Public Raids Thread

[Stefen]

Bump. Starting Fear in 15 minutes.

Lazor- Thanks for the kind words. While we have enjoyed hosting the public raids, we feel the current server climate is not conducive to the goals we had hoped to achieve with the weekly events.

As stated in our opening post, the motivation behind the raids was to help the unguilded or casual player to experience content they might not otherwise see, and hopefully send them on their way having enjoyed themselves and with a few new pieces of gear. I think we were somewhat successful in this.

In recent weeks, however, our average open raider has transitioned from the casual player into players already tagged in other serious raiding guilds. Players who raid the planes nightly during the week, some of which are tagged in guilds that do their best to train or steal pulls from Blackwater at any opportunity, show up mid-public-raid and start /randoming for loot. Often we'll see the ALT toons of players in serious raiding guilds show up, competing with the truly deserving public raiders for drops.

Scheduling has also become more of an issue. As everyone knows, there's not enough raid content to go around. With a public raid, you post a start time, which allows other guilds to start 30 minutes before you if they so choose. We've tried moving the start time forward as much as possible, but I don't think it's fair to west coast players to expect them to wake up before 9am on a Saturday. Anyone who's shared a plane with another guild on this server recently knows the huge potential for disaster, intentional or not, and that's not an ideal environment for exposing new people to the planes. I've spent a few hours in tells with raid leaders for other guilds, and while some have been accommodating, the general response was - "We don't care that you're hosting a public raid for the server, we plan to clear Hate three times today."

In short, it's simply too easy to undermine a public raid on this server. We've helped a lot of people experience basic classic raid content and walk away with gear, and that's an achievement we're proud of. The factors I've mentioned above are preventing us from continuing this at an acceptable rate, so unfortunately we've made the decision to halt the practice entirely for now.