A request from Ragefire: Luclin & Beyond

Velious has been open for 127 days. How many vulak kills do you have now? 75 for 300 drops?

300 vulak loots and monopolizing it to get "a few more rares" while STILL completely blocking the other guilds on the server from even seeing the encounter 4 months into a 6 month expansion. You may have changed leadership but this is exactly what all of us predicted when we left Lockjaw. It's exactly the same behavior that doomed your server and why Lockjaw will be lucky to survive past POP.

Please, though, keep us updated on when Vulak items #381-384 go to another guild out of your extreme generosity and cooperative efforts.

I think most people would agree TL were by no means angels, but at least they were clear of their position. TL is killing everything, nobody else is killing anything, end of story.

FI could never compete with TL, jumped ship, went to Lockjaw, did the exact same thing as TL and then put in a farce of a rotation that they played off as "playing nice or fair" while in reality they were just bullying everyone around like TL .

Not like any of this matters now. Phinny was the perfect solution and allowed everyone to raid. Genius move really by DBG. Now literally everyone on Ragefire, Lockjaw & Phinny get what they want.

It's a valid concern for the EQ playerbase because purpose of this thread was to lobby for development time to be taken away from new development efforts and used instead to retrofit a couple dying servers. That work isn't free and the whole community is absolutely impacted by it.

Oh I completely agree with TL definitely being clear on their position of greed and FI was wishy-washy on a lot of things in Classic and Kunark. FI definitely wanted to be on top of the server and have control but they also shared to benefit other guilds when they didn't have to.

Bodes, you seem to be picking on Faceless a lot and I understand why you have such strong opinions against Faceless due to what you had endured on Lockjaw but I think you are barking up the wrong tree at the moment.
It really doesn't seem to me that Faceless is oppressing DHS at all. It even looks like DHS people have defended Faceless in this thread. I tend to believe them. DHS is just family oriented and they seem to not care about the loot aspect hardly at all. It looks, from the outside, like they just want to experience the game as oppose to having the best geared character on the server. I have been there before and had a lot of fun doing that. I loved when things in EQ were actually challenging.

If the servers were to be merged without instances being added, I would fear that DHS wouldn't be able to kill anything even if they wanted to because the server would have too many guilds competing to allow for them to spread their wings.

What is your opinion on your current server, Phinny? One guild gets to double dip on Vulak and has probably got an equal amount of Vulak kills or very close to that as Faceless. I could see some of the items that Sil mentioned going to their alts too.

I believe his point is that 13 guilds are currently killing Vulak every single week, with some of them splitting the instance and killing multiple vulaks each week.

Meanwhile DHS has killed 0 Vulaks by the sounds of things FI is handing some of Vulak's loot to alts when I'm sure members in DHS could use it.

Basically if you told a new player the above situation and asked them which server sounded like the better place to play, I think the answer would be pretty clear...

So you are saying everyone has the opportunity to kill Vulak on Phinny just like DHS has been offered the opportunity.

Guilds on the Phinny server like Caer Cadarns, Broken Wave, Last of the Ancients, The Mystic Order, and Bregan D'Aerth haven't killed Vulak yet (phinnykills.com). They have the opportunity to just like DHS does but they haven't killed it yet.

So there are raiding guilds on Phinny that aren't capable yet of clearing NTOV (or chose not to just like DHS). They haven't even cleared it even though the instances have that little trick to depop Nev or Vyemm.

There are just guilds that chose to take the game a lot more relaxed and slow than others and that's fine. DHS is one of those guilds and they enjoy doing what they can when they can.

I'm not sure what part of this you don't get guys. If at any time, Gremin came to me and said, "Hey Sil, we want to take a shot at Vulak." My immediate response would be, "Hey man, sure thing. What time frame did you have in mind and we'll make sure Thylex is up for ya?".

