Glad you have developed a consensus after 15 whole hours into it. To me a consensus is an opinion reached by a group as a whole, not the case here, sorry but one persons opinion does not make a consensus.
Which is why if you read this thread, you'll see at least
two other people stating they think it is low spawn, and one agreeing with me that
in their experience they'd only seen 2 per spawn. But it's so much easier to assume I don't understand what the word "consensus" means, isn't it?
By the way, before patronizing anyone else, would you care to try and define "simply aren't very common" in
numerical terms? Which is the statement I actually made; Would it be as low as, say,
none at all which you yourself then tried to correct me about in your own post of what you'd seen around Jhelom? Is 0 now "common"? Would you also like to claim that even as many as 10, which
no one has seen anything close too, would be enough for even a moderate population shard? Or are you part of the "consensus" that it's too low at present?
Would you like to try and prove a negative too? You seem to think you can, in that if
you can't see them that means that they've not spawned at all. You mention Jhelom; have you checked both of the other islands to the north and south, which count as being part of the city limits? Of course, if you actually take the time to read what I said, I mentioned it's quite possible they don't spawn at the same rate in every city... Do you see Jhelom mentioned in my list? Did I ever make a statement as to the spawn rate in Jhelom? Best to cross check what someone's actual argument is before trying to claim it's wrong, wouldn't you say?
Furthermore, would you like to quantify the amount of spawn that occurs
on shards other than your own? You even admit you don't know what shard I play on; wouldn't it be wise to do so, before being arrogant and assuming anyone else is wrong, especially if, as I suggested, it could be that it's based on the amount of people with ropes or other indicator of active interest in hunting them; which on a low population shard or at the times I've been doing it could be just me?
And yet more incredible assumptions; who said I was even thinking that the ropes themselves are flagged to the city? It's hard to see how they would be from a programming point of view,
especially as you should already have discovered they work for arrests in any city, not just the one they are collected from. Isn't it more likely then that the locational flag is tied to the NPC itself? It spawns in X, thus it needs to be returned to X's Officer no matter where you gate it too in the short term? All I suggested was one alternative way you could easily find out how many NPCs were needed for a city, if the devs had tried to take that into account, by counting the number of quest ropes within the eligible city co-ordinates. It could even be as simple as being done by pure player numbers in a city, or the rate of arresting in the area, or even triggered just by an approaching player "converting" an NPC randomly; if you'd looked elsewhere on the boards you'll see in my own thread about the ones that are bugged that I'd already noticed you can see them flicker to a new identity in the EC, because you can zoom out and see them before they'd normally be on screen for CC.
Such a method would be the quickest coding fix, and also explain some of the lag people are seeing, because it's having to do conversion on the fly. It would also cause a natural cap on spawn numbers due to emergence from standard player behaviour, but I kind of left that unsaid because
it's not as important to me to assert my supposed superiority, and which is why I tried to politely state no one was necessarily wrong.
But well done on proving me wrong on that at least; your claims to what I was saying, or even what you were reporting,
are howling inaccurate and wrong.