According to Zinken:

> You could almost belive verrant wants camping for items! i mean NOT anything they have done to try and fix it helps against camping, it only makes it worse. and if this goes on i think alot of ppl will leave EQ for this reason. Soon there will be AC to play and more games will come i�m sure.

Verant has a particular blindness. They want an epic style of game, and
are balanced between "we have 3000 regular players per server, and cannot
make a unique hero for each" on one side, and "but we really want a sense
of achievment" on the other hand.

They DO want to keep some items rare. Their solution is: make these items
appear rarely in the game. Of course, the better items, the rarer... which
means that they're most highly sought.

The good solution is: the better item, the harder to get. But Drelzna isn't
*hard* to get at. You know where to go, you know what to do, and there's
not much risk once you are at the right level, nor variation to this routine.

The only solution is, of course, to make the item really more difficult.
Forget quests: quests aren't intrinsically more difficult than slaying mob X;
once a quest is "solved", in 1 week, everyone knows how to do it. Witness the
Glowing Stein debacle - the hard part was solving the quest. Once the first
stein was obtained, hundreds followed on all servers.

One can increase the difficulty to get an item by:
- raising the level needed to get it (which puts all rare items at the
level 50, everything before is chaff)
- raising the difficulty of the location (which, once a group gets down
the unvarying routine down pat, stops being true)
- raising the difficulty of finding the item (which is the case with
mega-rare spawns. How many players do you know with a Scarab Ring?)

> We are paying customers and not many ppl have 10 hours sessions to waste on camping for an item they should be able to get right away if they are apropiate level and group.

Apparently Verant did not think that JBoot were an item "appropriate" for level 30
players, but more of an oddity. Problem is, it is so useful in many circumstances
that it is considered appropriate.

Mankind has never been happy complying with "decrees from above" in its history :)

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Vincent ARCHER -=-=- Herve Schauer Consultants -=-=- archer@...
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