If it wasn't for Chest's dumb idea, BDA/Taken/Div would have gotten way more mobs/loot for the year and a half leading up to Velious with the default Class R lockout system than being in a rotation.

Not sure how you think otherwise. In fact, if the rotation had never existed I doubt Cloki and his morning pals would have ever split off into Omni - the rotation guaranteed them no competition loot.

From what I remember, there was some benchmark to get in the rotation, guilds had to kill a mob by themselves or whatever to earn a place on the rotation, and some smaller guilds were piggybacking with larger guilds without having fulfilled the requirement.

Are you saying this did not happen?

Nah, smaller guilds were teaming up to kill harder targets as an alliance that they couldn't kill alone. But then for easier targets (like Venril Sathir) they would split the alliance - this caused a ton of rotation slow down on high value (loot) targets, and sped up the harder targets (like Gorenaire) - the bigger guilds would a lot of times end up having to kill Gorenaire at bad hours just to prevent it from going to Class C.

What eventually broke up the rotation is the bigger guilds wanting the smaller guilds to take up just one slot on the rotation - either as a permanent alliance or alone, and kill what they could kill solo or recruit more so they could do the bosses they were on rotation for alone.

Certainly for the revised rotation, put Gorenaire in as an admittance ticket.

This suited the zergy BDA/Taken because that's easy...the smaller guilds like Moonlight Crusaders, Supremacy, etc - not so easy.

...but it's obvious with those revisions nobody was agreeing to it, and BDA swung the axe, Taken followed and guaranteed Class R welfare pixels were had by both guilds.

Y'all keep pounding good and hard on that dead horse...

I mean, BDA for years was selling themselves as 'we are the good guys, we could beat TMO but we won't stoop to their level of training etc'. When they blew up the rotation, they had to reindoctrinate their cult (hence all the 'NWO' propaganda about how Hulk Hogan went into his 'heel' phase and so on) and made a lot of noise about how the rotation was making guilds 'soft'. Then Velious launched and BDA was forced to confront the reality that they just weren't able to compete with either Rampage or F/A. BDA even failed at the Ring War multiple times with 70+ players, when with strategy it can be done with <50 and variance isn't an excuse there. And since the staff removed the R/C system (since they didn't feel like giving BDA/Divinity/Taken, three C sized guilds, a free rotation on Velious) BDA was simply stuck.

I mean, I totally get going to Phinny. It has two expansions that are generally recognized as pretty good. It doesn't have insane FTE poopsocking. It's the best decision for BDA. But the harsh reality is that BDA failed on basically every level possible here.

And yes, I know that Cloki formed Omni like 6 months before the rotation ended. Again, I was in the FAP forum reading the posts. In fact somewhere someone crossposted Chest's ragepost against omni to RNF. So you can read it yourself.

BDA never attempted the Ring War after the fixes went in. The last time we tried Giants were still falling through world - and we just didn't have enough bards to Highsun them all back up.

And of course BDA couldn't compete with Rampage/Aftermath in Velious - the same reason BDA couldn't compete with TMO and FE/IB in Kunark. The same reason Chest finally threw in the towel when he realized there was no light at the end of tunnel after some of BDAs most hardcore officers finally couldn't take the raid scene anymore and he had no way to replace them or the other friends who had quit in frustration over the years. It was basically HoT farming, Vindi/Velk, and praying for Earthquakes when we could actually kill most dragons we attempted.

Because it's been 6 years of requiring some sort of insanity to obtain FTE to actually kill a mob. Either 84 hours of variance in early Kunark, Coth ducking, FTE racing, it's all the same to the casual guilds. BDA had a higher percentage of people willing to put in the hours to track and obtain FTE than the other casual guilds, but in the end we didn't have enough - when those guys burnt out it was over.

Awakened/Aftermath just has a higher percentage of those types of people. They are still a majority of leechers, but all they need is 20-30 hardcore enough to do all the work for the others.

Take Chest's signature as an example of BDA's mentality...

http://i.imgur.com/3Bingwu.png

"Crush the rotation"

"See the lesser guilds driven before us"



Followed by... "wut, no welfare pixels in Velious? I quit"

Sorry it didn't work out for you - perhaps if you'd ironed out the rotation problems there'd have been more of an appetite between guilds (that you didn't destroy) to work things out

:o