A Beginner's Guide to the P1999 Raid Scene?

[SirAlvarex]

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

And strangely all this could be avoided by having GM enforced rotations - almost no staff involvement necessary. You put your name on the list, it gets posted on forums. If a guild is not up for the mob / zone and they take it they can't really argue it was a mistake...

So why is this not happening? Rotations and lists were classic... makes you wonder what's going on.

When I stopped playing 2 years ago there was some semblance rotations between guilds. What happened to that? I remember us having a "shot" at a raid target every like 4th spawn or something.

[Dreenk317]

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

When I stopped playing 2 years ago there was some semblance rotations between guilds. What happened to that? I remember us having a "shot" at a raid target every like 4th spawn or something.

I took a long break, when I came back the rotation system was gone. I heard, and am stressing heard as I've not looked into it. That Chest and BDA decided to not follow the rotation anymore and began just camping raid mobs and getting FTE, since the rotation system, as far as I knew was setup by the players, it had no GM enforcement and other guilds were forced to began racing for mobs as well or lose out to BDA every time.

Again, that's just what I heard.

[Ravager]

Originally Posted by Dreenk317 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I took a long break, when I came back the rotation system was gone. I heard, and am stressing heard as I've not looked into it. That Chest and BDA decided to not follow the rotation anymore and began just camping raid mobs and getting FTE, since the rotation system, as far as I knew was setup by the players, it had no GM enforcement and other guilds were forced to began racing for mobs as well or lose out to BDA every time.

Again, that's just what I heard.

The Swish spin did its job then.

The class system was hard-coded into the server, the only 'official' rotation was between class C and class R guilds. If you were class C you could only kill class C mobs and FFA mobs. Class R guilds could only kill Class R mobs and ffa mobs, or they would become class C. Class R guilds had lockouts. If they killed an R mob, they could not kill another R mob for 2 more R cycles, which was effectively 9 weeks later. Class C had no such lockouts.

If a mob was left up for 6 hours in either class, it would go FFA.

The player agreement was with splitting up those R mobs between multiple guilds. You could guess that having a dozen guilds rotating every 3rd spawn made things contentious about who should be allowed into the rotation and the conditions they needed to meet to stay in the rotation (very important because of the 6 hour rule and so few mobs to rotate in the first place -- if a guild in the rotation couldn't kill their mob, it would go ffa and quite likely to a C guild).

Despite what Swish would have you believe, BDA was not the only guild unhappy with the player made rotation, it was just that BDA was the guild leading the negotiations for change. That's the short of it. I won't get into the politics of it since there's years of RnF you can read up on to get everyone's side of it, just put Swish on ignore if you want to see the facts from both sides of the argument.

Edit: The C/R/F coding was removed with the launch of Velious, presumably because more mobs meant more guilds would have more chances without the need to rotate anything. We can see how that's working out...

[Vallanor]

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

TLDR: the raid scene on this server is pure aids. If you want to raid, go play on Phinigel where they have instances. Which is sad, because Project 1999 is an amazing recreation of classic EQ in so many ways.

This is pretty much 100% correct. There are a few things like Vindi, Velketor and some of Kunark that aren't really poopsocked, but outside those exceptions, the raid scene is total garbage.

Play P99 for the road to 60. Leveling is still really fun, there are abundant groups with mostly friendly people, and the amount of content pre-60 is enough to keep you busy for a really long time. Just don't expect the fun to continue at the end game.

[Whirled]

http://www.project1999.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=261345

Give this a nice read and tell me the raid scene is doing great.
Here's some more light reading while one fills a sock.
http://www.project1999.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=257090

http://www.project1999.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=259666

http://www.project1999.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=260469

http://www.project1999.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=259153

Anyone telling you that the raid scene is great is either on drugs, doesn't work for a living or both. You can easily find multitudes of other threads of adults screaming at each other for their pixels. More importantly, you be your own judge. because no one here will give you anything but their own biased opinion. Even mine; since I don't GAF about raiding. I just like to read some of the retardation that goes on to pass time while on breaks & laugh at the fact that grown adults fight over such petty things.

[Whirled]

http://www.project1999.com/forums/sh...+staff+sickens
OP, please tell us your thoughts on this thread.

This one is still going too:
http://www.project1999.com/forums/sh...49#post2432049

Who needs a pixel epic when you can have epic laughs?

[Nuggie]

you cant truly appreciate how far the server has come from the IB/TMO/VD days unless you were there. We were in the Dark Ages. We've moved on and are now in the Enlightenment. I don't expect the raid scene to progress past where are are currently until the population is back down around 500 at peak and there is only enough people who want to raid to satisfy the needs of 1 guild.

All that said. Raiding on P99 Blue sucks. It's a huge time investment compared to most games, and most iterations of this game. Now that there isnt enough of a population on red for pvp, raiding red might be the most authentic version of PvE EQ you will find. I'm just not willing to start over.

[SirAlvarex]

For those saying the current raid scene doesn't replicate classic -- when this has been brought up in the past the returned argument is that this raid scene *does* emulate classic. It's just it emulates the servers that had the "best" raiding guilds who were always the first to complete content.

For example on Tunare EC tunnel was a wasteland -- we did all our trading in Greater Faydark (GFay). There also was, to my recollection, a rotation for raid targets amongst the top guilds. But that wasn't true for all servers and some of them were reported to be very cutthroat. P99 is emulating that cutthroat server because the effort to make it "nicer" would be fairly immense.

[fastboy21]

The basic "problem" is that classic raiding on live was horrible. The game lent itself to spawn camping by entire guilds (affectionately later called "poop socking" -- sounds pleasant), racing, kill stealing, training, bottle-necking progression (affectionately called "cock blocking" --again, sounds pleasant, right?) etc.

Live EQ never solved these problems until end-game PoP (INSTANCED POTIME). On **some servers** the competing guilds cooperated and entered into their own agreements because it was mutually beneficial, but the game mechanics and CS teams never solved them. In the end, it was only fixed by designing content that was hard to bottleneck or was actually instanced.

So...the "problem" here is that the server did what it was designed to do. The state of raiding on P99 is a FEATURE intentionally replicated and implemented by the designers.

There was an era in the server history where I thought the dev team had changed their philosophy on this. For those of you who weren't here yet, Rogean shut down all raiding for all guilds. He did this until they agreed to cooperate in a raiding system. The result was the class R and class C system. It wasn't a perfect system, but it was a milestone in p99's history. The commitment to the paradigm shift that caused raid reform here seems to have waned in recent times on the server.

Maybe the team decided on a change of heart and went back to their original design philosophy?

Maybe the team decided that enforcement was impossible with given resources and they gave up on it?

Personally, I think they were on the right road and they got off of it (for whatever reason), but that's just opinion. The current state of the server is what it is now...and I don't imagine it changing much. The one exception is that I hope they use p99 to beta test the systems they will hopefully implement on the reboot iteration of p99 whenever that happens.

[Ravager]

Originally Posted by fastboy21 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

There was an era in the server history where I thought the dev team had changed their philosophy on this. For those of you who weren't here yet, Rogean shut down all raiding for all guilds. He did this until they agreed to cooperate in a raiding system. The result was the class R and class C system. It wasn't a perfect system, but it was a milestone in p99's history. The commitment to the paradigm shift that caused raid reform here seems to have waned in recent times on the server.

True, except the players made no agreement to cooperate and that was the whole problem. The result of the class R and class C was 100% Rogean and hard coded into the server. It wasn't perfect, but it was something. C/R/FFA may as well be re-implemented at this point since there is no Sleeper anymore and arguably shittier raid conditions than back when it was first introduced.