the server, loot and the way things are

[Grod]

There is definitely skill in Everquest but it mainly has to do with intelligence and decision making. The combat is relatively slower paced, so the order in which you do things over a longer period of time matters tremendously. In addition, a player with skill is more likely to recognize other players with skill because they are correctly assessing the overall situation.

It's funny but players with less skill are 1) more likely to laugh about the game requiring skill because they can't tell the difference between good players and bad because they ARE one of the bad players and 2) more likely to call other players noobs because they don't know what's going on or why another way is better / more efficient / safer then the way they do things. It's actually annoying because some players will stubbornly do things in a worse way while you KNOW they are looking down on other players in the process, especially if they are in a "good" guild.

In reality, the majority of players in top guilds are average at best and power through some content not on superior skill but based on the gear advantages they've obtained as part of that guild. The strength of the top guilds are usually in a small core of players and the leadership that develops the strategies however the strategy aspect is irrelevant on this server since it's all old content.

A lot of raid bosses in Everquest are "zergable" in the sense that you can bring more then the content was designed for and that's precisely what many guilds did so every single expansion the raid content was designed for more and more players. It wasn't the developers fault, they were simply designing content for the amount of players the guilds were using. If they designed the original dragons for 24, some guilds that had trouble would bring an extra group of people until they could kill it. Next thing you know the next expansion is now developing raid content for 30 people and so on and so forth and that's exactly what happened in the raiding game each expansion. The problem with going too large with your guild relative to what the encounter requires is that you will spread the loot too thin among your core members. That's why the better guilds tended to try to keep the guild size closer to what the encounters required and the variance was small, but for the guilds a little behind the curve (but still beating the top content) they were bringing that extra few players which would result in the next raid zone requiring a few extra players to beat it and every guild across the board would have to recruit more to keep up. There is no reason to continue to increase guild size if you already have the players to beat the encounters. However, that's not what happened and the increase in guild size was a neverending cycle and it is why the natural progression ultimately became instanced content with caps on the number of players you can bring. It's also why the Everquest model is severely outdated and not likely to make it into a mainstream MMORPG again anytime soon. Hence, why we play here [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.] (Well for me, defeating boredom and it's free!)