It's Time. No Seriously

Daybreak is folding. Servers are going to shutdown.

READ THIS: http://wiki.takp.info/index.php?title=Data_Collection

Login and go collect some data. Find some obscure quest, NPC, ANYTHING. Turn logs on. Record video. Just go NOW. Focus on PoP zones and CT.

Coordinate with me if you want jobs to do.

 

A dev has a concern after the layoffs today at DBG, that there is a problem.

If you post in this thread to try and make people think there is no issue or urgency.

You are going to eat a ban.

 

Half staff laid off, other half sent home to grieve/drink. Rumor mill churning over other Columbus Nova subsidiaries having their assets frozen due to ties with Russian oligarchs. Mild Damage-control scrubbing of old press releases to deny that Columbus Nova actually owns Daybreak at all.

It definitely seems to be the shakiest ground EQ has ever been on.

 

THIS IS NOT DIFFICULT.

Open text editor. Enter a zone. Write down mob's mob. Try to mez, lull, charm, stun, snare. See if it summons. write it down. move on to next mob.

Turn on fraps. Do a quest/event. Turn of fraps. Repeat.

 

Another thing that's valuable and simple: If you have a wizard with a staff of temperate flux, spam cast it on stuff. Use it like 1000+ times per mob. Make sure you note the wizard's level. Use some sort of tool to spam the key. (like auto-it. a script for it is in the link above)

Organize your data so it can be used more easily later.

 

Another REALLY easy thing to do: turn log on, go invis, con every mob in zone

Edit: also, hail everything in PoJustice and try to get dialogue

 

Posting updates so far so people know what to skip.

Video of the following events are more of less fully captured:
* CT Ooze Ring
* CT Gnome Escort
* Hedge Maze
* Justice Trials
* PoEarthA - Mud Ring
* PoEarthA - Vine Ring
* Crypt of Decay - Bertox event (have 2 showeq window vids; no game footage, but don't really need it)
* PoWater - Coirnav Event
* PoFire - Fennin event
* Drunder - Rallos Event (showeq window only; game video wouldn't hurt I guess)

Video of the following events are partially captured: (feel free to do these if you wish, but events with no video might be more valuable)
* CT Ring of Fear (up to Fright, then the ring ended for some unknown reason. I do want the end somewhat badly)
* HoH Trial - Crazed Norrathians
* HoH Trial - Protect the Villagers
* PoEarthA - Rock Ring (I have a showeq video, but not game footage)
* Plane of Time - ShowEQ window only (not a super high priority due to screenshots being abundant)

Immunities checkable by enchanters is being worked on in PoJustice

 

Has anyone looked on twitch to see if any of the agnarr or phinny streamers have these encounters saved to video? Since I dont have anything higher than a 70 on live, I could find some links if needed.

 

I remembered Faceless Empire posted raids from the test server like 5 years ago before the TLPs started. Here's a big cache if you scroll down:

https://www.youtube.com/user/FacelessZaide/videos

Here's some relevant videos I saw:
Aerin Dar:
Terris:
Grummus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEqiw_dOZrQ
Mithaniel Marr: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cikfk8Tx9OM
Xanamech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW0Y3wjW5zk
Maenetic Behemoth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnL14NcUDDg
Tallon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oiozp1-Abk
Vallon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejNA-c791eA
Rallos Zek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xfARn6UGPw
Saryrn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q1nP_DdaFY
Bertox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79RMRyG-Yd4
Agnarr: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFymhZnE_vk
Sol Ro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpzozfZ_5cA
Tantisala Jaggedtooth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2suyju-yF8
Fennin Ro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjEnVn1d3Hc

Plane of Time:
Innoruuk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHYN7L2YqFs
Saryrn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS43thDc92k
Terris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsAL8V1eWTI
Tallon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHCWNB_4b-k
Vallon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV_iUPNVGm8
Bertox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPIC3bGYNKU
Rallos Zek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sctZcimbMjY
Cazic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbpLZiFwJww
Quarm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f72WJaYLrT0

Hope these can help, if only a bit.

 

I think there is a small portion of the server who understands what to look for and is capable of doing so. If you are contributing to the cause of keeping this server preserved Akurately thank you and Godspeed.

 

If you're not testing because you don't have a character on live, you can spend $35 to get a "heroic" character unlocked. it basically PL's you to 85, gives you a bunch of gears, aa, all your spells, skills, etc.

 

I'm not too concerned with raid bosses. (at least the major ones) I've been collecting data on those for years now.

