Heh, to me that's low hanging fruit: the message seems pretty clearly to be "play by the rules."

Also, I don't think it gets missed by everyone: 40 days off tends to make people pay attention to messages.

I'm reading what you're saying Loramin and I agree. It seems that there is either a lack of creativity or lack of willingness to adapt. You're right on /cheer

Half of the raid bans are from stalling and breaking raid agreements, those are 100% avoidable, lol. Trains get a little trickier though because it's harder to tell whether it was an accident or not. The players are the ones that choose to pull tov mobs to the entrance though and by doing so take a risk of training people and eating bans. Unfortunately the people on this server are so pixel crazed that they constantly come up with the most effective way to get mobs as fast as possible in order to beat the competition. So instead of raiding tov the way it was supposed to be done, they use the train tactic, which makes killing mobs much faster and convenient but also much easier to break a rule. So yes, there are ways to easily avoid breaking rules, but it would require everyone to change how they've been doing these encounters.

At any rate, it's good to see the days of a 5 day bans between windows is gone.

Omg

I've never raided with the A/A's, so I can't speak to what happens in NTOV, but I can tell you that even for the casual raiding guilds this can still be a problem, and you can't just simplify it down to "play by the rules". I'll give you an example of a situation we encountered when I was an officer in Paradox.

We were in Fear, contesting golem pops with another guild who will not be mentioned because the drama isn't needed. They made the FTE on the golem, but their puller got turned around, and pulled it into our camp thinking it was his. We were on the same wall, but not all that close to each other. Not even in los. Neither group had intentionally positioned themselves to be a problem for the other. The golem began rampaging through our ranks, and we killed it rather than let it wipe us.

This was a situation where mistakes were clearly made on both sides. But nothing was done intentionally, and there weren't a lot of options available. The puller's only option was Don't Make a Mistake - you've already agreed that's not exactly a viable option.

Our raid force's only option was Let The Mob Wipe Us. Well, in the heat of the moment that's just not something that's easy to do, especially when no one is sure of what's happening, where this mob came from, or why it's suddenly killing us.

So mistakes were made on both sides. Luckily, neither guild wanted a suspension over one golem, and we were able to work it out. But a suspension is what would likely have happened had it gone to GM resolution, and it wouldn't have been because of bad leadership choices, or because people were trying to get away with breaking the rules.

Hard to play by the rules when the rules are arbitrary and nebulous, and the staff holds grudges.

it is no small feat of Cosmic Humor that A/A and AA are so similar in population