Everquest is failing on the Luclin server. We have 3 full raid guilds: TR, IL and IE. The rest, a small number, need alliances to raid the recent expansions. The better players are incrementally headhunted making the alliances less effective. Guild players stop showing up for raids, or leave the guild or stop playing for a while or longer. Guild leaders don't want their guilds to merge and lose their identities. That means they will eventually fail in terms of raiding capability, given a declining server population and cherry picking from full raiding guilds. I assume that at least some of the other servers have the same problems. So the best solution is for DB merge servers again, starting with Luclin please. And before someone says move players, many folks have multiple accounts, and that gets prohibitively expensive. Starting again after many years isn't a great option either. DB merging servers with less active populations is less physical server maintenance and the obvious benefit is retaining current paying customers who want to continue playing Everquest and raiding. Anthirian.
Please explain why guilds on a server that merges with yours would be willing to give up their identity and merge with your guilds. Same problem just more "bottom feeders". Put some pride aside if you want to form a bigger raid guild. You could do a creative combined name change and keep alts in the original guild should it not work out or do public raid forces which last I checked worked well on Tunare.
Here we go again with the server merge ... i say no to server merges, there were far to many problems with it in the past. We don't have enough of a dev crew to deal with more problems than we already have.
What would change with say 6 raiding guilds instead of 3? I fail to see how the dynamics you describe would change.
Aurastrider, I agree guilds should be willing to give up their identity and merge but I have never come across any who will. The guilds are the members, not the name. Iblis, more raiding guilds give more opportunity for folks to progress. I would prefer myself that guilds merge to make decent size raid guilds. There are sufficient alliance raid guilds to make at least 2 more.
Do you guys even have public raiding? If not you might want to jump over to Tunare or another server that utilizes it and check it out. The leaders of these struggling guilds might be able to learn some things that will help them implement a new raiding venture. It allows players from even the smallest guilds the chance to raid. Someone will need to setup a website, figure out how to award DKP, and then start announcing. If you can already field a partial raid force this is a great start. Making it more inclusive rather than exclusive is probably what you need not more players unwilling to give up their guild identity. Realistically if they did merge servers and you got the outcome you were looking for you basically just destroyed guilds on another server all to serve your own purpose. Should these new raid guilds fail now you have just caused more disruption and created even more long term problems. Lets not forget the fact that you are also requesting that non raiders merge all for the sake of yourself and others raiding.
On Vox, a very low population server, we have 0 raiding guilds. If I had to guess, the highest raid completed is Dracholiche or vim and vigor by our guild. The server is severely lacking in population to raid and most people that want to, end up transferring off to BB or Bertox. We open our guild raids to general and have a few alliances but even then we could not complete Droga raid last year. TBL gear might make it easier but it still doesn't make up for pure numbers. Never have we had more than 30 real players at a raid. My point is to just show how lacking the population is on some servers which then breeds boxers that are not quality raid players by any means. Population is a huge restriction on Vox.
Luclin Server is probably one of the more healthy servers in terms of population, culture, and economy. There's consistently been 60-90 players in PoK (thanks Timbok), "too many to display" (/who) in GL and Bazaar over the holidays. Lots of returning players too - perhaps OP is a returning player? I am not sure if a narrow issue and single perspective - i.e. raid scene for a small demographic - warrants a server merge? As a year-round Luclin player, I always see TR, IL, and IE recruit more aggressively (sometimes spamming) on off-peak months.
