How Guilds In Everquest Worked

Quill, you're right, we've been persuaded. Good thread, def don't need to rehash this ten more times. Thanks!

Guilds were always night and day difference when it came to how they were built back in the day. Casual guilds usually farmed trash content (PoHate/PoFear) for loot and stayed away from major raid bosses. Middle of the pack guilds were either smaller; I came from Dead of Winter on Innoruuk Server and we accomplished a good bit with fewer people, but we were never in the race for being a top guild on the server. Then there were the high end guilds. SR and GRG merged and raided Elemental Planes as 2 raids to knock more stuff / keys out. AV and LoD were larger in size guilds, and were tops of the server along with SR, but stayed as a one raid team.

Anywho, guilds always were built different. It's all about what they are their members want. If people want to be a part of a larger force to see the game at breakneck speeds, or if they want to belong to a small home that raids PoHate named for the next year; none of them are wrong. Everyone pays to play in one form or another...Live and let live

Where is the off button on this moron.

So you want 3-6 person guilds? That's how many it takes to do any of this content without motm.

It's probably best that we stop provoking and responding to this guy. Either he's a troll or has some form of social disorder that inhibits him from recognizing social cues. And the fact that he continues to relentlessly assert that an entire community should conform to his ideals is definitely a red flag that something isn't quite right with him.

Best to put down the pitchforks and just ignore him until he tires himself out.

a group of 40 can kill nagafen. It just requires organization and strategy instead of zerg.

I don't agree with the original poster about how things use to be. And I also enjoy large guilds. You can't have too many friends!

That said, he does have a point about smaller guilds not having the raiding options they had pre-mitigation. I wonder how hard it would be to offer unbuffed raids as an option with a smaller player cap of something like 36?

Any need to even ask?
Ah rhetorical questions FTW!

More important question is will we ever forget?
Heh

Yes he does have a point, pretty good one actually though perhaps too long winded making it.

If the status quo were literally having BS for lunch you would draw fire for saying it tasted bad.

I was in a casual guild I guess back in the PoP era. We called ourselves a family guild that raided. Suer we were generally an expansion behind, but that was as much due to the raiding mechanics of the day (ie no instanced content) and a lack of people willing/able to be on call for raid mob pops.

Hell our first RZ kill we had one raid of 48 dealing with trash while the main raid focused on RZ. It worked, we got a few drops and moved on ... it is what it is.

The biggest issue seems to be people trying to make a game something it's not.

Pretty sure the main point is the raids are not really difficult just lllloooonnnggg drawn out affairs due to the buff. Sure that increases the risk a bit but the boredom can be very real even without the buff.

Nothing wrong with thinking ahead and wouldn't hurt anyone at all if the matter was reversed.

One of my favorite memories was Velious being too hard so the top two guilds on Brell Serillis. Couldn't clear the content on their own so they had to team up on raids. When asked why they didn't just combine guilds they said it would put them over 100 members and guild chat would of not been tolerable with that many people. Flash forward to agnarr the guild I am in has 1589 members lol!

It would absolutely hurt all guilds. Why would anyone want to join a guild (or save lockouts to raid with guild) if you can just 3 box naggy on your own? Or grab two friends and kill him yourselves if you don't like to box?

No... I described an EVERQUEST GUILD circa 1999-2002.

Per bold... Legit question... what? The game peaked at half a million players. And you think only one or two guilds raided on a server?

Let me phrase your statement... 'Only one or two guilds raided the endgame zone of an expansion on a server, period'.

And this I would agree with. But holy crap man. Total? On A Server?

On Fennin Ro we had 10-20 guilds or more that raided on server, even guilds out of Hong Kong that raided during our night hours(assuming you could find anything up). But only one that raided endgame(The Mystical Order), because endgame could be blocked. The first one or two guilds to make it in per server 'protected their turf' at all costs because they didn't want to split loot with more and more guilds. Where exactly do you think replacements came from in those 'high-end' guilds??? Thin air?

And typically if those guilds were hitting endgame, it would open up content an expansion or two back that they didn't need anymore that other guilds would then have access to. This particular problem being solved with instancing. But it was never because they couldn't kill that stuff.. it was because they didn't have access to it.

But you have some serious misinformation and rose-colored glasses if you think your guild that was raiding endgame was the only one on server. Just... whatever.

As just one example... the reason that the cleric epic dragon got turned spawnable is because *3* or more guilds would sit the spawn leading to massive petitions and CS problems. I even vaguely recall a news article appearing(was it the BBC?) about it. So they turned it into its current form.

I do find it interesting how the history of this game seems to have gone by the wayside. It peaked at 490K subs, and the casual players got flushed when things shifted to 72-man raiding. Even they admitted this was a mistake, and have focused on 54-man raiding for well over a decade.

But apparently people(those who perceive themselves as 'hardcore' or 'elite') have convinced the devs to block off raids to only those willing to bring 72(and really.. as soon as you open it up to people outside guild, there is no reason NOT to bring 72) to break them effectively or get bored to death. Its disgusting. If you want to bring casual raiding back, simply allow us to spawn the Live versions of these mobs.

