Current state of blue vs. green?

[Ennewi]

Originally Posted by zelld52 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

So this proof of a single guild killing Dozekar up to 4 times, 3 months before Luclin release is proof that Dozekar was instant FTE engage across all servers?

Same with AoW. AoW was not killed every 7 days like clockwork.

Neither of these prove the existence of FTE races in Velious era in 2001.

That guild mentions another raid guild actively killing doze and even completing at least one of the quests. But it actually shows one case where guilds were cooperating, or attempting to, in order to play the game at raid level.

But my post was separate from the larger argument here and only served as a means of fact-checking. The claim was that the first AoW kill happened out of era and that doze quests weren't known about until late Velious. Both of these claims are not accurate.

[zelld52]

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

That guild mentions another raid guild actively killing doze and even completing at least one of the quests. But it actually shows one case where guilds were cooperating, or attempting to, in order to play the game at raid level.

But my post was separate from the larger argument here and only served as a means of fact-checking. The claim was that the first AoW kill happened out of era and that doze quests weren't known about until late Velious. Both of these claims are not accurate.

i appreciate your fact checking, but i mentioned that on most of the servers this was the case. cant think of many people who raided in era velious that were regularly killing Doze, or even KT and Dain. they used to sit up for days before a raid happened.

[Danth]

Lot more competition in the private server scene than there was in the 20-teens. P99 has a hard time competing because it maintains, fairly or not, a strong reputation for having a GM staff and ruleset that favors the high-hours players over regular folks.....so a huge portion of those regular folks pick other servers nowadays.

Codebase deterioration doesn't help any. P99 felt less buggy in 2017 than it does today. Stuff that used to work fine but got broke, like Z axis pathing, remains broken years later, giving an impression that the admins don't care anymore. The admins themselves encourage this impression by barely communicating and giving the appearance of having "checked out." Not many players want to start in such conditions.

Blue appears to be in a death-spiral where the in-game economy has fallen below functional critical mass, making it defacto virtually impossible for people to buy/sell goods in any kind of reasonable manner, totally suffocating off a supply of newbies and leaving the server population to wither. Green appears to be a little better in this regard, still with a functional in-game economy, and still attracting some small amount of newbies, not a lot, but some.

[Viscere]

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

1. Visceral and co

rent free etc

[cd288]

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

That guild mentions another raid guild actively killing doze and even completing at least one of the quests. But it actually shows one case where guilds were cooperating, or attempting to, in order to play the game at raid level.

But my post was separate from the larger argument here and only served as a means of fact-checking. The claim was that the first AoW kill happened out of era and that doze quests weren't known about until late Velious. Both of these claims are not accurate.

I think this supports Zell's broader argument given the timestamps on the evidence you submitted.

E.g., sure, the first solo guild non-nerfed AoW kill was pre-Luclin not after Luclin. But it was just before Luclin. Which supports the argument that there weren't multiple guilds trying to FTE high end raid targets in the Velious era, because there simply weren't multiple guilds capable of competing for it.

I mean, shit, people forget that one of the reasons you've had multiple guilds competing on P99 is that the accounts are free and every guild has a lot of CH Cleric, COTH, etc. bots at the ready. When accounts are free and you can have an army of Clerics parked at raid targets and ready to be logged in, it greatly increases the viability of a guild to be able to compete on a target. Back then, you didn't have this to nearly the degree you do now.

[Solist]

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

rent free etc

How's TMO?

[Ennewi]

Originally Posted by cd288 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I think this supports Zell's broader argument given the timestamps on the evidence you submitted.

E.g., sure, the first solo guild non-nerfed AoW kill was pre-Luclin not after Luclin. But it was just before Luclin. Which supports the argument that there weren't multiple guilds trying to FTE high end raid targets in the Velious era, because there simply weren't multiple guilds capable of competing for it.

For sure. The copy/paste info had to do with the mundane details rather than the larger argument, to cover all bases in terms of what was achieved then and should be available now. Certain aspects of gameplay p99 have been hemmed in or neutered outright because "it wasn't done regularly in classic" or "possible with dial-up" which seems antithetical to the spirit of the game and feel of the world. AoW was killed, Tuna was killed, etc. So credit to those early raid guilds.

But yeah, the doze copy/paste shows an interest in separately factioned guilds working around each other or at least coming to an agreement about who got what. From other reading on wayback, OG guilds were typically cooperative rather than competitive. If not setting up rotations, actually calling dibs on zones like Plane of Fear in forum posts; a wipe meant the next guild zoned in and took a stab at it, rezzing the previous raid. Very little of what I've read from back then could be described as competitive and none of it to the esport levels that have existed on here.

