Request for a different policy on (game-changing) specific item camps

[Shiftin]

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

If you want a more realistic perspective think of it this way. You're in line at a concert to try to get tickets and there's a limit of 2 per person. You walk up and see 2 people in front of you and realize there's a supply of about 10 front row tickets.. So, you measure your odds and say "Okay, this is a pretty good situation.. I still have a shot at front row tickets, and the line should be fairly short" An hour later the guy at the front of the line sees a friend and says "HAI MAN How's It Goin?!" the other guy says "Oh, Hey.. Yeah.. I just woke up. Guess I wasn't the first person here.. you mind if i just stand behind you?" and the other guy says "Oh, hell yeah.. That's fine dude.." In another hour the same thing happens, and again, and again, and again..

How would you react, would you happily chew on the crap sandwich? or would you speak out and say something?

That's the situation that the people who started this post are frustrated with. It's not the fact that your guild want's <Insert contested item name here>, cause most people could give a crap. It's that when they walk up there's 4 people at a camp and every time one person gets their item, they leave and 1-2 more people show up and jump right in front of the people who have been sitting there waiting patiently for 3 hours for the 2 people they originally saw to get their fill.

Now for the solution.. Like I said, a little consideration would help a lot. If you see someone sitting there waiting and it's a guild camp.. You might say

"Hey, I'm going to be here for another 3-4 hours and I've already promised the camp to a few guildies after that and I've got no idea how long they'll be on but they're usually online pretty late.. So, if you want to wait I'll warn you.. It'll be at least 8 hours."
Or!

I want to take this in 2 parts. It's a good post but slightly misguided because what happenned to secure one of the most contested camps in kunark wasn't made public before Kunark opened (for obvious reasons).

Leading up to kunark, we did more than a few walkthroughs of how to get to specific zones and camps within those zones on other EMU servers to drill it into people. We tested the fastest routes, built backup plans and sent a team with built in redundancies to both xalgoz and chancellor. So you understand the margins we were working with, we missed chancellor by 2 seconds to a Fusion bard and "easily" got xalgoz (by about 45 seconds). Teams were sent to other camps in similar fashion. All told, we had probably 30 people with specific instructions and redundancies to attempt to capture high priority targets. Without fail, these were pretty much the first 30 people with howling stones keys on the server.

It wasn't just us - some of the highest value camps went to Fusion, TMO and divinity in a similar manner because we all, as guilds (playing together with shared goals and values) decided these things were more important to us than the GM event loot, exploring, etc.

We had a minimum of 3 people in kaesora until we all had our xalgoz fangs and people rotated in to take their (sometimes extremely long) turns sacrificing experience to ensure we could key not just our individual toons, but our friends and guildmates so that we would actually be able to form groups to crawl the dungeon. When we got all our xalgoz fangs... we left.

We also had people watching the chancellor camp and as soon as fusion messed up and lost the camp, we were able to do the same thing at chancellor. This meant 2-3 people at a time sitting for 8-12 hours (or longer before the patch to fix the drop rate) in a room not getting exp, staring at a chair ready to answer AFK checks. Understand that if we don't pass it off to our guildmates, we have useless keys. The analogy of guildies "waking up late and cutting in line" is not particularly apt because to get a spot in line for a key, you had to show up at the appointed time, often times rolling out of another guild assignment or waking up in the middle of the night to take your minimum 8 hour shift (done again to ensure redundancy).

As to the second bolded part, that's exactly what happenned. I had plenty of people wander up and ask to get the next prod. I politely explained the length of time I had been there, how many people we had to key, and could list the next 24 hours worth of people who would be there. I let them know roughly how long it would take us to get keyed and that they should try back after that point.

The other option, as I explained, is not viable in this instance as it negates our ability to efficiently make groups (one of the ways the list for keys was prioritized), but is perfectly understandable in many situations.

I hope this sheds some light on the situation. Our interactions with folks over these camps were significantly more pleasant and reasoned than the people actually showing up late to the party now demanding to be let in.