Paradoxically, it will actually slow down progression, because these events won't keep getting overpowered. Cap the raids without MOTM at 54, if needbe. Heck.. make it only for Agnarr and Let the game be the game there. It ends at PoP anyways, you have nothing to worry about. Take a chance and experiment.. you'll appeal to more people than just these few.

If these other people want to do them on hard... let them. Hard and easy versions of instances have been in the game since instancing was introduced in LDoN. Its not hard to do.

Meanwhile, it will allow us to make smaller raid teams like existed in the early game and not force us into a style of game that a lot of them quit the game over to begin with.

The people i'm talking about have no clue how to '3-box naggy'.

Not everyone who played this game was that type of player. Oh Wait... THOSE ARE ALL THAT ARE LEFT.

Exactly. It'll get worse as the game progresses because there are a lot more events available per expansion. And given travel is an issue until PoP, can be a pain to get everybody to in a timely manner. We used to do like... THO, Vindi, that other mob in TD, maybe one or two more if they were up. But boring people to death (or having a strong Boring Tolerance), doesn't make you hardcore or elite. It makes it a bad mechanic.

Its not a problem for 72 people hogrolling(and into various splits later on)... particularly given that if you can get VT open quickly, you don't even really have to farm that much, even when current. As soon as that happens you have a ton of loot coming from Luclin that will have you ready for PoP.

Its really a completely different and far easier game than the one that was played by the casual guilds of the era. You get strength via numbers. As long as people sing along with mitch and hit the right mob and are in the right places, you're good. Not to mention that these guilds don't have to even worry about turnover of their core members.

And if that floats your boat, they can leave the HARD versions of it just for you pal.

That wasn't the game that was originally made. I want *that*. The same one that persists to this day on the Live Servers. Ending at PoP, of course.

You have 14 Days. If after that time the Plane is not properly tuned, I am deleting my characters, and cancelling all of my accounts. The rest of my guild will follow suit, as will several other guilds and people that play Everquest.
To be brief, I did not work my off, jumping through your idiotic hoops with my friends and guildmates, so I could go to a zone where only groups of 18 could enjoy the content. EVEN if past these initial moronic events I can finally get my entire guild in to raid with me, YOU GUYS. Seriously, YOU.
I cannot believe this... right now I'm just so pissed off. I am sitting here in the Plane of Time, and 3/4 of my guild is just sitting around while a group of 18 is repeatedly trying to beat one of the mini ring encounters. Don't you people have ANY DECENCY? SMEDLEY WHY DON'T YOU STOP COUNTING YOUR MONEY AND START ISSUING ORDERS?
The tragic irony of creating the ultimate encounter in the form of the Rathe which requires 80 people to defeat and then to limit encounters in the Plane of Time to 18.
14 Days.... after that this site will change from the most popular EQ fan site on the internet to the most popular World of Warcraft fan site on the internet. I'm done playing ball with you useless fuckers... it's my turn.

Dedicated troll or delusional beyond repair. Either way, there is literally zero need to try to respond or reason with this guy.

You know what, I think Vore has returned. Welcome back Vore.

man you guys sucked, on Xev we had at least 200+ guilds raiding!

E'ci had two guilds raiding early on, excluding the Asians. Souls of the Shadow and the guild that eventually became Reconstructed (original name was maybe Township Rebellion but IDK for sure). The Asian guild was Vane but not sure how much they raided, they weren't in direct competition with the other two. This was at least through Kunark because those were the two guilds fighting over Trakanon.

Then the server was split and people could opt to move to Zeburuxuk (sp?). SoTS moved, Reconstructed stayed. Eventually an alliance of three guilds began to compete with Recon for raid content. Up through Velious this was pretty much how it went, those were the two entities capable of moving to NToV.

Over time, more guilds grew and possessed more raiding focused people. There was more raiding of older content by those entities. I was in a very casual guild, basically a pure family style guild. We once "raided" Kael, which basically was just a guild romp through the area where we didn't take on any real named. The same with the dungeon under Thurgadin. Casuals didn't really raid, they just visited zones with heavy backup.

Epic quests increased the interest in raiding for casuals. Periodic large events to help out a friend where there was usually one big mob to take down. That was more in line with casual capabilities. Zerging worked, and you didn't need multiple mandatory raid days to get things done. Luclin was the first era I truly remember seeing more guilds raiding, and of course I don't mean Vex Thall, but I do mean specific hard targets that could be taken down with a large group.

Of note... in its original form, you could not split the 5 events of Time, as Is done now. It was, in fact, untuned.

I would agree that it definitely grew over time, particularly as healing strats(which were the big bottleneck) became known. But his statement was that no guilds except 1 or 2 raided on a server, and that was in no way true.

Halls of Testing
Vindi
NTOV
WTOV
WW Dragons
Tormax
Statue
Fear
Hate
Sky
SSRA
Epic Events

All that stuff got raided by casual guilds in gear that would make your Elitebro of the current game blush. And they didn't bring 72.

The game that was built was never meant to ONLY appeal to the high-end player, or it wouldn't still be here 18 years later. But they seem to think this is the way to go with TLP, even if the server ends at PoP #boggle.