not a single player has told me to plan on raiding

[sulious]

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

The way some people get energy from projecting their own misery on their surrounding never ceases to amaze. Add to that the way those people seem to find each other and do it in groups to multiply the effect.

Solution 1; Take the fight to them, in this case beat them at their own game.
Problem with that is you will become the very thing you hate; a greedy, cockblocking loot whore.

Solution 2; Don't bother with raiding P1999, enjoy the rest of the content solo or in a group. Dungeon crawling with big pulls will be just as fun as any Kunark raid (pre VP).
EQ raiding doesn't become serious fun until PoP!

Solution 3; Face the fact that it's been 14 years and MMO's have evolved. Let EQ stay a memory and realize that "first ever" is not the same as "best ever".

Don't bother flaming this, I wont read it and don't give a fuck anyway!

\V

so much truth in 100 words or less.

[Rooj]

I remember a Ragefire rotation on Rodcet, but I don't remember when that was.

[Highbrow]

P99 has never tried to emulate the fact that EQ had like twenty servers for the hardcores to spread out on. Raid content being completely and utterly inaccessible was not a universal feature of EQ at any point in time, you always had the option of moving to a server where the endgame hadn't been totally monopolized or where the top guild had room for you. EQ essentially had twenty times the content P99 has. The developers have never cared to acknowledge this problem and don't seem interested in fixing it. It has created a community of people who hate each other and distrust the GMs, a server where doing anything meaningful means you have to step on others and ruin it for them in order to get it to yourself. It has created a community of constant bickering, abuse, conention and rampant cheating -- everything you want to do has to be done at the expense of others.

So many players quit because they come to realize that the only way to get anything other than the leveling experience out of this server is to join a guild that expects completely unreasonable and unhealthy things of their members, and makes you shunned by the community because you're content-blocking a thousand other players. It's not the fault of the resident überguild, it's the fault of the server for failing to account for the fact that Everquest is not a game that functions properly with just one server that has no instancing or manual spawning of raid content.

Failure to account for this is the reason P99 has numbers in the hundreds instead of the thousands, and the conflict created by this endgame environment has been such a blemish on the server throughout its history and the cause for several good GMs quitting, not to mention probably 75% of the people who have played here. It's the #1 issue with this server and one that has been dominating the community since the very beginning, but almost nothing has been done about it. Emulator communities always consist of disproportionately high amounts of hardcore players, former raiders, and people who come with ambitions of doing all the stuff they didn't get to do back in the day. This has to be accounted for or the server suffers severely, as P99 always has. It's only because there has been no classic EQ alternative of reasonable quality that P99 even has numbers in the higher hundreds.

There's not enough content on an EQ server for more than one, maybe one and a half serious raid guilds. Instead, EQ had its twenty servers so that there generally was enough total raid content for everybody who wanted to raid. Maybe you had to reroll elsewhere if your current server had a hardcore poopsocking guild, but you had that option. There's no alternative on P99, even if you were to "beat" the top guild then there's still only enough content for a certain amount of players. You've just shifted the hierarchy around at best and saddled others with the issue of no available endgame content. This has actually happened a few times here.

It's holding P99 back from being awesome, and it has cost the server many individuals who would have improved it.

[Rhambuk]

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

It's holding P99 back from being awesome, and it has cost the server many individuals who would have improved it.

great post, solid points, but what do you expect to be done? make 10 server copies of p99 for people to move around between. Each guild would have its own server there simply arent enough people for multiple servers.

Too many for 1 server, not enough for multiple. That's been the problem of p99 (imo) to many people trying to coexist on one server, but not nearly enough to open other servers else we have a bunch of near empty servers (then of course people bouncing back and forth doing nothing but griefing people on those servers).

[Faerie Blossom]

My server could beat up your server! :O

[Skope]

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

great post, solid points, but what do you expect to be done? make 10 server copies of p99 for people to move around between. Each guild would have its own server there simply arent enough people for multiple servers.

Too many for 1 server, not enough for multiple. That's been the problem of p99 (imo) to many people trying to coexist on one server, but not nearly enough to open other servers else we have a bunch of near empty servers (then of course people bouncing back and forth doing nothing but griefing people on those servers).

Coexisting isn't the issue here, at least outside of the high end raid scene. People generally get along fine, but as soon as you put dragon loot between them they go apeshit.

You can keep things calm provided you're willing to stomp down on behavior one would consider douchey, but that just hasn't happened consistently on this server since Uthgaard. Which is kind of pathetic, really. Uthgaard, the paranoid schizo who took things to the extreme was the the only one who gave a shit.

