Plane of Storms Progression

Out of genuine curiosity, do you believe the tone would truly have an impact on this.. ? Not trying to be stupid here.

***The big raid targets from each expansion will be instanced. While bosses like Lady Vox, Lord Nagafen, and (/cough) Phinigel Autropos (hey, THAT’S where we got the name!) will still spawn out in the world, groups of players will ALSO be able to have these targets available to them via Raid Instances.

**players will ALSO be able to have these targets available to them via Raid Instances

*available

So what, we're going to argue the semantics of "available?

If you give an average joe a football, and say "there's the goal, you just need to make it past NFL linebacker Lawrence Taylor is it still "available"?

That's what's happening here. Regular people came back to the game under the impression that this content would be available to them.

The point seems to be escaping a few of you, what seem to be trolls, or sociopaths with the inability to relate to people on a social level. People came to this server and invested in it because they thought they wouldn't have to deal with poopsock antics.

The devs went out of their way to make a change that flies directly in the face of what many people were led to believe was the spirit of this server. So either DBG could coldly and shrewdly say "you should have read the fine print" which quite obviously isn't the way to maintain a satisfied customer base, or there could be an acknowledgement that the premise of this server was grossly misrepresented, and that DBG pulled a bait and switch. It doesn't take a savvy businessman to recognize that such tactics aren't widely recognized as being attributes of good business.

The people that leave aren't going to be the ones ranting on the forums. They are the people that a few of us in there lead in guilds in raids, the quieter and more passive ones that will simply have had enough after "Lawrence Taylor" knocks the wind out of them one too many times.

Many of us have dedicated the better part of the last 18 years to this game. And I use the word "game" loosely because it's actually many people's favorite hobby and pastime. So to suggest that we haven't the right to speak our minds about it, to me, seems audacious.

The fact that this is going to adversely affect so many people is a travesty by itself. But I can say confidently that there WILL be subscriptions lost. EQ, while I love it dearly, only has a finite amount of time left, how much exactly is uncertain.This only serves to drive another nail into the coffin of a hobby that means a lot to me, as I'm sure it does many others. I just don't understand why the devs refuse to take the path of least resistance to do what's best for it.

THANK YOU so much for finding this post by Absor, I was looking for it the other day and I couldn't find it. This post needs to be reposted over and over again, because what is happening in PoStorms is directly contradictory to what he said in that post. Putting the mobs in the instances doesn't make killing the content any easier, it just prevents a bottleneck!

Everyone needs to keep reposting this quote from Absor...

Which is it Absor? Instances is to prevent bottlenecks or not? You said it was and yet you are creating the biggest bottleneck this server has seen?

So again, Which is it Absor?

I think we deserve an answer to that question.

Other than the GoD/OOW thing I have never seen an issue so one sided on these forums. Right now the leaders/raid leaders of AoS, OGC, Entendre, EoE, Resolute, and Medacium (I may have missed some that I don't know their names? ) have all come here to voice their support of this issue, that means the vast majority of the raiding population wants these in instances...even the guild that likes to Open World wants it in instances! lol

You guys are taking things way out of line..

Even with just instances, it won't take but 3-4 weeks to key up a raid through PoStorms.

That does not even take into account OW stuff.
Which, if what the people in this post have stated comes to pass..
We will supposedly have 2000 people in PoStorms trying to get keyed, so how many picks would that generate?

These are bottlenecks that are meant to be there.
They are to create competition and alliances between guilds to get past the hurdles.
That is what made Planes of Power an amazing expansion.

Besides, you still need to grind out 61-65 and there are like a hundred AAs (okay maybe 80) that are worthwhile to get. It won't be as bad as everyone here is stating. Hell, farming random shards for the VT key will likely have been worse, and even that was not that bad.

Be realistic, it isn't a big deal. We have six months of PoTime being the top end raid zone.
Even with Vex Thall being the top end raid zone for three months (at least in my guild) already have had pieces rotting and going to alts for over a month and we still have almost a month to go. And we did not make it into VT the first week and we took Christmas off.

They want raiding..
To be even easier..

The amount of gear that essentially every guild can gain through even three months of instancing top end raid zones, is more than most top end guilds were able to gain in an entire year of raiding.

