This is my first post and, in fact, I\'ve yet to play the game as I can\'t seem to get a registration email back despite several resends. On top of that, I\'m on a Mac and understand that the latest update currently is bugged for them.
Regardless, I\'m looking forward to participating in what looks like a great project.
Firstly, isn\'t the current spawn camping situation mostly a function of the lack of things to do in the game currently? That\'s the impression I get from reading these forums. If that is the case, I wonder if the expansion of hunting areas & quests over time will solve this problem? Presumably, some not-yet-achieved balance between the number of players on a server and the available activities will eventually be reached.
Secondly, I\'m seeing two different approaches in this thread: 1) Loot \"timers\" & 2) Mob rotation. I don\'t know just how realistic the loot drops are in PS but from what I\'ve read, you could kill a rat and find a sword as you can in many games. How the rat swallowed it or lived for so long with it sticking out of it\'s side has always been one of the mysteries of MMORPG\'s.
Short of creating a realistic loot table based on what a particular mob might truly be in possession of, this is how it\'s likely to remain.
At any rate, I have seen in some MMORPG\'s that mobs simply decrease their spawn rate if they are being \"excessively\" farmed. Alternatively, they might also decrease the value of their loot drops. Neither of these will stop farming if there isn\'t something more lucrative somewhere else to send the campers to....and then how long do the folks who weren\'t in the farming team have to wait until the \"normal\" spawn and/or drop rates return? MOBs with \"built-in\" radar who can sense when players are or are still in the area would be needed to make this a true deterrent. They might even need to keep track of players by name to avoid people learning the \"Radar\" range and simply moving out of it to get a reset.
As for MOB rotation, this is the way a real ecology would function. Granted an MMORPG can\'t have a truly real ecology simply due to time constraints. However, Nature does fill a vacuum when man creates it by forcing other, stronger predators to increase their territory as a food source is depleted or by filling that void with a lower species which is no longer limited by it\'s predator. Both of these are chain reactions which ripple up and down the food chain.
Too great a farming of one species would typically have dual effects in any fixed location-the next higher mob would start turning up when it\'s food supply was depleted AND the next lower one would also increase in numbers as it was fed on less. If this approach were implemented in the game, with the two species increasing on opposite sides of the area, two problems might be solved. One, the campers would have to move on as the higher mobs moved in and two, those being left out of the camping would have something to kill now as well...the lower creatures. If the area stopped being camped, the growth of the originally hunted species would restore the balance.
In a situation where one species was being excessively farmed and no other players than the campers were around and all the species, high, middle and low were aggressive, the campers would find themselves overwhelmed in short order.
Mechanically, how is balance restored? The same way mob\'s pop up they could simply unpop. Without creating tons of holes and caves of various size for mobs to emerge from, the \"poof\" factor of mob birth is a fact of life...and creating actual dens for mobs to pop from just increases camping.
The part of an ecological solution that I can\'t quite get my mind around is the possible down-side effect in gameplay terms.
Would you want the effect to truly \"ripple\"? If it did and a sufficently high team started farming species D, then species C & E would show up or show up in larger numbers and with faster respawns. If the original farm team was high enough to deal with species E, would species F start showing up as well after a while? (and species B too!) Would the arrival of additional teams start to create a cascade effect causing that area to became untenable for all players as the amount and level of mobs became unmanageable?
On the one hand, if spawn areas are tightly defined so there wasn\'t species addition in adjoining areas, players nearby would not be effected by the cascade, unless they were forced to pass through that area for some reason. On the other hand, players would certianly be aware of the potential situation long-term farming would cause so how would they deal with it? Would they \"exploit\" it and if so, how? Could the effect be used to grief other players? Or does the cascade solve the camping problem plain and simple and the de-spawn when the original species respawns provide a \"soft-landing\" cool-down timer to encourage campers to go somewhere else?
Perhaps I\'ll have a better idea once I actually get to play PS!
