Progression server this summer

What many of us, including myself, are guilty of is knowing we have cheaters, griefers and trainers in our guilds and not doing something about it.

I myself, will be very vocal about making sure that does not happen this round.

Just for a point of reference of how bad even the "lower population/competition" server was - I've started going through some of the old officer discussion and such on the DHS forums from when I was leading. (Again, Hi Everyone - yes, Vaclav on here translates to Aszuth in game at least for the past dozen years or so - did use Vaclav as my in game up through the millennium and a little past though).

Only edits I will be making to it are to remove names and guild names - since the "what was encouraged to happen" is the important part not the specific who did what's. I will warn you in advance it's dark - and probably people will be able to "Mad Lib" a few of the names back in if they'd want. I'd suggest not though - no good will come of it.

The context of this was it was a proposition sent by the 2nd tier guild of the server to us and presumably other casual-ish guilds to deal with things and to head off some at the pass: [Note: I left the game approximately two weeks after this because it sickened me that things were getting to this point]

Now, I'm not saying what they presented is scripture - but that's the sort of nonsense that was making the server a cesspool that I could no longer handle.

(And for the record - we still did things in our normal unaggressive fashion afterwards - although we did get help from some other guilds on a "raid mob campout" as a result of this - we supported the goals but weren't going to get too drastically involved per our ideals. At least during the time I was still around, forums read as if they stayed the course while using the DHS tag, but its not impossible things changed once I was gone for too long)

The way i see it is if one or two people in said guild are doing it and the mob is taken and killed by said guild and no punishment was handed out by leadership then that says that it is acceptable as a tactic. This was happening constantly from every piece of information coming from tlp...

I am not saying that you personally are doing it... i have no clue if you did or didnt but from your own words people in your guild did. Your guild takes down that target and its on the guild as a whole. Lets not split hairs here... it was a constant occurrence and a sheet show from start to finish... and with no GMs it will be much worse... think we all know that. Instancing stops it cold. Unless the top guilds who lock down spawns are willing to boot players for it? I think we know they wont and didnt?

Jax: I definitely saw at least one case of "Ooops, a group of our people trained you - we're to that, sorry you wiped (even though it's because of our guild members)" myself, even while trying to stay out of the way. Like you discuss as a theory. Didn't seem often on Vulak - but then again it was GM-offense territory there as well - I do have worry it could become commonplace with basically zero GMs.

They didn't absolutely say they were OK to do it, but considering the person in question wasn't booted anywhere near that timeframe it was a sign of tacit approval. [They were booted down the line from what I've gathered though - so it's not impossible it was a first demerit that led to that, but something like that is an instant boot in my book]

you missed an edit. not that i think tryin to protect the name of the guild is worth it. cause..cmon man. we all know. and not casting stones, both servers were pretty sewerlike during non instanced raiding era.

Ah crud, I did miss one - I'm sure most could have Mad Libs'ed it pretty accurately anyhow - it's past the edit timeframe to catch that one. (Darn him for using lower case for something that should be capitalized!)

And, I realize most people "knew" - I just don't know how many people glossed over things or had some of the dire level of things fade mentally in time.

Honestly, that reminded me it was actually worse than I remembered - I was going to bat for people, but I'd glossed over alot of this myself.

[Although on a positive note, going through things and reminiscing on our philosophy of staying out of the way - we really didn't deal with it TOO much - we only had a few bad incidents because we did stay clear of drama whenever we could. I had a refresher in both the positive being far more positive than I remembered but the rare negatives being even worse]

I think that some of the people posting in defense of 'competitive raiding guilds' don't appreciate what it's like to be on the same server as some of them. You personally may not have cheated or trained anyone yourself but members of your guilds did regularly. It was a part of the guild's strategy and condoned. The entire guild would attempt to KS every raid target they could get to regardless of who was there first and engaged first. The entire guild is complicit in this. You can use the euphemism 'DPS Race' if you like, but it's just kill stealing by another name. Most of the individual members that I had dealings with were thoroughly rude and arrogant. I can't count the number of times that I was trained or KS'ed (with or without obvious cheats involved). I would be happy to see a server without that type on it, certainly one where they are prevented from driving most of the decent people off of it.