Video wise, what I am concerned about are stuff like random escort quests. Quests that spawn NPCs and/or have lots of moving. Also there are details that don't get captured in a typical video. (like what happens when you fail an event)

Video is only a fraction of what is collected however. Statistics for common NPCs and raid trash are the bulk of what is needed. (read the link in the first post)

 

Aid Eino (minor escort quest, but prerequisite for the Essences of Power quest) might be a good one to capture, if someone hasn't already.

Major kudos to any PC people (or Mac bootcampers?) who are helping out with this.

 

I will do Aid Eino soon.

 

One important note: if you collect data, label it well so it can be found in the pile later. Otherwise devs have to spend an enormous amount of time just cataloging and searching through this stuff.

Rename videos files to describe what was shot. Name data files (text files, spreadsheets, whatever) describing the contents.

 

If somebody wants something to do, film this and log it: http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/npc.html?id=14850

And the other one too

 

I'm wondering about the relevancy of data harvested from the live servers now after so many changes have been made over the years. Changes to content, changes to game mechanics, etc. If this server is meant to be locked to PoP era as it originally existed, then how can you copy information that has changed from it's original form then bring it to this server without compromising that vision?

 

There are many things that changed on Live in the past 15 years.

But is it likely they changed RandomMob203's immunity to Charm or Mez or Snare or Ability to see invis? Not really. So many of those immunity checks are worthwhile to grab.

I went through PoDisease yesterday testing and got most mobs show in the allakhazam DB. Also found a few not in the DB.

I'll continue to casually go through PoP zones starting with Tier 1 checking immunities.

 

I don't know, I think Torrinn raises a good point, but...I think it's worthwhile to capture from live, for several reasons:

1. As Darchon was saying, they've changed a lot for sure, but old stuff like classic through PoP would not have been the target of any changes as much as all the later stuff would be. It's fiddly and expensive to go through things and change critical game-play elements like resistances/HP/abilities because you then have to extensively test to make sure you didn't totally break something. I don't see them as doing that a lot for zones in which nobody plays anymore. Im kind of surprised they haven't just deleted everything before PoP.
2. There is no other source. It might be polluted, but it's the only water so you kind of have to drink it. We have an active research team and we have people's memory and 'feels' to make adjustments when something feels really out whack.
3. They can cross-reference stuff on websites and public everquest change logs and so forth to add another layer of checking.

The really hard stuff is complicated stuff like events/rings/wars/escorts that are heavily scripted with lots of moving parts. Just having a record of what happened and who spawned when and how often, emotes and announcements, drop rates for gear and stuff like that is priceless even if some of the underlying mechanics have been changed (made easier, in all likelihood).

 

Darchon: Walex is doing tier 1 immunities with an enchanter.

Responding to Torrinn: A bit of a derail, but in a nutshell: I can tell what's changed and what hasn't the vast majority of the time, and for questionable things I can generally compare against AK logs. Most raid content is more or less untouched, and most of the altered zones are in classic.

 

Fair enough I can jump ahead to Elemental Planes in that case.

Also I'm assuming you don't care about Fear immunities since our fears all cap at 52? And pacify immunities 66+, since all of ours cap at 65?

I was checking for Charm, Mez, Slow, Snare/Root, Fear, Pacify, Stun, Flee, Summon, See Invis. Dunno if there are any other things I need to check for.

 

As luck would have it, PoDisease is the only T1 zone I haven't touched yet. Did you finish everything? If not, I can go through and clean up anything you might have missed.

 

I didn't get through some of the rare or made up spawns.

Edit: if I can figure out how to google spreadsheets I'll provide the link for you to modify or copy.

 

Correct

 

At least on the plus side the panic seems to have calmed down and it no longer looks very likely that DBG will get hurt by the CN problems. The layoffs are the real problem now, looks like DBG is in a world of financial hurt. But thats at least not an imminent concern.

 

i got 3 level 85 toons not used in 10 year.. i ll try see if i can get these on and see if i can maybe do some stuff in PoJ that no1 else really ever did on AK .. xept me and Bumm or so lol ..
will start with that ..

 

Worthwhile endeavor going on here. Torrinn is correct, however; in that live did change many things since their era, even in early expansions. An example of this is every raid mob in NToV summons at 100% health on live. Another large one is spawn timers. They basically went through everything and changed almost all spawns to a 10min 40sec spawn timer.

Fortunately lIke Torven said, many of these things (I think) are fairly obvious to spot.

Does anyone know how I could recover my old live account? I don't remember any info about is tho =/. I don't remember pw, login name, email account it was attached to...