Plane of Storms Progression

No... not exactly. What made Planes of Power a great expansion was all of the loot pinatas and a tiered raiding system that allowed multiple guilds to reasonably raid in era content simultaneously.

What really happened, and anyone who actually played high end raid content during that time should remember, that guilds didn't work together - they cockblocked other guilds from progressing to be able to compete. This server isn't a competition server.

Also, to whomever had the dumb comment of "its only gonna take 3-4 weeks to get past"... that would be fine if the server was non-instanced and 6-12 month expansion unlocks... but that isn't the case here. This is an unreasonable hurdle for players in an instanced server and goes against the entire philosophy of playing on one.

I'm trying very hard to campaign for the change. Others are also, as we can see.

However, if PoP is released as is, I will be forced to instruct the members in my guild to do what they have to do for the sake of progression. I have no doubt other guilds will be doing the same.

The idea of guilds coming together is nice and all, but we've all been burned by that notion with the sleeper, and have spent enough time on the server to know how other guilds operate.

There will be no first in force or engage rules arbitrated or enforced by a Game Master or Guide on any server. We believe players can resolve disputes about camps and raid bosses between each other. Game Masters and Guides will not help negotiate these disputes between players and guilds.

With policies like this in place, I can safely assume that other guilds will not be respecting my people's camps. So my people will have no reason to respect the camps of others. You can hate me for contributing to the madness if you want, but I won't apologize for doing right by my own.

I deeply regret that it is devolving to this. But to succeed, you gotta adapt.

Hopefully the devs will come to their senses soon.

^^^^

He's right you know

Here's what I'd propose. If all the guilds were onboard, and really wanted to work together. Which I know will not happen, and this is just an exercise in "What if..." IF guilds did this, it would not be a bottleneck.

The keys to making it work are #1 giving guilds the incentive to flood the zone at a specific time and spawn dozens of picks initially, #2 give them incentive to keep the picks alive indefinitely even when not actively farming, and #3 give the hardcore guilds incentives to participate with a lot more free for all opportunities than might otherwise exist.

If PoP opens at 2 PM Pacific, that's the tail end of Euro raiding times and a bit before the start of US raiding times. Give everyone ~2 hours to get Plane of Justice trials done (needs to be fairly early or you'll lose too many of the Euros to the middle of the night.) Then at the designated time have everyone flood into Plane of Storms base instance. Designate pickzones to specific guilds by the #'s of bodies they have in the zone-- for every 45 toons a guild has in PoStorms to help spawn a pickzone, they get a pickzone all to themselves (or however many toons it takes to spawn a pickzone.) Could use either the luclin or overall guild ranking list from Phinnykills.com to order them-- so if AoS has 135 toons, they get picks 1-3, then IVAS gets picks 4-5 with 90 toons, OGC picks 6-7 with 90 toons, etc. Or however it works out. The base zone and any extra pickzones that get spawned from guilds that don't have 45 are free for all. A neutral party or a council of guild leaders could coordinate all this, verify #'s, and assign pickzones accordingly. Only guild tagged toons count. Once a guild is assigned a pickzone they send 45 members into the zone to spawn the next. Would probably take ~30 minutes away from raiding for guilds to get into the right pickzones and spawn them all. Guilds would need to maintain 45 members in each of their picks until the setup is done (or they'd lose the pickzone.) If most guilds would rather raid the first night, this could be done on day 2 instead, at the time in between Euro raids finishing and US raids starting.

Now once this is done and guilds' pickzones are established, the caveat is that if a guild has less than 3 groups camping that pickzone at any point in time, or if the giants spawn and aren't killed within a set time, the pickzone becomes temporarily free for all until an hour after they have the #'s back up (You'd want a process in place to verify this, eg a shared channel where any guild can report another guild being below #'s, at which point a ten minute warning is given, and representitives from other guilds must pick over to confirm the situation. The specifics would have to be worked out here that everyone can live with.) If a guild has no one in their pickzone and it collapses, they permanently lose their pickzone until the next server reset and have to just compete for ffa opportunities.

