"Competition", "Skill", Cognitive Dissonance, and You.

[FungusTrooper]

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

This is the kind of guy that tries to hang around on the airplane after landing so he can give the pilot tips.

After [/i]landing[/i]? He waits in the airport, he doesn't actually get on a plane. Gross.

[Ravager]

Many jimmies rustled by cold truth.

[Bboboo]

Fun fact, May is mental health awareness month.

[Vormotus]

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

If you want "us" to acknowledge that raiding/playing on p99 is a mental disorder i think we're all very aware of this thank you very much. I think we actually embrace it flamboyantly.

Ahhhh this is a superb answer [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

regardless of the low hanging fruit bait op posted, on another line of thought , one of the things I really enjoy of classic everquest raiders, players and communities is this amazing frankness.

What others seem to misconstrue as allegorical concepts I find simply to be honest frankness.

Elfsim Pixel Simulator is a wonderful phrase, full of flavor and delights.

The new counter culture is indeed one of responsibility, and this starts with being honest [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.].

A hug to you and all of the other awesome p99ers from the far shores of the isthmus [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Darkatar]

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

If I went on a my little pony website and said "I've never played with a my little pony in my life, but you're all wrong with your theories about why certain ponies have dessert-related names, allow me to share the correct theory with you ..."

... well, I'd kill myself in shame.

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[FoxwoodEQ]

Man this is RNF, home of debates of the highest quality. Find some place else to talk about WoW.

[Speedi]

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

Never played on P99, but I do occasionally lurk the forums as I find RnF very entertaining. I just wanted to address a few things that I've noticed over the years and hopefully get some introspection going in the twisted maze that is the hardcore raider of the Velious expansion in 2018.

I see the words competition and skill thrown out a lot around these forums, especially when it comes to from what I understand to be the two top raid guilds, Aftermath and Awakened. I am here to make the argument that neither guilds, or anyone who raids in EverQuest for that matter is particularly skilled at all.

However before I do that, I'd like to first touch on the "competition" of the raid scene here. My understanding is that the first person on the aggro list of a raid mob triggers a zonewide "FTE" message. Obviously none of the content on this server is instanced. That, combined with these FTE messages leads me to believe that the competition most of you guys are talking about is who can login to a parked character and claim a raid mob first. When I was a teenager I enjoyed cockblocking other guilds and feeling good about myself knowing that they would never be as "good" as I was. But then I realized, if each party doesn't have equal opportunity to engage in the content, is there really any competition?

With that out of the way I'd like to get down to the meat of this argument and that would be the skill part. I think this really boils down to two things. How well you can play your character, and how well you can traverse each raid encounter and the specific mechanics of each boss. Playing your character in classic EQ basically boils down to pressing a couple buttons here and there. Do you press your backstab button as a rogue with such passion that it makes you better than someone else? Boss mechanics in EQ means running a ranger into a DT mob and having 10 or so clerics press one button every so often.

While all of you like to talk about how carebear WoW is, and I tend to agree that most things in the game are compared to classic EQ, the raiding scene in that game is definitely not. A fight like 100+ man AoW, vs a fight like Heroic 25m Lich King really outlines these differences. The Lich King, and pretty much any Mythic encounter of recent expansions, had/have multiple abilities that gave one person the ability to wipe your raid instantly. I cant think of anything like that in EQ short of somebody training something into the raid. Now I know that the average RnF'er on this forums has the attention span of a goldfish so I'm going to ask a few questions directed towards the members of these two guilds specifically and anyone else who is in the cutting edge competitive hardcore super serious raid scene that is Velious in 2018.

1. Do you, in good conscience, feel like you are skilled when you are killing ~20 year old raid mobs with an insane amount of players?
2. Do you feel like there is real competition on P99?
3. Given that WoW is generally considered easier than Classic EQ, do you think that AM/AW could compete in a raid scene that everybody has an equal shot, and statistics on individual performance can be looked up for literally anything?

It has taken me about 7 years to ask these hard hitting questions so I expect some Shakespeare quality answers. Looking forward to it.

1. No
2. Yes and no

Yes, when it comes to who can log on the required number of toons the fastest and work together to kill X target the quickest.

No, when it comes to true difficulty. The game has been out so long and all encounters have been done many times before by many different people.

3. Some players in both guilds you mentioned could make the adjustment, and some couldn’t.

WoW is considered easier than EQ for one the ease of leveling to max level and also because of its marketing, some call it pay to win. But I would be willing to bet most guilds on p99 could kill most raid targets, what makes raiding on p99 different is because the amount of time a guild has to invest to get a shot a target.

With that said I understand where you’re coming from. Heroic encounters (now mythic I think?) on WoW is much tougher than classic EQ. What makes classic EQ stand out (and IMO better) is real players in a true simulated world vs instanced content where you can just restart the instance and keep going again and again till you win.

Keep in mind this is coming from a former WoW raider/PvPer (during WotLK expansion as well) and former p99 raider.

[solleks]

How can you be mad about something you don't care about so much. Very cool

[Wonkie]

right or wrong op is still a big weirdo [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Raev]

OP, I congratulate you on obtaining a truly epic level of autism. A child of three would realize this thread would backfire.