Treasure Chests, Thieve's Troves, Resources -- Spawning

Uazole2 · June 19

It has been noted in other topics that the population of our fantasy world seems to be shrinking. I tend to agree, based on my totally unscientific methods. I judge player population by the number of treasure chests and thieves' troves that I find. When I am the treasure king, the population is obviously too low.

I suggest a solution that will not solve the lower population issue, but will at least hide it. Change the spawn timers so that they are dynamic. When the population is low the spawn rate is slowed down, and when the population is high, the rate of spawning increases. This could maintain a better balance and force players into other activities, instead of farming chests in a circle.

An additional change that would be nice is chest aging, where the treasures a chest presents become more valuable over time, the longer a chest sits without being looted, the better the stuff it will contain.

zaria · June 19

Slow hours like very early in the morning is the best time to hunt treasure chests.
It also depend on who instance your on as some has much more people than others.
You can see this then reloging on other caracters at the same location.

katanagirl1 · June 20

I really don’t see why lots of chests would be a problem. I also don’t like the idea of them micromanaging the activities of the overland. It would undoubtably add overhead to the code and hurt performance.

SeaGtGruff · June 20

As I understand from previous duscussions, the way these things usually work is that the game tries to keep a certain number of them available at any given time. In other words, when you harvest a resource node, the game spawns a new resource node of that type somewhere else, chosen at random. I'm not certain that that's actually how it works, but that's my understanding based on what other people have said. And even if that's how resource nodes work, I'm not certain whether treasure chests and thieves troves work that way, too. But if they do, then you're pretty much always going to see the same number of chests in a given zone, assuming you're running around all over the zone and checking even the rarely-visited spawn locations.

KekwLord3000 · June 20

So people that play at dead hours (night shift workers,Oceania/East Asia) get double screwed.
Once because they play on non prime hours since we only got EU and NA servers no Asia/Oceania so they play when the server is semi dead, and now the one's that collect chests will get to see even less chests due to increased spawn time? That's wild.
Imo zos should just abolish the whole NA/EU servers as well as console/pc and when you login you can see everyone at the same time, cross play is on ESO's mind for a while first we saw Rich address it in that ps website interview and not long ago both him and Matt were talking about it briefly.
Since zos has plans for eso 2-3 years in advance, my suggestion as 6-7 year vet is for zos to dedicate a fairly large portion of their staff, to solve this issue (of crossplay), even if it means less content for 2026 and 2027. As this feature is probably the most requested one (besides maybe harder overland) that zos got. While I love subclassing i'd trade it in a heartbeat for a cross play.

cozmic72 · June 20

No thanks.

LootAllTheStuff · June 20

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

As I understand from previous duscussions, the way these things usually work is that the game tries to keep a certain number of them available at any given time. In other words, when you harvest a resource node, the game spawns a new resource node of that type somewhere else, chosen at random. I'm not certain that that's actually how it works, but that's my understanding based on what other people have said. And even if that's how resource nodes work, I'm not certain whether treasure chests and thieves troves work that way, too. But if they do, then you're pretty much always going to see the same number of chests in a given zone, assuming you're running around all over the zone and checking even the rarely-visited spawn locations.

I was hanging out at a geyser on Summerset that had a treasure chest nearby. It respawned on a regular timer in the same location, although the chest difficulty changed randomly. (The geyser, of course, never triggered...). I've also noticed that resource nodes are on a similar timer. So I'm not sure it's the case that clearing one causes another to spawn somewhere else immediately, rather that they all respawn at a fixed rate.

AzuraFan · June 20

No. If I end up in an instance with low population, I don't want to have to wait around for long periods for stuff to spawn. I think that would drive people away from the game.

I judge the population by the number of players running around, not by how many chests and such are available. Lack of chests or whatever doesn't necessarily mean the pop is high. It could mean there's one player farming stuff at that time.

UrQuan · June 20

Many years ago the devs explained that the respawn timer for chests (this was before thieves' troves existed so I can't say for sure if it works the same way with them, but I'd guess it's the same) varies based on the population of the zone. They didn't share specifics, but basically if the player population of the zone is within one range of numbers it will take X seconds for a looted chest to respawn, if the population is within a different range it will take Y seconds for a looted chest to respawn, and so on. They also noted that the respawn counter starts as soon as the chest is opened and the contents are randomly determined not when it's fully emptied as many people erroneously believe.

LootAllTheStuff · June 20

So the best resource farming to be had is in high population zones where 90+% of players are busily doing anything but farming resource nodes? Sounds like Craglorn...

redlink1979 · June 20

It's fine as it is.