Load-balanced zones

Daybreak has created the ability for the game to automatically create instanced versions of zones when they become overpopulated.

The /pickzone command (or just /pick) is used to move between them.

To help with how crowded some zones can get, we have “Load Balancing” tech in many zones on our servers. Once a zone reaches a specific threshold of players, it will spawn another version of itself. The number of players needed to trigger a new load balanced zone is relative to the amount of combatable population in that zone. You will be able to choose which version of the zone you want to enter upon zoning in, or you will be able to use the /pickzone command to choose another version.

The goal of this is to let people group up with friends while reducing crowding, so players can try to find NPCs and things to kill.

When an instanced version of a zone falls below a predetermined minimum number of players, the zone will lock and players will get a 15-minute warning that the instance is closing. If players are in the zone when it closes, they will be sent to the base version of the zone along with player corpses

Zones that have load balancing enabled will spin up a new version of themselves once all existing versions of the zone reach a threshold of characters. The threshold needed to spin up a new zone varies; it's keyed to the amount of combatable population in the zone. You can switch between load balanced versions of a zone by typing /pick from within the zone and selecting your destination.

Switching over will teleport you to the 'safe spot' in the zone.

Because the command is /pick, you will often hear the system referred to as pickzones and the zones as picks.

The goal of this system is to have available open air content scale relative to the amount of players who are interested in tackling that content. This is especially important on Progression servers that can have hundreds of characters hunting in the same zone, like Greater Faydark on a new server that starts in Classic. But the functionality exists on all servers.

As of the February 11, 2020 game patch, almost all zones have load balancing enabled.

All expansions have been load balanced, in that most of the zones of each expansion now have load balancing enabled. Not all zones within a given expansion have load balancing enabled. Plane of Justice, for example, does not, because switching over in the middle of your (or someone else's) trials would be bad.

Named (rare) mob spawn rate
Pick zones use the same spawn data as base zones. The % chance on an encounter table to spawn a rare is identical.