3rd party programs

I think the way he said that isn't as direct as you took it, so hopefully you were just caught off guard by how he said it. To me it was more like.. Ok you're getting 54 of your friends together to tear stuff up, what can you seriously not do with you and 53 others? EQ used to be so much more unforgiving. No corpse recovery or anything else nowadays. So I hope these events knock us on our for a while, they should be hard, unfair, and you should have to learn why you're fighting so hard to keep 54 people showing up to raid. If it was all easy and tank n spank, what fun would that be? Here's your loot, thx for buying the new exp, see you in 9 months? Yuck.

/rant off

Fairness is a matter of opinion. I don't think it's fair that raids should be defined by players who aren't good. Generally speaking if you're in a lower tier guild, your skills aren't going to be up to par with those in a higher end guild, not saying that this is 100% all the time. But there IS a reason the same guilds place top 10..There IS a reason that the top 5 guilds are who they are..

and i would say that reason is because the same guilds get to beta test the raids even if they dont go through as is from beta its still a very good head start. whose to say what those guilds consider to be low/mid tier aren't really high end raiding guilds all because they never get publicity. In order to make a name for yourself you need a dev in your pocket it seems it doesnt matter on skill levels devotion to the game most of us love ect

i just dont get it from a competitors perspective

Taking this slightly out of context, that is I'm not talking about Beta testing, there needs to be raids that the mid and lower tier guilds can do. Beating our heads against Arx Mentis for a year just hasn't been fun. Neither is doing CotF raids for the 500th time for gear that really isn't much wanted.

We don't demand the best raids and gear handed to us. I'm more than happy to have the "uber" guilds get the higher tier stuff and for us to work towards that goal. But one tier of raids means no one is happy. There need to be raids for everyone, with the better gear and harder mobs for the guilds that can do it, but also something for the rest of us.

Our guild is basically hanging on at this point in the hopes that TBM will permit us to do something new as far as raiding and maybe later go back to Arx with better gear and spells and win. Without something for us to do, our guild will fold and our people will quit. And that isn't going to be good for you uber types as more people leave EQ and less and less content is created until the game is cancelled.

This beta is open to anyone who pre-orders the next expansion. If your guild wants to compete for serverwide firsts, then they should all have the new expansion pre-ordered. Meaning you can all raid in beta. Having the same advantage as all those guilds you think have an unfair advantage. I'd think that someone in your position would be very excited about this upcoming beta. Getting your guild into beta, getting the advantage of seeing raids before they go live, and proving to everyone what skill your guild has. If you get 54 people onto beta, then you will be able to get the attention of a dev. They want to test the raids, they just don't want to waste their time. I hope your guild has a good beta and gets to raid all the new content first and gives everyone some new competition.

It doesn't take a year to make up for "a very good head start" if your guild can acquire one by doing Beta. Not all guilds who field a full raid and take on events during Beta necessarily spend any or much time with Devs. I've heard that raid descriptions and hints at tactics might be posted on forums where anyone can read them. It's my understanding that in many cases there's a group version of raid events that's not totally dissimilar from the raid.

IF I led a mid-tier guild that wanted to be more competitive but had difficulties fielding a full raid force during Beta I'd look for another guild in the same situation. It's not the same as bringing in 54 of your own, but doing with a 25-30 player core of your own with another guild's players has to beat merely reading about it.

IF I was a member of a guild that beat its head against Arx Mentis for a year without making progress I'd conclude that I was in a friends and family guild and decide if I wanted to be in a raid progression guild or stay in a social/casual one. I've been helping out in old progression/achievements, acquiring currency for older rares, gear up alts/people with bad gear older content pickup raids (including PoWar) for a few months lately. Stuff looks better than normal group content drops. Cherry picking raiding is alive and well.

cocky much?

as the old military saying goes "Don't ask , Don't Tell"

Well. I don't think the boxers are your competition, as they box so they can play alone. Compete with the folks competing against you

all due respect, and I am NOT saying this because of where Im tagged from, but beating your head against a wall on Arx for over a year with no progress goes well beyond beta testing and being uber. There are PLENTY of guilds that I personally know of that have cleared Arx under that time span that did not beta and arent considered what some would deem "uber". There is alot of unanswered questions to ask as a guild if Arx is a priority target per say and is not down at this point, as touched on by some here ie cherry picking, raiders attendance, etc etc.

just my 2cp

I do think it's a bit more than that Killz, to some extent and I can speak from personal experience.

For some, perhaps they got hung up on ToR (which then kept them from Void). Then even with full raids, they attempted Arx 1 and still couldn't pull it off for whatever reason. Folks' interest started waning (who wants to always wipe-keep in mind we're talking non top guilds here and these folks typically don't have the same mentality as the trailblazers do). Enough interest wanes, recruit more, those folks don't log in much, recruit more, some of those log in, but still low on numbers. Talk to a fellow guild on server and partner up, finally beat Arx 1 (twice) with the partnership, then perhaps for some reason the partnership breaks. Beat Arx 1 once again as a guild with friends/guests invited.

My own guild followed part of that pattern; we had CoF Tier 1a/1b down before Tier 2 came out (first time in history that happened). Then we worked on Argin, got that down in 2 months, then hit our head against the wall and it took 9 more months to get ToR down. Void dropped fast after ToR. But then another 5 months to get Arx 1 down (partnering with another guild to do it).
- It takes special people (or a special guild culture) when players who love raiding choose to stick it out and fight during those long droughts instead of taking what some folks say is the easier route (jump ship). But as Fanra hinted at, you can only keep that up so long before you can't anymore.

It sounds like, Fanra, for guilds like us (of which there's many I'm aware of that are in our boat), that we'll probably be able to enjoy Hate/Fear if we can't handle the regular expansion raids right away. No idea of their difficulty level but hopefully it was set easier (like Corrupted ToV was).

