Raiding in P1999 is nothing like raiding in classic.

[Morgander]

If you're reading this, my guess is that the title of this thread had captured your attention.

Now I've played on P1999 for several years now, on multiple characters in multiple guilds. Each one has been a raiding guild. I've dabbled with guilds such as Dark Ascension and The Mystical Order, just to name a few, and every guild I've been apart of has been first and foremost, a raiding guild.

Through these experiences I've come to notice that the way you're forced to go about raiding on P1999, well, it just isn't very much fun.

It's not very much fun because there's such thing here as fair competition. Imagine if you would, a game of chess where black has the official starting pieces: 1 king, 1 queen, 2 rooks, 2 bishops, 2 knights, and 8 pawns.

Now imagine you're black, and you're playing the game against white, who's starting pieces are: 1 king, 7 queens, and 8 pawns.

Just doesn't sound like equality.

Sure, if you've two basketball teams on the court, one's bound to have superior players, better strategies, harder training regiments, etc., but they're both going to sport 5 players, and each side of the court's got the same measurements, and both teams still abide by all the same rules and undergo the same penalties.

What I'm getting at here is to reinforce the idea that this whole "competitive" aspect of P1999 raiding is an illusion. From my experience, there seems to be a clear outcry to continue to focus on this same-old competitive aspect of raiding from the more efficient raid guilds. And why not? This is of course directly in their best interests. Why share when you can take more than the other guy?

There seems to be a second group of raiders who feel so vehemently toward a given guild(s), that the mere idea of not having the opportunity to take something from these most hated groups, simply boils them up from the very soul outward.

And that's about it. You've got the group who wants nothing to change because they're already getting theirs, and you have the group who may or may not be getting much, but what they're getting keeps them in favor of this same competitive system because when they do get some, they relish in the idea of imaginary bragging rights against the group(s) they hate so avidly.

If you don't believe me you can just run a quick scan across the forums at the myriad of flames from guild to guild. You've got people from TMO blatantly bashing other guilds, calling them names, ridiculing them, and frankly, being very unsportsmanlike for a very competitive, sport-like endeavor. It's not TMO I'm talking about though, nor are they the focus nor major culprit of this topic. It's all the guilds. You've got guilds hating one another, telling lies about each others members, blowing up in public channels, across voice software, all over the forums... The list continues.

So what's the damned point? Well, the point is, why are we still accepting this archaic outlook on this server? How is it fun to log out next to a raid target, leave your guilds common voice-chat program open, awaiting the call, only to log on, play the game for a grand total of maybe 5-15 minutes, then move your character(s) to another target or targets, then rinse and repeat the process?

Whatever happened to actually logging in and playing the game? When did Everquest raiding mean you've got to have multiple max level characters just to stay logged in?

It's not just about who gets the most or who gets the least. It's a culmination of principles and what's most positive for the community.

I for one would implore the server administrators to take another look at the state of affairs on this server regarding raiding. We can do better than this. We can do better than forcing the staff to come up with a slew of seriously ridiculous, arbitrary rulesets to safeguard an illusionary form of competition between a select few guilds and a large minority of the playerbase.

Everquest wasn't like this. Not on any server I'd played on, nor the server in which I was a guide.

I for one hear more disdain, irritation, and sheer flagrant hatred come from the current system than I do positives on how things are running.

Do we want better? Do the players on this server deserve better? Can't we do better than this?

I think we can.