Enforced Raid Rotation Discussion Thread

i've wondered at the timing myself... they buffed the mobs, then announced forced rotation in less than a week, and only a week before the transfers?

the mechanics are made for a quater,, at most of the current server populations, which is why they made the servers hold more/load balanced newbiezones before they even released them... too bad they got far, far more than they anticpated...
instancing is wanted ... and you know this well already... because will not share and hold a monopoly with asshattery in most cases. they are bleeding out people who saw it coming, hoped for the best, and are giving up now.
i see the forced rotation as a hopeful effort on DGB's part to try and save both time(i understand the time constraints they said) and subscriptions. too late most likely judging by the reactions and the adimant refusal of TL to share nicely even when forced to.

I'd rather stop my sub.... no expos gooe bye! Thanks for killing Everquest not going to waste my time Raid rotation WTF this is not 1999! Lazy is as lazy does!!!

I have made a Raw sketch of a possible sollution here.

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=19402C245DB521B8!278&authkey=!AOB7NlTIgyr-0BA&ithint=file,xlsx

Sounds like a lazy company to me...................... What if other guilds want a shot??? Why are we being forced to sit in line? I truly think DBG is in over there heads.......... I mean this is by far the worst idea.......I Know lets keep pissing off the players... Until its just the top 5 guilds and a bunch of no bodies FFS make it instance or the server will just die

Might have 15 or 20 guilds wanting in this rotation in a month..

Wow, openly hostile to the guild leader of the top guild on Lockjaw and think anyone will care about you. /golfclap

Almost missed this. Nice job selectively quoting my response - to another player - to avoid responding to the rest of my quote, after your odd silence concerning my first reply that was actually to you. Anyway, what I was referring to when I said majority was clearly only by way of comparison to the other alternative - forced rationing of content. I.e. Most people who are expressing themselves here, who were in favor of instancing, do not seem to want forced rotations. Speaking for myself and not for others I can easily say this is because I have no desire to interfere with others' gameplay, which is what forced-rationing content does.

If you look through my posting history you will very clearly see I am not one to make assumptions about numbers.

There is so much I want to say, but at the same time I don’t want a wall of text no one reads.

I have been raiding EQ on and off for 16yrs, I have be a part of “Top 50 World” guilds in WoW. I raid for fun. It’s where I get my enjoyment. I want to raid every day and if there is a target up, I want to be the one killing it.

There is nothing in my mentality of raiding where I am out to squash people, hurt or harass other guilds or players. It’s actually against my character as a person.

This whole rotation talk honestly has me nervous about staying. I do not want to wait an entire week, and then raid for a couple hours only to wait another week before doing what I love. (Yes, I know I exaggerated)

The one thing that really bothers me about this whole thing is that DBG was very clear from the start. Before the servers where even open. These servers where suppose to be Open World, competitive DPS races. Dev’s posted on forums, and they also edited their EULA to document this same mindset…..again before the servers where opened up.

Everyone knew what they were getting into and now….you want to change those core beliefs. You want to uproot and perform a 180 on the entire server mindset and foundation to what these TLP servers where designed for. This blows my mind…I am simply staring at these forums and my jaw drops.

There is nowhere on god’s green earth that you should be able to do that. Changing a founding principle on how these servers where started shouldn’t happen. There has to be some fraud law or hell….just some common decency, ethic, or moral code in peoples guts that gives them pause about this.

I get it, I understand where you guys are coming from, and I totally would agree with you if there wasn’t this big flashing light before you even created your characters.

Please don’t change the founding principles of the server. We all signed up for the exact same thing. Let’s work with each other the best we can. I honestly can’t believe what’s about to happen, if DBG flips on the very core principles they in good faith started with on these TLP servers. I honestly will have lost all faith in them.


Change or modify, but to do a complete 180 …. /sigh

Founding principals can and do change all the time.

I had tossed out suggestions for a separate server for people not wanting the DPS-race-brah game, that wanted instancing instead. I'd also tossed out that instancing be a side-set of the servers instead of changing the contested game. Devs said they didn't have time to address it. I think we're stuck with what we have for now.

But as it stands now, it kinda sucks for everyone and this enforced raid rotation just has the feel of everyone being "put in the corner for time-out".

Kismet,

I love your post a lot and can feel your passion ... but try looking at this from DGC or other players perspective for one moment. The reason DGC is doing this IS because in all this time since the servers have been open, guilds like yours haven't worked with others to such a detriment of the server that something had to change.

DGC doesn't talk much about the 'internal why' but either the massive amount of complaints of so many issues across the board has had them jumping through hoops.

I do understand someone's desire to race to every mob, take everything they can, but when things are so lopsided, changes have to happen (anyone here play planetside in the past and can give an analogy about the various factions being so imbalanced the game itself was affected)?

Assaulting people who have to go to work and ACTUALLY do work while they are there is lame. Most of us have jobs and we have to function at high levels while we are at work which means we have to have sleep. We have kids who have baseball games, soccer games, and ballet recitals. We want to be able to log in and play a game when we can and we would occasionally like to see a raid target. Do any of you seriously think any of us casual guilds out there are actually going to be able to take out much more than Phinny, Nagafen, and maybe Inny? Do you honestly think any of us are going to actually be able to maintain being in the rotation even under the constraints I listed a few pages back?

Nothing is going to really change. TL will still end up with most of the mobs even though they don't really need some of them anymore. The only real difference will be that other guilds will have a shot and when they fail TL will be able to clean up the mess without .

