[Sweetbaby Jesus]

Originally Posted by Daldolma [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Poop-socking is far better for server health than one mega-guild dominating content by perma-tracking 96 hour windows and having 30 raiders available at any time of any day. But poop-socking could be solved, too. Instead of the silly "first raid force" rule that resulted in hours upon hours of poop-socking, just make it FTE. It will take guilds 30 minutes to arrive, buff, and wait on a pop. Every guild that wants a shot can show up and pray for FTE, same as everyone else. After a few weeks of that absolute misery, you'd have a rotation. It absolutely would alleviate the dominance of the top guilds, by the way, if implemented by FTE rather than first raid force. TMO can be as big and mobile and "determined" as they want. If 150 people from 5 different guilds are sitting on VS's spawn point hoping for FTE, TMO's odds are pretty crappy relative to the 90% they're claiming now. Ditto for every other mob. Obviously that scenario would be an absolute mess, but that's the point. Things have to get bad before they can get better. EQ Classic raiding worked because everyone had the power to make life miserable for everyone else unless there was at least some degree of cooperation. That created a community. The current rules minimize friction and make GMs' lives easier, but they do that by creating a bastardized version of EQ raiding. Most raid mobs are uncontested because the current rules just threw progressively more ridiculous obstacles in the way of raid mobs until only one guild was willing to keep trying. I don't see what the issue would be with classic variance and FTE rules. If you're worried about disputes, implement a FTE-shout. I don't understand how there can be any disagreement that the current raiding scene is broken. There's only one raiding guild, and they had 77 members at an uncontested raid last night. Does that sound classic to anyone?

This is exactly what I've been trying to get across. It'll be a huge mess at first but it wouldn't take long for the players to get sick of it and work together to make the things better.