Thoughts
 

I have been on this server off and on for a year, and during that time I have seen the firm reign of TMO unanswered by the smaller guilds. I was around during the emergence of FE and saw at their peak as they tried to rival TMO, but failed, I sadly saw them jump the gun several times at Trak attempts, if only they had waited 30 seconds- 1 minute so many times....ah the what ifs. But anywho my point being even after they came close, they dissolved this summer due to a lack of personnel.

I personally don't care about TMO's reign, people are allowed to do what they want with their time, and if they choose to spend more hours than most raiding and batphoning that is their prerogative ...but at least these guys are successful at it, a lot of the now "casual" guilds are casual because their lack of leadership lead them to getting smashed into the ground at attempting to challenge TMO. Lets be honest, if anyone raids planes at all you most likely spend 15-25 hours a week on this game, the hours close to holding a part time job, so everyone who talks shit about TMO's pixel madness, guess what, we all play this game a shit ton...I am just sick of hearing the hypocritical bickering from all the people who want a shot at high end raiding but are unwilling to do anything about it...so this is where we get to the meat of the potato.

What is the problem? The monopoly TMO has now has created a stranglehold on end game content, and if you want to compete with their gear and alt army you have to play 50 hours a week and poopsock. What happenes is no one can play Everquest 50 hours a week for longer than a month without A-living in a basement or B-being a trust fund baby. So guess what, TMO wins everytime because of their influx of players. You can only raid hate and fear so long before people get really sick of it, every month a couple of people from the lesser guilds decide to join TMO, after having had their fill from straddling the line of mediocrity that is hate,sky,fear. Are there exceptions? Sure, Divinity has done this for a long time still remaining in tact, A-Team is now doing it which i think is badass(go solo artist) but at the same time I first hand know players who left Divinity for TMO, and A-team tries to buy VP loots from TMO for outrageous prices.(so i heard anyway shrug). Everyone is slowly losing members every month or so and feeding the monster that they are throwing stones at...I don't get it...

What to do? It's simple...merge or nothing is ever going to happen. Who needs to and is it more than one guild? I don't know. I would love to see TMO have competition though, and at this point I think they would welcome it, someone just needs to get the balls to start talking. It's just a numbers issue, don't know how many times i have been in Trak lair and watched people engage Trak before TMO and fail, so add another 10-20 people to those attempts, sure it may be zerging, but who gives a fuck, it doesn't matter if its 20 highly skilled players completing a task or 40, achieve your goal. Yes i know the problems of guilds merging, personalities, etc, and everyone is not going to be best friends with everyone...and that's ok...guess what you can still heal a player or click a dragon and nuke it...hard game right? Even if people just functioned under a banner in two different factions...it could work...and someone could finally change things on this server. I hope someone takes this and runs with it, if anyone does ill be in line to join, as im sure would a lot of others.

And please this post was made to rile up people under one banner, don't respond with bullshit blind hate, im just saying, lets give them some competition in a way we wont have to sacrifice paying a heavy tax on our RL for pixels.

Those that want to "be like TMO" have left their guilds to join TMO.

What you seem to not realize is the majority of people don't want to get woken up at 3am to kill dragons, or leave dinner with the family, or whatever other real life shit they have going on.

We can only wait and hope for velious really.

Exactly this. If I wanted to be like TMO, I would have joined TMO.

Take this to RnF.

It's not hard to get in a zerg guild:
1) be level 60
2) be available at all hours

Join red. The PvP makes the game more fun and there are fewer players competing for all the lewtz.

The laws of scarcity dictate that a rival force to TMO will rise again. TMO thrives because of competent leaders. The guild has not been without its struggles at times, but thus far has overcome. The leaders see issues and correct them.

One "weakness" of TMO is that with its size it can take a while to get a dream item. A smaller, dedicated, and well-organized guild could equip its characters faster. This in turn would start to rob TMO of good recruits. But to overcome TMO's size they would have to be hella-dedicated.

Its probably just easier to join TMO or wait until Velious.

That is not true.

TMO doesn't require you to wake up at 3AM. If you want to wake up at 3AM to kill a dragon you have that option with TMO... plenty of people I know attend what they can because they have jobs, families, etc. That is how EQ works though, on live we had to do the same thing otherwise the HK guilds would snipe shit in the middle of the night.

The argument that raiding with TMO is more time intensive than raiding with different guilds is completely false. Just as the OP said, in Rapture we spend 2-3 hours every Monday night in sky, 2-3 hours clearing hate, 2-3 hours clearing fear so that is easily 6+ hours a week 'raiding'. If you join TMO and attend nothing except trakanon while waiting for VP key you might spend all of 30 minutes a week raiding assuming you aren't getting trained/griefed when engaging.

The big difference between TMO and other guilds is that TMO has a steady stream of players who want to play the hardcore 24/7 play style so TMO has a mechanic to appease & reward them: Poopsock raid targets. You track targets, you get DKP faster than those that only show up for kills. Other guilds seem to be adamantly against the idea of poopsocking and so they make up all these bullshit statements like "oh TMO makes you raid 24/7, I have a life so I can't do that." No, TMO has a handful of people who "raid" 24/7 and then an extensive list of people who they can ask to log on when a target spawns. You don't see them log 300 people online every time Trak pops, you see them log in maybe 3 groups.

The thing I don't like about TMO is that you are just raider_0192 in a giant machine... Like a lot of people here I did the big guild thing and it is fun, but I also enjoy being in a smaller guild where I know everyone and everyone knows me.

This all will probably change for a while when velious comes out and TMO will have to invest some time teaching the masses of members the new encounters but eventually it will probably be more or less the same. Camp yourself at a target, log in when it spawns, kill it, log out (or move to next target to log out).

That is not true. The only players in the guild who might be "unknowns" are the ones who make no effort to be known. I would guess less than 5% of our guild is unknowns and that seems over-estimated.

... All so interesting... I usually pity TMO. Isn't it boring at the top? I play this game to be challenged -- when it stops being challenging I will stop playing.

Hey now, let me sit and say other people's made up reasons are dumb while having my own made up dumb reason!

Geeze. =P

!!!!NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!