I've mentioned this before but it keeps getting ignored: delete raid loot. If the guilds can't work it out on their own and require a babysitter then you should take their toys away. They'll quickly learn their lesson. Finding a GM with balls is an entirely different matter

[Highbrow]

The one single good thing that came out of the hilarious failure that was The Sleeper was their idea of a dynamic raid spawning system. They never actually implemented it, but the idea was sound: every qualified raid guild would get their own, like, weekly allowance of tokens with which to spawn raid mobs. This would only have to be for the actual top end raid content as people aren't destroying the server over the rights to farm planes. A token turn-in system would probably be abusable no matter how you do it, but I think something could be done with temporary alternate server shards that people can transfer to and from.

Something like this will be especially important in Velious because that expansion is all about raiding, being a non-raider during Velious is just absolute garbage. It's manageable during classic/Kunark because so much of the high-end gear can be bought, but Velious is the point where you're either in a top raid guild or you're nobody. The stuff you can do without access to ToV/ST-like content is completely worthless, you're just an unwashed plebian of no value if you can't raid during Velious. That's an expansion where being a casual player just isn't enough.

Imagine a server where there is no content except the raid bosses and their associated trash mobs, you can't go there and farm Sebilis by yourself or camp some rare spawn without competition. You can, however, transfer there to raid (and back to P99 afterwards), but only to the shard that your guild has been assigned. Nobody has access to more than one shard, and in order for a guild to qualify for a raid shard, they have to prove that they're actually a serious raid guild that deserves access to the endgame content. Hell, it might even create an environment of healthy competition for "world firsts."

This would make raiding available to enough people without compromising the rest of the game. There would be no reason to stay on the raid shards outside of actual raid sessions since there would be no other content, and there is no unfair advantage for anybody. This is the only way to accomodate a playerbase where several hundred people want to raid but can't because there isn't room. This is how you emulate the fact that EQ had twenty servers, without causing problems in the leveling and grouping scene.

[Tiggles]

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

The one single good thing that came out of the hilarious failure that was The Sleeper was their idea of a dynamic raid spawning system. They never actually implemented it, but the idea was sound: every qualified raid guild would get their own, like, weekly allowance of tokens with which to spawn raid mobs. This would only have to be for the actual top end raid content as people aren't destroying the server over the rights to farm planes. A token turn-in system would probably be abusable no matter how you do it, but I think something could be done with temporary alternate server shards that people can transfer to and from.

Something like this will be especially important in Velious because that expansion is all about raiding, being a non-raider during Velious is just absolute garbage. It's manageable during classic/Kunark because so much of the high-end gear can be bought, but Velious is the point where you're either in a top raid guild or you're nobody. The stuff you can do without access to ToV/ST-like content is completely worthless, you're just an unwashed plebian of no value if you can't raid during Velious. That's an expansion where being a casual player just isn't enough.

Imagine a server where there is no content except the raid bosses and their associated trash mobs, you can't go there and farm Sebilis by yourself or camp some rare spawn without competition. You can, however, transfer there to raid (and back to P99 afterwards), but only to the shard that your guild has been assigned. Nobody has access to more than one shard, and in order for a guild to qualify for a raid shard, they have to prove that they're actually a serious raid guild that deserves access to the endgame content

This would make raiding available to enough people without compromising the rest of the game. There would be no reason to stay on the raid shards outside of actual raid sessions since there would be no other content, and there is no unfair advantage for anybody. This is the only way to accomodate a playerbase where several hundred people want to raid but can't because there isn't room. This is how you emulate the fact that EQ had twenty servers, without causing problems in the leveling and grouping scene.

Nah

[Highbrow]

Nah

Great debate.

[falkun]

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

being a non-raider during Velious is just absolute garbage.

"Casual raids" in Velious:
Kael plate cycle
Kael arena farming
Vindi (larger raid, but 8 hr spawn)
Lodizal
EToV
Sirens Grotto
PoG clear
Fear golems (post-revamp)
Hate minis/upstairs (post-revamp)
Abandoned Kunark content
PoM
Possibly Velk and Lord Djo
WW dragons

Most of the above can be 2-grouped or less, especially with the large contingent of L55+ players on this server. While you will be far from BIS/full NToV geared, you can complete these raids/group encounters for gear better than what is available in Kunark.

Hardcore raiding definitely sees a boost in Velious, and there is TONS to do, but all tiers of raiding are improved by Velious, and factioning actually spreads people around a bit so they aren't all fighting for the same mobs.