Leapfrogging

[azeth]

I'm interested if those of you who have "not seen GM intervention due to leapfrogging" are in agreement with that non-policy?

Consider a guild has a mage parked in NToV for COH. You and your guild drop Aary and pull the left wall drakes. What if that guild opens the mage and starts bringing people in ahead of you? Do you agree still the best policy is no policy?

^ I am not agreeing/disagreeing with either PoV.

[logiktrip]

Letting the players work it out is preferable, but the major difference was that on live servers people and guilds cared about their reputation to a different degree than they do here.

For example, two guilds on Terris-Thule were barred from entering Ssra for 24hours after a similar incident. The GM's made it clear they weren't going to deal with it, so we were forced to work alongside one another for the benefit of both guilds (we didn't want removed from our primary targets again.)

Things weren't all roses and we still bumped heads, but there was a working relationship that developed. I'm not sure that this is viable on a server with so little raid content while also having so many people ready to raid, but it would be nice.

[Serin]

The only times i ever saw GM intervention on my server was during kunark and luclin era.. Basically certain mobs were free for all targets, and certain mobs were "whoever gets there first with the most people"..

One time i remember in particular, was that a guild that was notorious for zerging would call in their entire guild (level 1-60) and have them all sit in a zone in order to lag the zone server so bad that it would prevent anyone from engaging the boss mob. (They actually brought down the zone servers several times)

When that happened the GMs stepped in and set up a forced rotation, because no agreement could be made between the guilds..

However, the other case was free for all targets..
Once the GMs got fed up enough with actually trying to mediate between guild conflicts.. They declared certain spawns "Too Contested" to be rotated. Things like Venril Sathir fell under this rule, as did Avatar of War, and King Tormax.. (basically mini-bosses) Those mobs would effectively become huge clusterfucks where every guild would run in and engage immediately and try to out damage everyone else.. It made it chaotic to say the least, but also made it quite random as to who actually "won" the loot..

That being said, Sure there were some people who would QQ cause they didn't get king tormax's head.. or whatever piece of loot they wanted.. but it made it very fair.. cause whoever could do the most damage won..

All in all, the gms didn't do much in the cat herding business.. They mainly stuck to what they were good at.. Fixing problems.. and let the uber-guilds sort out their own rotations..

[Oogmog]

I think what people are failing to realize, things were handled different on every server. Those who claim there was never GM intervention may have been on a server where this was true and others saying forced rotations/guidelines were presented to them could be true as well. I've skimmed through a lot of these forums, however, on my server we were forced into rotations just because the GMs who worked our server got sick of dealing with our crap.

We were forced to work out a rotation on VS and Trak after many problems/attempted KS's/leapfrogging/training.

In Velious, this is how things went down:
First guild to kill the rat guard in DN had rights to Zland(Until a wipe).
First guild to kill trash to Ikitair the Venom could not be leapfrogged unless they wiped and the first guild to kill roy had 24 hours from the time of his death to have NToV with no competition.
First guild to kill the first giant in the arena(Was a particular spawn, couldn't remember his name) could claim Vindicator/Statue/AoW.
Whoever was pulling and attempting to split Dain had his rights.
Yelinak was pretty much a first engage and it was yours since there was no trash(Mage CoH).
Whichever guild began clearing Tormax's area had his claim.

These rules for Velious were set in place after a Tormax raid where my guild was set up and pulling Tormax to WL zone line and our only rivals guild started zoning in and attempting to botch our pulls. After about an hour of the monks training each other, a GM showed up and asked which guild was there with a force first and began pulling.. it was our guild, so we had the chance on him first and if we wiped the other guild could claim it. Unfortunately, we were low on numbers and they ate our mod rods(right in front of the GM and nothing was done haha) and we wiped and it was theirs. Following the raid, the GM sat down with the two guild leader and created a system for every contested mob during the expansion.

So pretty much in Velious it's easy to have a fix for leapfrogging because on many occasions the trash itself requires a raid force to get through, or the dungeon is completely linear and you can assign a mob to claim the named. With Classic/Kunark, you can clear with a single group or 10 people or whatever. IMO, the only fair way to fix this is designate a set number of people actually clearing trash. Take for example, a group of 6 is clearing Shrooms etc on the way to Trakanon - by all means they can clear, set up a CoH chain if they wish, whatever. If a raid of 24 shows up, the group with 6 cannot delay them because they were there "first." In that instance it's not really leapfrogging but one guild trying to stall.

I'm not sure if this has been stated or not, and I apologize if so, but there's one underlying cause for this shitstorm that we're dealing with and its the fact that on any "normal" live server, there was maybe 2-3 guilds top competing over the planes/gods/dragons. Right now, I would say there are probably 6-7 guilds capable of downing those targets. While we're trying to relive the classic experience, there's never been a time where guilds would camp for days on end just for one single pop. Furthermore, on every server on live I've been a part of, if there was a guild in hate/fear/sky, it was just a general rule of thumb it was their zone and if CT/Inny/Dracho/Maestro popped while you were there it was your lucky day. Here, there's too many guilds competing for the armor drops for that to be an option.

