I was just curious what the justification was of zones having like a 3 or more hour reload time. I understand you want some stuff to be rare. Just seems like there are other ways to accomplish this. Anyways I was just wondering.

Drystan

Seems to me the longest load time should be 30 minutes. Otherwise what is the point, no zone exists, so no game exists.

Apparently Heaven takes longer than 3 hours to repop. Why?

To the best of my knowledge it is very much due to keeping rare equipment rare. We can all understand that up to a point, but when it is so ridiculously difficult to get certain items to load at all, then to only load with terrible stats, it can be immensely frustrating. There is no better example than Heaven equipment.

Anybody else agree? Any points on the other side of the argument?

I'll check around a bit and see if there are forces at play other than the rarity issue. Who knows what evils may lurk in the ether?

Applying long reload times is not the way to keep equipment rare. Lowering the load rate (as if it's not already enough) is probably a better solution. But yes, it is extremely frustrating to wait long periods of time in between the reload times only to pop equipment with terrible stats.

There are different types of zone resets. Some will reset right after a player leaves, or soon after. Others will reset on a schedule, whether players are present or not, for example every 2 hours. As a player, I prefer zone resets that happen after a player leaves. I don't like repops that happen while I am in the zone. I also don't like repops that happen immediately after a player leaves, as I don't think that gives much variety.

I'm pretty sure all the levels of hell take awhile to repop. I'd have to run them more often to check. As far as what merriam was saying it seems to me all zones have a timer but if noone hits it in awhile (like the timer already ran down) it will reload as soon as you leave if its the type of zone you were talking about. Or it will repop after the first tick if its the other type. If that makes sense…

Oh Wemics is pretty long as well.

Reducing the repop rate will make the mud more fun as it reduces downtime, sitting around just waiting (well talking with friends when they are on).

I agree that the rarity issue can be better managed with redction in drop rates, though it is already randomized and it still takes significant time to load a perfect stat.

Does items still do a game check for items before loading? This could improve gameplay if the game does not need to check this (asking people to and ourselves housing the item as we try to load it). The randomization and drop rates could be used to maintain rarity, makes things more streamlined.

Hard to load items when they are on players that are afk and the games doesn't load it because it is registering it in game.

Generally, less down time waiting for things to kill is a good thing. It gives the player more fun in a short amount of time, and many players have only a short amount of time to play.

I agree that it would be a good and fun change to make equipment drops not dependent on what is already in the world. The challenge is that the system doesn't know the difference. By this I mean a key, a fountain, a flavor object (like some shackles bolted to the wall), a sword, and a breastplate all might be configured to load 100% of the time with a max load of 1. That is, if 0 are found, it loads. If we change the code to break this system, then you might have 'A large fountain is here. [3]' or 'Some shackles are bolted to the wall. [9]' or 'You get a black key from the corpse of the cave troll. x11' Likewise you might kill a bad guy and see 'You get a brass crown from the corpse of the kobold. x3' which is sorta weird.

Perhaps it could ignore items in the world carried or worn by players or outside of the zone. This might make it easier to break vendors, however, as high-value items could be vendored more often. So there are a lot of chain effects to consider. But in general I support what you are saying and what Drystan has suggested for some time. I'd like to see a player's individual game experience vs. mobs be less impacted by other players and what those players might be using.

I've authorized modifications to allow zones with unreasonably high load times to be reconsidered and tweaked.

Thank you for letting us know.

W

Uh level 1 hell has a silly long reload time.

We will look into it. Thanks!