DANGER: You've Activated My Text-Wall Trap!
For a while it was IB vs TMO. Then IB R.ode M.otorcycles T.o get off the server and put some dolla billz in they pockits. So TMO then reigned supreme. I think they reigned supreme for about 2 years, although I only started raiding during the last year of that.
At some point IB came back. BDA was a good guild at one point but a lot of the best players splintered off to pursue a more aggressive guild named Forceful Entry to contest TMO.
(As previous posters have said, TMO had ALL server content on lock and was selling MQs)
Mid 2013 TMO > IB/FE > Everyone else. BDA, for instance, confined themselves to doing planar clears, Chardok royals, that sort of shit. It was enough to keep the new raiders happy but almost NO ONE got epics except for clerics, rogues.
Snagging kills of prized targets like VS, Sev, etc., was almost impossible because TMO or IB would always have some crazy loophole strategy. I remember once TMO(?) camped a cleric and a warrior at VS spawn point and snap engaged with their trackers. Donal's BP cleric + geared warrior back then was enough to engage VS and hold it for some time.
It was bad enough that I basically stopped playing a couple months after getting into BDA.
Then something changed. TMO did something that pissed Rogean off big time, a sort of tipping point. He basically banned all of TMO from raiding, and then banned THE WHOLE SERVER from raiding. It was a forced time-out where the big guilds had to sit down with server staff and negotiate a solution where TMO could no longer monopolize the raid content.
Chest the leader of BDA was probably the central agent in getting the Class C/R/FFA system set up. I believe he honestly wanted to help steward the server so that casuals could get some pixels. He and a lot of other BDA officer core had gotten consistently denied for 2 or 3 years by TMO and so the salt was real. So, with the help of an angry server staff, we received the Class Rotation System that was basically supposed to create a tiered raid environment that encouraged guilds to "get keyed up" and then go competitive. The only problem was that guilds like BDA and Taken and Div had been shit on for so long they just didn't want to have anything to do with TMO and the likes ever again...
Ultimately the Curse of the Casual Pixel Lust and the Inability to GET OVER IT ruined BDA from the top down
And what happened to the Rotation is another thing entirely (thanks for the green scales)
Right now the Raid Scene is broken down into two Top Dogs A/A (similar to TMO/IB). Main differences are that casual guilds really can get epics for their members now, excepting shit like warrior epic is still insanely competitive. But with undead trak, vs remains, etc., there's a lot less bottlenecks and a lot less nerds making those bottlenecks tighter, because now they are off bottle-necking shit in ToV first.
Gloriously, burnout is a real thing happening and a real threat to these guilds. Back in Kunark, there was passion and drive to get geared for Velious(TM). But now we have Velious and it isn't going anywhere, so people get their Vulak loot and then log off for good because they hate raiding 20-40 hours a week with a bunch of unemployed elf lords (read: addicts). You can observe this in the numerous threads where Awakened/Aftermath brag about "low numbers kills." This, in reality, means "we couldn't get as many people as we wanted so we had to log onto a bunch of abandoned accounts instead of playing our mains so we could have enough clerics etc to pull off the kill."
I would say that the raid scene is a LOT better than it was a couple years into Kunark. You actually have some cool targets you can get as a casual guild. There are casual alliances to some extent. And the truth is, you DON'T need NTOV gear to clear everything in the game. Always remember, all raid targets in Velious died on day 1 of release when we only had Kunark gear.
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