Server History Lesson?

[JurisDictum]

Originally Posted by commongood [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

This is a really interesting read. I started playing on p99 in November or December of 2014 but it wasn't until two years later I really started raiding. As such I've mostly just heard tales of how things used to be.

Can someone shed some light onto how it used to work in terms of rotation of VP etc? It seems today like there is nothing being rotated except for the 10th ring war. What would it take to re-introduce a rotation on VP and NToV stuff? [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Basically Casuals were allowed to compete only with each other rather than against the hardcore raid guilds (but they couldn't raid except for on causal weeks). The problem was BDA was a borderline case because it was a massive guild with some raid history.

When left only to compete with casuals, BDA basically behaved exactly like TMO when facing casual guilds. Trains, petition quest, and poopsocking. Therefore it diminished any sympathy or respect for the guild until it left.

The rotation was never complete (always excluded the best stuff that we found at later, was being RMTed) and never allowed guilds to raid on their own time. The powers that be always thought it was really important to preserve "competition" -- because that's what EQ is all about (they literally said stuff like that).

But we all dealt with it. But I and many others really got disenchanted with this server once they screwed up the raiding. Back in the Golden Era, when we were taking down Rampage and breaking into NToV, everything was a kill-race. Not merely an FTE race.

Everyone had to be logged in as the Dragon was being pulled to camp and kill the dragon. Something went wrong with the pull? Drop it, the other guild gets a chance. Raid wipe? The other guild gets it.

So for guild in general, it was way more involved and fun. But the guild leadership (of both top raid guilds) was basically engaging the staff like a bunch of D.C. lobbyists to get the raid rules changed to something they thought would be an advantage to them . We eventually ended up with the crap rules we have today that hardly anyone likes. Those were a product of a few people scheming for pixiles.

Something that's hard to see now, is that we thought we were on our way to dominate the Server as 1 guild. After Rampage quit it looked possible. Over time I've come to accept that the "competition" is never going to end. It's a limbo not a competition. You can't kill all 20+ targets in the game without another raid force getting some.