Oakwynd Feedback

yes, it's drastically changed. it's endless now, like i said. you never -needed- to race another OW, but it means 1 more kill, ie. having 1 less alt to grind to max level to legacy transfer your gear to, or in the extreme case, that's 9 kills instead of 8 which is maxed by your char limit. that's what high end competitive raiding guilds do

you are interpreting differently, but correctly, and seeing the same thing i am. i'm telling you it's NOT fun, and it IS a sorry situation. that's exactly 'one' of the points im trying to make

Because it is another shot at loot and people want to get as many chances at the loot as they can.

sounds fun

For some people it is about the competition to see who can get their team assembled enough to take down the raid boss before the other guild. I've done a few races for targets before even as a semi-causal raiding guild after AoCs was introduced and it was always a rush getting to the target and burning it down before the premier guilds can get it. It was actually a lot of fun hearing the call go out "Hey such and such is up we got the people on lets see if we can grab it first.", and then head on out; sometimes we won other times we lost, but all the times we had a blast and lots of laughs.

Think of it as the neighborhood kids just going out and racing each other for no other reason than it sounded fun at the time. Yeah for some people it is only about the potential loot, but for most that I know who raced it was mainly just because it was fun.

You have been pretty calm and reasonable, but this is lowkey a trash take.

No one -needs- to kill old pixelated frogloks for nostalgia, but we do. Your post just boils down to "Hey, you play the game differently than I want to, and perceive the game to be, so why do you -need- to?"

You ARE missing something. The competition for the raid target in open world IS the fun for some people. FTE destroys a ton of skill expression, and fun for quite a large portion of the player base.

INB4 "Mischief exists, go play on it"

Do you need to intentionally roll over other players "for nostalgia"? That is what far too many in this thread have advocated. It honestly sounded like that is what was being describe yet again, not just a competition for raid target vs other raiders but 'rounding up everything' no matter if raid-related or not, to spite other players because you don't like the ruleset or want to prove it's possible to be more toxic with it.

I am, though, truly baffled why AoC isn't seen as a bigger change to the competitive raiding if part of the "fun" of raiding is preventing anyone else getting those targets. Why are the competitive raiders not railing against AoC lock-outs being changed to character vs account, as noted in the FAQ, since that will definitely make it easier for your "opponent" raider being able to gear up and thus have a better chance of beating you or 'rolling over' your intended targets.

i dont care if you kill bosses or not. its not about preventing you from having fun. what you with your friends behind closed instances, is completely your prerogative

in fact, you're welcome to come out in open world and play EQ with us anytime you want, we want to race. it's completely boring to play on a dead server. we're not expecting to win every fight, and we never have. what happened when the top guild on thornblade dominated for 4 expansions? they eventually moved to mischief

in fact, the example I gave you wasnt griefing players, but as a smaller guild picking off a bone from the largest guild on the server, and that being part of the fun. ie. losing MOST of the time and yet having the chance of winning a target. that is fun for a lot of people

just sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder because a vocal group are upset about this change, like most other changes DBG tries to implement, and you know what that's fair. you're allowed to be upset that your fellow gamers are upset, i guess. i'm simply trying to explain to you WHY we're upset, as many have lumped the anti-oakwynd crowd together and said 'youre not giving examples.' i am, in very clear terms with examples from past servers, and you're turning around and saying "IM BAFFLED" and "YOURE EXCREMENT"

well im rubber ur glue. and i want an aon, and a mistwalker, and epics, and im going to try and get it in OW occasionally, where other people can see me doing it. that's just it

Some people like competing versus other people. Source: sports..... or human history lmao.

I think the devs know how the community feels now, in general. We will get to test it for 1-3 weeks, and then launch. I will be there to flim your flams and loot your pixels!

Also, I am against this, but not for the reasons you mentioned, because we won't have a 'better chance' at getting FTE by having more gear. We just need to be faster now.... so gear is less meaningful. Actually, I am against it because now that we have the option to have alts of the identical class and raid the same instances every night, we might be asked to do that, and there's even less reason to want to grind that hard, especially with the 25th anniversary coming and a hope for a better server

it sounds like a grindy unfun system. a lot of people were on the fence about Oakwynd due to the FTE and have decided to sit out due to the legacy + endless instancing

but if I have to die on a hill about something, it's FTE, because they said in no uncertain terms they're considering bringing it to live. there's just a lot to be mad about and I find myself having to choose

Honestly I think the people speculating about guilds running raids 7 days a week with 7 alts is overblown. Burnout is a thing and these raids get old super fast. How are you even going to replace people and keep this going as a guildleader? Good luck finding a war rep that has 7 warriors available on 1 account.

