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#101
09-18-2014, 12:08 PM
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Anyone who knows anything about the top level raiding scene also can smell the unspoken reality miles away:
The winners of this game are people that know how to macro and automate without getting caught. EverQuest is extremely hackable and extremely automatable. Back in Classic the top guilds were all using all of the cheats, macros, mods, automation they thought they could get away with. To me it sounds like this server has GMs that are more attentive and interested in catching cheaters, but that just means they're going to catch the obvious ones, and the winners of the game will be people who were subtle enough to make sure their cheating is of the type that can't be caught. The kinds of "competition" people are talking about here is exactly the kind of competition that is easy to automate while appearing to not be automated. There are entire suites of software that provide tools to people to allow them to automate gameplay--especially in non-twitch games like EverQuest. I see these "uber" players going around doing stuff like swarm kiting 40 mobs in tight perfect circles. Like circles with a 12 foot radius. For hours on end. Who the fuck are people kidding? These people are obviously not doing all of this manually. They're using various forms of automation. Whether that automation is technically legal or not is irrelevant. The point is that you have no chance to win unless you also use these techniques, and using these techniques means playing a programming-oriented metagame of plausible deniability and becoming friends with moderators so they start to believe that all your achievements are actually skill. I've seen it all before. So anyway my appeal is just to the purists like me who want to play the game with no scripts, no modifications, no programming or macros of any kind. Not because this will make me a better player--in EQ a purist will always be inferior to those willing to do what it takes to win. You should play this way because it's way more fun, even when you lose. Now let me tell you a story... I was in a guild of around 50 people and we discovered that it was easier to create software on each players computer that would allow the leadership to control their characters for them than it was to teach each player every raid encounter. All guilds are made up of a core of 1-5 people who do 90% of the work. The remaining people are more or less bodies filliing up slots. Those remaining people may put in a lot of time, or they may not, but the point is that they are fairly easy to replace and don't bring a lot of key intelligence or competitive spirit to the guild. In one of my guilds, the core 4-5 people realized that we would be most effective and adaptable by actually writing software that our players would install on their computers that allowed us to just control their characters remotely. Think of it like long distance 50 boxing. We would just map their abilities on to certain triggers--including movement and making heavy use of the /follow command--and this would allow us to puppet string entire raid forces. This made us way more effective. Imagine having 1 person in control of all the wizards in the raid. The head wizard pushes a button on his software and all the other wizards nuke at exactly the same time. This is just a bad example. The point is that this allowed for tremendous control and flexibility. Some of our players complained that it was like making them no longer even a player of the game. But even those complainers were quickly silenced because they very much enjoyed being part of a guild that was so dominating. This was just one little intiative that was dreamed up one day and then implemented 2 weeks later. There were dozens of others, with the most basic being straight up automation of tedious tasks combined with alert mechanisms to bring the player to the computer should a GM send them a tell to test if they were AFK. The knowledge kept inside uber guilds in MMOs absolutely dwarfs all of the public knowledge available on sites like p99 wiki. Most of the tricks of EQ are still probably NOT known to the general public. Now by my estimation... the top guilds on p99 are of fairly low calibre worldwide. IB/TMO are not really big fish in a small pond but just little fish in a tiny pond. But the nature of EQ--with it's lack of instances--means that the winners of EQ are going to be people willing to take their competitiveness to the next level. Whatever that level may be. So my advice to BDA and everyone else who feels wronged by IB/TMO is to stop trying to win at a rigged game. Learn to enjoy EQ as a purist like me and have fun roleplaying and doing low or mid level grouping. You actually don't have to play their game, and you don't need gear from Veeshan's Peak in order to have fun. Life is way too short to get upset that people are beating you in a videogame. Just realize you'll never win without going into "hardcore" mode and that going into hardcore mode is not worth it. | ||
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#102
09-18-2014, 12:20 PM
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TLDR
__________________
 Yumyums Inmahtumtums - 59 Shaman Lemonspoon Icebeaner - 52 Enchanter Yumyums Inmahtumtums - 60 Enchanter | ||
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#104
