First: OP - I appreciate how thoughtfully and calmly you laid our your position. It's clear that it's not a rant, but rather a carefully considered suggestion.
I haven't done a ton of competitive raiding, though I have done some, so I don't have the same amount of skin in the game as Vanquish or Riot members, but I think the changes are good.
I don't see the problem with just 3 major raid targets going to random. I think what the top guilds haven't considered much is the Ex Astra, TSS, and Aegis types of guilds; guilds that are very capable, but not to the extent of being able to have 50-100 members on char select parked on multiple targets 16 hours at a time. I think it makes sense to open up some of the targets to guilds like this so they can experience that part of the game too more frequently than onceish a year in the draft.
And the rolls will still heavily favor the large raiding guilds; once targets get much out of guilds' prime time, they'll likely have to hang up the towel and hope for better luck next time. Or maybe they'll team up with another couple of guilds for the roll, which will still reduce the number of groups rolling and allow folks to meet new people on this very social game, which doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.
Also, soooo many raid targets are still not going to be /random. The top guilds can still have their fun on those!
Last but not least, with 3ish quakes a month we're probably looking at just 1 or 2 respawns going to random per month. That doesn't seem like too heavy of a price to me for the health of the server of the time of our volunteer GMs.
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