[Oogmog]

I think what people are failing to realize, things were handled different on every server. Those who claim there was never GM intervention may have been on a server where this was true and others saying forced rotations/guidelines were presented to them could be true as well. I've skimmed through a lot of these forums, however, on my server we were forced into rotations just because the GMs who worked our server got sick of dealing with our crap.

We were forced to work out a rotation on VS and Trak after many problems/attempted KS's/leapfrogging/training.

In Velious, this is how things went down:
First guild to kill the rat guard in DN had rights to Zland(Until a wipe).
First guild to kill trash to Ikitair the Venom could not be leapfrogged unless they wiped and the first guild to kill roy had 24 hours from the time of his death to have NToV with no competition.
First guild to kill the first giant in the arena(Was a particular spawn, couldn't remember his name) could claim Vindicator/Statue/AoW.
Whoever was pulling and attempting to split Dain had his rights.
Yelinak was pretty much a first engage and it was yours since there was no trash(Mage CoH).
Whichever guild began clearing Tormax's area had his claim.

These rules for Velious were set in place after a Tormax raid where my guild was set up and pulling Tormax to WL zone line and our only rivals guild started zoning in and attempting to botch our pulls. After about an hour of the monks training each other, a GM showed up and asked which guild was there with a force first and began pulling.. it was our guild, so we had the chance on him first and if we wiped the other guild could claim it. Unfortunately, we were low on numbers and they ate our mod rods(right in front of the GM and nothing was done haha) and we wiped and it was theirs. Following the raid, the GM sat down with the two guild leader and created a system for every contested mob during the expansion.

So pretty much in Velious it's easy to have a fix for leapfrogging because on many occasions the trash itself requires a raid force to get through, or the dungeon is completely linear and you can assign a mob to claim the named. With Classic/Kunark, you can clear with a single group or 10 people or whatever. IMO, the only fair way to fix this is designate a set number of people actually clearing trash. Take for example, a group of 6 is clearing Shrooms etc on the way to Trakanon - by all means they can clear, set up a CoH chain if they wish, whatever. If a raid of 24 shows up, the group with 6 cannot delay them because they were there "first." In that instance it's not really leapfrogging but one guild trying to stall.

I'm not sure if this has been stated or not, and I apologize if so, but there's one underlying cause for this shitstorm that we're dealing with and its the fact that on any "normal" live server, there was maybe 2-3 guilds top competing over the planes/gods/dragons. Right now, I would say there are probably 6-7 guilds capable of downing those targets. While we're trying to relive the classic experience, there's never been a time where guilds would camp for days on end just for one single pop. Furthermore, on every server on live I've been a part of, if there was a guild in hate/fear/sky, it was just a general rule of thumb it was their zone and if CT/Inny/Dracho/Maestro popped while you were there it was your lucky day. Here, there's too many guilds competing for the armor drops for that to be an option.