In short:
The old ruleset governing the rotation allowed for guilds to cooperate freely with one another without penalty. Large R guilds who rarely cooperated with other guilds thought small guilds were taking advantage of the system.
The only leverage the large R guilds have ever had to get rules changed (they are 3 of 10 R guilds) was by threatening to leave the rotation. They've used this strategy in the past to successfully drive three series of rule changes.
The main difference between all of those times and this most recent proposal is that the three previous threats were followed by a willingness to negotiate terms to address the issues the larger guilds had, whereas this most recent proposal was presented as a take it or leave it option and the other 7 of 10 guilds said no, thereby prompting the three larger guilds to officially leave the rotation.
Creation of Class R/Class C and the rotation:
The two class system was created by the server staff mostly due to the fact that one guild (TMO) had all of the raid content on lock down with one other cooperative raid force seeing very sporadic success (FE/IB) and the rest of the guilds seeing little to no content.
Once the two class system was officially created, all of the R guilds that were involved in the negotiations that birthed the system went to work on crafting the rotation agreement.
The rotation lasted for about a year, and for 99% of the people who were in Class-R, it was probably seen as a very healthy, cooperative, and successful time as they now got a chance to raid content that they had previously been blocked from. For the 1% of the people in class R who had to participate in FAP (the class-r officer/leader forums where the policy was crafted and disagreements were adjudicated) it was sheer hell and nobody in their right mind would want to participate in that again.
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