ATTN: All Raiding Guilds

[bktroost]

There have been a lot of words... and I've not seen server rule changed by sirken regarding this race.

So I'm going to have my few people who can cast scale hang out and my one person watching tormax show up and if we tag a giant we tag a giant. I don't care enough to have a jury decide for me the pros and cons of sow v.s. scale as it pertains to 50 clickies and strat a-z as seen in VP or NToV....

My gosh guys. Why is everquest so hard?

[Culkasi]

What Nemce said - can we for once not try to rules lawyer the shit out of something that is supposed to make our lives a little bit easier?
If you think what you are planning to do might by dodgy, newsflash; don't do it. We are trying to create a better environment, try to help with that, not worry about how you get these specific Statue/KT pixels.

Now, back to the important part about this, the meeting. I will attend, I hope many of the existing raid guilds and maybe even some up and coming ones will as well, and we can have a constrcutive chat about how to make the raid scene more inclusive and less about who can get closest to the edge of the law without stepping over the line.

[Daldaen]

The problem is without clearly defined rules all of this stuff will be on the table. Some of it may be so dumb that you may find that in an attempt to be inclusive and not rule lawyering, the guilds you are hoping to include are turned off because they cannot or refuse to stoop to the levels other guilds will with gimmicky clickies, tricks and mechanics.

Dodgy strategies win mobs. See CotHing to a raid mob and instantly gating. That would be dead tomorrow if Sirken said it was not okay for all raid targets. But outside of GM intervention things like this simply will not change.

We will see how Statue and King Tormax shake out tomorrow/Sunday. For the time being it shouldn't be too gimmicky because scale prevents stupid clickies.

We've all been posting for over a year a way to make the raid scene more inclusive. Reduced variance and far more frequent sim repops to better simulate classic. Unfortunately the keys to both of those changes are in Rogean's possession only.

[Pint]

Everyone wants clearly defined server rules. The problem is that sirken, the guy who makes the rules, does not play everquest and does not have first hand experience with raiding here. He is going to give us the best rules he can but if you guys don't stop being dense and start helping to lay the ground work for those rules then you are going to end up getting the short end of this deal.

Nothing about this is hard, you take 5 minutes to think about these very basic concepts and you decide what is and isn't good for your people in the long term. Youre thinking about 1 tormax, the rest of us are planning for the next 6 months for tormax. Dont under think this bc you feel like somehow negotiating with your peers is beneath you. That attitude is what has lead to every other rule change and as history has proven time and time again, it does not work in the long term and it is particularly harsh on the casual guilds.

Shadowstep should obviously be illegal. I'm not really seeing the advantage of sow expect maybe that short cut at hub to get to statue? What would solve all of this and be immensely amusing to me is no run speed buffs at all. I do see the advantage of scale from your angle though and I think it has merit. Its just a balance between bind sight classes having a 1-2 second advantage off the line or needing another person to show up every hour, which is obviously not something that aftermath wouldn't be able to manage.

[Kileras]

Everyone is tracking the darn thing anyway, why not just make it sow only and no levi, and put a zone wide message in when it spawns. If you are honestly looking to cut down on the manpower and stupidity of tracking on some of these targets then just remove the extra body that needs to be committed for 16 hours sitting there face tracking. Removes the bind sight shenanigans and the body time commitment.

Not against face tracking but face tracking 16 hour windows just to lose because you don't have a bind sight class ( i suppose spirit of scale also fixes this ) seems pretty lame.

Looking forward to the discussion and I hope something good comes out of it for everyone involved.

[Daldaen]

Honestly...

Every single guild in this forum, and those who don't even have access yet because they are new can get behind a single universal truth.

Getting 3-5 Simulated Repops a month would drastically improve the raid situation on this server.

When the entire server shakes, and every mob is up, guilds can mostly go through and do a lot of their own things. If you want to rush to King Tormax and clear his guards and then pull him, you can. Other guilds may be occupied with Dozekar or Eashen or Cazic Thule.

Guilds who previously had no shot at a Trakanon, now can because he will be left up.

