Question for those of you who "want to raid"

I want to raid, and a lot of other people here want to raid too. When I think "I want to raid Classic EQ" in my mind I think, I'm going to be in a guild which uses a batphone to notify guild members when a raid is called, requires gate/perma pots to shed precious mobilization seconds, who has a pre-established list of instructions for when a raid is called so time isn't wasted figuring out groups or buffs or mobilization. I picture this guild crushing the competition because they are not willing to be as proactive. I am not attempting to be haughty, I'm explaining how this goes in my mind.

A lot of other people are saying they want to raid the content, and I am just curious, what do you have in mind? There is a front page post right now where a level 44 dude is saying he is going to quit since he doesn't have a chance at raiding, but he's not willing to form XP groups to even get himself planar.

There are, roughly, five guilds currently contesting end game content. These are Twisted Legion, Rosengard, Reign of Insanity, Apokalypsis, and to an extent Reign of Eternity. Other guilds make cameo appearances, but these are the ones who have beaten bees and you see on a daily basis killing or contesting gods and dragons.

If you want to raid but are not in one of these 5+ guilds, assuming there are no game changes (instancing), what are you expecting. I'm not being dumb, I'm being serious. Are you hoping for a rotation, or for guilds to just kill targets, say, once a month, so your guild can raid? I'm not officially posting on behalf of TL, just as a RF player like anyone else, but I genuinely want to know, if you could sit down with these guilds and ask for something, and get it, what would it be? How would this work?

For those in these guilds (probably not if you are in TL though), and you are not satisfied with the current raiding situation, what change are you hoping for?

This is eluding me. I think raiding as it is right now is the way it is because the EQ metagame has been solved and this is the result. Possibly it's even this way because this is how Daybreak expects or even wants it to be. I facepalmed at Holly's comment, though I think I know what she was trying to say.

So, as I lead with, for those of you who "want to raid," what are you imagining? How does it fit in with the current scene, or what changes do you imagine among the current big players in the raiding game that would make raiding possible for you.

This is really just a thought experiment. Personally I think Daybreak is woefully out of touch with their playerbase, so maybe you could reply with something enlightening to them, but otherwise I'm just asking for the sake of interesting, philosophical discussion.

TL;DR? That's fine, I'm only looking for thoughtful, thorough replies anyway.

EDIT: Replies from fellow TL members also welcome of course. How does your perception of current raiding line up with or differ from mine?

Good post but for those in "other guilds", they should have an opportunity to raid just like the 5 you mentioned. Not to bring up the "old days" but atleast on Tarew Marr they had a server calendar where your guild actually signed up for a raid in advance and you were limited to 3 raids a week. I believe spawn times were different then but you get what I'm saying. It worked well because then more than just 5 guilds were able to down content.

The way it is now, the 5 guilds you mentioned will rule the server. And we're not even into the discussion of folks from those 5 guilds using 10-20 mages to either down the content or invade a different guild's raid. I'm not saying they WOULD do that but I've seen some pretty disturbing crap on RF so far.

Should i expect to be able to raid if the guild I'm in starts getting level 46+ members and wants a crack at Inny? I would certainly hope so.

I think people want to raid against the game, rather than other players.

What no one seems to want to discuss or admit is that there just wasn't as much 24/7 socking and "batphoning" in 1999. Through patience and diligent scouting, it was possible to get a few raid targets without having to DPS race others. For many, that was enough, even if it didn't make them the best geared on the server. Now, it's much less possible, and if everyone who wants to raid against the game actually to steps to do it, it would be 100% impossible (if it isn't already).

All boils down to more players and/or a higher percentage of raiders in the playerbase (even if the split to Lockjaw makes total players closer to a 1999 server, we have a lot more players hitting 50 a lot faster than in 1999, and looking for more), combined with players who know the game and spawn mechanics inside and out, and are doing things to min/max their raid results that just didn't happen as much in 1999.

