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Originally Posted by DeathsSilkyMist
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I think most people on P99 miss the 1999-2001 live days, where people didn't know much about the game. This allowed raiding to be more interesting, because your guild had to figure out the encounter while competing with other guilds who weren't sharing the information. Plus you needed to prepare for the next expansion. In that situation you don't really need all of the P99 rules/features that try and make raiding harder/fairer.
Unfortunately you cannot put the genie back in the bottle when it comes to game knowledge. I can't see any other way for Everquest raiding to end up in this scenario where you don't have instancing. Everybody knows how to beat the encounter, and at least two guilds always have the numbers available via batphone to kill the encounter. Racing and tracking is how you get the mob first, and FTE lets everybody know who tagged the mob.
Custom content would probably be the only way to change the current raiding system, but it almost certainly would fail. People just don't like custom content that much, which is why all of the EQEMU custom content servers have a fraction of the population of P99.
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I think you're right for the most part. There's certainly no putting the genie back in the bottle with regard to game knowledge. I do believe there are a variety of changes that could easily be made to make the endgame less toxic and stupid and not just instances. They might be less classic? But honestly at this point how "classic" does p99 endgame raiding feel? It feels so different than classic that it might as well be a different game.
I've been a big proponent of either completely removing variance or making it significantly shorter windows. What good does having 16h windows do for anyone? It rewards unhealthy extreme neckbeard behavior and abusing account sharing/screen sharing/scripting. None of which is objectively a good thing or classic in any sense. Either 0 variance or windows of 1-2 hours would go a long way to reducing the extreme timesink barriers and reducing the need for scripts/account/screen sharing. I feel like most people that play this game can stomach tracking for an hour or two. People wouldn't be earning extra DKP to waste their lives staring at a screen for 16 hours straight for the 92389238524th spawn of the same dragon/giant/whatever we've all killed on this server time and time again. This only helps lessen the stupidity of the tracking portion of endgame and doesn't address FTE/Racing which I also think is terrible. Figuring out a better system than FTE/Racing is a slightly harder problem though. On paper I think enforced rotations is probably the most fair and least likely to result in toxic behavior but it has it's own share of issues. People would inevitably just splinter into like 30 different 30man guilds instead of having like 4-5 guilds of 100+ players. You could artificially limit how many guilds can be eligible for the rotation and just tell players if they want to be part of the rotation they need to join/merge into one of those guilds. That's not a perfect solution by any means. I do personally think it's better than encouraging guilds to spend HOURS and HOURS practicing race lines through raid zones and scripting to move off the line quicker and endless farming of otherwise unnecessary clickies and all the dumb shit that happens in this current system.
Another possible solution would be just making raid mobs spawn far more frequently. If every raid mob was on a 24h repop timer I suspect that a much larger variety of guilds would get much more valuable targets on a more regular basis than they do now. What's the negative? People get gear faster? Who cares? P99 is a non profit project right? Not like they have paying customers they need to retain to pay for operations right? What's wrong with making some changes to allow people to actually participate in the endgame? This isn't supposed to be such a competitive game. PvP servers are dead for a reason. Not to mention how many more players would they gain if the endgame was a bit more approachable for the masses? I basically entirely gave up on P99 endgame in it's current state. If some big changes were made to make it less toxic I would certainly consider getting back into it myself. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Every one of us as human beings only gets a certain amount of time to live our lives. I'm not one to shame people for choosing to spend their time however they like. I've spent a disgusting amount of my life playing video games of various kinds. Do you really want to spend DAYS of your life staring at a screen to "track" a 1999 pixel dragon and not even actually playing the game the entire time for a little extra DKP? Does anyone actually enjoy this?