not a single player has told me to plan on raiding

[Rjones61]

To OP:

I have never desired to raid while on this server. I have never enjoyed raiding while ever playing Everquest. It's long, tedious, and just has too much sitting around. Many players feel the same way.

[Zeelot]

Originally Posted by JanitorGotGriefedOffBox

Yes, because the server is first in your thoughts.

Like when you killed the spell vendors that had kunark port spells on them to cockblock the whole server?

You mean Skie? Harrison inaccurate as always.

[Ele]

Originally Posted by Sarius [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Downside of tokens: TMO loses competitive aspect of current raid scene
Upside of tokens: The other 95% of the server is happy

Who should this server cater to?

People that want classic.

[falkun]

@Zeelot: I don't have faith in TMO doing anything that does not directly benefit them and/or cement their name in the Server. Therefore, I foresee, "Server First: Wake the Sleeper: The Mystical Order" which will both benefit them by keeping primal weapons and other drops more rare and also cementing their name in infamy.*

@Ele: "Classic" arguments do not hold ground on this server regarding raid spawns because the raid spawn system on this server is, by design, not-Classic. One raid spawn method is no different than the next when neither is Classic.

*Example: TMO locking down the Locket camp in Droga and then within 24 hours of them losing the Locket camp making a Bug post saying TD Firepot binding needs to cease (http://www.project1999.org/forums/sh...ad.php?t=31170).
[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[August]

Originally Posted by Ele [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

People that want classic.

I guess my thought on this is that classic is not about adhering to the strict guidelines that were set forth in the early golden days but more about NOT wanting what further expansions gave us, such as:

AAs
Cats on the Moon
Mounts
Bazaar
PoK books
Instances
Spreading out the world / obsoleting the old-world content.

I'm not sure how 'classic' defines what we currently have. Being in Kunark for 2.5 years is not 'classic' - there is too much platinum on the server. The server is too top end. The server has too much item bloat.

To add to that, technology has significantly advanced since the 'classic' times. We have resources to find out everything we would ever want to know about X quest and Y NPC. Hell, even the wiki and it's price watching is not 'classic'. Part of the great thing bout EQ is that I could catch a steal on an item and then resell it for gain. Now when you buy an item you are BASICALLY using the bazaar - pull up your search interface (wiki.project1999.org) and you can see a listing of all the items and their sell price.

I just think the excuse of 'we want it classic - no tokens! no respawns!' is so old hat and just caters to the people who want to monopolize the content. While a high end guild certainly dominated servers across the board, we had 20+ servers to spread them out on, and if you wanted to be a 'hardcore raider' you could get into that guild on your server. On this server, we have 300+ 'hardcores' and 1000s of people who know their class and would like to attend a raid and there's only enough end game to support 60.

Devs have worked hard on this server and you can't expect a small team to recreate what a whole org did back in 1999. There is definitely an issue at the top that is affecting a vocal minority of players on p1999 - the same vocal minority that likes to rant and flame on these boards. There's a lot of logistics problems with fixing the end game bloat, but let's not wave the 'classic flag' as a reason not to pursue any of those options.

[bluejam]

Originally Posted by Sarius [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Who should this server cater to?

The people in charge.

[arsenalpow]

This doesn't even have to be tokens, it could just be a bag limit (think hunting)

Right now TMO can stall VP attempts with a handful of trainers, kill everything else they can, then finish up in VP. If each guild had a bag limit of say 6 TMO would shoot for the 3-4 VP dragons then 2-3 from the VS/Trak/Sev/CT/Inny pile. This would allow other guilds to pull some targets, and encourage other guilds.

This would require some cooperation and maturity though...

[vulzol]

Originally Posted by Highbrow [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

P99 has never tried to emulate the fact that EQ had like twenty servers for the hardcores to spread out on. Raid content being completely and utterly inaccessible was not a universal feature of EQ at any point in time, you always had the option of moving to a server where the endgame hadn't been totally monopolized or where the top guild had room for you. EQ essentially had twenty times the content P99 has. The developers have never cared to acknowledge this problem and don't seem interested in fixing it. It has created a community of people who hate each other and distrust the GMs, a server where doing anything meaningful means you have to step on others and ruin it for them in order to get it to yourself. It has created a community of constant bickering, abuse, conention and rampant cheating -- everything you want to do has to be done at the expense of others.

So many players quit because they come to realize that the only way to get anything other than the leveling experience out of this server is to join a guild that expects completely unreasonable and unhealthy things of their members, and makes you shunned by the community because you're content-blocking a thousand other players. It's not the fault of the resident überguild, it's the fault of the server for failing to account for the fact that Everquest is not a game that functions properly with just one server that has no instancing or manual spawning of raid content.

Failure to account for this is the reason P99 has numbers in the hundreds instead of the thousands, and the conflict created by this endgame environment has been such a blemish on the server throughout its history and the cause for several good GMs quitting, not to mention probably 75% of the people who have played here. It's the #1 issue with this server and one that has been dominating the community since the very beginning, but almost nothing has been done about it. Emulator communities always consist of disproportionately high amounts of hardcore players, former raiders, and people who come with ambitions of doing all the stuff they didn't get to do back in the day. This has to be accounted for or the server suffers severely, as P99 always has. It's only because there has been no classic EQ alternative of reasonable quality that P99 even has numbers in the higher hundreds.

There's not enough content on an EQ server for more than one, maybe one and a half serious raid guilds. Instead, EQ had its twenty servers so that there generally was enough total raid content for everybody who wanted to raid. Maybe you had to reroll elsewhere if your current server had a hardcore poopsocking guild, but you had that option. There's no alternative on P99, even if you were to "beat" the top guild then there's still only enough content for a certain amount of players. You've just shifted the hierarchy around at best and saddled others with the issue of no available endgame content. This has actually happened a few times here.

It's holding P99 back from being awesome, and it has cost the server many individuals who would have improved it.

Perhaps the only reason guilds like TMO play P1999 is to cockblock others. My hypothesis is if TMO had a server all to themselves to dominate end-game content then they wouldn't want to keep playing. After all, who would be there to inspect them in east commonlands tunnel?

Why not just have 2 servers of P1999, one designated as "hardcore" where game is run as it is now and one where a GM enforces rotations. People bitch that it'd split the population too much but remember there are many people who have quit because they haven't had access to end-game content. All-in-all we'd likely see many people return to experience the content so overall the population will increase.

Clearly a win/win. The only people that should be against this idea are the people at the top who will lose the inspecting messages.

Classic had multiple servers. P1999 is trying to emulate classic. Classic solution for classic problem. Done.

[maverixdamighty]

Originally Posted by vulzol [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Perhaps the only reason guilds like TMO play P1999 is to cockblock others. My hypothesis is if TMO had a server all to themselves to dominate end-game content then they wouldn't want to keep playing. After all, who would be there to inspect them in east commonlands tunnel?

Why not just have 2 servers of P1999, one designated as "hardcore" where game is run as it is now and one where a GM enforces rotations. People bitch that it'd split the population too much but remember there are many people who have quit because they haven't had access to end-game content. All-in-all we'd likely see many people return to experience the content so overall the population will increase.

Clearly a win/win. The only people that should be against this idea are the people at the top who will lose the inspecting messages.

Classic had multiple servers. P1999 is trying to emulate classic. Classic solution for classic problem. Done.

not enough of a population to warrant a 2nd server. problem is lack of content and will continue to be so until velious is out.

[Sarius]

I think the bag limit is a cool idea, but it will never happen. The problem with the current raid scene is not lack of content. The problem is the cost of competition, and not a lot of people willing to pay that cost.