the developers side of things. None of them do I really consider a big deal at all or anything that will change the game from how it already is.

As for the positives....

SOMETHING TO DO. Good lord I cannot tell you how many times I actually wanted to be playing this game. I wanted to log into eq2 and do something, but there was nothing to do, nothing fun left open, nothing worth my time. One of my many characters still needs a spell that can drop in Poets Palace. I would gladly run through that zone over and over again when I have the time to do so hoping to get that one out of hundred spell, but alas, I must wait 18 hours inbetween trips, and therefore I am actually being encouraged to log out. That is just not right, encouraging players to log off out of boredom isnt good for the game, you should want us to stay logged in and farming or donig whatever we feel like doing.

Along these same lines I just think this would make the game more fun. I personally hate Halls of Fate. Some people love it and hate Obelisk. Ok let them run Halls of Fate and dont force them to go to obelisk if they want to do another heroic instance. Why cant they just do it to their hearts content if thats what they want to do in the game?

I also think this will lead to more dynamic and interesting heroic instances like Unrest. Unrest really is a very well done zone for what its worth. Farming unrest for that one drop you really want is not going to be a simple, quick task. It will take time, and thats perfectly all right, in fact, I bet most players are willing to put in that effort to get something they want. Removing the lockout timers would encourage more dynamic zones and discourage the copy/paste 1 room zones of loot that at times seem too commonplace.

Finally, I think it will create better risk vs reward for not only heroic/solo content, but raids as well. There can be those extremely rare items I mentioned above that are raid quality loot. Hell, make them fabled, I am usually the first person to bitch about heroic loot being better or equal to raid dropped loot, but under my proposed system here, those few rare drops, go for it. It worked great in eq1 and it could work great here. RBG anyone? On top of that, it would be clear what loot is going to come out of people doing the instances over and over and over. This ensures that getting that rare drop off a random named in <insert dungeon here> could be better than the equivalent drop that you could farm off a guarenteed name in an instance. It would also make it clear for raid itemization just what gear you can expect people to have and therefore making clear cut upgrades a much easier task.

So can anyone think of a really negative drawback of removing lockout timers from heroic/solo instances? I honestly cant think of one and I can only see their removal enhancing gameplay and just making the game more enjoyable and less boring all around.

I should add that I realize the need for epic isntance lockouts as those are guarenteed fabled drops and even if they were not those are the best(or supposed to be the best) loot in the game, the pinnacle and having that enter the world with such a massive quantity would cause a problem because lets face it, everyone sells loot rights eventually.

And one more thing, if anyone has a developer friend or wants to repost this or ideas from it on the SOE boards or whatever, go ahead. Hell take full credit for it, I dont care, just get these damn lockouts removed so we can all just enjoy the game more.

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"So standing around doing nothing makes you a better player and for a more satisfying game experience you dumb fucking idiot?" - Me

Mephiston

i was gonna disagree with you, siting flooding the market etc, but you answered that and i find myself agreeing with you 100%

it would also fix the issue of random zone crashes that chuck you out so sum non english speaking guy with an over love of copy and paste can tell you to go fuck your self.

id love to run many of these instances over and over, and to be honest i think youd be hard pressed to find just any group willing to do many of those over and over...

good idea imo

RadarX

You argue that pretty well. If I truly believed most people were actually chewing through this content instead of farming it I could agree. Lockout timers are to extend the life of instances. If people do them 3 times a day they'll just be in here a month from now asking for more instances.

There were heavy complaints when they redid the loot tables in RoV, RE, etc... and M1's were everywhere. This would flood the broker with crap and tons of it. I don't know about you, but I see enough crap on Kith already.

The group instances like OoB, CoV, Unrest, etc... aren't the issue. It's the zones that people are soloing through. Yes I still see tons of DoF gear up for sale so I know people still do it.

Pinski

Lower the drop rates on those items that you don't want flooding the market. And if the items are crap, who cares if they "flood" the market? Isn't that the point of transmuting, to take the crap out of the market and turn it into useful crap.

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RadarX

Ok but now you are punishing groups legitimately doing the zone by restricting what they might get. If I'm in my lower 60's doing Poet's Palace I don't want crap loot, I want something I can use.

Windraa

Take Nizara... droprate is low and most stuff is no-trade.
Lockout on this zone really doesnt make much sense.

Hell, an ex-guildy got discovery on the Sash of Draining on Everfrost a month ago..heh

Ishbu

My suggestion for that would be that they take a look at the various instances they have in game and apply the "no lockout" to only some.

For example, Scornfeather's Roost is a one room farm-a-thon. It needs a lockout. Unrest certantly isnt and doesnt need one.

I have no problem with the one room loot cow zones and they could still have some of those, thats not a problem, but for the real "zones" like the poets and the unrests no lockout is necessary and would just leave people with something to do.

How many times have you had a friend ask you to go to <whatever zone> only to find out your locked out or a third friend is and cant go with? What could have been 2 hours of fun turns into 30min of figuring out what to do and a lot of times results in people logging out.

__________________
"We are looking into ways to reduce the feeling that you must always be pressing a button to contribute to the group or raid" - Aeralik, aka Chris Kozak.

"So standing around doing nothing makes you a better player and for a more satisfying game experience you dumb fucking idiot?" - Me

Cupcake

That's a pretty good argument you make, Ishbu. As Mephiston said, I was going to disagree but you already answered my questions.

I think it's an idea the Dev's should take some time to really consider.

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Illuminator

This is the exhaustive T7 heroic instance list off the top of my head:
Nest of the Great Egg
Vaults of El'Arad
Den of the Devourer
Blackscale Sepulcher
Halls of Fate
City of Nizara
The Acadechism
Crypt of Valdoon
Obelisk of Blight
Estate of Unrest

Plus our T6 instance:
The Poet's Palace

After a list like this, available to you daily on top of raiding, I wonder how you can be so easily bored. Lockouts are a worthwhile dummy check against exploits, especially like what all those assfaggot plat pharmers were doing to MOA3.

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Cupcake

I find the opposite is true a lot of the time. I often decline groups because I know my friends will want to go there in a couple of hours. Then of course, it turns out my friends couldn't make it and I've been sitting here all day doing nothing.

Why can't I go to the instance with the pickup group and then again with my friends straight after? Like you say, it's not like I'm getting free drops, I still have to spend a lot of hours in the zones and work for the drops so what difference does a lockout timer really make?

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