Lack of Progression of Mid Teir Guilds

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Mulleteer, Jul 26, 2017.

  1. segap Augur


    Changing guilds is one thing, changing servers is a complete different thing. Think of it as changing jobs while not moving, versus changing jobs, selling your house, uprooting your family and moving across the country. They are not equivalent actions.

    Many people have friends they spend time playing with outside of raids. Friendships that may be 10-18 years old at this point. Many people have multiple accounts and multiple characters per account. Each of those requires a transfer token. That can get expensive. In the case of the original poster, it's a schedule issue and nearly every raid guild has settled in to near identical schedules (days may differ, but time of day does not). It's a take what you can get situation.

    I agree, if there's another guild on your server that better fits your needs, that's no you for not making a change. Changing servers is not as simple. Part of the problem here is not all servers are currently healthy. There are some that have no guilds to have beat the expansion. Some that don't even have more than 1-2 guilds actively raiding current content.
    Reynen likes this.
  2. lancelove Augur

    3 words : Server mergers!
  3. Bamboompow Augur

    Quite a few players are just stuck where they are at for all those aforementioned reasons. Ties to family and friends, RL responsibilities, time zones etc. EQ just does not have much mercy for anything outside of Eastern US and the Euro servers and the need to have a very regimented schedule that never changes. The top guilds that have a certain brand recognition (Everyone knows who ROI are and what they represent) and standards to match in which don't tolerate much absenteeism. Absenteeism = having to carry a larger roster and loot dilution. That is all spelled out in their rules. Besides, you know the brand and what you are signing on for. You know whether or not you can meet that commitment based upon what your RL situation is. Probably quite a few talented players are out there that could do well in a guild like ROI, but they can't get past making it mesh with RL.

    Mid Tier tend to have to bow to the fact that they don't have whatever star power will make recruitment effortless. ROI can vet, and turn people away at will. Smaller guilds have to accept those who DON'T have rigid schedules that allow very high or perfect raid attendance, DON'T live in New Jersey or Florida, are NOT the exemplars of their class and CAN'T commit 100%. Thus they carry larger rosters and have loot dilution to try and at least meet the class requirements that mechanics require. To the devs credit, they have made more overlap in classes so that it is not always a need for EXACTLY X tanks, Y healers and Z dps. Still, there is the need to have something close to that. Raids are designed to be somewhat exclusive in that regard. You need this amount of people and these classes or you fail. If that failure is a gate keeper event, then that is as far as you ever go. Its the game and how it works.

    So if your best cleric moves to Los Angeles or your best tank takes a 2nd shift job in the middle of summer....well, your guild might have to cancel a few raids. Once that stigma of a few cancelled raids hits, then players start not showing up, or they move to a guild that DOESN'T cancel raids. Progression starts to lag and its a whole self sustaining Poop-Show after that and you plug in what you can. So not only loot gets diluted, so do flags.

    Thus the never ending rebuilding of the mid tier guild. Those who just are in it for the fun stick around and just accept whatever happiness comes from what can be achieved. Those who are more competitive....move on. Typically it is also the more skilled players that leave since they have that competitive nature to be better than most. Its 2 steps forward and 1 step back at best. Many times its 2 forward and 2 back. The game is just not of a strong enough player base to get a small guild on track if they falter. The game is also too rigid for the remaining players of mid tier guilds that have lost their way to find good homes. Mostly when a mid tier guild dies, all the top players get siphoned off by the big dogs while the rest either quit or EQ just becomes a chat room for keeping up with old friends.

    TL;DR: It is what it is. Its too late to fix anything at this point. Maybe get rid of the flagging/progression grind and just make events winnable based on skill alone.
  4. kizant Augur

    Sure, you don't have to change servers necessarily and I'm sure there's other guilds to join or ones in a similar situation to merge with. But you also don't have to be limited to just one server. For people that have a bunch of alts and multiple accounts just move one character to raid with and leave the rest alone for playing with your friends. Either way it's not a problem for anyone else to solve.
  5. wingz-83 Augur

    People that pay money to play a game for entertainment should suffer. Think about what you just typed and I hope you start to see the problem. Apply that logic to other things in life.....and some people don't believe there's an elitist attitude out there. Unless you're playing Super Meat Boy or Super Mario Brothers Frustration Forever which are just single player games...that's kind of a disastrous attitude towards an MMO.
  6. feeltheburn Augur

    wait fantasy football player?? I m in tell me where !!!
  7. kizant Augur

    You're right. We should let people accomplish anything in EQ in any way they'd like. Make all content beatable by soloing with a level 1 of any class. Just scale things down but keep the reward the same. I mean not everyone has time to level or get equipment or is available to play when others are playing. Plus they are paying for the entertainment so there's no reason they should be left out. In fact anyone, right now, trying to solo in chardok at level 1 and constantly failing isn't being dumb at all. It's just Daybreak being unfair and holding them back. They should post and complain about it until the problem is addressed because there is absolutely no other solution to their problem.
  8. Bamboompow Augur

    Maybe nothing so extreme. The thing is, if your guild falters now, its finished and there is no means of facilitating any kind of a fast recovery. Or at least the odds of recovery are very much against it. The game is cannibalistic at best. Good players go to greener pastures. The rest quit. There is nothing to accommodate a smaller raid and prevent cancelled nights.

    Plus the pecking order is well established with the top of the food chain being very well known. The day when ROI can no longer recruit anyone from the one remaining blue server is the day the raid game is finished and it seems to be that way by design. Eventually all the little fish will be gone and the big fish will starve.

