@Devs Now that we've downed DoN (Early morning on the 21st of August for Lockjaw and within a couple of days for Ragefire), we're looking ahead to Depth of Dark Hallow.. As this next expansion is more complex than past and our estimates look to put this next launch in December (around the holidays), could we get a heads up on an estimated launch (if vote passes of course)? We'd like to give our guilds and guildmates a heads up on timing so they can do diligence with requesting time off if they so desire!
I thought Ragefire and Lockjaw were on 60 day lockout timers now? Memory is a fickle . Lockjaw 60 day mark is Oct 20th. 90 day would be on Nov. 19th. I am assuming it only took you a day to beat DoN, and the expansion unlocked on the 20th of August. That would put potential voting block end dates on: Sept 3 Sept 17 Oct 1 Oct 15 Oct 29 Nov 12 Nov 26 Dec 10 If lockjaw is indeed on 60 day timers, that would put your vote starting on Oct 20th and ending on Oct 29th. If Ragefire defeated the content by midnight PST on Oct 21, they would be the same launch date. If it were after Oct 21 midnight PST, it would roll over to the following voting block and launch on Nov 12. If you all are on 90 day timers now, you (Lockjaw) would just miss the voting block that ends Nov 26, (Ragefire by a day or two, lockjaw by an hour or two, however long after midnight PST you beat the expansion.) Both would launch on Dec. 10 (assuming votes pass.) Hope this helps.
That is the servers ruleset. They don't switch rule sets after creation. As you can see new servers have not had that method, these are possibly the last of this dying breed.
Before Ragefire launched, there was a vote. We voted for maximum nostalgia, voting time-locked progression. We also voted on the server name.
Voting opens 90 days after an expansion is completed(barrier down). So if it takes Ragefire or Lockjaw 2 months to complete an expansion, the 90 day timer doesn't start until then(as far as I can tell, though, every expansion has been finished within a week of opening meaning the 90 day timer starts right away). Voting lasts 2 weeks and if the vote passes, the expansion goes live the following Monday at 2pm Pacific time. If the vote fails, another 2 weeks of voting happens until the vote passes. I think both Ragefire and Lockjaw will be able to vote sometime in November and since both servers finished DoN in the first week, they will remain on the same timer.
Just a FYI Ragefire had DoN down by 9:30-10pm the same day Lockjaw cleared it. We just went to bed at midnight and killed it the next day during normal raid hours with the people who wanted to go to bed.
Most players box at least two account. Because of this, any solo player is usually joining a group played by 1-3 players. Because a large portion of the playerbase is more or less self-sufficient, you need to be proactive and make friends/join a guild in order to join xp groups. Class doesnt really matter. If you are wondering what classes are wanted for guilds, then all guilds will likely take any player regardless of class. Otherwise, cleric.
Who would hold an election in November??? Ridiculous! People will be distracted by Thanksgiving! It's probably not even held on a weekend! Oh...right.
Any class should be able to find a group. If you want to join a guild for raiding, and want everyone to love you, play a cleric, druid, or shaman (healer). Otherwise, all the other cloth, leather, chain classes are generally welcome. You'd have to be an exceptional warrior/shadowknight/paladin with a lot of AA, lots of HP/AC, and great gear to join a raiding guild, which is a catch 22 since you get that best with raid gear. So, main a healer (or anything but a tank) and have your tank be a box/alt and you should find a good guild to join.
And the smallest too, but only pretty people And we on Ragefire are second smallest and second prettiest of course.
I asked a similar question in another thread a while ago, though my wording was more like: "If a no vote never wins, is there any point to the voting mechanism?" People playing on the server that responded in that thread (not many but a few) basically said they like it. Fair enough, they are the ones playing there. FV ruleset has been tweaked numerous times along the way (for example), and I doubt Coirnav would be furious if they decided to give it higher XP early. They certainly could change any ruleset at any time, it doesn't seem to be something they have been doing in the past 5 years though. Irony is both Fippy and Vulak would have benefitted from being put on auto-unlocks when the population dropped. Having played on Vulak stuck in SoD with a force unable to beat it, but missing quality of life things that would have made isolated play better (and looking forward to some new things that we would never get). Now in Vulak's case I will concede this would likely have been to little too late.
Eh, not sure I agree in Fippy's case. I certainly wanted to make it all the way to live, that was my goal from the very start of Fippy. But, if we had been put on auto unlocks when we started struggling to beat expansions due to low server population, I think it would have ended our remaining population much faster. We first started taking a longer time to beat expansions in VoA. If they put us on auto unlocks at that point, I think very few of us would have been interested in pressing on, beating expansions out of era with an extra 5 levels. As it is we had a memorable and fun couple of years in VoA, RoF, CoTF and then TDS before we finally threw in the towel. I have great memories of some of our struggles to beat certain raids, where we practiced for months and then had to have a perfect night where everyone logged in and everything went flawlessly, (Pillars of Alra comes to mind.) With autounlocks, I think too many would have just shrugged and said, "Let's come back in two months when this will be easier." Only, I don't think we would have still existed two months later.
I'll clarify that I would have put both on auto unlocks once it was clear the server was stuck. That doesn't undermine the "beat content to open next" aspect of the server ruleset sell, because it would already have run its course. For Fippy that time occurs when the last raiding guild waves the white flag (relatively recently). My approach wouldn't save the server(s) per se, but let them meekly catch live and the dabblers/returners at least have that. Considering how long Vulak was allowed to linger on basically empty, I don't see an issue with this.
