[heartbrand]

Actually, your analogy is awful, because blue has an enforced mob rotation which actually ensures everyone WILL see the end game. It also had variance and multiple guilds, which meant even during TMO dominance, it wasn't 100/0 on raid mobs. People would stick it out because they knew they still had a chance @ character progression, albeit a slower one.

Everything else you write is just lol. I played in the top guild on my server on Xegony. No one had the same drive to kill shit for minimal progression that exists on this server, or blue99 for that matter. Had you told us back then on Live to log on to cock block Talendor @ 4am from the Asian guild, people would have cracked up. No one would have cared. But here, it's a matter of life or death to get that RBB for your 17th alt. It's just a different mentality that I would argue is limited to p99 which seems to attract power gamers unseen in any other MMO.

Everything else you wrote is just blah. Newsflash, the server is already circling the drain, it's a pvp server with 80 people on it prime time, that very likely might be shut off soon. No one is using sympathy to get loot, we showed up and fought for dragons. Do I think the server would be worse off if RD went away? Absolutely. Do I think the same 50 /play committed people would log? Yup. RD has no impact on Nihilum, because core Nihilum members don't care if Velious is contested, if there's PVP or not, they just want to log into Velious, slay dragons to deck out their chars on a naked server, and then I guess retire and link their wiki magelo? Not sure tbqh. But for those of us genuinely interested in a fun exciting server, then yes, I would argue RD matters a great deal.

On live, uber guilds were incredibly selective with their members. People like Qazzaz / Devastation / Lokii / Maximillien, etc., etc., would never have gotten in. Reputation mattered. On red99 it doesn't. There's nothing "elite" about being in a top guild here. There's no loyalties, etc. When you made it into a top guild on live, it meant something, at least "something" within the context of a video game. You could be a top tier cleric but if you were a faggot, you weren't getting in. Being a faggot doesn't matter on Red99. I mean for crying out loud, Maximilien brags about craigslist bombing people on the forums, was perma banned, and he's a member of Nihilum. I could say the same about Azrael members as well. So cut the crap about "deserving" and "earning" and all this other stuff. P99 is a strange community with almost zero resemblance of what EQ actually was like. It's a numbers game pure and simple on a server with almost no pop.