Sirken's proposal

[Galelor]

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

"there are tons of MMOs with instanced raids and triggered bosses, EQ is not one of those games. not having instances or triggered bosses was one of the things that set Classic EQ apart from all the crap games that exist today. i know that the staff doesn't want a rotation, and would prefer to see racing/competing for the targets."

Sirken the Great

I played live up until 07ish. EQ IS one of those games in the literal sense from LDoN forward (they even went back and instances PoTime when OoW was released...) and in the metaphorical sense since go live. Once competition became intense enough, (not even close to as bad as what happens on p99,) Sony understood that they needed to instance raid zones so everyone capable of killing x raid content could get a shot at it.

During the classic days there were metaphorical versions of instancing because there were many servers and each server only had 1-3 guilds capable of killing raid mobs. When comparing classic competitive raiding to p99s competitive raiding, multiple servers was a version of instancing! In classic, most servers didn't have all raid mobs dead the second they spawned. The high level goal of getting to mobs quickly was to get to mobs before they ended up on euro time (there were obviously races to spawns, but nothing like we see here.)

Guilds had a 'raid start time' not a bat phone... (Do you remember being docked DKP because you were late for raid start times? Do you remember PUGing dragons? I do. They weren't even called PUGs then, they were 'open raids' and sometimes they were scheduled days ahead of time on the forums...) If there was too much competition on 1 server, guilds literally switched servers. There isn't really that option here...

The point is, there was less competition on live because of the vastly smaller amounts of max level characters, no bat phone/vent (for the most part), the number of raid guilds per server was a fraction of what it is here, and the fact that there were tons of servers to choose from.

p99 is horribly overburdened at level 60. It is like 5 or 7 classic servers worth of raid guilds all jammed into one server. No one is going to be happy with the results of a raid agreement, if there is one, because no guild is going to get enough raid mobs. When looking at what we have here currently, or what could possibly be agreed to in some kind of sever wide guild agreement, trying to compare this raid community to the classic raid experience is laughable at best.

The only way to keep only 1 server running, and allow even a remotely classic experience in the raid scene, is to set up some sort of instancing (or partial instancing) to alleviate some of the congestion of having so many high level guilds on 1 server.

I'd also like to add that I personally don't believe Velious is going to solve this particular problem. High value targets with top end gear are still going to be kept perma down (NToV/AoW/ST/ETC.)