The problem isn't the game it's the players. There is a run run run mentality that cropped up 15 years ago. That's why WoW became so popular it was a dumbed down easy version of EQ. If the raids took 2 months to figure out and beat and then put on farm status, that s forgot m would be late added with people complaining about it being to hard. There were pages about how hard the 2 group missions were. I beat F.F. day 1 in 1 try and Heros are forged took 2 attempts and I am a filthy casual...
They had a 2 minute head start. They won by 2 minutes. So SR and RoI effectively did the same. No clue on variability on people lagging behind or individual events where some did worse than they should, but it was basically the same. Which is about what everyone knows, most (not all) of the better players have filtered into two guilds over the last few years. Its not like this game is hard. So if you can just play your class like you should and other guilds could be at the same point. Its actually more disappointing that MORE guilds aren't right there. Does it suck that the deciding factor was who got the instance first? Sure! But, then again, if we had gotten at the same time, no telling what RNG issues would have changed either. Plus, its not the first time luck had something to do with it. Better luck next year. I won't be holding my breath that they make anything challenging every again unless its on accident.
100% we planted a banner with twelve toons up top and one person down below. I've never denied that and no one in SR would. But I don't think anyone can truly argue that planting a banner or campfires is considered 'engaging' content/mobs. It's part of initial prep, like setting up groups and tank/cc/mechanic assignments. If you're going to consider it engaged time, might as well say that as soon as we form the raid and build groups we're 'actively engaged' in the events. We had a "second instance" but it certainly was not "Active". Almost every raid force in EQ will set up campfires, forges, banners as markers and run-to locations. While you do all the prep work inside the instance nothing is happening to the event itself, at least not until you actually trigger the event, start the scripts, or aggro the event mob. Another note: only 6 of the toons were involved in the event. FFuge and AatD are 2 different events, they required different raid groups for us. We didn't need a 2nd tank group in FFuge, but we wanted one AatD, so we swapped a dps group out to cater the raid force to the next event. Changing raid composition for the next raid event is not an uncommon strategy, in farm season and even during the 'race hour'. The banner was set when it wasn't needed in FF anymore. We planted a banner and the extra seven toons were removed from the instance/zoned out (like any other DZ fishing crew). Left only the 6 people we were putting in the raid based on event mechanics/strategy. Once we had enough people in zone, the event was started. Those people still in the zone, got ported down and had to make the run up top or to wherever their assignment was. Again, I have 0 problems talking about our strategy and what we did, or even why. I don't hide anything except names of people who asking me if we still needed certain types of stun proc weapons or not! Send me a DM and I'm more than happy to discuss ad nauseum about every little detail now that Saturday is over. Just ask my guild about how numbingly I will go into every little detail about every mechanic and every strategy option and decision we make. And since a previous post was removed I'll repeat this part here: Over the years most people in RoI/SR have been very cordial and respectful and, like a class acts, use these times as a learning tool. Motivation to stay on their toes and keep pushing themselves. Most competitive people like actual competition and having challenges to push themselves. It's a very boring day in Dodgeball when you pull a 'Billy Madison' and just wail on some 4th graders as an adult. I have no idea why all of a sudden everyone else is bitter and and in an uproar about things. Mostly the 'new account commandos' that like to cast stones behind a veil of anonymity.
idgaf, but the basic argument I hear is 54 vs 54 vs 54 vs 54... not 54 vs 54+12, or 54+54, or 54+54+54. It's a hilarious sentiment, next year a guild like RoV (just because they have a really large roster+ alt roster + FnF) could easily field 3 raid forces, and do all 3 events at the same time. TBH, with how much earlier Cazic seemed to go live, the complains lean more towards that 1 specific person in your raid. (you know, the one who has the ability to delete this)
You do realize that guilds have been rotating people in and out between events for a long time...right? This even happens in guilds not "racing" per se, to let more people participate. RoI (and probably others) used varying raid comps and people to pre-request DZs prior to the main force zoning in during t1/2 (as did we). You can see these tactics and/or roster choices in the videos of numerous guilds. You can access the list of "good" zone boxes posted by Aldryn in a post on these forums. Many guilds even fish for good zone boxes during farm. Sometimes, this involves players who aren't in the main raid. DZs also have a long history of going live at different times on different servers. I remember this annoying me when I raided on Xegony in past years, and it annoyed us on Cazic when Xegony got them several minutes earlier during t2 this year. Everyone on every server was annoyed when t1 went live without a key npc to start the PoMischief raid. It's an artifact of an imperfect game. Not whatever strange conspiracy theory you're trying to make from it. Also notice that RoI leadership aren't the ones on here complaining. They know as well as SR leadership that every guild has gotten the short end of the DZ stick at one time or another. Does it suck? Yes. It it some kind of conspiracy? No. The fix for this issue is making raids challenging enough that a minute or two of lag or zoning isn't enough to decide the race. And I'm confident most if not all members of the "racing" guilds would agree. Don't believe me? Check out Kizant's videos to hear them discuss swapping players and passing DZs around. (This isn't a dig at them whatsoever, simply illustrating the reality we all share)
The bigger question of it all. Do we really want harder, more tedious raids all year or easier raids that we don't mind doing week in and week out? I'd take the later everytime. Mischief is still my favourite this year.
Thanks for reminding me why I came to this post to begin with. Yes harder tedious raids that make you feel like you actually accomplished something when they are won = good. I can't imagine you are going to enjoy these raids in the coming months, when people are falling asleep at the keys during the latest snooze fest. I literally raid in one of the worst guilds I have ever seen, and winning all the raids on opening day gave them the impression that they are "good" and I can assure you, they aren't. While there are bad players, that will never be good. There are ones that cant see how bad they are, because "lately" there is always cake on the table, and everyone gets a slice. ** If it's so miserable, why do I do it? I expect utter $hit every time that I log in... I am rarely surprised by an outcome vs raiding in a high end guild & watching good players do dumb things over and over, laughing because they're good enough not to wipe, so it's clearly not a big deal.