Basically every guild is allowed to take a step up because mobs that are typically 2nd/3rd tier targets for the neckbeards guilds now will be left alone for an hour or two. Likewise guilds that are currently dominating VP may move to Velious. Guilds that are very casual may be able to try their hand at Nagafen or Vox or Faydedar. Etc.

This is the one thing I think, without fail, that every guild can get behind. Why can we not have the sim repop key given to Sirken or Braknar or Llandris so that we can see them in a higher frequency (which I will again mention, is very classic because of how frequent live patches and server instability was)?

At least 1 European hour repop a month and at least 2 American hour repops a month, with 1-2 on weekends or random hours spread through the month I think would provide the most coverage that would be fair proportionally to the servers population.

[arsenalpow]

It's not going to be on the table. We all want less variance and simulated repops and fixed resist tables but that requires dev involvement and they are likely working on other stuff.

We have 16 hours of variance, an absurd raid scene, and dated raid rules. If Detoxx is serious when he's saying its no longer just about him or Awakened and it's about the health of the raid scene, then maybe something relevant will come from this summit.

[Daldaen]

There have been how many raid discussions with GMs in the life of the past two years Chest? One, maybe Two?

I think it should be brought up that Simulated Repops and possibly reduced variance are huge pluses that everyone could get behind that would reduce petitions. Yes, it requires some code changing, but Rogean was able to add spam filtering just to deal with Greengrocer, I'm sure he could swing some automated sim repops if Sirken is behind the idea.

[arsenalpow]

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

There have been how many raid discussions with GMs in the life of the past two years Chest? One, maybe Two?

I think it should be brought up that Simulated Repops and possibly reduced variance are huge pluses that everyone could get behind that would reduce petitions. Yes, it requires some code changing, but Rogean was able to add spam filtering just to deal with Greengrocer, I'm sure he could swing some automated sim repops if Sirken is behind the idea.

I'm not a huge fan of 16 hours of variance, but I understand why it's a fair number. It gives the Euro contingent a fair shot at seeing something pop during their hours regardless of when the window opens. Shorter windows mean if a mob is localized around the US primetime it will stay that way unless it goes late over and over and over.

The staff always says the same thing, work it out amongst yourselves. They've never really strayed from that message, but since 2009 nothing has ever been worked out. The closest things we've ever had to cooperation is the Ragefire list, the skyday rotation, and the Class R rotation, and all of those had their problems at varying points.

Would I like to kill some more ToV content? Sure. When Velious first opened Telk or Gozz would be up for a few hours, you could mobilize and get it done. We killed Eashen and Ikatiar easy peasy a couple weeks in, but like everything else in the history of p99 things got more and more hardcore and now we have the current ToV raid scene. This is the raid scene that no one really wants to participate in. You and Aftermath begrudgingly do so because it's what's required now, but it's not fun. Y'all like the loot, you like winning a race, but you don't like everything involved to get that loot. You don't like the tracking, constantly recharging, escalating tactics, and then there's the aftershow of frapsquest and lawyering and deal making.

We all play a part in this. You choose to participate, and you're forced to escalate tactics to win, there's no point in contesting if you aren't willing to match the competitions tactics right? I choose to participate in a limited fashion because I can only stomach so much of it. Others don't participate at all because they are essentially priced out.

We can all make it better, or we can continue down the destructive path we've always followed since the start of the server.

[Kileras]

frequent earthquakes means you have to be a batphone guild or you get nothing. I am not opposed to them, but just pointing out that if we quaked every weekend then even if you went for the most uncontested target, you would still need to get your guild in line with batphone/neckbeard culture to take a stab at it because if all of us larger guilds know that every mob in the game is up, many of us will just go down the list and norrath will be a safe spot in under an hour.

Anonymous would definitely benefit from frequent repops and smaller windows because we subscribe to that culture, and maybe that simply IS the raid scene culture here... but I felt it was worth pointing out that it is the spacing of the windows/lost timers ( because the lower targets aren't a priority ) that create space for smaller guilds to step up and find room.