Spawn Data Variety

haggzor · #1 12-30-2013, 02:32 AM

Hi guys,

I set up a new server this week and I was just curious about a couple of NPC spawn related items. I noticed recently while playing in Innothule that I never see any skeletons or frogloks with equipped weapons. I dug in a little bit and this is what I found:

Code:

select  ld.*, lde.*, i.name
from    npc_types nt left join
        loottable lt on nt.loottable_id = lt.id left outer join
        loottable_entries lte on lt.id = lte.loottable_id left outer join
        lootdrop ld on lte.lootdrop_id = ld.id left outer join
        lootdrop_entries lde on ld.id = lde.lootdrop_id left outer join
        items i on lde.item_id = i.id
where   nt.name = 'a_decaying_skeleton'
order by ld.name asc

When I ran this relatively simple query, I discovered that there are 1212 different loot permutations set up for the various decaying skeletons throughout the game (obviously these aren't all used).

I took a little time and figured out how the data structure works for NPC spawn points. Just for fun I took the distinct NPCID's of our above resultset and compared it to the spawn points in Innothule:

Code:

select   *
from    spawnentry se left outer join
        spawngroup sg on se.spawngroupID = sg.id left outer join
        spawn2 s2 on sg.id = s2.spawngroupID
where   se.npcID in (
50002
,50018
,415108
,383015
,383031
,392014
,392006
,392005
,413061
,414016
,414002
,457139
,709066
,2000
,2104
,47074
,47088
,155034
,155317
,56060
,56078
,38009
,38013
,54013
,54026
,78012
,25322
,4010
,9003
,9006
,10003
,10004
,22003
,30000
,30012
,34002
,33106
,85109
,75001
,75004
,46008)
and s2.zone = 'innothule'

It would seem that in innothule, we are only ever spawning skeletons who are NPCID 46008.

When I went back and looked at my first query only restricted to that specific NPCID, I found out why I only ever get skeletons carrying bone chips in Innothule.

I found the frogloks similar, except they are only NPCID 46015, which has a loottableID of 0 (drops nothing).

So, that said, here is my real question:

Is this indicative of the data for most zones (somewhat vanilla) and the developers are assuming that server administrators wish to customize their own loot tables, or is this, perhaps, just an oversight in some select zones? Is anyone else experiencing complaints on their servers of this nature?

If the answer to the above question is "yes, it's pretty vanilla across the board", then is there an effort going on right now to update the spawn data in order to more closely mirror the 'production' game's spawn and loot data? I know that the loot from certain mobs (especially low level) is pretty crucial to a new player's game experience. If you can't get gear from drops, the cash grind gets to be pretty nasty.

Also...

In the event that I wanted to contribute data scripts diversifying some of this (based on Allakhazam's mob drop lists, ie http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/npc.html?id=28990), would the submissions run through the same channels as code commits or is there a separate oversight for data?

Thanks!

Haggzor