The point is mute.

Exactly.

It's not about gear or making anything easier, it is about removing a bottleneck, which is the entire point of the server to even exist in the first place...by Absor's own words.

Absor said:

If you think bottlenecks are good and should be in game, Ragefire/Lockjaw are >>> over there - leave us casual carebear phinny people alone.

Absor is probably receiving lashings for that statement, as he left a 'grey area' for people to feed into. Anywho, RadarX posted yesterday and that makes DBG's stance pretty clear.

And, it wouldn't be a bottleneck if guilds worked together!
(Not sure what's so hard about this concept... Hey, it didn't work before? Well, suck it up and fine tune it this time around so it works!)

Lastly, you do realize if they instance the PoS Giants, Quarm will be defeated in like 48-hours? This is content that took hardcore guilds months to figure out, which will be completed in mere days. There's no profit in that for DBG, they want to keep people's subscriptions active and desperate folk buying krono.

They should stop putting stop signs and red lights at bad intersections. Drivers just need to communicate better.

It's such an easy fix tho..

What do you guys want? An NPC vendor with an unlimited supply of medallions instead? We could ask DBG to put it right at zone in clicky..

This. So much this.

Nobody wants them to make it easier to kill the giants. Shoot, make them difficult raid bosses on the level of the EP or Time bosses. I'm totally fine with it. In fact, I would love the challenge.

The thing people are upset about isn't that it's hard to get the medallions, but that it's tedious and worse, pointlessly tedious.

I know, I'm only kidding.

And we have a double flag on the play.

With poopsockers and RMT'ers, for a lot of people, it'll be like playing a game of whack-a-mole where every round goes on for 4-6 hours.

Will you finally get that pesky mole this time?

Nope. Sorry. Poopsock FTW. Oh well At least folks can still appeal to the GMs when they wait at 1 camp for 4 hours, then a larger force shows up 10 minutes before spawn and out-dps's you for it.

Oh wait, no. They no longer resolve disputes between players involving camps.

I'm not sure just what you think that 'guilds working together' can do to make this NOT a bottleneck.
The same number of guilds will need to get the same number of medallions.
Which means the same number of giants will need to die in open world for that to happen.
What is your grand idea? Each Guild gets their own pick to themselves? No one KSes?

The point of instancing them, is so that the guilds on the server can work at their own pace to get stuff done. Rather than being forced to hold up, and wait for hours on end in order to get a raid force to progress past a certain time.

If these weren't a multi-hour respawn camp, it wouldn't be so much of a concern. 24 keys, per pick, per day. That is the maximum number of keys that will enter the world. Spawning new picks gets harder the more that are open, you need to keep them balanced across the entire situation. And if you DO spawn a new pick, they're not in on zone up, so you have to hold that pick open for several hours before seeing your first medallions.

So, that means, to key up a full raid force of 72, a guild will need to sit and poop-sock in a single pick for 3 full days as a unit without missing a single spawn to a kill steal by some other guild trying to get into Plane of Time faster.

This isn't the time commitment many people have in the lower tier guilds. Put them in the instance, and a slower progressing guild can key themselves up on their time. Most guilds here raid on set schedules, they aren't going to open-world race every mob to try and finish in 48 hours. Most want to do a few hours of raiding per night via instance the way they have since the beginning.

The dps race in era would have gotten you banned under the play nice rules. Back in the era the GMs actually enforced the rotations on raid content and ksing in PoS was treated like blocking a guilds progression by kicking off an event with no intent of completing it.

You are not arguing for many people. The people I have grouped with in OGC, for example, would prefer if there was an instance. Only because outside of the dps race they could be flagging people through instances (since the respawn timer is so long on the giants).

Any way you look at it the instancing is a benefit to all. Even with a 5 day lock out on giants, you will still get a dps race for a couple weeks on giants where you can sit there and wait for them to spawn. Did you even consider that? If so how can you argue anything other than getting them added, oh right you dont care.

If soth quit then they lose business, if more leave with him you lose your server and the game is over. Having a BS bottleneck in the game when DB doesn't enforce the rules that existed back then is bad. That is not what the server is about, you should have played during the first progression where we did have to take turns getting flagged. But that was still much more civilized than this show on our server.

