I don’t remember seeing anything like the dynamic respawns in Classic back in 2004/2005–was this a thing originally?
I started a 1-2 months after the game released on a very imbalanced server. Not sure if maybe I missed it, or never noticed it due to the population being so low for my faction.
No. I’m pretty sure all that the game actually does is repopulate “camps” semi-randomly which is why a mob can be killed and almost immediately respawn because large portions of the rest of the “camp” were killed earlier.
For example the Defias Knuckledusters in the southern most portion of Westfall all seem to share one big collective camp. People were killing them and the other Defias all over but my wife and I were able to literally stand in one spot and kill the “same” guy three times over.
Yes, 2 or 3 of the original developers said this is how things were.
Farmed harpies in the rogue feather den for 4 levels, sometimes id walk through most of the cave looking for mobs, sometimes I would just keep getting respawned on, but it never changed due to amount of players farming the spot, sometimes the camp decides to gang bang you.
I remember mobs not spawning as fast and having a way higher aggro range.
Dynamic respawns weren’t in 1.0 but they were introduced fairly early on to deal with the high demand of mobs that were few in number and had low drop rates for quest items central to progression through a zone. So they implemented a system that would accelerate respawn rates when there was a lot of demand for certain mobs.
That said, it didn’t function quite the way it does now. Dynamic Respawn has been largely supplanted by the “layering” that people keep talking about where multiple versions of the zone are layered on top of each other. As more players enter the zone and as mobs are killed within a given layer the players are transparently shifted to other layers which causes the “instant respawn” effect some see where you kill one or two mobs and then suddenly both respawn really quickly. They didn’t actually respawn but you transitioned to a layer where they weren’t dead yet.
People “exploit” that by grouping up with players who are in other layers already. Grouping forces both players into one or the other layer which can help force the layer shift, especially in lower population zones where the layer shift may not have occurred otherwise.
It was that way. People just not remembering.
Mandella effect… WE REMEMBER!
Absolutely, yes.