Post LDoN Zone info here

[WildcardX]

Here are the facts I remember:

* only a single group of 6 players can enter any ldon zone instance.

* Once the group leader requests and accepts an ldon mission, a timer begins and they have x amount of time to enter the ldon zone instance or they need to go back and request a new ldon mission.

* Once a group enters a ldon zone instance, they have x amount of time to complete the mission goals before they are forcibly zoned out of the instance and placed at the zone instance entrance and the zone instance is destroyed.

* the minimum level to enter an ldon mission was level 19. You could only have members in your group that were in the same level range where all members of the group could earn exp. ldon requires a minimum of 3 players to create a zone instance. (although I can tell you right now I am going to code a rule to override this requirement).

* after a group completes their mission goals, they have x amount of time added they can remain in the zone until the instance is destroyed and they are forcibly ejected.

* if you camp out in the zone instance and log in AFTER the zone instance is destroyed, you will enter the world at the zone instance entrance.

[sfisque]

they must have changed some of that stuff.

from what i remember (this goes back to about 1 year after ldon went live, when i retired from eq).

if you camped out, and came back in after the timer expired, you were placed into a "faked" instance. no mobs, no traps, no chests, no nothing.

similar if you died and logged out or went LD. you were placed into a "faked" instance where you could run up and loot your body, but there were no chests, mobs, traps, or anything. just an empty instance with your corpse.

also, if the timer expired, it was extended by 30min and you were able to complete the quest for a reduced bounty (it was usually something like 20-30% of the points you got if you succeeded).

for "kill the boss" or "rescue the friend" quests, the target mob wasn't spawned until about 60% of the zone was cleared. this prevented an exploit early on where people would invis/pacify/feign-flop upto the boss and gank them or avoid wrong turns on the rescue mission.

hope this helps.

== sfisque

[Angelox]

How about the NPC's , what changes with the higher level groups?
Example; a level 20 spider becomes a level 40 spider? What drops change?

[RangerDown]

LDoN didn't make use of true instancing as we know it in other games and later expansions of EQ. What most unaware players saw as an "instance" of their LDoN dungeon was actually a different zone -- each LDoN adventure zone had 10 clones of it. Example: Mistmore Catacombs had zone ID's "mmca" thru "mmcj". The LDoN system mimicked instancing by keeping up with which zones were allocated for active adventures at any given moment.

As an example, an adventure party might be getting a level 45 spawn in mmcd while you're getting a level 55 spawn in mmca. Nobody else's adventure party will be able to enter mmca while your adventure is active (barring any bugs).

similar if you died and logged out or went LD. you were placed into a "faked" instance where you could run up and loot your body, but there were no chests, mobs, traps, or anything. just an empty instance with your corpse.

I'm not sure that I ever LD'd long enough to stay offline past my adventure's expiration, but if it put you back inside the dungeon as opposed to outside near the entrance, that would be a serious bug and I'm certain not what SOE intended. If you found yourself inside the dungeon, most likely you were in the same zone that was used for your adventure, and were fortunate that the zone was idle at that time. The zone could have just as easily been reallocated to another adventure party and you log into a full spawn :o

What the game was supposed to do (and always did for me) was that if you died and left a corpse that you didn't loot, after the adventure was done and you were all ejected from the dungeon, your corpse would be moved out of the dungeon and placed near the dungeon's entrance in the outside zone. This was the first time EQ saw the ability to move a corpse across zones... and shortly thereafter Shadowrest was born.

[WildcardX]

So not so really zone instancing, just a subsystem to manage entry to specific zones based upon dynamic conditions. That doesn't sound so bad

The other thing I seem to recall was the importance of the average level in your adventure party. I cant remember all the "tiers" but there was a way to calculate how many ldon points you were going to get based on the average level of the group.. or was it that the average level of the group determined the levels of the mobs the zone loaded for you.. actually, i think that was what the average level of the group determined...

There was another calculation i recall we had figured out as players.. something along the lines of whoever was the highest level in the group got slightly more ldon points than the rest of us.. wish I could recall these numbers... I just vaguely remember thinking of them.

[jdankanyin]

What about monster missions seems like the same as ldon.

[ChaosSlayer]

to add a little bit on LDON.

The truly instanced part was the level setting.
When group leader woudl accept the mission, the game would determined average level of the group, and populated the zone with according level mobs.
Esentialy SoE has created a shit load of a_spider from level 18 to 66, and all other mobs. But during mission you would only see those that correspand to group average level -2 to +1 level. On HARD adventures this would +1/+2 levels from group average, capping out at lev 66 on HARD 65. Additional +2/+4 levels were for LDON raids (oh dear lord those were insnanly hard. Elemental difficulty for normal raids, and Time difficulty for Hard raids)
The named loot was also figured in the same way. There were a shit load of named_orc001, broken down into 10 level tiers. So from 20 to 30 you would meet a named_orc_01, from 30 to 40 named_orc_02 etc. And their loot was done in simular way. There were rathly 10-12 unique items per tier (10 levels) that would drop any named mob.

Essentialy, LDON wasn't realy instanced zones. But it was instanced populated from a list of mobs coresspanding to group level