P99 Sky Agreement - why its bad for the server
 

What if your a raid guild who wants to do sky, but raids in the PM and not currently holding one of those PM slots?

As it stands now, if you're in a PM raid guild that is not the following: Paradigm Shift, Clue, Blood Guard, Azure Guard, Anonymous, The Second Sons, Kittens Who Say Meow or Hydra Alliance and you hold a standard 8am-5pm job you are never going to be able to raid sky on your own as a guild function.

Not to mention, if you're one of the unfortunate classes (ranger, monk, enc, mage, paladin) that have epic items in this zone you will now have to leave your guild and join one of the above if you don't want to pay a ridiculous MQ price, or hope your guild is friends with one of the above and hope the host guild does not have a player that already needs the item.

There have definitely never been any epic bottlenecks on this server. These poor, poor people!

What's your alternative? The reason sky is rotated is because there are limited keys and certain mobs need to be killed in certain orders/times, and ideally people corpse keys to raid the same day next week so you can have more guildies attend. Do you really want to race people for kills on islands and key like 8 people and then no one can proceed to next island?

I see your concern, but complaining without providing a viable alternative isn't constructive.

Also
1) Enchanter epic anyone can port up and loot the item off the table.
2) Paladin you can request from a guild to accommodate letting you pop the dude.
3) Ranger item likely rots a lot, you can always ask the guilds for an officer and discuss.
4) Monk epic you can buy the keys off of Key Master, and do it whenever. People sell Demon Fang MQs regularly that don't have sky slots, this shows it's possible.

Mage/Necro are the 2 valid points since it requires an actual sky quest. Provide a viable alternative if you want a good discussion, otherwise this is just gonna end up in RnF.

Also, some of those guilds may not have their sky slots for too much longer. I see one or two guild names that are slowly shrinking.

I imagine if you approached any one of those 8 guilds’ leadership indicating you are working on Epic Piece X, and would like to join them for their slot in the foreseeable future while you work on it, you could come to a fair and equitable agreement about how that would be handled. None of those guilds is particularly interested in bottlenecking people’s epic pieces, and if you are contributing, I expect they would not mind letting you tag along and work on those pieces on a fair basis with their membership.

I think when people are frustrated they can have a bit of tunnel vision. OP you're looking at this purely from the point of view, as you said, of someone in:

But you have to understand a few basic facts:

1) the Plane of Sky has to be organized somehow: without a rotation even fewer people will get their epic parts, haste belts, etc., because there will literally be less of them being added to the server

2) it's very difficult to get fourteen guilds/alliances to agree on anything

3) Classic EQ (especially the P99 version) is a bitch. Just as a for instance, I had to farm 130k to buy Torpor (it was more expensive at the time). Would I have preferred to just win a copy in a raid? Of course! I naively joined my guild thinking that was a possibility. But when I learned the reality (that non one wins Torpor on raids) I did something I very much didn't want to do (farm 130k), and while it took awhile I eventually got what I wanted.

So, that's just the reality of Project 1999: all scarce popular resources are hard to get, and as a result often require doing things you don't want to do. Furthermore, when Sky is involved you have to contend with the fact that a fragile agreement was reached between fourteen different groups, and that agreement is essential for ensuring the most possible epic parts/haste belts/Shaman FD rings, etc.

But, my point in saying all that is not to end with "so suck it up." My point is, if you want to change things, you have to first understand why things are the way they are, and then you have to propose something better. And whatever you propose has to look better to everyone (or at least most people) ...

... not just the people in the one guild that was late to the party. Because even in the current system you do have options (pay for epics, join a Sky guild on their raid, get your guild to form an alliance with an existing Sky guild, etc.) that don't involve leaving your guild. So you have to do more than just say "hey EQ is hard for me and it'd be less hard if things changed", you have to suggest how the whole system could be change to be better for everyone. Not because "it's the right thing to do", but because you won't succeed in changing things otherwise.

If you can do that I think you'll have much more success.

Epics are a big part of the complaint, but not the entire complaint. There are many more raid guilds, than there are slots on this list. Furthermore, not all raid guilds were consulted when this list was made.

Forced rotations, for the most part, are non-classic as well. As for 'showing up late to the party and wants things easier' really is laughable, not to turn this into rants and flames, but the two biggest supporters to post in here so far are members of guilds holding PM slots. Coincidence? not likely.

5/8 slots you discussed were apparently updated or selected on in the past 6 months. There are also currently 3 open slots. Did your guild take advantage of those opportunities and express interest in a Sky slot?

I haven’t been around here that long, but again, I bet that if you and your guild had a conversation with another guild’s leadership in a slot you would like to raid in, you could find an arrangement that works. I understand Clue has not been going up to sky every week recently - maybe they’d be interested in a joint raid.

Is your solution to just make it FFA?

That's the thing here, a raid guild that's capable of taking on sky shouldn't have to ask permission to raid in a zone that's uncontested in the first place. This very situation actually resulted in a guild getting raid banned recently when clue found out Untz Factory had gone up into sky during their slot when clue had zero intentions of going up that day. Things like this shouldn't be happening, and guild's shouldnt be able to sit on slots indefinitely from a player made agreement that the GM's decided to make law that alienates a large part of the population on this server from the various epics, and item quests sky has to offer anyone or any guild who is capable of going up there and taking on the challenge.

I mean yeah, I get it. Those of you who were in this player made agreement that the GM's made law are now able to capitalize on 100% and the greed of the few will probably outweigh the needs of many. But really its a selfish outlook when there is other guilds out there that should have a chance, just like any other target on this server.