Deciding that #1 guild is the one that got DZ first is not how this should be done in 2024 and forward. It worked in the past when guilds took hours/days to beat the events but it doesn't work now when there are minutes/seconds between guilds finishing. EQ community needs to come up with a different system. We've got entire year to work this out. .
That moment when you realize it takes more effort finding collectibles in GFay this month without spirit of the lost than raiding t3 events. Whole new rock bottom have been reached and we're squarely in uncharted territory.
You remind me of last years post, except the person that was upset about tactics used didn't hide behind a newly created account and hidden profile.
Too bad this thread isn't showing up in the list for The Veteran's Lounge anymore. This is exactly the type of conversation we should be having as a community. NVM, shows it when I'm logged out, lol
It's a little odd that now, after considering kill time to be THEE finish line for decades, we're talking about changing the metrics. Like I'm all up for change, it's just odd that there are so many people on board the year that ROI isn't #1. I think SR came up with a legit strategy, that was 100% within the rules and executed flawlessly. Pretty easy work around is requesting the dev create a flagging system for raids, where the requester of said raid, needs to have the flag for completing the previous raid. This allows for kill time to still be an effective measuring stick, and stops the pre-pulled instances.
Just put each tier in a single instance. Make it so you cannot do them out of order. Then all of the “let’s do them simultaneously” to come in first chatter stops. This is a DPG issue, created when they moved to tiered launch days, with zero flagging requirements. I’m not taking away from SRs win, I think it’s fantastic, they just out ROI’d ROI this year.
While forcing the event orders for standardization seems good on the outside, something else to consider is that one of the fun things about EQ and raids is it's flexibility in strategies and ways to approach events/mechanics. A huge majority of race day planning strategy goes into what order to do the events in. When will burns/abilities line up? What zone might be a laggy one if it's the first one pulled? What door will other guilds be in front of and possibly be annoying to click through... Up until the night before, our plan was to do them in the same order RoI did. Because AD, FF, HF is the fastest way for sequencing/burning. But in the end we didn't want to leave it up to chance getting a bad DZ on the Artisan raid and instead chose to control what EQbox we got for that event. After that decision was made we had to come up with a way to make up for the time we would lose zoning out of a previous instance, before zoning into that one. Our banner planting was nothing more than a way we could, to quote Aldryn, "control what we can control" in order to not worry about the usual "Jumva bad RnG" and get a laggy instance where kiting and burning were important to our strategy. In the game's current state, I also think suggesting to put all raids of a tier in a single zone might be something to think long and hard about. Because as the game is, what will the complains and issues and excuses be when X guild on X server only won because they lucked out and got a non-laggy instance because Y guild had 3s of lag before server ticks, and Z guild had 5s of lag between server ticks! Fixing the lag issues/chances/randomization first would be a great step in 'fairness' first and foremost. Once that is taken care of, then putting all 3 raids in the same zone can be a good step in that direction. But I'd still think many would prefer the ability to choose which event to do at what time. Not having a 'set order' to do events in allows for that kind of creativity in the game. And I think a huge selling part of EQ is about that. Not forcing everyone to play the game in an exact set way, is kind of what makes this game enjoyable for many. I personally love raiding with multiple raid forces. And while it can be 'frustrating at times with certain ones, I still enjoy it and love seeing the different choices and strategies they come up with to deal with the same events we all do, but have to change it to cater to their raid force. And while we are focused on race day fairness, we can't forget that there IS that entire raiding community that doesn't care about the race/speed. Locking events behind another isn't something that those raid teams are a fan of. Especially when you have raids that can be challenging in front of other raids that are just as challenging. When you have events like Primal Vampire, which is a fun raid that requires controlled killing/movements; although extremely fun and challenging, sometimes gives other raid forces a lot of difficulty. So if they spend 2/3 of their raid nights/week trying to beat it after many wipes, it means they don't get much time in their week to work on Close the Gate, the other challenging event of that expansion that was locked behind it. Repeat the same argument for Mycnoid Mutiny/Dance of the Demiurge. Maybe it's fine to have raids start that way, but put in a flag that if you've beaten the first event in the chain, you can then work on the second event at any time without having to have lockouts on the first event. It can be really frustrating to raid forces when these kind of blocks are in your way, and you have to keep working on the same raid over and over each week before you can even start working on the final event. It can lead to lower turn outs, then crippling raid forces. And I don't' think anyone truly wants that. I don't disagree that something can and probably should be done for standardization and rules. I know everyone is starting to talk about triggering/activating 2+ events simultaneously; but honestly It's been brought up in our guild every year since ToL T2. We've always squashed it internally because of what kind of impact that would have on the community. It's not a level of cheese we wanted to do, but were always worried someone else might do it. For us, until someone else did it, we weren't going to be the ones to start going down that rabbit hole. It's why I've been so involved in the conversations this time more than any other year. With all the moving parts of race day, we were VERY adamant about not having more than 1 script be active at the same time. And I was not a fan when people were starting to accuse us of doing it.
Why punish the lower guilds who can easily do FF and Forge and struggle with Unkempt? Not having to complete previous raids really helps the lower guilds who struggle with a mechanic in the first raid of a tier. The auras in that raid are a nightmare if you don't have prior knowledge of where is safe to stand. The other 2 raids, with them being missions also, give the guilds a far easier time. Stopping the higher guilds from being able to skip mechanics would be better rather than having events over in 2 minutes
