Knowing Zones

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Orlin
Posts: 10
Joined: Tue Oct 26, 2021 6:49 am

Knowing Zones

Post by Orlin » Fri Jan 28, 2022 11:14 am

Piggybacking off the PK guide Shinobi posted but not wanting to clutter that thread.

One of the primary things people will say for pk is "Know your zones"

That sounds great but what does it REALLY mean? And more specifically is there a hierarchy? I know there will be exceptions but when someone says know the zone what does that mean to you? How would you prioritize if you can't know everything all at once?

I have my ideas but want to hear yours :)

Adael
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Joined: Sun Mar 22, 2015 12:34 am

Re: Knowing Zones

Post by Adael » Fri Jan 28, 2022 11:43 am

There’s a lot of aspects to this, but I’ll take a short quick crack at it.

A first step would be knowing rooms that have common callouts for pk. Places like neon, 2n, shoulder, elbow, downer, rocky ent, camp ent, 4K junc, Roland ent, 4x, narrow, path, wall, etc.
Knowing what is meant by those names will help familiarize you with where pk is happening when you hear them. There used to be a page on the main website that actually gave a list of pk terms and locations, but I’m not sure if it’s gone into the abyss now.

Knowing what sort of zone those rooms are in then informs you what is going on.
neon and 2n means pk is dusty/winding, around FD. The fight is probably there because humans lost or are outnumbered and had to retreat back to a place friendly for them.
Conversely, shoulder/elbow/downer are all in the blight, so DS is the one that felt they needed mob support.
Roland ent/4K junc are down near Caemlyn, so someone is probably raiding.
narrow/path would mean southwest pk, or wall would be around EF. Less likely to be DS PK, more likely to be SS.

That kind of just gives a general “if I hear these names on narrates, what’s going on”
For the zones themselves, mob support and special rooms are important. No hides or no channels can be common regroup points. Knowing where mobs that are friendly to your side, or your enemy, load are important for knowing where to fall back to, or where to check for your enemy. Are the mobs stationary? How strong are they? Is it a patrol that roams?

The most critical part of zone knowledge though is literally the zone itself, by which I mean the rooms in it. Where are doors they I may have to watch out for? What rooms are good dlines? Where are common block points that give good/bad flees to one side or another? What is the layout of the zone? What are the zone boundaries, so I can maybe confuse trolls who are smelling my horse? Can you get from point A to point B without misspamming and giving someone a chance to catch up to you? Walking around a zone (if you have a client with a map that supports it, offline mode is good for this) to get a feel for the layout is good.

When I first started playing I had no maps. In order to get around from city to city, I wrote down the exact spams along the roads and would follow those. This eventually led to me having a tendency to memorize spams from one important location to another. Eg, starting inside gate keep, 7w 4s takes me to 3n elbow. 3s 3w takes me to rock. 2w takes me to allw elbow. s e 2s w s 2s takes me to downer. 4s takes me to orch ent. s e 2s e takes me to ptg. 8s takes me to bush. 2s to MT. 4s 4w takes me to asaw. And so on.

Building up small chunks of zones and becoming familiar with them so you won’t have trouble fighting in them is important. Knowing the figure 8 layout of blight near rock/allw elbow/stedding. Knowing the shape of the blight around culhook. The box of rooms around xroads/orch well/ragan orch. Knowing the shape of dusty/campsite, etc. I personally tend to focus moreso on the shape/layout/exits of zones/rooms/connections, whereas I know others rely lots on room names.

May edit this and add more later, but that’s some first thoughts :)

Rhys
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Joined: Tue Mar 07, 2017 6:10 pm

Re: Knowing Zones

Post by Rhys » Fri Jan 28, 2022 11:49 am

Great post Adael

Ragyn
Posts: 327
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 11:50 am

Re: Knowing Zones

Post by Ragyn » Fri Jan 28, 2022 12:01 pm

I made a quick guide to some of the popular zones up north a while back, could be you find some answers there.
viewtopic.php?f=75&t=11564

Fermin
Posts: 453
Joined: Sat Sep 10, 2016 12:16 pm

Re: Knowing Zones

Post by Fermin » Fri Jan 28, 2022 12:34 pm

I'd suggest learning blight on a trolloc first, you will get led to gap and winding and start getting a sense of them...
Then try to learn dusty and winding gap DF loop on a LS hunter...drop remounts and run the loop over and over again.

1. learn the exact spams from any callout/choke to any other (these are the commands you will use when chasing).
2. learn the successful DL and spams to get from any room to any other without walking back into a group.


When I'm learning the zones I had a paper with the exact spams and chokes called out and so i could run them over and over, eventually you don't have to look you just know. Then you take a break / get lazy and the alas you can't go that way start popping back up...but its rare that a couple alas, you can't go that are enough to get you killed. Many more kills come from walking back into the bash / group.

Eol
Posts: 704
Joined: Mon Aug 31, 2015 10:34 pm

Re: Knowing Zones

Post by Eol » Fri Jan 28, 2022 4:09 pm

One of the funny thing about the game is - we're all sort of on the same internal clock. Theoretically if you are running somewhere and you start first, never get aggroed, never stop entering commands in sequence in the right order, don't have a laggy connection, etc - no one should ever be able to catch you unless they've got a block set ahead of time.

Back in the day I didn't know Spine. I had to try and run down it to safety and I was being chased by Jaster. I obviously entered a lot of souths but ran into a dead end. Every second of misdirection - the game block was running. I was entering commands to fix my mistake, wasting pulses looking at exits figuring out where I was. Meanwhile my opponent was hitting the directions in the exact order to navigate the zone.

I literally died with a 20+ second hard start. If I had known exactly the spams to Cairhien then Jaster should have reached Cairhien 20 seconds after I did and found me inside already. We should have spent the exact same time period navigating the zone assuming we did it identically.

Which brings us to another fun point. If you never stop moving and no one catches you - you are more likely to survive. A long time ago I was running low but had a ton of old school vials. I made some stupid run (probably only possible because of how poor darkside regeneration is) from upper blight to Lockshear through tunnels back to Blight and then Stedding and then down DF, camp, shady, sward, and in. What worked about this? I didn't hag and I never stopped moving. In fact likely other people kept moving but the diversity of exit options - ie. where do we go, how do we block him, how many vials do we spend to kill 1 person factored in my favor. The runner will use all their vials to survive. They are going to lose all their vials if they die. Will the chaser use all their vials to kill 1 person. Additionally, what routes did I run. Routes I was comfortable with. I likely could have tried spine again and found myself racing a zone I was inferior in.

Orlin
Posts: 10
Joined: Tue Oct 26, 2021 6:49 am

Re: Knowing Zones

Post by Orlin » Sun Jan 30, 2022 10:06 am

Thanks for a lot of great stuff! One thing I didn't see mentioned was knowing horse loads. I was taught to find horses and them move them to strategic places. It has saved me a few times. I have certainly noticed with the recent horse downing a scarcity of horses though when setting stuff up.

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