My guild has never and will never raid lock outs. This is a game, not a job. Am I a little irritated that I'm likely to have 10 less raid coins and 1 less flag this week? Sure. Life goes on, though. There's what? Maybe 270 players in the entire game, tops that raid lock outs. I'm probably being generous with that guess. Whatever the bug was in this mission, such a very tiny, microscopic piece of the player base will have to deal with it. The developers world's don't revolve around our stupid, pointless player generated rat race. They don't care and quite frankly they should point and laugh at the players for even creating such a thing - especially so with all the arguments we cause among ourselves about it. Oh and if you think there's no pride in our guild having finishing 5, 7 and 10 on this rat race for tier one you're mistaken. We're just glad we get to continue on and not lose sleep over where we end up for tier 2 and 3. We'll be where we always are, in the top 10, not raiding lock outs.
We (TLP) report and nag about issues PRIOR to expansions launching to try to avoid situations like this thread.
Your guild reports your progress to the "rat race" website, therefore, your guild does, in fact, care. This is no different than any other HOBBY. People take time off work to go to baseball card conventions. People take time off work to go to vegas to get together with people they met in this game. People take time off work for their softball leagues, arrange their personal life (babysitters, time off, whatever) for their bowling league. This is no different. It is only those that are 1) jealous of others and have to belittle in order to "bring down to your level", or 2) people that cannot comprehend the difference between a hobby and a game, that make statement like yours. The kind of people that don't have a care in the world for poofing on their guild, or not showing up, because "its just a game". Do people just not show up to league bowling night? Don't think so. And here's a newsflash: we don't raid lockouts all the time, just during progression. As soon as the "rat race" is over, we don't raid for a couple weeks, then go back to raiding for 3 hours 1 night a week, for the rest of the year, barring a special event raid that we log in every X days for the 45 minutes to go do it for limited time gear. If you don't want to raid lockouts, no problem, don't do it. Heck, we don't want to either. Blame MS for that and them doing it in TBM forcing everyone else to do it. I'd much rather raids were a lot harder and not a joke like tier 1 is. Heck, I'm not too worried about it. If other guilds took that long to beat tier 1 vs RoI, then we should open up a nice gap on t2 which is a LOT harder. T3 is a joke, unfortunately, so those are guaranteed 1 shot wins.
Be funny if OT crashes on one server and comes back up with the NPC, would be awesome if some random guild jumps into t2 3-4 days before RoI/CT/etc due to luck.
If a random guild outside of the top 5 gets into T2 first, it won't help that guild in the remaining part of the race. At all.
I hope they didn't fix any of the bugs they introduced to t2 the last couple days of beta. I'd love to see which guilds actually progress through the events before they nerf/fix them, since they are beatable even with those things going on.
It might add some welcome randomization to the rat race. At least when it was open zone raid spawns there was randomization to spawn timers. Plus random guild wars, wipes, trains and other human/luck chaos factor that could VASTLY impact the outcome. Now its paint by numbers. Raids are an instance and once you learn the mechanics its just muscle memory while farming. Adding randomization to lockouts might add some fun to it. Maybe 4.5 days +/- some number not to exceed 18 hours.That is why this NPC being gone is such a upheaval. It adds an unknown variable to what is otherwise a spreadsheet static structure and it doesn't compute. Would RoI still win if the RNG gave them a bunch of 4.5 days +18 hours while another guild got a bunch of 4.5 - 18 hours? Who knows. Right now, there is no question. Its why some guilds might not subscribe to getting up at 4am and missing work to raid lockouts. RoI is going to win anyway, right? So why not sleep in, use off time for something else and have things be less structured.
double AoE on dusty tomb, AoE going off as soon as the chest spawn... the random sarnak running in the room and despawning if not aggro'd..? those thing?
Uh, no. Those things are trivial and avoidable. Getting 3+ of the same mob type up and then getting 60+ casts in the same second from those mobs (think a * got switched with a ^ there personally), introduced like 2 days before beta ended, for example, is what I'm talking about. You can muscle through it, but made events a lot more interesting.
Would be hard to switch a * with a Math.pow(ability, number_of_mob) but... Nevermind , there's probably some fortrand or such language lurking around in EQ code =)
There were a lot of ways to solve this problem, and I have to say, I am impressed with Daybreak for choosing the worst solution possible.
Looks like the devs are on vacation this week. I'm sure they will be back around Jan 02. Meaning that the guilds that have been farming T1 since the release day will lose 2 Cactus kills regardless of raiding every 5 or 4.5d. Everybody in 'the race' will reach T2 after 1 extra lockout cycle. Nobody needs to make any changes to their raiding schedules. All that Hurturanus Cryalot was for nothing.
It's annoying it's not back up yet, although when it went down I kinda expected it to wait until the new year so I'm not as disappointed as I could be.
Hey I understand why raiders are upset. But this also affects the group players too. If you can't request this mission, then I don't think you can unlock the skyfire mission or gorowyn either. VP key also requires those 3 missions beat, so it may delay people from getting the VP key. And this is also the best way to farm spells for the majority on the server (until you get VP access). So by taking out the NPC, it is hurting a lot of people, who may have taken time off and planned to spend it playing the new expansion.
I've got it done on four characters, with you being this snarky, I hope you do too. I'm just saying that most of the people I see around Cryolex are raiders and not casual groupers.