I can agree with that to a point, what I hate is when people blatantly paint a picture that there was only one guild that ever did anything wrong, which is far from the truth.

Apparently all competitive raiding guilds are evil trolls and everyone else is an angelic saint.

There were obviously many guilds that did those things. That was the only way to get to the top. Then once on the top, they could look down at all of the peasants. There may have been some cheating happening in the non-competitive guilds but the difference is that it obviously wasn't nearly as pervasive. If it was, they would have been competitive...

"You can please some of the people all the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time" - Abraham Lincoln

I'm sure there are lots of people who don't like me for any number of reasons. To be fair, my character's name was Justin Bieber, and unless person X knew why I named my character that, they could use that as a defining factor of likability.

I do have to admit, I would love to know what person "hated" me (I'm a naturally curious person), because they did a very good job hiding it during my stay with EoE. I do know there was someone who wasn't sure about me at first, but later became someone I grouped with almost constantly.

Absolutely, Irbax - honestly, the more I read of stuff reminiscing - I think the moment I finally gave up on TLP 2.0 is when I really started to feel GUILD2 in my thing above was actually worse and potentially just trying to manipulate things to get to the top and do exactly the same or worse.

And there were definitely some "evil" casual players at times too - tempers flaring or whatever cause quite some stuff at times. [Frankly, since he's been mentioned by name here already - I'll mention one absolutely as a thing - I didn't remember anymore that the much maligned Wulias actually STARTED IN DHS.... he was actually our problem first (he didn't last very long, and was OK before a sudden deguild in the middle of a raid to switch guilds but still...)]

ive been in plenty of casual and hardcore competitive guilds both throughout my time in eq. while "competitive" guilds dont have a monopoly on griefers/hackers/trainers general Dbaggery...they are definitely the market share leaders from my experience. and i think you are fooling yourself if you think otherwise.

Hmmm

Not sure about that...1 officer of 1 guild was vocal on the old Fippy forums about people hacking from the top raiding guilds, then got caught doing it himself. The GL of another guild that was not competitive during classic era had a boxed alt afk and stationed in hate all day and could say what mobs had spawned and could lead the raid to targets, this on a non tracking class. Yet another non competitive guild were observed cheating in PoS.

Yeah, as I understood his/her point, he/she was saying many casual players were hacking just as bad or worse than the raiding guilds. Unfortunately, that is very true.

What was new, to me at least, was that many people didn't seem to care if you knew it or not.

At this point in EQ I just assume every group has at least 1 person with full vision of the zone at any given time.

Those are fair points. I didn't know of anyone in the guilds that I was in who was cheating. I never observed anyone that I grouped with doing it either. I can't deny that it's entirely possible that there were some.

I think that my previous posts were harsher than I intended too. I'm still fairly bitter about the last progression experience but it isn't fair to take that out on anyone now. I apologize.

I think everyone is bitter from the 2.0 experience, but in different ways and for different reasons.

Don't apologize, passion drives change and some things obviously need to change. I understand you aren't attacking anyone and I'm sure others do too.

The cheating they were pointing fingers about could both be classified as "clever use of game mechanics", not third party programs...

Being on mIRC and a couple of people boxing on regular spawn times and usually some mob rotation on first attempt.

Yeah. that's just like today Mez: with everyone's computer being able to box several windows, and having 3rd party programs, and bat phone sms ,with varied spawn times, boxes perma-camping, and constant griefing till one guild wipes....just like today.

Anyway, as I said, it's a fresh type of hell for most people and it's not actually fun.

I do love how people who want gear are so against everyone else getting it via instancing, it's not that you want the gear, it's that you want to take it from them. The way things go, with increased speed between expansion, instancing seems like a no-brainer to me anyway.

So, with the apparent dismantling of the reasons to not instance everything, is there still any voice out there with a reason not brought up that could allow for non instanced bosses of any color?

The reason I ask is I have been away since the day WoW came out and have recently been bitten by the nostalgia bug and am itching to play the old school version. I remember the freak show raids were even back when we had agreements set with the other top guild and GMs watching constantly.