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New EQ Producer Introduces Himself
The new producer for Everquest Live, Craig Knapp, has put up an introductory letter to the community on the official site. He discusses his expectations going into the job, and mentions some of the issues he'll be addressing going forward. From the letter: "First, we'll be instancing the Plane of Time to alleviate the bottle neck that many of you may face as a result of higher populations. Second, at the request of the players, we're going to combine the servers that have established a voluntary rotation system for raid targets. The Rathe and Karana will now be combined. The communities on The Rathe and Karana servers have put forth an extraordinary amount of time and energy to create their rotational systems and we want to do what we can to support these players and their chosen play style. As a result of this change, Bertoxxulous and Tholuxe Paells will be combined."
I gave up my Evercrack addiction about 4 years ago so I guess my knowledge isn't terribly up-to-date, but I think I can answer your questions:
1) The Plane of Time is (probably) the high-level zone that most high-level guilds would like to loot and pillage aka raid. Here's a sample of what you run into there. Bottlenecks are caused by having too many guilds all vying for the same zone to raid at the same time, hence
2) raid target rotations were implemented. They're kind of like sign-up sheets for the running machine at the gym, AFAIK.
3) I don't know.
Plane of Time is the end level content from a two year old expansion. It is a place many guilds can upgrade their equipment/gear easily.
On Povar for example, their are about 10 guilds who raid Plane of Time.
Their tiers of mobs that grow in difficulty as you advance through the zone. The further you advance in the zone, the longer it takes the mobs to respawn.
The last mob, Quarm, takes about a week to respawn.
So, these 10 guilds get together, and instead of fighting/racing for the right to kill the mobs, they instead, take turns killing them - rotation.
Plane of Time changing to a fully instanced zone, (it's partially instanced, but we won't get into that right now), will allow all 10 guilds to gain loot 10 times as fast.
As far as I know, the new producer is just for EQ1.
I've just come back to Povar after a 9 month hiatus. I don't know the current situation of rotations on Povar since the server mergers, but I hope it helps you get the idea.
I found them a useful window into the EQ lore, personally. Xev and Tholuxe, for instance, are minor deities (the gods of luck and capitalism, respectively) who have never appeared in game, but I found them intriguing enough to work into my rogue's personal pantheon. I probably never would have heard of them if not for the server names, indeed Tholuxe may well have been created simply because they needed a new server and were out of gods.
Sounds like they instanced the zone in which the guilds were rotating their raids. If you are not familiar with the idea of instanced zones, it means that basically all the guilds can go and raid at the same time in their own private version of the zone. It's an increasingly popular way to do dungeons/zones in MMORPGS these days...
The alternative is merging a server that has a self-imposed rotation policy with one that doesn't have such a policy. The chaos resulting from that situation far outweighs that required to fit the guilds from two servers onto one list. Besides, the reason for the merges in the first place is a sharply-declining population, so the assumption being made here is that (especially with instancing) on the merged server, it'll result in a full, but not necessarily overburdened, rotation list.
Well, his annoucment just mentioned them instancing the Planes of Time, so it seems like the rotation policy would still be needed for other raid bosses. Since the policies are enforced by the comunity, it'ld make sense to merge the two together rather than with servers that don't have any sort of policy.
To make it rarer. (IE, no, not really.)
In The Real World, some resources are just rare. Not everyone can have a shower curtain made of gold. To try and duplicate that in the game, certain monsters (and therefore the items they drop when killed) respawn slowly.
So if a give monster drops The Sword of Pwning and only respawns once a week, that means that there can only be one Sword of Pwning in the game for each week it's been out.
"Hardcore" players love this, because it makes them much more special to have a Sword of Pwning if there are only one hundred in existance in the game out of say five thousand players.
Is it a good reason? Does it just annoy (most) players? Someone else will have to answer that. My personal opinion is that it isn't really a good reason and just annoys most players. But the reason is simply an enforced rarity, which makes them more valuable.
(The other option some games use is a monster that spawns every 10 minutes but only has a 0.01% chance of dropping some really rare item.)