p99 at lowest point since launch

[dk0]

What gets me is that pull-to-entrance was the most accessible ToV has ever been. For all kinds of guilds and players. There's a serious misconception that you need a zerg or had to be crazy hardcore to compete, but that was absolutely not true.

Small guilds like Rustle & Core were very successful. Towards the end, AG started to drop the "casual" image and showed up to compete with some great success. I am absolutely confident any "casual" guild could have put in less effort in ToV than they did on targets like VS, fear golems, etc. and walk away with kills.

Spawn windows were tight in these days. This made raiding very manageable for people with lives outside of EQ. Also because of this, just by showing up for a few hours each cycle, there was a solid chance you could bag a dragon just because other guilds would be locked in to another target, since many windows would overlap.

Hardcore players got to be hardcore. Spend time on the line, coth mages, whatever role--there was plenty to do for these players. But also casual players got to be casual. Logging in for 10 minutes to stab a dragon is laughed at a lot, but warmbody auto-attackers make raiding incredibly accessible to casual players who can't commit to multiple-hour clears.

It was literally a win/win for everybody. I know petitions got intense and too frequent, but has it gotten any better?

Nowadays it's a numbers game. You will always have a single dominant guild rather than real competition because it's about getting sheer numbers. Success yields growth, and so it takes a long time to curb the momentum of a successful guild.

I haven't played in a while but apparently there are bag limits and/or rotations on the server now. In the time it takes to kill a single charity dragon, any guild could have had put a system in place (placed coth mages, setup a test server, practiced pulls, etc.) to compete every week and result in way more pixels. Oh well, I do genuinely hope people are having fun.

Since I assume we're never going back to rooted dragons, my opinion is that the server needs a brand new ruleset that's designed for the current meta rather than rehashed rules that were created for a completely different era. But that's another discussion.