Also, as I've said before, unless someone can find some sort of evidence (forum posts, etc) confirming that the idea of "the games' too easy, so we need to make it difficult for each other" actually existed in 1999, then that's just a completely modern invention for the anti-instance crusade.

You just explained the very reasons people are asking for instancing. We have a difficult fight against a dragon, not a 3am call to spam dps a dragon faster than another guild. The fight should be difficult. If you don't want "Casuals" killing the dragon, the dragon should be that difficult.

I don't think "I want to raid classic EQ" because this isn't classic. I think "I want to fight the epic monsters for years gone by, when my character is at the appropriate power level to make it a fun fight".

If they don't instance it, we will simply go as far as we care to, then quit.

Sitting at a spawn point is not fun. It's time I can spend with my family. But when I got 3 hours to spare, I want to get my teeth kicked in by a dragon. I don't want to race your guild. I don't care about your guild. This is a PVE game. While we may share an environment, you are not the environment the players want to be set against.

I want to get home from work, log on, see who else in my guild is online, see what targets are available, make dinner while people log on.

When we get enough people, I want to go to the target, buff up, try it a few times (if it takes that long my guild rarely wiped unless we were trying new content back in the day) and then move on to the next target for the evening. And do it again tomorrow night.

When the evening is over, I want to go do the rest of my maintenance work on my character. Questing, tradeskills, in game errands.

In order to do this, I'm willing to level up to 50, camp relevant gear, do quests, farm keys, all of that jazz. Even level a wizard box for ports to hate.

Raiding takes tons and tons of preparation time. I'm willing to do all of that.

I don't know why this is so hard for people. It's not the TIME, its TIMING.

That guy saying he was 44 and didn't wanna grind out the last few levels is not one of us. I don't want the game to be easy. I want a hard PvE game, not a quasi-PvP cluster.

Also, some people didn't rush to 50 because they saw the ****storm coming and wanted to get a number of alts in position for the final grind while they *thought* DBG was going to solve the mess. They wanted to optimize their productivity with the time they had while the kinks were worked out.

With the end-game and raid scene such a toxic mess and no end in sight, there's little desire to finish out the grind. The grind lost its purpose.

The metagame being "solved" is a large part of the crux - as is simply too many raiders population wise compared to Classic.

Kunark was pushed out THREE MONTHS EARLY compared to their planned release date because at the end of Classic some servers were starting to have scuffles like this with 3-4 guilds fielding 30-50 people regularly over Classic content. It's still beginnings of the servers with almost two months more of Classic on the fast server to go and we're already nearing twice that (assuming none of those "lower tier guilds" count - realistically they do) with rosters that are mammoth compared to old school.

As players - especially with so many involved parties now and any bad party being able to screw up the whole thing - I don't think there is any player based fix that would work. Rotations would fail because SOMEONE would screw it up no doubt. Straight competition under current rules will still pivot based upon those willing to make RL sacrifices as much as proper planning. (i.e. RL phone numbers being given out as happens for many)

Realistically I don't see these servers ever "solving" this issue without quite a bit of legwork. (raid instancing - with preventions from excessive abuses by those that know "that metagame")

I think the best hope for solving things is to simply have future Progression servers (hopefully including one somewhat soon - since clearly RF is still too populous from the weekend crash consistency) start with a massive amount of content open with the first unlock being exceptionally long to make up for it. I'd personally suggest PoP since at that point most of the class balances issues are gone (most of the balances were done WITH PoP->OoW era in mind as the target for balance) it gives a wide range of room for guilds to "tier" and have the best content be taken by the best, with "lesser" guilds getting content down through the ranges. It would also make LDoN available shortly into things (or maybe even force it at the start) to guarantee some instancing is available while it likely would still remain non-preferable as LDoN raids frequently were)

Something like that would create the best of both worlds IMO - while theoretically being a very easy thing for devs to enact if they had the hardware for it.