[Solist]

Originally Posted by zelld52 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

So this proof of a single guild killing Dozekar up to 4 times, 3 months before Luclin release is proof that Dozekar was instant FTE engage across all servers?

Same with AoW. AoW was not killed every 7 days like clockwork.

Neither of these prove the existence of FTE races in Velious era in 2001.

What is the point you are trying to make? You're arguing against facts, and when presented with those facts that counter your previous argument you now change the argument.

We raced for mobs on live, albeit in luclin. But there was quite literal guild mobilisation races through Ssra come raid time. Faking out other rogues saying traps were down to get their members cursed. It was complete chaos.

Early morning the US guilds would be online trying to stop the korean guild from wiping everything out that spawned post patch.

And everything that could reasonably be killed, like clockwork, was killed. Not AoW, as noone could kill that except maybe 2 guilds worldwide. Anyway.

All of that doesn't matter though. This is P99. It emulates (mostly) EQ. It isn't meant to emulate the terrible play that existed back in the day. It's such a dogshit argument to try and compare what we did/didn't do then to now. Even the early few years of P99 were laughably terrible compared to the coordination that exists right now.

And if you don't think that, you're not participating, or not paying attention, or completely oblivious to the way P99 does things. And it's wonderful; competition between guilds spurned on cleaver and unique engages. Imagine if P99 was still 30 people sitting around waiting for full buffs, a procession around a buff circle, camping arbitrarily to chat, it would be a horrible experience.

Arguing over who did what on live, when we've got some massively unclassic changes here, the server can support an order of magnitude more activity, we have better netcode, all NPC's are tuned to be twice as hard as they shuld be on average, resists just.....dont work here, etc etc etc is silly.

None of this has anything to do with why a merger with current rules is a terrible idea.

The existing rules are suffocating both servers. Merging them just halves the content available and accelerates the decline.

Fix the rules first. Breathe some life in. Bring some players back. Even without dev support it can be fixed if the absolute pelicans that are current CSR would look at times the server was healthy, and times it was not. Their current metric is "no petitions, server healthy"..... of course there's no petitions, there's only 1 guild, and there is 1/5th the population there used to be.

[Zuranthium]

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

the designers didn't have a unified vision, and the one they had is nothing like the game we ended up with.

EQ as we know it can literally be more attributed to the people in the guide to dev pipeline who were kids addicted to raiding at the time than the original design doc presented to smed

Wrong. It wasn't until Luclin era that those people you talk about were handling the game. They, and raids, didn't even exist when the game was being released.

The original designers very much had a shared vision of creating an interactive fantasy novel come to life, a 3D dungeons and dragons game with thousands of players, a realistic MUD. And that is indeed how the game played in 1999.

There were of course some disagreements about specifics, but that doesn't change the overarching goal of what was trying to be created. And it's important to consider how the game should be shaped in order to keep that vision alive. There are tons of things the designers would have changed if they knew the ways the game would eventually devolve, and if they had the technical capability and creative solutions to fix those problems and allow EQ to be the living RPG experience it was meant to be.

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

I never once encountered mob rotations during this era on live.

Then you never interacted with the Play Nice Policy. That was how everything in game was handled after they stopped allowing DPS to decide everything.

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

We raced for mobs on live, albeit in luclin. But there was quite literal guild mobilisation races through Ssra come raid time. Faking out other rogues saying traps were down to get their members cursed. It was complete chaos.

Early morning the US guilds would be online trying to stop the korean guild from wiping everything out that spawned post patch.

That is not FTE racing, and not classic era either. That's trying to kill content before other guilds are there after repop.

Whenever two raid forces were at the same spawn at the same time, GM's made them start rotating, unless they wanted to agree to roll for it every time.

And US guilds didn't have the majority of their players online during a typical weekday morning. People were at work (and on weekends often had other commitments), this is well documented by Legacy of Steel.

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

And everything that could reasonably be killed, like clockwork, was killed.

Nope. Raid targets were frequently up for many hours before being engaged, this is extensively documented. Not just the top end Velious targets either. Things like Vox were being left up for considerable amounts of time during that era.

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

This is P99. It emulates (mostly) EQ. It isn't meant to emulate the terrible play that existed back in the day. It's such a dogshit argument to try and compare what we did/didn't do then to now.

Classic developer decisions were based on how people played at the time. You're clueless or in denial if you think those devs would look at the way people play now and say "yep, that's definitely what we want the game to be." They were suspending guilds in classic just for using wall tricks.

[Ekco]

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

Wrong.

no u? the devs literally talked about it in their Arobot w/e that dude from M&M name is interview series.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.