Time to rethink "timed raid unlocking"?

I don't think this has anything to do with it.

How many paid months of time do they get from raiders affected by this?

Not much of anything, as that is the demographic most likely to have lifetime subs, year long subs, or tons of krono.

I mean, we raid all year long, no matter what. You tend to get 1-2 people that quit after beating an expansion, but that's usually it. you tend to lose 4-10 more over the next 8 months of boredom during farm.

If not beating ONE raid (which other than the achievements for evolving gear, doesn't have anything really good on it anyway) caused a guild to collapse they were on the verge already or filled with fair weather players.

Now, guilds stuck raiding 1-2 events wiping to some gatekeeper raid blocking the rest of the content, those can get killed by tough raids eventually.

I think its a good idea to not lock raids in such a way that it prevents trying other raids.

I think flagging to fundamentally create minimum time locks is fine, but instead of making you have to have 21/21 flags to raid +85/15, just make whoever requests the next tier raid needs to have 21/21 or whatever.

So let's say 3 raids per tier, and 3 tiers:

T1 - can request any of the 3 raids immediately, no prereqs, drops flags
T2 - requester needs 21/21 T1 flags, each raid drops 7 backflags for people to get achievements and such, but otherwise irrelevant - that requester can request any of the 3 raids
T3 - requester needs 21/21 T2 flags, etc

If you want to do something like tofs, either make the zone such that you can pick which raid to do (sort of like crystallos was, for example, or group smoke trials).

Results in:

1) No script that messes up everything
2) Content is open to everyone
3) Can make 1 raid in each tier challenging, if a guild can't beat it, they can just kill the other 2 couple more weeks before they can request the next tier
4) Make the gear between tiers actually freaking matter. Not the same gear and we just have to wait before we can loot 2/3 of the slots. Heck, or make raid gear have a charm like power up feature based off completing raid flagging, so one set of gear that starts at basically the same as last years gear, get to 21/21 on T1 all the sudden it gains 10%-15% to stats or whatever, get 21/21 on T2 it goes up again, get 21/21 on T3 and it goes up again. So still can have 1 tier of gear.
5) Flagging no longer an issue, if ONE person was there for the 7 clears of the tier (or whatever), you can request the next tier and take any 53 other people
6) Content still time locked to keep players engaged, and actively playing

It’s time to rethink the whole expansion....

Drama is the number one challenge for long-term guild survival. I learned the hard way how much harm a "malicious Eddie Haskell" can do. For an instigator like that, the health of the guild is typically irrelevant because they can stir stuff up even if it's not accurate. They are extremely dangerous people if you don't catch them before they do too much damage.

The thing about pounding an event like Mearatas with little to no chance of victory is it gets people irritated, and gets people more prone to being malcontent to point fingers. If people were not human, you would be right, but the human factor is the most difficult part of keeping a raid force alive for years. Please note I know full well it's important to evaluate performance and, if you are extremely fortunate enough to do so, build the raid roster around the strongest players you can. The difference between that and irritable finger-pointers is the latter is destructive rather than constructive, and when things go wrong the latter don't tend to look at the actual reasons and instead jump into personal attack mode (often missing the entire real cause of a wipe in the process; having a "feel" for raid flow is not the best strong point for every exceptional player).

In particular, the timer was stupid since even if people played well if they didn't also do huge DPS it was also impossible. It was the last event of its expansion, which makes it not as bad, but almost every single event in the entire expansion was disastrously tuned anyway. Mearatas was just on another level entirely. I actually specifically avoided complaining about it because of that.

The thing about being successful is that any guild will have a backbone of very dedicated loyal players who actually care, but you also attract the people who are strong players that will leave at the drop of a hat if they feel it suits them. Those strong players that also have zero loyalty are at risk of leaving when pounding an event like that. Note I'm not saying all strong players are like that. In fact some of the best strong players in the game just quit if their raid guild dies, but the phenomenon of strong players with zero guild loyalty is a thing, and is very dangerous when hitting something like Mearatas. It's a range too of course. It isn't just dedicated loyal players and players with zero loyalty to anything but rankings. It's often in between, and to the people leaving guilds a bunch of times they usually have their own excuses for what they do and don't even realize that's the kind of player they come off as. And really, it is a game after all, so I'm not personally attacking people like that, unless they are conniving and disingenuous.

The best strategy with Mearatas for guild survival is pounding it only when it's clear the force is strong enough to do it, and if possible mixing things up so it doesn't burn people out too much. If not, it's weighing which drama is easier to weather: avoiding it until stronger, or riling up the finger pointers by hammering it. But like I said, TBL and parts of RoS were horrendously designed for all but the strongest of raid forces. That's a bigger problem than the final event of an expansion being hard.

I will take an expansion like Torment of Velious, Seeds of Destruction, House of Thule, Rain of Fear, Call of the Forsaken, and The Broken Mirror any day over the likes of TBL, Gates of Discord, Underfoot, and to a lesser extent Ring of Scale.

I'm trying to recall all the guilds that collapsed during the level 70 era because they couldn't beat omm, but beat everything else in gates/omens/dodh/por.

And the answer is to not use that method. They can absolutely pick specific days for unlocks if they want to. Instead they chose to use TLP expansion unlock method which was clearly a bad move.

If you want a really fair assessment of each guilds ability and who can beat a raid the fastest. Stop doing the raids in BETA. Lock new toons and guilds being created on Test 1 month before expansion release. Let the Test Server Test raids. Then all other servers and guilds see them all at the exact same time with no clues, not hints, no idea what the mechanics are without any penalties for failure like in Beta.

Quick, edit your post so you won't be embarrassed when other people read it.

Yeah, thats not even a take.

When you say "Heres how things worked historically", you're literally saying "Heres how things worked historically".

Thats how flags and keys worked historically. Thats how they worked even years past those examples.

Please, go on with how it used to work in Gates of Discord and do explain why the hell that is in any way remotely relevant to modern raids?
Here is the top song in the country on the day GOD was released February 9, 2004. I can only assume you're still rocking out to this today.
https://www.birthdayjams.com/us/2004/02/09/


Did you know that Facebook launched 5 days before Gates of Discord? Myspace users beware!
Here are other interesting things that happened in 2004.
https://www.onthisday.com/date/2004

On the flip side of things folks ... we might want to be a grateful for what we have instead of resentful of the things we don't have in these times.
We may also want to remember to be a little more tolerant of each other given the times we are experiencing.
It's a storm out there folks .. hunker down ... stay safe ... and see you all in Norrath!

I thought you didn't raid, so I'm curious when did you start?