There is nothing else to say I haven't already said, but in the current meta on RageFire, what's the point? Even if I did join one of these guilds I would imagine they have so many mouths to feed. One argument, and extremely valid point, is that there simply is not enough supply vs demand. Us, the players who understand that, do not want to waste out time doing raiding that typically involves griefing or getting griefed. We do not want to worry more about the player from the other guild behind us than we should be worried about the dragon in front of us. This is a PvE game which is being ruined by a "PvP" and FFA mentality, where DPS war rules all (AKA more numbers=more skill??).

I still don't understand how people miss these points which seem to be totally common sense to me. Why would DBG not think that people who come back for a "Progression" server, would do exactly that, AKA "Progress" AKA RAID!

We know that DBG has said raid instancing is an available option, but they seem to be doing everything they can to stop this from happening. With that said, I would recommend to not hold your breath for raid instancing. At the same time, I encourage all to keep discussing (politely and constructively) the subject of raid instancing, despite how many times they may lock your threads. Voting with your wallet is also appropriate, and I've already unsubbed and liquidated most items off of my account.

If you are similarly passionate on the subject, please see the below links where I go in depths into the problems at hand, and be sure to hit the like button if you agree.

Link 1: Constructive Feedback for Raid Instancing Wall of Text post #1 (Holly's Quote)
Link 2: Constructive Feedback for Raid Instancing Wall of Text post #2 (Raid Changes Coming In July)
Link 3: Constructive Feedback for Raid Instancing Wall of Text post #3 (Maybe Instancing Wouldn't Be So Bad)

I imagine a game with challenging raid content that's available to those who have the necessary skills to defeat the encounter without having to deal with griefing from other guilds. I imagine a management team who hasn't diminished the achievements of raiding guilds over the past thirteen years or so by implying their successes are less significant because they occurred behind closed-instance doors. I imagine a game where I am known as an excellent player not because I can monopolize rationed content but because I know how to play my class or lead a raid or follow raid instructions better than other players.

I want to be able to log in after work, group up with my guild, walk into a melt-your-face encounter with some of these old world bosses that tests my abilities as a Warrior, my guildmates' abilities as their respective classes, my raid leader's ability to lead and my strategist's abilities to strategize and improvise, to throw everything, the kitchen sink, the kitchen, the entire floor of my house that my kitchen is in, the foundation of my house, and the garage too, at, and maybe walk away with a win. Because this tired old monopolization and mobilization stuff is dull and boring.

The first thing I want out of raids is challenging content that requires more than zerging or pet walling.

After this if you have the requisite # of players capable of raiding it should be "reasonably possible" to complete said raids as many times as required in era to gear up at least half of the main characters(not including alts and boxes)

Reasonably possible means not having to resort to what is toxic, or outright cheating to accomplish.

Rotations are players rationing content on top of developers rationing content via mechanics. I don't like them in principle but they are the lesser of two evils, as below.

All that results from the toxic aspects of DPS/Race I won't bother to list all of them here is detrimental to the community, subscriptions and the longevity of the game.

Ultimately not all raid content has to be instanced if at all, but mechanics should be created that effectively make raiding a possibility for more of the population. Yes this means some form of mechanic to lockout players that have gotten alot of raids, which would allow them to tweak and increase respawn rates further if necessary to meet the greater needs of the plyer population.

I would rather see what Holly calls the achievement of current raiding be the result of harder content, or GM controlled world events like dropping a Kunark dragon in Classic for a weekend surprise or Mayong suddenly appearing in Castle Mistmoore.

As it fits with current state of the game.

I log in, see 100 people in hate. Naggy and Vox died earlier. Box armies in kedge, 150 people in fear.

Then I log off.

I can't speak for everybody, but I don't have the time to sit around and sock like I used to when I was in college.

I saw the thread the other day about Innoruk despawning after 10 hours of waiting. I smiled to myself, because that meant the entire time I was at work, there was almost a hundred (?) people sitting at their computer waiting for a mob to spawn.

Ain't nobody got time for that!

It's just not feasible for those of us who have a job, family, and other real life responsibilities.

Raiding in classic EQ is not difficult. Plain and simple. It's just not.

Telling people that they shouldn't be able to try a raid mob is silly. It's not a skill issue. It's a time issue.