We did this EXACT thing last week when Gremin said, "Hey we want to take a shot at AoW. Are you guys able to come in and clean it up if we fail?" My response was, "Cool, if you're concerned about wasting a spawn, kill Idol un-slowed to make sure you have the healers and tanks. It's all yours bro."

And at this point, if Gremin and DHS want to come in and kill AoW again which I'm sure they will, we'll make sure we are in NTOV that day.

of course faceless is more than willing to work with a number 2 guild that is progressing at their own, self impossed, stunted pace. there is absolutely 0 reason not to. DHS is not and has no interest in being a threat to their "number 1" spot.

if another guild came from ragefire with the intention of raiding on any semblance of a competitive pace akin to faceless, dollars to doughnuts itd be an entirely different story.

it seems like both servers have settled in to methods that work for both of their raiding populations, however small they may be.

theres really no point in merging servers until at least OoW where all the raiding progess is instanced naturally. both servers have proven unable to play nice with more than 1 "top tier" raiding guild.

while instancing is probably the reason most people migrated to phinny, i dont think you can just discount the true box feature. no game is really meant to have one person controlling armies of characters. im not sure i will ever play on a non true box server again at this point, it just has such a huge impact on all aspects of the game.

You seriously over-estimate how many Vulak kills we have... cut those numbers in half and you might be closer to the truth. You're stupid is showing sir. Please go back to playing on Phinny with your 17 guilds in instances. You live in a fantasy land.

Well spoken man!

I do wonder if Lockjaw or RF would have gotten instancing at the same time Phinny came out how Phinny's population would have looked. I have to say it was kind of fun boxing a bunch of characters and not being so dependent on others lol. It was also good for DBG when I was burning enough krono to keep 12 accounts alive.

I really dont see them adding instances when theyre doing nothing to prevent macroq automation on lj/rf. A week or two back when it was spreading to phinny/quarm nothing was said about it which was extremely shady and lacked transparency. its never been officially allowed unlike ibox. Its a serious roadblock in the way of another box server (with sure thing instances) because they still have never been able to deal with it. They suspend people for afk sitting at spawns with a pet out more then they do for mass automating tons of melee/other chars with someone at the keyboard. It really doesnt matter how much those people profit off the instances. People will get pissed its happening and subs will be lost. Most people getting to kill mobs they never have will probably be bored after a few times and just wait months for the next expansion.

Every boxing progression server has huge increases in boxing. On vulak I just remember seeing 5 or less 6-7 boxers tops in classic/early kunark. On LJ I saw more 24+ boxers then I saw 6boxers on vulak along with at least 40-50 6box teams. If nothing is going to be done about mass automating melee thru macq then I just dont see how instances will work on a box server without hundreds to thousands of people getting pissed off like LJ/RF. Monks/melee being automated with the insanely huge passive dps they got just doesnt balance out.

No what I am saying is there is only room for 1 serious raiding guild on Lockjaw. On Phinny there is no end to how many guilds can raid.

I dont think LJ is as hostile as some people make it out to be. Lots of people playing there were either on vulak or know the story of vulak. With no xfers to LJ and no word about what would trigger a merge guilds are just recruits for eachother to keep a couple guilds going (especially since MOTM is active) so theres no reason to make any bad blood. LJ being progression halted in the next 2 years or so without dbg intervention is a huge possibility. Every new progression / special ruleset server / event server takes its toll. As of right now I dont believe any guild is set up to slaughter/dominate all of luclin 4 months from now and do it for 6 months straight. Theres going to be some changes.

Atm as far as I know no real guild raids more then 5 times a week, all have set start times, and all are recruiting several classes in general chat. I dont believe there is any bat-phoning anymore. I havent seen any full raids without lots of boxed chars.

Because of instancing. Which we do not have... so there is no comparison. Maybe DBG should just make a "Phinny Server" forum like they've done with Quarm. It would probably help with any confusion surrounding the fact that LJ and RF are in no way the same type of server as Phinny.

