[Kergan]

The only way to solve the zerg "problem" is to make it a hindrance and less effective to have a ton of people.

I'll use RoZ as an example. The Dentists were by far the top crew there but were very selective in their recruitment, despite being able to essentially recruit the whole server if they chose. This was because there was no need to recruit more than 7-8 people to do any content, and once you passed that threshold it served no purpose aside from extending the time it took to farm the gear they needed. Once they were done doing a raid target and everyone had what they needed they stopped killing it because their time was better spent doing other things.

As you make mobs more difficult and requiring more people to kill, you exponentially increase the guild size requirement. If you only need 10 people, you can succeed with 12-14 hardcore players. If you need 20 to do anything you're probably going to need more than 24-28, if you need 30 you'll likely need a roster of 60, and so on to make sure you have the right class coverage at all raids. It becomes exponentially more difficult to gear up alts as well with more mouths to feed, further increasing the difficulty to having enough geared clerics, tanks etc, especially with the small amount of class specific gear in EQ.

There is a reason that every expansion ever released by Sony addressed this directly. Unfortunately the classic era falls before almost every one of these balance changes - instancing, raid zone caps, removal of certain class dependencies, etc. The only answer Sony had to making the game a challenge up until PoP was to require more and more people to kill the shit or make the fights take longer (I will say that Ssra temple is the only really notable exception to this, wish the dude designing those raids would have done the whole xpac).

Sorry for the TLDR, honestly. But it really grinds my gears when people whine about zerging in the EQ classic era. The game was BUILT around it. Every single decent EQ live guild would be considered a zerg on this server and were easily the size of Nihilum or Holo. The only difference is here these guilds are half of the max level population instead of 10-20%.

You want more competitive high end guilds that raid? You'll get one for about every +200 pop you add. That is the only way to solve this problem without specifically tuning the end game to killing the shit with half the numbers or less than was required on live to make it easy.