Swung by the forums today and I noticed that people are starting to get tired of spending their entire lives crawling NTOV, so I thought I'd post this idea again. I continue to believe its the best way to balance classic, competition, and some fun.
- Raid mobs are divided into tiers. For sake of argument, let's have Tier1: Loot Pinatas (Tunare, AOW, Dozekar), Tier2: NTOV (Eashen through Vulak), Tier3: Velious Dragons (Klandicar, Yelinak, LTK, etc), Tier 4, 5, etc down to Tier 27: Maestro of Rancor
- 6 earthquakes per month. No normal spawns. Repops are announced in advance.
- Each guild picks a start time and is scored based on their time to kill every target in their tier. If a guild is up for multiple tiers, they still only get one start time, so they are likely to have a bad score on one of them.
- Each cycle lasts as many earthquakes as guilds signed up in the most crowded tier. Guilds are slotted in by their completion time.
- At the end of every cycle, the fastest guild is promoted and the slowest guild is demoted from each tier, unless the slowest guild avoided demotion in a higher tier. Promotion overrides demotion.
- If guilds fail to kill their targets within 24 hours, they are demoted from that tier and all higher tiers and cannot repromote for 1 penalty round.
- All NPCs must be killed more or less on their spawn points, not the zone in.
- Guilds can enter the system at some nonzero tier by killing Derakor the Vindicator rather than having to grind their way up through Kunark dragon tiers for months on end. So most of Kunark would be effectively rotated . . . if anyone cares.
I think this system has some interesting outcomes:
- No free pixels. If Aftermath clears Plane of Growth faster than Awakened and demotes them to Tier 2, they can keep them (and everyone else) out of Tier 1 forever by clearing NTOV fastest. You can't promote just because you can clear the content.
- At the same time slot stacking makes it difficult for guilds to completely monopolize content, e.g. if Tier3 is Aftermath/Awakened/CSG but Tier2 is Aftermath/Awakened/Aftermath, then both A/A will have to make tough choices on which tier to clear; if it takes them 3 hours to clear the Velious dragons and 5 more hours for NTOV, their official NTOV time will be 8 hours.
- Tons of opportunities for strategy: how do you set up your groups and communication to clear most efficiently? Do you split your forces east and west in NTOV? Do you collude with other guilds to deny promotion chances when your rotation slots line up?
- This means that players compete by actually playing EverQuest better and more efficiently rather than poopsocking harder and at more inconvenient times.
- Tier sizes don't bloat because super small guilds will not be able to match the clear times of larger guilds, and thus won't ever promote.
- No mechanics changes required. It's classic!
That being said, have you guys not noticed that this is a really exciting time to be, like, alive and outside?