Staff - Players - TMO, a Treatise on the Future of the Server

[Tanthallas]

Originally Posted by Alarti0001 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

You seriously don't know why?
We are horrible players who want to avoid real competition

[Shiftin]

Originally Posted by Alarti0001 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

You seriously don't know why?
Variance

Maybe the only time i've agreed with Alarti, so there's probably some merit here Nilbog.

On live, you KNEW what day nagafen and vox were going to spawn. I led pre-kunark raids here and we literally scheduled them on open forums. Usually, we could, even on non patch weeks, go straight from one dragon to another, because they both respawned in a small window that was predictable.

Yes, they had a +/- 6 hours (or whatever depending on the mob, never remotely close to this level), but you could plan raid nights. On Tunare, by late velious / early luclin, we had 4? 5? guilds capable of downing most notable raid targets. They all had 40-50 members, some more casual than others, but you knew what you were getting into when you logged on each night because it was posted right there on our calendars "X Y and Z are probably up tonight, we'll kill some of that then maybe hit Q to farm some stuff".

Variance here forces guilds to be far larger than they truly want to be, because you have to have enough people guilded in enough time zones to respond to mobs that spawned at completely insane times AND have the people to track for those mobs. If you don't, you don't get the mobs. It is a cold war-esque arms race that inevitably escalates to giant guilds sitting 50 people each on VS spawn point when nothing else is "in window" - something that was almost impossible on live because either lots of things could spawn or basically nothing due to patch days that reset spawn timers and small variance windows.

Nilbog, I really hope this was nothing more than a tongue in cheek comment and you actually do understand the sociology of MMOs to some degree. There is more to what you describe as "the classic experience" than the pathing of greater skeletons. It's not a single player game.

To the OP, you're re-writing history. DA/TMO and IB/TR had at least equal parts in the escalation of hostilities. The reason there is effectively 1 raid guild has significantly more to do with rogean, after 6 months of not doing the things he exclusively had the power to do, gave exclusive power to a GM who was more concerned with being liked by players than enforcing the rules in a consistent and accountable way. Going from Uthgaard to no GM to Amelinda getting both servers dumped on her and snapping far overshadowed any fun I was still having killing the same stuff every week.

Everything I've read by ambrotos seems significantly more reasonable and level headed, which is why i'm back to logging in from time to time. I'm all for the server's continued existence, and as soon as velious beta goes live, i'll be right there every night on the test server, just like I was with Kunark, helping to get it ready to go.

Cheers.

[Razdeline]

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

One huge difference that I've witnessed on p99 compared to my eqlive server experience is the massive amounts of players per raiding guild.

On classic live, I'm not sure if it was the inter-guild conflicts, lack of enough loot to go around, or generally wanting to compete, but there were never guilds this large.


Why so large, raid guilds?


[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I wonder who hes directing this at? IB was always known for doing more with less players, we downed mobs with 20-40 players consistently.

[nymphloa]

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

One huge difference that I've witnessed on p99 compared to my eqlive server experience is the massive amounts of players per raiding guild.

On classic live, I'm not sure if it was the inter-guild conflicts, lack of enough loot to go around, or generally wanting to compete, but there were never guilds this large.


Why so large, raid guilds?


[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Awesome Star Craft cake bud! Zerg ftw....

[Lazortag]

So then make the variance shorter? It doesn't need to be 4 days long. No variance would suck, but it would be better than what we have currently.

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

One huge difference that I've witnessed on p99 compared to my eqlive server experience is the massive amounts of players per raiding guild.

On classic live, I'm not sure if it was the inter-guild conflicts, lack of enough loot to go around, or generally wanting to compete, but there were never guilds this large.


Why so large, raid guilds?


[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'm sure this has been said but the main reason is the time investment required to compete on this server vs. eq live. Tracking a raid mob for the entire duration of its window can take as long as 4 days, whereas on Live the variance for mobs was markedly shorter if not nonexistent. One person simply can't do this alone without either (a) wasting insane amounts of time or (b) missing several hours of tracking where the mob in question may have spawned. So the easiest way to track a mob for its whole window (and therefore have a higher chance of getting that mob) is to have a large number of people taking smaller tracking shifts. This leads to larger guilds being competitively far more successful than smaller guilds.

Also, if spawn times are unpredictable then having more players allows you to mobilize faster. If guild A has 200 players and guild B has 20, then assuming players in both guilds are equally skilled and equally good at mobilizing, then guild A mobilizes ten times faster simply because they have more players. In the time it takes for guild B to get 2 players to skyfire to kill talendor, guild A already has an entire raid force.

TLDR: The variance is entirely at fault for every single problem with the raid scene, ever.

[nilbog]

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

TLDR: The variance is entirely at fault for every single problem with the raid scene, ever.

Did you happen to see the raid scene prior to variance? I mean.. ultimately we would have everything we could 100% classic with no changes.. but there's a reason it was instituted in the first place.

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

this is where a rotation comes in, a classic solution to a classic problem

Rotations - Cool, whatever you guys decide, but not GM-enforced rotations. It should be a player decision.

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

Duuuurrrrrrrr --- FTE shout.

Not to discount that FTE shout is a good idea in itself, but the responses to this are correct. LvL 1 gnome enchanter, sitting down, first in zone, sitting there for days. Should that really be the deciding factor of a claim?


The players themselves have opportunities to change the raiding scene. They do not.

[Visual]

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

Why so large, raid guilds?


[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

We have killed numerous targets with ~20 players lately due to low turnout. Some of these like Talendor were up for some time before we even recognized it due to spot checking.

There has been plenty of opportunities for other guilds to get raid mobs.

[Danyelle]

Lower spawn variance to anywhere between 2 hours to 1 day MAX (max variance length dependent upon difficulty of encounter).

Simulated "patch" days anywhere from 2 weeks to a month apart. Don't schedule them, at least not often, make it a surprise. Hell, make up some bullcrap "we fixed this" excuse. Or even just post old patch notes from Live. Could even have the EQEmu launcher update eqlsnews.txt and force the News window to display upon patch like Live did/does if you want to emulate legitimacy.

Don't limit guild sizes. It's just stupid imo. In fact, I can only see that making this worse.

Don't GM enforce rotations. But the players SHOULD take it upon themselves to set these up from time to time, and not just on an epic mob or two, and they shouldn't be permanent when set up. Maybe a month or two at a time before it goes back to FTE.

Done.

[Joroz]

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

One huge difference that I've witnessed on p99 compared to my eqlive server experience is the massive amounts of players per raiding guild.

On classic live, I'm not sure if it was the inter-guild conflicts, lack of enough loot to go around, or generally wanting to compete, but there were never guilds this large.


Why so large, raid guilds?


[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

pixels are only valuable on p99 if you collect them all...

[Xadion]

as for guild size on live I was in a 2nd tier guild on veeshan while dealing with foh coe cd etc and we often had 50 to 72... 72 being the max number on the in game raid window. I have seen 100 strong fear raids in classic...

what people consider zerg vary greatly depending on what they think raids should be.