[Secrets]

i'll repost my 'non-valid opinion here from someone who doesn't play' here

Any agreement without everyone on board will always fail. Just instance this stuff or mandate rotations and be done with it. Player-made agreements are a colossal waste of everyone's time. Debating who gets mobs when there's a clear solution that solves the issue, for everyone - with far less bloodshed and butts hurt - is much preferable.

EQ wasn't designed to hold this many people at top-end for as long as it's been going on. there's evidence that GMs would police a rotation on live or that they would despawn the raid target if players couldn't get along.

Even the original designers wanted stuff like instancing but the tech wasn't there at the time. Take a look at Shawn Lord's interviews with developers from that era and how he, as a designer, felt he couldn't make challenging raid content under the lack of instancing (aLovingRobot on Twitch).

You don't need to have an absolute discussion every so often on rules. You make one solid set and be done with it.

This is content yearing 20 years of age. You all know how it spawns, how it works, what people are needed, etc.

The challenge is having a person wasting their life away instead of doing their real-life job offline in another timezone so that 80 other people can get a text message at 4am about Trakanon spawning and maybe getting loot if their force assembles their characters fast enough.

There's no skill in that other than who can be a larger toxin on society outside of this game and having people in your guild that are willing to forego responsibilities for the chance at loot in a recreation of a game they all once enjoyed.

On live, players would log in after a server goes down, the biggest uberguild would clear all the content at once that they could while other guilds go after lesser targets, and those needing epic pieces and such would just camp at the downtime at the NPC they need to get their loot.

I'm not in the vested interest of any guild here. I think the role was accidentally added when I couldn't speak after randomly deciding to join the Discord when it was getting trolled.

I am in the interest of making sure that people - who are dedicating their spare time to serve the position of guide, GM or any other administrative role no matter who they are or what company, team, volunteer organization they are from, have ample chance to actually sanely discuss, set up rules and expectations, and come to a solution that is clearly enforced with no room for 'petitionquest'. It's a complete and utter waste of people like Galach/Menden's time here to babysit and mediate more than once, and I'm a firm believer that all of this can be automated and that a group of players, no matter the guild they're from, have no right to decide the rules of the game they're playing. THAT isn't classic.

On that note. If the staff isn't getting willful cooperation from those involved, and instancing is not on the table to preserve the integrity of the game, I propose this: Forced rotations with no debate or choice as an ideal solution, and despawn the raid mobs until the debate is over and an agreement is made.

EQ was never designed to be this top heavy, and agreements like these on the outside looks despicable for everyone wanting to play all of EQ's content. It's almost like the staff hasn't the ability to control their own game. Imagine a game of Dungeons & Dragons where you, the player, could set the rules for the DM. Even in older MUDs like Diku that Trost, Smed and McQuaid based EQ's ruleset on, you couldn't do alter the rules presented to you by the 'dungeon master'.