New Tracker Rule
 

During the CT encounter yesterday BDA was racing against the combined forces of Azure Guard, Omni, and Europa. During the encounter it was found that a member of that alliance logged in at the north wall of Fear to assist in the encounter as a scout of sorts. According to Nemce of Azure Guard this was a strategy that was legitimized by Sirken and did not DQ their successful attempt.

According to the ruling they logged out their two trackers, and then had their additional tracker log in at nwall. It would seem to me that this would violate the rule of not camping too close to a raid target in addition to the two tracker rule, but I guess it's fine.

With this as a baseline ruling I guess it's fine to log forces at the nwall, or maybe it's ok to log a few extra clerics as additional trackers at VS as well. Just thought I'd let everyone know the new interpretation of this rule so every guild can adjust their raid strategy accordingly.

Welcome to the new Class R Chest.....

You do understand that what Chest is seeking is clarification, because this strat is new and if it's going to be upheld, then it opens a can of worms on all sorts of encounters, right?

Nothing wrong with seeking clarification and ensuring we're all playing with the same set of rules/understanding in place.

Bingo. I'd argue that camping at nwall is definitely too close to CT being that you can visually spot him from that location, and I'd also argue that he's not really a tracker being that the usual location of trackers is up on the bell towers or TT ruins. This ruling would open the door for camping out additional characters at places to assist in kills that circumvent the spirit of the rules, such as logging your coth mages to log into additonal clerics/dps on poop mountain, or your bards in Fear to set up directly at nwall, or a double invised character in Inny's room to pull him down after someone else takes the DT/FTE.

Trackers are there to track, the only exception is currently VS or coth mages.

The purpose of this lower level druid swapping in as a tracker for the trackers on the belltower, was to do just that. His purpose was to get a view of whoever was kiting from bda so our kiters could come in and bracer your kiters.

The argument that could be made is the proximity of the tracker. The rule Sirken stated to us was (found here at the bottom) that "To encourage competitive racing, guilds may not camp players out in the vicinity of raid targets." The word vicinity is an ambiguous term that is defined by the qualifying statement before it... "To encourage competitive racing." Meaning, our druid tracker that swapped in was not at all within FTE range of CT and in no way personally assisted (such as call of the hero) in competitively racing for FTE. The belltower is an arbitrary location that has never caused anyone trouble, so we all use it. As Sirken has stated, they do not intend to define exact locations of acceptable tracking.

We did not violate the rule: "Guilds may not have any more than two representatives present at a raid spawn location." (also found here )


So, as you think about whether or not to add clerics that are tracking to an encounter and want to use this example for a benchmark, please be aware of the specifics. I also recommend getting /who logs as soon as trackers log out and when your swapped trackers log in.

Except the agreed upon rules for the planes have always been that you zone your raid force in, you don't camp them out. There was an incident like this a month or two back with Taken where they had a cleric just log in at the entrance for a maestro. Wasn't a tracker or an a scout, just another character to log into to assist in the kill.

BDA was popped after day 1 of the new raid rules being that we were "too close" to Trakanon (the exit shrooms) so instead of hiding behind this ambiguous rule that you got the benefit of let's define the appropriate places a character can be camped out for a raid target. I'm willing to bet that that nwall of fear shouldn't be an acceptable answer.

None of this is in the spirit of the rules whatsoever.

I agree with Chest here that the North Wall is not a place for us to camp out our raid forces.

I dont have the full grasp of what all went down with this particular CT and how CSG's strat played out to benefit them - but I would really hope this doesnt open the door for entire raid forces to be parked inside of Fearplane before CT window opens

That would ruin a lot of fun this encounter provides and make it pretty boring actually.

This would never set any kind of precedent like that. The only benefit this could do, if you follow the same precedent, is get you a character to watch the other team's kiter. In retrospect, a monk would be a better person. However, he had nothing to do with the kite of mobs or getting/maintaining FTE. (and with draco up and no class C to kill him, it was too chaotic to do any good anyway, so it had no effect on this fight whatsoever).

CT popped. Arconis and Troubledour zone into Fear to start the usual kite, Arconis wheels around firewall to see Nuffwin of Azure Guard at nwall, of course there's no way he beat the bards to that spot so he obviously logged in. We down Draco and their alliance took advantage of our kite and manage to get CT.

I inquire about the validity of having additional characters logged at nwall in addition to their trackers that track from the safety of the belltower locations. Apparently Sirken confirmed that it was fine for Nuffwin to log in from that spot because the two trackers on the bell tower had logged out.

If Nuffwin's purpose was to call out kiters couldn't have their trackers done so, it's always the first people who zone in, there's no misdirection. This opens the door for anyone to log characters at all kinds of locations under the guise of "trackers"

This shouldn't be ok.

That's not necessarily true. If Class C ran in to get the kite for draco how do you determine who has the kite on the firewall? The bard from BDA doesn't need to be the first one in if the entrance is safe, you may send in a monk first to get you info on who is kiting for draco so your bard can pick it up. There are generally multiple kites going. One answer is to try and bind sight from original trackers, but that requires that you have the person on the bell tower (stationary) click the kiter and get the bind sight on a mob following closely to him and that's still sketchy.

If you just have someone watching from the field you can tell your guild's bards who it is and they can track that player to bracer them.

And again, he did not have any real effect in this particular outcome anyway, because draco was a mess.