09-18-2014, 12:23 PM
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Quote:
I mean, it's purely speculation and with the way raiding is at the moment such methods would be for the most part useless (which is why trackers can no longer engage, etc.) but we'll go with this Forensic guy's opinion. | |||
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#105
09-18-2014, 12:23 PM
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Quote:
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#107
09-18-2014, 12:35 PM
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Quote:
The rule legislators and rule lawyers will argue for months and years about what does and doesn't break the rules. All competitions work like this. People push the rules as far as possible. Being a winner means understanding where the line is and exploiting that. A hockey player who doesn't play as dirty as the ref will allow is a bad hockey player. Wayne Gretzky's high achievements were based on the dirty play of his enforcers who pushed the rules to their absolute limits and even got penalized for that many times. Gretzky is now hailed as the greatest player ever... and he was... If you turn EQ into an elite competitive sport then to be a contender you have to understand the rules and push them to their limit. This is what being competitive means... and pushing the rules to their limit means pushing them to their limit of enforceability. Unfortunately for EQ... it's extremely easy to cheat. This is why it's absolutely retarded to turn EQ into a competitive sport. Competitive EQ is the dumbest eSport ever. If you want an eSports competition you should go play a game that was built for it. All of these people are crying because they are being dominated and they are unwilling to "sink to the level" of the winners. It's really stupid to expect an "honorable" competition in this of all places. | |||
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#108
09-18-2014, 12:40 PM
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Take a look at a fairly similar situation. Shards of Dalaya (custom EQ freeshard using up to Titanium expansions) has a comparable population. It also has 13 raid tiers with more raid mobs in most of each tiers than all of current P99's zones combined.
List There are also 6-man encounters, 12-man encounters, and adepts (basically lowbie raids). I was on there for a year or two raiding T1-T10 via a couple guilds and rarely encountered issues with other guilds raiding a few hours three nights a week. There were some issues sure, but like I said, fairly rare. Am I saying this place is heaven? No. Am I saying P99 should try to emulate a custom server and add custom content? Obviously not as it defeats the purpose of the project in the first place. I'm just trying to communicate an idea of the amount of raid content it seems to take to make 500-1000 people happy and consistently raiding. Now, take that raid content, divide it by 13 and sit with it for three years. It's amazing you people get any raiding done at all without everyone's dicks going into everyone's butts. I'm lurking until Velious. Not sure it will change anything though, even doubling the raid content. | ||
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#109
09-18-2014, 12:43 PM
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If p99 is ACTUALLY giving us a classic EQ experience... then the dominating guilds will be chock full of tactics that the general public knows nothing about.
Tactics that the general public would be outraged to find out about. The technical legality of each of those tactics is a discussion for philosophers. But anyway I really enjoy the classic EQ experience including the fact that there are these pixel deniers at the top of the server. That's just part of the nature of classic EQ. <insert deal with it dog> | ||
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#110
09-18-2014, 12:52 PM
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So what's the carrot on the stick for the casual raider? We obviously refuse to stoop to the hardcore level of what they call "competition" and we've created an environment where 10+ guilds are sharing 33% of the content which happens to be more than half the server population.
This isn't a classic situation. It needs a non classic solution. Give us p99 blue 2.0. BDA will personally raise the necessary funds for hardware and hosting (as would almost every other class R guild I'm sure) and allow a onetime /movelog to the new server. On this new server the raid rules will be agreed upon by the raiding guilds and enforced by the staff in the spirit of the current class R rotation agreement. A council comprised of raid guild reps would come to agreements on punishments which would remove the need for staff discipline. Staff would be left with item reimbursements and corpse rots. I've had this idea for a while and the only class R guilds that didn't like the plan was A-Team and Omni (although Omni initially supported the idea) plus I'd wager that a large majority of the casual population would movelog as well because they'd know that they could eventually reach their EQ goals without being a hardcore neckbeard asshole. It's saying something when 75% of the p99 population would willingly secede from TMO/IB if given the opportunity.
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