Sure I walked uphill both ways barefoot to get my epic and flagging in PoP era. This doesn't mean I am entitled to inflict that sort of misery on new or returning players trying to get up to speed. The goal is to get more people to play on paying accounts not see how many additional people we can alienate and disenchant with playing the game.
Shorter random respawn timers wont hurt things UNLESS the mob in question drops a still sought after tradeable item that can be farmed by plat farmers.
In that case yes a long random timer is still needed just to slow them down and keep the economy from being flooded worse than it is already. If the mob also drops items needed for flagging or epics then maybe an alternate source or some way to obtain these drops elsewhere needs to be devised. Perhaps the tradeable items can be removed from the loot table and moved to some other long spawn mob.
Spawn Timers in Everquest
How Long Should it Take to Get that Mob?
Spawn Timers: Necessary Evil?
User Shuraz recently updated the Zlandicar entry to let us know that the spawn timer for this NPC appears to be 3 days, 14 hours and change. Contrast this to most modern MMO where the spawn timers on most world-named is rarely more than 10 minutes, dungeon named are usally about 60% show up in an instance (as most games instance dungeons now) and dungeon final bosses tend to be 100% with 1 to 6 hour lockouts on repeating the instance.
What do you think of Everquest's longstanding timesink design with spawn timers? Even group-level dungeons from classic era such as Lower Guk have this in effect (ever camped any of the epic 1.0 named there?).
Should this approach be changed in new EQ content? Should it be changed retroactively? Note that somewhere around Omens of War era they changed something on the NPC side that let's them do the "rare's spawn more often" weekends (and this impacts some older zones haphazardly... I think Velk's is one of them).
I'll keep my personal views out of it, but let's hear from users. Spawn timers: your thoughts?
