[Schortt]

All guilds have members who occasionally mess up and unintentionally screw themselves or others as a result. It would be nice if there were enough good will among raiding guilds to let these occasions go without resorting to petitions. The way to create that good will is to do things like:
1. Admit you fucked up and apologize.
2. Offer to get out of the other guild's way until the next time around.
3. Publicly chastise/guildremove members who intentionally screw with other guilds.

The way to ensure that such good will never develops is to do things like:
1. Pretend like nothing happened or blame others for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
2. Kill the contested mob while the other guild involved is recovering from the mishap caused by your members.
3. Publicly endorse such activity as competition, obnoxiously celebrate mob kills gotten in this fashion, and ridicule guilds for not getting such kills.
4. Retaliate against any of this behavior with similar behavior.

I think it's pretty clear why so many guilds end up going the petition route: you can only go so long trying to extend good will when none is being extended back your way. I've personally been a part of two different guilds that have broken into the high end raid scene (Europa/Remedy->Darkwind->TR and VD) and I've seen the evolution each time from "well-meaning guild that just wants to raid according to the rules" to "tired of getting taken advantage of for always being willing to let little things go and firing off the occasional petition" to "lets just try to get them banned any time it might be possible /PETITION /PETITION /PETITION" or even "fuck them, if they're going to 'accidentally' do X to us and then go kill mobs let's 'accidentally' do X to them". It's ugly and it's a shame, but the only other option is to not be a serious raiding entity.

To be clear - I am not indicting TMO as being responsible for this any more than I am a lot of other guilds including IB, TR, VD, DA, Transcendence, and others. The raid scene on this server has a history of people competing with each other in bad faith, and it's incredibly hard to escape this situation, especially when so many of the same faces keep popping up under the other side's guildtag.

What the latest suspension has shown is that it is possible for good-faith raiding to happen on this server. However, the current circumstances include three unrealistic aspects:
1. There's no guild around that is committed to killing as many mobs as possible.
2. There's no guild around that is steeped in the bad-faith raiding tradition of P99.
3. There's just plain fewer people going after the same mobs.

While BDA and especially Divinity have a history of staying out of the worst of the raiding ugliness, and they seem to be more than happy to let others have a reasonable shot at mobs, a substantial minority of the active raiders on the server (TMO members and whichever IB folks stick around/come back) are not of this persuasion.

It's not realistic to expect TMO to do what BDA did - TMO is not a casual raiding guild and no one should expect a group of serious raiders willing to commit a lot of time to killing stuff to prefer gearing members of other guilds over their own members and alts. What would be nice though, is if some of the same old faces, whether in TMO, BDA, or elsewhere, could try to perpetuate the current good-faith situation by not proselytizing for the cult of hating the other side here and in game, and stop interpreting every little raid incident as if it were a crime against humanity as well as a personally directed attack. Of course, actively sabotaging other guilds has to stop for this to work as well, but this tends to be retaliatory/escalatory anyway.

TL;DR: Blind spite and resentment for entire guilds on the part of a minority of veteran raiders is the root of why we can't have nice things on P1999, so grow up, get over past grievances, take responsibility for your own fuckups, and give people the benefit of the doubt for a change.

Not everyone is going to get all the loot they want in any case, but at least this way you wouldn't all have to be so mad at people on the internet all the time.

Incidentally, I agree with the current popular sentiment regarding reducing variance and adding more faux patch days, though more for "IT'S CLASSIC" reasons than because I think it will help the raid scene. If there are players who are on a mission to fuck other players because of things that happened a year ago, it doesn't matter what changes are made - the same shit will just manifest in new ways.