    I am guessing DBG is probably fine with that. There are probably some on their staff that would prefer the name to be "Finite Quest" so as to move on to bigger and more current projects. Of course the game could live on forever in perpetual reboot with time locked progs, but eventually that will jump the shark too. It offers the chance for many to actually live out "If I only knew then what I know now". The life cycle of those servers will eventually get very brief. That is after all how ROI even came into existence. It gives guilds a chance to "clean sheet" and very closely track progress. Gear everyone up with even the most obscure of chasers and best all the raids perfectly since its all old news.
  9. Jhenna_BB Proudly Prestigious Pointed Purveyor of Pincusions

    Unless something has changed this would screw over people out of hundreds of hours of trade skill work. I've heard nightmares about the recipe flags people lost on a server xfer.
    Reynen and feeltheburn like this.
  10. Reynen Journeyman

    You have any proof to back up this statement? Because I hear it for years and the game is still going on. Or is it just because you dislike it so you magically turn it into a general rule?
  11. kizant Augur

    Did you think having hate/fear or ntov available helped with this problem? Could they just add an extra/lower raid tier that's doable with low to mid 30s every expansion or two to give people something to do on a raid night with low turn out? Asking for more of that may be worthwhile but making everything easier unbalances things in the other direction for guilds with a full raid.
  12. CrazyLarth Augur

    the issue with Hate and Fear did NOT have drop coin. Why put a separate Raid merc in PoTraq that unlocks with Hate and Fear kills but not have raid coin on the raids.
  13. Millianna Augur

    The better solution is to offer raids for smaller forces that drops loot in retrospect to effort or difficulty of the raid. It's impossible to progress provided you never have enough players. Combining forces only works for awhile until a loot fight or lack of enough players geared for the next round of raids.
  14. CrazyLarth Augur

    I would love to see a half way chest one item and one spell but it does not spawn on a win.
    You would talk to the NPC in the zone to request the half way chest at the start of the raid and raid would stop at the half way point (or 50%-75% for the half win. cause a normal lockout. i could see this being used to unlock the Raid NPC items on a raid you could not win yet but gotten close.
  15. Bigstomp Augur

    Neither did NToV. It doesn't mean it was bad content. In fact it was alot of fun.
    Annastasya likes this.
  16. segap Augur


    NTOV was entertaining. Both Hate and Fear were not. Along with all the other rushed parts of TBM, the bad combining of group and raid instances in one (as well as the worthless idea of scaling raids) made the implementations boring.
    Sancus and Reht like this.
  17. Jaerlyn Augur

    Just an fyi - there is probably a larger (and probably more deserving of the name) Elitist crowd for Super Meat Boy than there is for EQ ;p
  18. p2aa Augur

    Another thing that happens in low tier raiding guilds is lack of motivation of some raiders to raid.
    In my former guild, the raid was due to last 3 hours, but after 2 hours top, 1/3 of the raid was logging out
    Some of it was due to RL ok, but still when it's constant it means you aren't so motivated to raid.
    When we were in learning stage of raids, the raiding time was going down to 1 hour and a half of 3 hours possible. Basically you had 2 tries at best to do on new events, before 1/3 of the raid starts to log out, fear of dying too much or bored to bang your head against a raid. It was frustrating for someone like me that was staying for the full raid duration even if it means wiping for 3 hours to see raid called off because of this. Was one of the biggest reason I moved on too.
  19. Bamboompow Augur

    Its not all boredom. A lot of it is just being an adult and still trying to play a game we picked up as kids. Since most if not all raids start at 8pm Eastern, 2 hours into a night is 10pm. That is bed time for most adults. Past for some. On a work night for me, anything past 10 pm is going to be a bad day the following day due to lack of sleep. Its understandable.

    Big part of why people leave for more accomplished guilds is other than at expac launch and the initial learning of events, unless you want to gear alts than the actual commitment of time is MUCH less. 1-2 nights and everything worth farming is farmed. All AA and group prog is front loaded at Expac launch so that's done. Again, unless you need to farm to buy Krono or have a bunch of alts, why log in the other 5-6 days? One lesson burn and you have all your glyphs.

    Also, why did they not make Veeshan's Peak an EoK Teir 1 zone or Tier 0 of the same premise as ToV? Fear and Hate sucked due to the trash tedium and some of Fear's encounters were just plain annoying. Seems like NToV was good because it had the right balance of Dragons and trash to not make it too easy to get to a dragon but not insufferably monotonous clearing trash either. VP seems like it would be similar, if a bit quicker.
  20. Zurril Elder

    In all honesty, I think the game is being set up to help Mid - Tier guilds again. It just won't be immediate.

    Up through TDS there were a lot of mid-tier guilds. These guilds raided past content raids such as NTOV/ RoF when COTF was current. They raided COTF when TDS was current. The raid armor, although outdated, was still better than group armor even a few expansions ahead. Ex. RoF T1 Gelid was better than T3 TDS Highwater group.

    TBM came in and kind of blew up that model. The build-your-own gear made a lot of items better than previous raid pieces... and it kind of got rid of the "want" to go back and do these older raids - unless you needed spells.

    The optimist in me is actually saying DBG is trying to right the ship again with EOK. EOK raid armor/ group armor was such a huge increase that TBM raid armor was kind of moot. And there is enough of a difference between group and raid that there is room to grow the group armor while still wanting EOK pieces.

    When the next expansion comes out, middle tier guilds that are rocking half EOK raid- half EOK group armor will get better group armor. They might be able to beat some EOK raids that were otherwise unbeatable to them. Then they'll get more EOK raid armor, which should be better than the next expansion's group armor... and the cycle reverts back to the old model again. Sure, it may be rough now on middle tier guilds, but its set up to get better.
    Jhenna_BB likes this.