FTE is Fing stupid

[Lazortag]

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

I hate this argument. most TMO members have full time jobs or significant others/families to care about, just like everyone else. we do have some members that have slightly less responsibilities than the rest, but it's a large minority compared to the guild as a whole.

where we are different from most casual players/non-raiders is that we're able to balance our time in real life and in everquest to create a healthy compromise between the two. it's not a particularly easy thing to do, and some people just can't figure it out even with time. but to say that just because you or others have real life responsibilities that prevent people from experiencing end game content is just a weak and flimsy excuse. everyone does. it's about achieving balance between the things in your life.

as others have said, we also have players from all over the world. our majority are north american or european time based players, but we have players with different schedules and playtimes to ensure our guilds presence at all times of the day.

I don't know everyone in TMO, and I have no reason to suggest that most of them don't have lives outside of the game. But like another poster said, it's the fact that TMO (and BDA) are so large that allows them to not spend that much time on the game. It's the fact that raiding on this server (unlike on Live) demands so much time that necessitates TMO and BDA having such large raid forces. Most of the smaller guilds are lucky to get 20-25 people a night, how can they regularly compete against a raid force that's three times their size? If you have three times as many people, you will probably mobilize three times as fast. By the time we have a group up in hate for Inny, you guys have an entire raid force.

Now that isn't TMO or BDA's fault. I'm not suggesting you guys split up or cut down on your numbers, or bring less people to raids. But I'm just giving you some perspective as to why casual guilds can't compete at the same level - if we did, we would have to spend all our time tracking and neglect our RL responsibilities, because we don't have enough people to pass tracking responsibilities around to. This has probably been the #1 reason why the raid scene has always been dominated by 1 or 2 guilds on p99, while on Live content was spread more evenly.

Add to that the fact that casual guilds tend to have stricter recruiting requirements. Add to that the fact that mobs often spawn at ridiculous times like 3 or 4 AM eastern, when almost no one is awake. I've tracked mobs for days only to have it spawn early in the morning - a small guild can't have an enormous european contingent that logs in immediately once a mob spawns. So people get discouraged, they stop tracking, they miss a few TOD's, and you get what we have now: a raid scene where for the most part, only 2 guilds bother to compete over raid mobs.

The solution isn't for everyone to rotate mobs, or for everyone to play nicer, or for TMO to give us handouts, it's for the system to be changed so that I don't have to spend up to 96 hours straight pressing "track" just for a chance at pixels. I know very few people who would waste that much time for a guarantee at pixels, how many do you think will do it for a ~33% chance at it?

2 and a half months ago Nilbog said he had a proposal to fix all this. What happened to that?: http://www.project1999.org/forums/sh...6&postcount=72