I'm usually not much of a Battleaxe fan but he's absolutely correct on this point. But this has occurred in EQ since the very beginning. You'd have people quit raiding (or quit logging in on their tagged characters during raid time) way back when Hate & Fear were current. Sure, there was more of a reason back then (if you lost a corpse....) but even going forward, it was happening. I was in a "family guild that raids" that hit the wall in mid-PoP (just after the PoJ trials were made unnecessary) on Grummus, Terris Thule, and Aerin'Dar. Once the flagging requirements were relaxed/simplified, add Saryrn to that list. If you like raiding and look forward to them, imagine wiping to these mobs with 60-70 people, some of which weren't max level or geared very well (people in the mid to late 50s were allowed to come) because that's how that kind of guild operated (at the time). Those were entry level raids, fgs! Once someone suggested we put more of a focus on raiding, the guild split in three (one raid focused, one casual/tradeskill focused, and the original guild). Not surprisingly, the raid focused guild dropped Grummus, Terris, and Aerin'Dar in their first week of existence.

There are often sacrifices and concessions that must be made in order to be consistently successful at the high end (and even just short of the high end). In my experience, when you start adding 'have tos' to family guilds, things start getting really terse. Have to be at least this level, have to have these flags, have to have this many AA, have to have these specific AAs for your class, have to maintain X% raid attendance, etc.

The situation Crystilla describes is one I am very familiar with. That cycle would often be made more difficult as new "AAA" games were released and siphoned off some of the target audience for recruiting as well. Many people had/have the perception that raiding in EQ is like getting a second job when that hasn't been true for YEARS. So all the games releasing with lower requirements appealed to them.

Complaining that guilds like roi beta test and that's why they are ahead ignores where they came from and forgets how they got to where they are.

In underfoot that guild was a no name guild having finished SOD in the mid 20s server wide, having just caught up to current servers after completing their progression. Sod gear reset the entire raiding population, it was essentially a brand new raiding scene in Everquest. Then the bottom fell out for a lot of guilds during underfoot. High end players migrated from their once prominent guilds to those guilds making progress on the unforgiving content. This pattern has repeated itself ad nauseum since. Most long term players of high end guilds are now concentrated in the clusters of the top ten. With the top 3 guilds holding the highest concentration of these dedicated and knowledgeable players. There are many good and great players scattered across various guilds they just don't have the concentration of players these top end guilds do. As an example traility turned in the towel... Look at where those players are now when several expansions back it was all trash talk and hatred between them and roi.

It isn't that casual guilds can't compete. It is that even after the gear resets, easy content and year long farms these casual to niftier guilds do not have the concentration of good players or the dedication the top guilds have that keeps them in top.

I'm sure roi welcomes the challenge throw down the gauntlet and beat them. Beta testing raids is not why they are #1 for like 7 expansions. It is because they are better than you. And will continue to be unless a guild can match them player for player with the same level of dedication. At this point in eq I just don't see it happening. Good players don't want to downgrade guilds they will either make a lateral move or get invited to the high end guilds. This is why mid tier raiding is what it is.

That's not how it works.

yeah beta is in 2 waves one is normal expansion beta the other is raids

I gave up on this topic ill do what i personally can for that crown refusing to back down regardless what others say its just who i am and how i play ^_^

It was true during House of Thule for the raid guild I was in. That was my last time raiding.

Most guilds raid one day a week right now for 3-4 hrs that's hardly a second job.

In a former guild - ~50 attempts vs. OMM in Anguish before a win.
In my current guild - Arx Mentis #4 plowed us within 10 seconds the 1st, 2nd, 3rd,... time we started it. I thought, "No way. This isn't beatable like this. It just isn't."

But they were beatable. You stay calm. You wait for raid analysts to look at logs and notes. After 15 minutes the Strategos says, "This time we're going to do this..."

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;" - Henry V, William Shakespere

Players who can't abide by that can't progression raid. They can however usually do pickup raids where the strategy has been figured out long ago and is known to work.

IF one's guild can't field a raid force capable of doing these things, raiding 5 nights a week while learning events, not logging out, and showing up every day its simply not a progression raid guild. You can't expect a family pet to fight off a bear (some will/some won't). That does not reflect badly on them - you should judge them for what they are rather than what they are not.

B - who said anything about 'progression' raid guilds? I said raid guilds that weren't at the top so clearly defined who I was talking about. But yes, you're referring to something else entirely as you're talking those 'higher' guilds that you have been in being challenged when I'm talking the lower guilds who as I said don't have those same dedicated members (so when struggles happen for a long time time and people still stay, that says something).
- Doesn't make what you're saying wrong; you are just referring to a different target group of players than I am.

@tanksalot - I'd challenge your 'most' comment there

Expansion blah blah, guilds blah blah...
Nice derail from the topic.
If anyone care to put it back on track find the quotes from holly about the third party tool creators just being nerds that just wanted more features.
I won't stand for the drivel about them being evil and having destroyed the game for years, that kind of talk has been going on for years uncontested here as well and it's unfortunate and unfair to say the least.
Third party tools exist and we should all be grateful to the guys creating them, if it wasn't for m q 2 you guys wouldn't have the new tradeskill ui, advloot, /useitem and a bunch of nice features that was inspired by that program.
Complain and make up all kinds of stuff all you want, but at least be honest, yes there are some not so awesome features that people abuse in said program like being able to create bad plugins, but that's on the users and was never the m q 2 devs intentions.
Now that they are trying to work with dbg and dbg seem to want their cooperation you all should embrace that fact and look forward to what might come out of that collaboration instead of whining so much. Lots has happened in the last couple years and it's a new dawn for eq and third party tools, don't fight it cause you will lose.