DHS just barely killed AoW with 4 warriors, 7 clerics and our dps with total raid force of 56. We have killed every target in Velious except Dain (waiting tell august so people can do shawls), Vyemm, Nev (ugg) ,Ventani, and Vulak. We only raid 9 hours a week and we dont have instancing so our gear level is not the same as your 15 or so guilds with instancing.

As far as FI goes I trust their leadership to do whats right.

I could do with a phini-less forum.

Look, I can live with another 3 months of Velious. This isn't about Velious. It's about RF and LJ players being worried about their server's future, but not wanting to talk about it since live servers, RF, LJ and Phinny are competing for scarce players, scarcer dev time, pride, and---let's be honest---schadenfreude.

We want to know that DBG *will* lift a finger to help our server f it's needed later on. The fate of Vulak worries us. A dev post saying that (for instance) if population drops below the level where we can progress, they will remove progression requirements would do wonders for my, and others', peace of mind.

Call me a carebear wellfare-progression Secret World of Hello Kitty online Old Republic player if you want. It's not about Velious or instancing or timers, and everyone here knows that.

Given the road map of EQ and pretty much every TLP server other than the couple that actually managed to catch up to Live (was like....Fippy and Vox? Don't recall the full history of all of these servers), what leads you to believe these servers are intended to be long term anything? Majority of TLP servers are ghost towns long before they get near caught up to Live, no? Partly because the overly fickle base hits an expansion they don't like, partly due to new servers/expansions creating some cannibalization amongst the population, and partly because server populations always decline on their own?

And in the case of the TLP servers that do catch up it's usually one guild that is dedicated and well run and focused (props to those guys for seeing it through), which, while cool of them, their server doesn't really have a healthy population in the first place if there's only 1 guild doing anything (miss you, Kuk Clan!). The RoI type success stories hardly seem to be the norm these days.

Seems like these servers are more of a temporary, nostalgia driven cash grab that is designed around a re-roll on the new server loop, and has little to do with converting those players to Live/ongoing customers, which would make fretting about the "long term" future a little odd, eh? I get that we all have emotional attachments to our toons, but yeah....

I think people are trying what they can to NOT end up like what you have described.

As of last week, DHS had really made headway into NToV. My understanding is that Gremin's approach for DHS on raid nights is significantly slower than FI's. To each their own on that point; you can do what you want in 2 months and take it easy the next 4 months, or you can take it easy over the entire haul and see incremental improvements along the way. Rabbit or Hare, both can end up at the same place.

FI raided basically 7 nights a week for the first month and then scaled it back to 6 nights in the second month until DHS starting taking targets and we accepted that 6-7 nights a week was burning people out. The other day I noted a new schedule change that may actually setup two off nights in a row going forward. That'd be pretty nice instead of gearing more alts (mine included) for 85% of the drops we see on a given night. I'm pretty sure someone in FI now has a BoC on a low level warrior just because they can. Maybe one day they will kill off the motm on older era mobs so we can go back to trio / small manning nagafen again.

Hell, the FI loot policy had to change 3 or 4 times along the way because we were literally letting good items rot instead of getting them to alts in preparation for the drag on attendance that would surely follow (I'm guilty as charged myself on attendance as I need to find a new apartment before Sept 1). If you look at last night's loot awards from FI, Gremin actually looted a War Bow of Rallos Zek and he's not even in FI. I'm pretty sure that isn't the only item DHS has taken from our rot loot either.

Not that the war bows are hotly contested for even alts anymore...

Point is, FI and DHS have up to this point had a pretty solid relationship working out targets and raid nights around DHS's alternating schedule. A big kudos to both sets of leadership there. I'd hate to have a relationship with competing guilds that required waking the sleeper or some other poop socking nonsense at 2 AM on a saturday.

I'm actually hopeful that this relationship continues to be generally harmonious. It makes for a pretty good experience overall; although a good ol DPS race for $h1ts and giggles can be just as entertaining. As long as there aren't any hard feelings of course.