[Jeice]

I think its silly how raiding on this server is done. I know of many players who would much rather have competition and not be required to sit and wait out a spawn. Not only does it not seem like the game we all grew up to love, but in my eyes it actually seems worse that people can claim spawns and not even be at their computers when the mob is up.

I am hoping by the time I get to 50 to raid the rules of the game have changed and we can allow the steam rolling and guild competition begin!

[yaeger]

I'm loathe to suggest this, to add more load onto the Devs, but I have a suggestion.

First, pretty much everyone that's playing now knows everything about the raid targets before they even raid. We know respawn timers, loot tables, strategy, numbers, anything and everything about these 'classic' mobs. They've been killed so many times in so many different ways that it's trivial.

Why don't we change it. The awesome thing about Classic was trying to learn encounters, expect the unexpected. The majority of the players on this server have raided at some point on Live, are familiar with what EQ expects from a successful raid force, and can use Google to answer any and all questions.

I know this topic is about leapfrogging, but I believe that solving the challenge of raid difficulty will help eliminate it.

Here is an option that I think might be viable.

- Create a counter on raid targets (bosses). This will increase the difficulty slowly to create a steady and consistent challenge as raid forces gear up.

a) When a boss is killed, the next time it spawns, it'll spawn with 1% more health, damage (to attacks, aoe's, and various special abilities).
b) Make the bonuses cumulative. If Phinny is killed 5 times, he'd get a 5% bonus.
c) The bonus will wear off by 1% every spawn cycle it's up without being killed (with spawn timer +/- 2x the random spawn delay).

[Allizia]

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

I'm loathe to suggest this, to add more load onto the Devs, but I have a suggestion.

First, pretty much everyone that's playing now knows everything about the raid targets before they even raid. We know respawn timers, loot tables, strategy, numbers, anything and everything about these 'classic' mobs. They've been killed so many times in so many different ways that it's trivial.

Why don't we change it. The awesome thing about Classic was trying to learn encounters, expect the unexpected. The majority of the players on this server have raided at some point on Live, are familiar with what EQ expects from a successful raid force, and can use Google to answer any and all questions.

I know this topic is about leapfrogging, but I believe that solving the challenge of raid difficulty will help eliminate it.

Here is an option that I think might be viable.

- Create a counter on raid targets (bosses). This will increase the difficulty slowly to create a steady and consistent challenge as raid forces gear up.

a) When a boss is killed, the next time it spawns, it'll spawn with 1% more health, damage (to attacks, aoe's, and various special abilities).
b) Make the bonuses cumulative. If Phinny is killed 5 times, he'd get a 5% bonus.
c) The bonus will wear off by 1% every spawn cycle it's up without being killed (with spawn timer +/- 2x the random spawn delay).

what? are you high or is this for serious... It's great you are trying to find a solution, but I think yall are looking a bit too deep into things =P I can shoot this idea down from about 8 different angles, no offense

[Kainzo]

GM's only intervened if there were trains / conflict. 95% of the time, the community banished the people who kept breaking rotations / rules on mobs that were widely conflicted.

[Xadion]

Here is my 2cp

I played day 1 on Veeshan, home of FoH and many other guilds that make other servers look like childs play in terms of raiding etc.

We never had GM enforced rotation- because although how much the high end guilds where hardcore and could all be assholes- there was a general respect among the guilds- FoH,CD,CoE etc etc if there was a force in stage, lets say PoFear it would be a race to get a force and break westwall- whomever broke the zone, got the zone.

Kunark, I cant tell you much as I raided very little near the top end guilds at that time- Velious was the same, first to get into their respective wing had it- leapfrogging happend mostly in north, and 90% of the time resulted in training each other and then a GM would kick one guild out- usualy after they leapfrogged and got 1 dragon or two- as they would not skip the guild, but at the split at the begining most would go right kill Dargon and the other two as they move to the ring interception/vulak area- if there was leap frogging the other guild would go kill the AoE knockback one and the fish one- then usualy there would be some trains (aka we r just pulling tripplets watch out!) and then a GM would come in and sort things out, if it ever got that far.

Mostly things will be okay come Velious- that is if there are a good number of overlapping desired pops. Just the number of things to do in velious will fix it, Kunark and Sky will not...what is there to raid in Kunark? Sky, Trak, VS, Chardoc, 3 world dragons...oh yes the trial zone of ToV..that will take forever to get into because of the Trakanon drop. Kunark may only help depending on the attitude of Epics, as many of them require popping back into old raid zones, PoF/H and alot in Air/Sky- are the guilds going to focus on taking a force to clear out the gholems and CT rather than sit poopsocking VS? Time will tell.

The only real solution is have more content than is needed, that /may/ happen in kunark- but I honestly do not see it happening untill velious.

rant random over

[guineapig]

Good points Dumesh and Azeth.

If poopsocking is truly going to be done away with then the above ideas should be "good enough"...

I have yet to see much ostracizing on a guidl wide level on this server, but one would hope it would happen in this case.