MongoJerry,Nov 24 2004, 11:12 AM Wrote:Earthon and I headed toward the camp where Samuel Fipps roams only to find about half a dozen other players gathered, waiting for him to spawn. Ouch! Another bottleneck.
While sizing up the grouping possibilities, Fipps spawned and was immediately tagged by one of the waiting players. Other players joined in and helped that player kill Fipps, and I hoped that meant that several people in the camp were in the same group and would all get quest credit at once. If so, I figured Earthon and I could invite the remaining people into our group and we could all kill Fipps on the next respawn.
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Some notes and observations on the respawning currently in the game. Some of these points were being mentioned by the developers in the WoW forums about 2 or 3 patches before the end of the beta and there may have been a minor note in the patch.txt concerning it also. The developers were changing the respawns to a dynamic system instead of a fixed rate for areas outside of the instances. This would mean that the respawns would be faster in an area that has very high player count and a slow (or even very slow) respawn rate in areas that hve low (or almost none) player counts.
From what I was observing of some players reactions durning the last month of the beta, most have been unaware of this change in the game dynamics. By that point the distribution of players was usually fairly well spread out and differences in the respawn rates would not usually be apparent from what they were before. It was only when I would get onto the beta server after the stress test started and at a slow period and area that the effect could really be seen. In going through an area that I had observered the activity in many times prior in earlier patchs I could see the severe difference in the respawn rate for when the area had a very low player count (about 6-8 players for the whole zone of Tanaris). I was finding that I was almost to the point of being able to do solo full clear of one set of ruins that had been over run by ogres. In prior patches, I had never seen less than 6 ogres in those ruins even when there were 2 parties of players working to clear them for getting to the quest objective in the area. Now here I was having cleared about 12 ogres out solo and not yet seeing the first of them respawning even though I was not rushing to get everything in the area (the first that I cleared did not respawn for almost 15 minutes after I started watching for the time).
In similar vien I can report a situation similar to yours from the human starting area. There is a quest to get the head of one of the defias in the area (Garrick Padfoot). When I came up to the area to do the quest there were about 8 players all standing packed close together with a pile of corpses at their feet. I arrived just in time to see Garrick spawn and everyone try to get him. My thought was "hmmm... lets see how many pick up the head and leave. Bet its only one." I was right unfortunatly. I then just started doing unsolicted invites to players there to see who was wise enough to take the hint on how to get the quest over with quick. That got the quest done somewhat faster for the five of us in that group (except the item lag spike that choked us some). But while waiting for the respawn, I was able to take a closer look at the corpses on the ground (the lag spike while looting helped in this reguard). All the corpses on the ground there were of Garrick and there were at least 5 of them there. For those more familiar with the respawn rates in the early to mid beta, any corpse of a killed mob would end up decaying prior to the mobs respawn. But in this case, Garrick was respawning a greatly excellerated rate due to the very high player count in that area from all the players trying to get started on the first day (looked like on the order of 20 to 30 seconds at the time I was there). That explained to me why I was having so much trouble moving through some of area around him with all the bandits that kept spawning next to me. One area near the bridge has so many respawn points close together that 2 players could stand there and just fight continuosly due the steady rate of respawns on top of the players.
I am less sure of this point, but it also looks like the respawn rate of the mineral and herb nodes is also being dynamically modified by the player counts in the areas. This was from the observation of the mining nodes in a couple of the areas during the last couple of weeks of the beta (with very low player counts in those regions) compared to prior to the stress test.
Feel free to split this out if you feel it deserves its own thread.