Lol, that was not a "grey area." You might argue he didn't really mean that, but it was absolutely not a "grey area." It was a conclusive statement that exactly this type of thing shouldn't be happening, and which, by the way, is how it works right now. Remember every time you opened a Ssra instance, and the commanders, arbiter, general, and advisor were never up? Me neither.

This is meaningless. They can make whatever stance clear they want. It's not going to change the fact it goes against what they billed the server as, how their subsequent statements clarified what they thought was acceptable and what wasn't, and how they've now decided, based on nothing, to change the way it actually works on the server currently.

They could take away instances tomorrow and post "We never intended casuals to be able to see content" and you could post "Anywho, RadarX posted and that makes DBG's stance pretty clear." Well, yeah, it does, it's just that it's a completely absurd thing for you to say. And for them to do.

The level of naivete in this comment would be absolutely adorable if you weren't serious. This is Phinigel, brother. I don't know if you remember some of the totally ridiculous shenanigans that have gone on here, but for one, we had one guild wake the Sleeper after their leader promised they wouldn't, publicly, on the forums, after two weeks in Velious, and tried to frame another guild for it. In Luclin, we had guilds exploiting their way into the emp chamber or pulling him to the zoneline, we had groups getting constantly trained out of VT key spots, we had the VP medallions dissolve into a messy free-for-all for weeks on end, we had the first emperor kill get its wraiths ganked by members of another guild who were waiting in the wings to snipe them the moment they appeared, we had/have groups of farmers locking down content like Queen Velazul Di'zok nearly 24/7 to RMT the gauntlets endlessly....

I mean, unless you are throwing some kind of Hail Mary play to convince the world you shouldn't be allowed out by yourself and deserve a hefty SS disability pension on the basis of a severe mental disorder, I cannot understand why or how you would say this with a straight face. The people on this server are here to see the content and to do whatever they have to, to see it. They are not here to work together.

There are kronos here, bud. All the cooperation in the world, even if you could get people to do it, which you can't, isn't going to change the giants being killed constantly for the first few weeks by RMT crews who are very good at 1) KS'ing things 2) having the patience to sit in one spot for hours and hours on end. I can't do that. 95% of the server can't do that. That's why they're here and not on Ragefire or Lockjaw.

So what? Once again, this is Phinigel. If I want to go super hardcore and stay on for 70 straight hours at a time and kill all the content available to me in the first few days, I can do that. If I want to play an hour a day and finally get around to killing Quarm 5 months into the expansion, I can do that too. That is the point of instancing. Literally the only thing that instances change about raiding is that you can do it on whatever schedule you want, without being held hostage to that first group I mentioned a couple sentences ago. And that's what, again, 95% of the server is here for. There's no way to make this simpler for you.

Buddy, nobody doesn't understand why they're doing it, they're saying it's dishonest and that DBG decided to go against the rules they themselves wrote to make more money. Again, I don't know how to make this simpler for you. It's also just plain baffling to me that you can say "Yeah, they're breaking the rules of the server just to squeeze out more money" thus acknowledging the very reason we're all upset is actually true, and somehow make the argument that that's okay.

Xoner already expertly covered why this is pants-on-head , so I'll just add that every time someone does something like this, knowing how flagrantly dishonest they're being for the sake of trying to win an argument they're manifestly losing, it makes the world just a tiny bit worse. Stop it.

The problem is, it still won't be much of a bottleneck for the guilds that don't want to work together. I'm quite sure AoS will have the #'s to compete in every pickzone until they have what they need, and several other guilds will be fighting tooth and nail. It only takes 1-2 guilds not playing nice to make cooperation untenable for the rest of them. Why would Rosengard, Resolute, Entendre, IVAS, etc make an agreement with one another if AoS or OGC or EOE will still swoop in and take their giants?

(I still contend it would be in AOS's best interests to cooperate if they want to finish PoTime in max speed, as they could have far more pickzones available through cooperation and get what they need more quickly, but probably only by a day or so--and here is their chance to finally go head to head in open world with no way for OGC etc to avoid it, and that's probably worth more to them than a day saved on beating PoTime, especially after Luclin launch events.)