[Zengez]

I dunno, I kind of agree with Angelox here, Which is why I wanted to institute something along the lines of a wiki style database server... which was laughed out of hand and dismissed, oh well.

But I think what Angelox is more aiming toward isn't the fixes and patches and items that are addressed as a community things (i.e. doors, quests, and zone lines) but rather the raw and pain in the ass spawning of a ton of mobs throughout all the zones that aren't being touched. I know Angelox is ALSO talking about doors and zonelines etc, and that shouldn't be by any means overlooked as without them it doesn't really matter too much if stuff is spawned correctly, but at the same time being able to zone into an empty zone isn't much of an accomplishment either.

Seems to me the problem is that people are going one of two routes;

One: This is an Emulator, and as such, should be open to customization and so it doesn't matter if we aren't spawning things similiar to live, as that isn't the point,

Two: We don't even have all the stuff that we have 'done' finished, so lets finish that and fine tune it before we move on.

My response to these are as follows;

One: Very true, and a perfectly good point, if you just want to build your own world, litterally, custom tailor your own spawns and zones, great, and good luck, you needn't care any further. (this is arguable, but I'm tired and I'll leave that to someone else)

Two: Also a good point, but as has been said so very many times, this isn't live, this is an emulator. As such it will nearly be impossible to make zones exactly the same. Even if we got everything spawned as perfectly as possible, a bunch of other things are still broken. More importantly, I'd argue (in my currently limited capacity) that having most all the zones 90% spawned is far better than having 20% of the zones 100% spawned. Most of the spawn work is not terribly difficult at all, just mass production of static and/or basic roaming mobs. The other 10% is the quest triggers, named spawns, and special loot stuff that takes actual knowledge of the spawning system and time to dedicate to correctly crafting, and as a result might be beyond the abilities of a large portion of basic admins and spawners.

But, here is my issue with this, I simply don't know the stats of the mobs.
Sure, I could go about spawning mobs and probably getting the pathing right, and I'd have a bunch of lvl 1 mobs with 10 hit points and no damage wandering around the countless zones as glorified placeholders for whatever they should be. I've even re-activated my account in live to try and gather some data to get better info on spawns, but that will still take far too much effort than what it's worth, since at most I get some very rough damage stats and some equally inaccurate hit point guestimates.

So, Thats why I think something that may be a good start would be for people with true massive population experience to type up a thread on how they decide stats for mobs. Things like what really goes into the max damage in a mob, will their strength matter? or is it entirely off the 'maxdmg' stat? how many hitpoints do mobs tend to have by level and expansion? dmg? special abilities? etc etc...

Finally, perhaps a semi-public server if wiki is such a terrible idea, where we have a select few that are allowed to log into a 24/7 server and spawn as they desire to ballpark a full pop of every zone in as short a time period as possible, even if the mobs aren't quite right, or some zones are only half spawned, it's better than nothing. I myself stopped truely exploring expansion zones since PoP so my experience is limited, especially since I never did any Raiding, so there isn't much for me to go on, but I'm sure others have. If this were done then more serious database developers like Angelox and the PEQ team would merely have to make (hopefully) minor edits, some tweaks, and some crafting of quest mobs and whatnot, and the database could grow and develope much easier since the bulk work would be more or less completed.

Anyways, thats my 2 cents, perhaps it will spike some debate and get somewhere /shrug

EDIT:: As a clarification, that semi-private server would just be a database breeding ground, the updates would be made public and everything would thus would be for the good of the community.