And of course why would you let it get to the point where you are doing that? If your guild lead asks you to level up same class alts just reply lol and ignore them. Find a better guild.

yep the counter argument is "lol don't do that?"

well I probably won't, since it sounds awful, which would mean I'd be giving on being the 'best' ie. not playing competitively and therefore I really won't care about the server. I am but one person, so that's the only anecdote i can positively give you today, before the server launches.

on the other hand, I know people who are actually going to do this, and ill tell you exactly why: they will be selling loot rights like crazy to the server since anyone can pop an alt to go grab an item from an instance. It's going to be loot pinata RMT heaven for those dedicated enough. but to me it sounds like burn-out city

7-8 warrior alts is the extreme. 2-4 may do just fine. it's already too much, but for those with krono to burn and enjoy it, the option to scale is there

I just don't think DBG really intended to make a system like this: one that provides unlimited instancing to those willing to put in time. that's incredibly hardcore. It seems like the lesson of selos wasnt learned. they branded it like a casual server, and it ended up being extremely competitive due to half-lockouts and xpac speed, and it burned a lot of people out

for me "find a better guild" is not reasonable. I have been playing with them for years, so, no.

OW "DPS racing" raid targets is pretty much dead, been there done that, collected a few T-shirts along the way.

Servers before Phinigel didn't play any in a hardcore fashion so can't comment on.

Phinny: AoS/Wild Treasures vs OGC probably the last server with any "Epic" OW contests.

Agnarr: Faceless vs absolutely nobody

Coirnav RI vs TFC. But mostly petitionquest, TFC exploiting petitions to bypass VP keying lol. TFC made it to the end so I guess they won the attrition game.

Mangler: Bloodthirst vs absolutely nobody.

Aradune: TEB vs absolutely nobody.

Mischief: 6 man farm crew heaven. Who even cares about open world when you can one group targets that drop BiS gear.

Yelinak: Return of Petitionquest and Reportquest. 2 Mediocre guilds both claiming to be #1 but spending more time reporting each other than actually racing for anything.

Oakwynd: TBC but probably won't even be enough guilds interested in OW content for any racing to occur, and there's nothing wrong with that, the ruleset almost actively discourages OW racing when you can just do another split with alts and hand down heirloom gear.

it is only 100% times easier to ks a raid mob when you yourself are used to having a zerg of boxes/friends behind you. i understand why you power gamers dont like FTE - you're assured victory through numbers of players/boxes - the zerg - is no longer a win all.

just because it's there doesn't mean you have to do it. i know the meta type will think they will get fomo if they don't raid on 10 chars a week. most people wont be doing this. it's literally a perk for people who like alts - the time investment to meta this feature is so totally not worth the time if you're not into playing multiple chars.

it's everquest - competitive high-end isn't a thing with aoc's roflmao

From all the thousands of posts I've seen and attempted to understand I have detected a pattern in some of the responses.
There are people who will definitely train you if they can't beat you in a DPS Race and they are the cause of the FTE changes but don't want to face that fact.

High end raiding exists only in live, so nothing you know anything about.

The average TLP player on a TLP doesn't raid high end ever. Killing 20 year old different colored versions of naggy doesn't constitute as high end, no matter how much you wanna tell yourself it is.

I always check out the rules and such when a new progression server is being launched. First time I was actively excited about trying it out because it would allow you to not be KSed anymore by someone.

I check the forums and see a bunch of people not just complaining but whining about the one thing that excited me for it, the ability to not get KSed. I see all these people saying "KSing don't happen often" I'm calling BS unless you are boxing. I'm a non box player and the amount of times I've been KSed at a server start up is unreal.

Also the people claiming "Nostalgia" about racing other guilds are full of it. Back then the race was actually real people because dial up or even early high speed internet couldn't support tons of accounts in the same house hold all at the same time it was not 5 neckbeards boxing 10 characters at a time because they have computers that still run windows 98.

lol competition doesn't exist in eq but "i do want to remind you that you're a terrible player and i have progressed and know more than you"

oakwynd looks like it's going to attract some real weirdos

I mean in all fairness and for a non-negligible amount of hardcore and casual players alike out there who end up picking what guild they join simply based on the "which one gives me the best mathematical chance at getting the loot I want" appeal.....you kinda do if that is what is most important to you. Which again and behind all the grasping at straw complaints going on is the real issue a lot of those people in particular are having with FTE there. As it royally screws with that potential math that dps racing allows to otherwise add up to be the no brainer choice it needs to be to make the One Zerg concept work as well as it does here.

You really think 1/3 of the early server population ends up tagging themselves into EQB on Aradune if they were losing even 1/4 of the open world targets to the much smaller guild/s they stomped out of existence? You know how many casual players they attract in (and need to) just on the greater surface sell of ending up with that epic raid drop, or piece of completed doz loot that otherwise might only see one completion in a non OW raiding guild? You ever been on the losing end of a string of batphone races, god forbid to a much smaller guild, and see the impact that can have internally in maintaining harmony among it's top to bottom membership?

All that said I genuinely don't believe there even ends up being more then one guild going after OW targets on this server after classic at the latest, and that most of those people are getting worked up over nothing lol

i have no issues with the zerg meta changing - and to your question, it certainly will be hard to maintain harmony if a 300 person guild is losing to a well-organized 40-50 person team.

that's the whole point about dps racing - that assured dominance through numbers - people that are used to "winning" don't want to change the status quo.