What has actually happened is, if a highly sought mob is late in window two raidforces will sit there, with 70-100 players total at times, for hours on end, all hoping to get "first to engage", talking smack to each other and basically spreading H8. The mob spawns and everyone kills it, in seconds, and a GM checks the log to see who hit it first. Then there is usually a bunch of rule lawyering for the next hour to several days accompanied by RnF posts and general trolling on the boards and public channels in game.

No one likes to do it either, but if you want the mob and the loot you have to do it. That's what variance does for the server.

Variance and not spawning on server resets etc are not classic. In classic when a server resets a guild would prioritize which mobs they needed/wanted the most. This gave other guilds a chance to pick off some of the lesser mobs. However with variance a single guild is able to kill all mobs if the right circumstances happen.

Indeed. That in turn lends itself to rotations exceedingly well cause then you have other targets of opportunity to tackle while someone else is taking a turn on the priority mob/zone.

I'd be down with all mobs on a certain timer sharing the same variance (ie all 7 day spawns spawn at the same time, but there's still a variance on them; similarly for 3 day spawns, trak, draco, maestro, (what else?) would spawn at once). It's not really my preferred solution but a lot of people in another thread supported it and I think we can all agree it would be way more fun than the current snoozefest that is raiding here.

I support that idea. This still makes it so it isn't a "guaranteed" kill every week with your whole raidforce, gives the ability to include people outside of certain time zones (if there are any euro etc... guilds here) etc....and you would still have to "pick" which one your guild was going after.

3) Subtract levels instead of suspension, plus give a permanent exp penalty to normal and aaxp. The more offenses/more serious the offense, the more levels and more penalty.

For some people, the race is the game. This has always been the case in Everquest.

This.

For Classic EQ the variance was no where near as crazy as it is on P99.

Why not let everyone poopsock, not just those with huge zerg numbers.

Asher

While I do like your ideas, they are not without their issues, just as the system we use now is not without it's issues.

I think a largely overlooked aspect of the overall problem is simply that this is a Classic EQ Experience, but it is not Classic EQ. It is 100% impossible to bring back Classic EQ in it's pure, difficult, and punishing perfection because we KNOW everything about this game this time around. We no longer have to discover all those invisible floors, or what this quest mob means when he says "Amulet of my Ancestors." We have the knowledge, or at least the resources to find it, and that will prevent Project1999 from truly re-creating our former experience.

Overall, we play on this server because of the experience we get. Will it ever be exactly like Classic EQ? No, because the player base is just too well informed. We know exactly what to do and how to do it, without that long process of discovery. P99 may not be a perfect replica of the image in our minds, but fuck there was a lot of work put into it - from devs to players alike - and will always demand some tweaking for the population it currently hosts.



tl;dr Great ideas. But absolute Classic limitations will not always apply to a server with such a large and well informed player base.