I'll admit this came to my mind with all the complaint posts about Agnarr content of late (and each prior progression server has had its day of forum noise on the issues I suppose): My original server had 1 elite guild, probably top10ish quality of entire game (so probably the only one on the server doing Vex Thal in era, though I can't remember) and 2 others doing endgame content by PoP. No one else could get PoP flagged as they contested and held the content with each other... it may even have taken that 3rd guild some time to get through it due to needing #1 being done with it and #2 working hard to block others. A 4th guild with a very bad rep (for the tactics they used, the way they treated the community, etc.) managed to break into Time around GoD era. I'm pretty sure the 5th guild into Time wasn't until OoW but they had to push hard to backflag through the other guilds still blocking a couple of planar progression targets. The vast majority of us on the server were not in any of these guilds. There's a ton of content we didn't see at all until they unlocked the zones globally and/or some of us moved up the guild food chain (or the stuff had gotten so old you could get near it with the family casual guild 15 levels higher than the era). TLDR: back in the day not many guilds saw most of the endgame raid content in era, or even that close to era. Was your server like that?
I was on Druzzil Ro and I was elemental flagged in my guild(Evening Reign). We got elemental flagged after LDoN was released, though. I have no idea how many guilds were elemental at that time, though.
Likewise PVP on Tallon Zek. Top guild blocked all other guilds from current endgame and usually the prior expansion as well. Two Tier 2 guilds were sniping what they could but massively outgeared and could not compete for the important stuff (plus they hated each other almost as much as they hated the top guild, so they rarely cooperated.) A handful of tier 3 guilds were usually competing for stuff 2-3 expansions back.
Tunare, had like 2 very elite guilds, then like 7 very good guilds that were competing at the top level including Euros and Asian which made for interesting competition during all times.
My server had one top guild that did everything to keep others out. Was 2-3 guilds behind it that was atleast an expansion behind. When PoP came out my guild had moved up to number two spot and we tried to get elemental flagged, but they kept Rallos Zek and Solusek Ro down at all times. We eventually managed to get a RZ kill, but Solusek Ro we couldn't kill. What we did to kill Solusek Ro was to get up at 6am one day before people went to work or school and did the kill . Then trying to get Time access also was hard.
Cazic-Thule server had a lot of very good guilds, rivalries and alliances. Some merged, others split. I remember the top guild at the time in Kunark transfered to a brand new server during the fall of 2000 opening up the game between 6 very good guilds, 3 of them already in a alliance to combat the guild who moved server. Two of those guilds ended up raiding together all the way up through luclin. A rotation on Trakanon came up, but some of the epic fight races were a mess lol. ( mostly Zordak Ragefire, when he popped back at the firepot in Naggy's hall). Wasn't really much a competition during Velious either at start because everyone thought you had to choose between Giants or Dragons with a blood oath - so the top guilds where either in NorthToV or Halls of Testing. Of course the complaints came in when the Sleeper were awokened somewhat late compared to other servers (Late summer 2001) and no more primals for other guilds still keying up. I can't remember when they implemented the ancient dragons, but once sleeper were awokened back then, your Primal farmdays was basically over.
Tallon zeks top guild Pandemonium never let the other 2 raiding guilds get into time. They had bots camped at Rathe Council and trained every attempt.. very easy to grief that encounter. Then the pvp servers merged during PoP era and it was the greast moment in everquest history, 1000 players in PoK, mass pvp everywhere, top guilds from the different servers going at eachother. Pandemonium was the last one standing though after the merge.
Bristlebane had a top 5 guild that was Euro time and a Top 10~20 guild US time they would both try to keep each other from getting things by doing stuff like intentionally failing the Corinav trigger. Beyond that the biggest issue for the next 5 guilds was racing to get content. We actually had 3 guilds in Plane of Air raiding different elemental minis at the same time. This is probably part of what gets lost with the instancing and innate player power boosts much less need to raid sub optimal content.
This was true, it was also a reason a lot of people quit the game. Beating content out of era is not very satisfying, but beating it in era was impossible under the constraints we set for ourselves. One reason we were never top tier is that we do not play the game obsessively. We have real lives and real families. Beating something 10 times is really quite enough of that. And, it's already quite enough of that. Agnarr fixes some of this with pickzones (with a few blatant open sores and player abusiveness), but then exposes the problem these choke-points were designed to hide: utter lack of things to do. Kunark really is a 6 week expansion hiding behind a 3 month lockout.
I was on Povar and it's tough to answer as "in era" was a year or so for most expansions originally. I had a friend in one of the original raiding guilds on Povar and heard stories from him of their breaking Fear and arguing over who got loot (we all know a lot of early plane gear had odd stats for the classes). My first raiding was Kael arena, even with 20-30 characters there we couldn't keep it cleared. A few months later we moved to Halls of Testing, but we had to go early mornings (~3am eastern) to maximize all our members being there and it not being claimed. Again I recall other raids being there and being able to "split" HoT by north and south sides without a problem of clearing. We started raiding Umbral months into Luclin (when it was less busy) but would be bought off with spells (i.e. KEI, group Aego) to move out of the way for the "bigger" raid guilds to do Doomshade or RC to get into VT. All of that classic and early raiding has been different on TLP's, with base character power and picks available for farm zones (Yes we had picks of ToV for a short window on Ragefire). Eventually Povar had a message board for the ~10 raiding guilds to coordinate rotating raid targets from NToV to PoP.
I was a scrub in school and was lucky to play each day lol. I have no idea how hard content was on my server because as soon as the zerg moved into naggys lair my computer would crash!
I was on Bristlebane in 1999 and the raid scene was really nice early on. There was a lot of open raiding where anyone could join in to a raid that was not run by any guild but rather a few great players. There were some big guilds that did their thing, and there were some small guilds that could get involved in raiding as well, usually with the help of some stronger players from outside the guild. Once Kunark came along, things started to change. Raiding became more important. By PoP it was a hardcore raiding game and the small guilds started to tear themselves apart with people wanting to do more and others not wanting to or not being able to, and people ended up leaving for other guilds. I grew to hate my small guild and I didn't really want to join a big guild, so I just quit the game. I think that was 2004 or so. I didn't come back to real EQ until May 2017.