You guys act like the casuals are going to take your prized bone away when in truth they might gnaw on it but they don't have the numbers or the time to consistently do anything.

If anything under the constraints I laid out TL will have sole access to mobs for long periods of time without having to poopsock because nobody else is taking them down consistently and can't get into the rotation.

You guys act like us filthy casuals are getting a free shot at the ultimate prize when in truth with the buffed mobs we will all likely fail but we will happily pay our subscriptions and enjoy our failure because that's all we ever wanted was to get our hide roasted by a dragon one last time before our old age, arthritis, and family drag us back in the world of bills, problems and forced gaming retirement.

Long live the good ole days may they always be remembered fondly.

The quantities were established a month before the server opened on a 30+ page thread that was 38 to 6 in favor, then there are the 20 or more posts from then to the famous 99 page thread... that was 130 or more to 16 in favor.
Add another 20 or so since that thread and it would be safe to assume we have numbers.

Yes we all know that only a minority of the player base posts here but it would be safe to say that the vast majority of them favor instancing in some form. (You can verify this by pulling up the threads, make sure you have at least 5 hours to spare if you want to verify)

That being said I am curious as to your position on "hand outs" now that bosses are buffed and actually difficult it would seem everyone would have to "earn" the kills yes?

The above of course takes away the PvP aspect of killing PvE mobs

This really is the worst of both worlds solution. I'm happy that DBG is trying to solve the problems that will allow the more casual player to raid, but I didn't want the solution to impede on the enjoyment of others. Instancing + open world mobs is and will always be the best path to take for both sides. It allows anyone who puts in the time to get to 50 a chance to raid via instancing, but it also allows for a contested "bonus" mob for guilds that wish to compete in the open world. I wish DBG had the bandwidth to implement it.

I don't think anyone can possibly fail to realize that removal of PnP was a manpower issue, rather than a policy shift.

That said, until it is established what exactly "competition" means, it's hard to have sympathy for it being removed, as it's basically heading in the direction of who is willing to throw the most accounts at it. Arms races aren't competition.

If people wanted fair competition, they'd set up rules like 72 player max raids, with no DPS in raid and no healers out of raid tricks. No fielding of alt raids in addition to the main one. If a guild socks a mob and you want it too, then you sock it with them and try to take it. If that means that a third guild is able to take a second mob that spawns elsewhere while they're doing it, then that is how the game was designed to work, and how it worked in 1999. And frankly, considering how many people talk about mobilization races, I don't quite see why no one has wanted to implement a no socking agreement.

But, yea...wouldn't agreements like those 3 (to restate: max 72 person raids, one raid per guild and perhaps even a no socking agreement) set healthy parameters to the raid scene and allow things like mobilization races and theorycrafting to actually matter more?

What kismet says is he likes to raid, not race. Again, instancing or tasktimers would fix the problem.

You'd have to ask the guilds that begin the socks why they feel it is necessary to do so.

Things that I like about a rotation:

1. Allows people who want to raid but don't want to deal with the quasi-PvP nonsense an avenue to do so. If my guild can kill the dragon without help or hindrance from other players, rotations allow my guild to do so.

Things I don't like about rotations, even though I will likely benefit:

1. They're a pain in the to administer. (see p99).
2. Even when administered properly, they cause lots of drama. (see p99).
3. Some players feel a great deal of discomfort when they have to wait around for any length of time looking at an "available" target while another guild takes a shot at it. (Note: Even though I don't personally feel this way, in the aggregate these negative feelings tend to cause problems). And,
4. The biggest: virtually no one will be happy with this. I'll be okay with it, but I suspect that I'm in the minority of people here. DBG has figured out a way to make me resubscribe, but make me feel very nervous about whether that was a good idea.

DBG, I hope I don't need to tell you this, but you should be making decisions that make people WANT to play your game. Your statements about Alan Rickman make it seem like you're prepared to punish your customers because you refuse for whatever reason--legitimate or otherwise--to implement a structure that will make everyone happy.

TL leadership and vocal members are on the record as being in favor of exped instancing. There a hundreds of threads on this forum from the past 6 months discussing this issue, the overwhelming majority of which call for instancing.

Any resources available should be diverted from whatever half-measure intermediate "lets see if this works" plans you have in place to instancing classic-pop. Announce it today. Tell us you expect it to take XYZ months (years?) to finish the whole project. Rip off the bandaid and save the game.

Rotations are fine, with me, in the short term. But I think you'll find within a few months you've managed to piss off a whole new set of players without actually giving anyone what they really want.

Do the right thing.

The fact you're implying that ~44, or even ~146 people stating their opinion matters on something on a server with literally thousands of individuals show a complete lack of understanding of how to build a product. That sample size is literally not even statistically relevant given the player base.

Poll the entire server then. We all know what the majority will vote for.

If this was a brand new game, comments about understanding how a product is built might matter. It is not, however; the EQ1 instancing drive is about asking them to apply what they already did in later expansions to older ones. And via OMM missions, for example, technically they already did it.

And that response just highlights your total lack of comprehension around how things are built as I pointed out to other people yesterday (though it may have been in a different thread). Simply because the mechanics exist elsewhere in the game (5+ years of development time afterwords) does not mean that those mechanics can simply seamlessly be copy/pasted or ported back to content created years prior that were originally created without those mechanics in mind at all.

Edit: as for "poll the entire server" that doesn't really address the problem. A level 20 character that plays 2 hours a week shouldn't have a vote in the raiding scene; if you live in the US do think you deserve a vote in governmental elections in France, for instance?