Most of the guilds/pickzones will probably drop below the threshold sometime during the night and allow the hard core guilds to have plenty of pickzones to fight over. Far more than there would be if there is no cooperation and every guild is simply out for themselves. If an agreement like this were in place, all the raid guilds participate, and it is well organized, it could easily result in 30+ pick zones being kept alive for the first week of PoP and virtually all of the guilds getting all the flags they need. And even if there are some shenanigans along the way, the sheer # of picks will make it very difficult for any one guild to dominate them all, or for krono farmers to pick into each of them on every giant pop to contest. For that matter, even if one or two guilds chose not to participate, and decided to contest everyone everywhere, the sheer #'s of pickzones would make that largely irrelevant after the first day or two.

If the server goes down etc, the process to establish pickzones repeats at 4 PM pacific or whatever the designated time is when most guilds can participate, all picks ffa till then.

Machen you post too much for a guy who stopped playing the game.

Does Rodana know how much you're lusting over this game still?!

Probably... She is used to rolling her eyes when I tell her about my forum posting.

Cool. Thanks for giving me a reason to murder CoC members. I look forward to it. Why wait until PoP, amirite? KOS ya'll wuwu!

This may be correct mathematically, but after the last three pairs of progression servers I think we know this is socially unrealistic. Besides just the track record, there's also all the above discussion which clearly shows all it takes is a small handful of players going rogue before this becomes a straight up race to the bottom. Even in your proposal you mentioned the idea of "temporarily free for all" and that might look like an inch but we all know it's a mile.

And to be completely frank about this, I don't think I really even support the idea of players having to go to all these lengths. The Vision(tm) for Phinny has been pretty clear from the get go and, in spite of my appreciation for how much work has gone into making this server work (and it has worked), the playerbase should be holding Daybreak's feet to the fire on this one.

Think about the resources that have been required to get Phinny where it is today. But after PoP, it should be pretty smooth sailing. Modernizing all the raids from Classic through PoP has pretty significant, but it also means now Daybreak has a template for launching this kind of server again. Phinny has obviously been a success for Daybreak. There's been some hiccups but I guess my question is - why dig your feet in on this one?

Why not just get this right the first time around?

I've argued all along that Daybreak should fix this. But given that they apparently won't, and given that that decision is completely out of the hands of the players, it's up to the players to decide how they want to respond. "Get this right" isn't a choice that the player base gets to make.

You really don't understand do you? With DBG's current decision, you don't have a choice but to either,

1) Work together
2) Lose your in-game humanity and fight
3) Fall in line and wait weeks or months.

Typing up an emotional response at this point is fruitless. You can complain. You can cry. You can do whatever you want, but that won't change the fact that those medallions are up for grabs when the Planes of Power expansion unlocks. We know how you feel and many of us feel the same way, but it doesn't matter.

When will you understand this very critical point?

Welcome to where I stand Machen and I know it's not a very good position, but it's all we have to work with.

Ultimately this is all you've been saying:

"I have opinion! Hooray me for having opinion! The only other valid opinions are opinions that align with my opinion!"

You keep saying the same thing over and over. We get it. Get over yourself. People clearly don't like this. They're allowed to not like it. Every time somebody voices that, you seem to have this compulsive need to sanctimoniously chime in, "But MY opinion."

It's a tad overbearing.

It is not an opinion that players cannot determine how the PoStorm giants will work. Being allowed to dislike it doesn't somehow give you the power to change it.

The whole point here is to give people a medium to speak out against it with hopes that the devs will listen. It's not that unreasonable and it's certainly not that complicated.

No one, literally no one in this thread, has suggested you shouldn't speak out against it.

I won't be bated into your childish attempt to point a bent finger. Grow up.

Then refer back to post #351 before you incessantly try to pull us into a moot argument that needlessly goes in circles.

Yet everybody else is supposed to be baited into yours? Do you have some sort of social disorder (barring standard cognitive dissonance) that inhibits you from recognizing your own behavioral patterns?

He didn't tell you not to post in support of your position.

And there's the straw man again. I should start a count of how many times I can catch you reverting back to that song and dance.

You started with the straw man when you said, "People don't like it. They're allowed not to like it." No one has been arguing otherwise.

But please, explain how any of my positions are straw man arguments.