Think about this...

If casual players were given a shot to kill raid mobs (via instancing) and they weren't able to do it. How would that change things for you and your guild? What about if they were able to kill it? How would that change things? Why would any of it matter to you?

I'm not quitting the server due to lack of instancing. I will just raid an expansion or two behind the hardcores until PoP comes out. I'm not angry at the hardcore guilds/players. I used to be one.

I just can't figure out why you care what casuals are up to? Why would you care about raid instancing? It doesn't make sense to me now and it wouldn't have made sense to me when I was hardcore.

Okay you are about the 3rd or 4th person to say something like this. If that's what you want, that's great. But, at the same time, if that's what you wanted, why did you decide to come play on the EverQuest progression server?

There are some EQ expansions that will melt your face, absolutely, and even with instancing very few guilds would be able to defeat them within era - even on a progression server where all the strats are already known. So that's definitely something you could have to look forward to in the future.

But I ask again, why did you come play on the progression server if that is what you were looking for? You knew what you were getting yourself into, we all knew (or at least most of us - how many of you actually never played this game before?). If raiding was something you were interested in, you knew what it would take to have to compete. It's not a competition against the raid encounters in the first few expansions, it's a competition to mobilize more quickly than the other guilds and kill the boss before they can - we all knew this!

This isn't even the first progression server to come out for EQ, so it's really surprising to me that so many people can be upset about the current state of the game. I really don't know what you expected.

I don't want to "re-create" some fictional vision of classic raiding. When EQ came out I was in College. Now I work 12 hours a day and have a family.

What I want is to face in-era challenges and advance my characters by progressing through said challenges. I want the fights to be at least as challenging as they were originally, but I don't want to deal with fighting other guilds over the spawn and re-arranging my life schedule to attempt a single kill.

DPS racing isn't classic. It only existed on a few servers, mainly PvP, but the play nice policy was firmly in effect for the rest. The kill stealing and multi-guild raid "racing" never occured. Heck, back in the day they didn't have "raids". The group with the highest total damage got the kill, regardless of which "raid" they were a part of.

Nobody expected different. Nobody is really surprised since PnP is out the window and they want Paladins to DPS race mages. We are asking for a compromise that will make it a better environment for us. We are asking for a change. We know what we have. We want different.

This is spot on.

If batphoning is what it takes, I'll leave. I understand competition, but there are so many other games I could be playing. I want to play EQ and remember "the good old days", but there is a line that can get crossed. Batphoning is that line. is that line.

Many of us on these forums, myself included, played through the hard days of the last progression server. We took notes on what worked and what didn't and have been here posting long before the Johnny-come-latelys that think they are the only people who know what Everquest is about. Everquest has always had the reputation of being a game with a dev team that's capable of providing hard content. So don't be surprised that those of us who are on our second and third replays of these TLPs have some good ideas that we want to see DBG seriously consider. Would you rather I take my fifteen years of support and bring it elsewhere? Because even among all of the people who disagree with my points, I'd rather keep the old school players - and payers - invested in this game rather than lose their money that helps to keep these servers alive.

I have a lot of tolerance for the people that post here arguing for what they think is best for the longevity of these servers - I'll take Gregolo as an example, I've had some very quality conversations with him both in game and on these forums even though we generally disagree - but what I do not have is tolerance for the people who simply assume they are right and are completely unwilling to consider other points of view. I love this game. I would love it more if DBG started making some changes. Unlike some other people I won't throw a tantrum and threaten to leave the game entirely if DBG continues to be stubbornly ignorant. But the fact is that DBG has already introduced several new concepts that were not implemented on past TLPs and they have been, overall, a positive thing for these servers. So let's not pretend as though it's not worth my time to continue supporting changes that would have hugely positive impacts on these servers.

I think it's pretty reasonable for you to ask for something different, but is it really fair to get upset if they choose not to implement something different?

You knew what to expect coming in, you decided to give it a shot anyway, if it turns out you aren't enjoying it anymore then sure ask if it's possible for changes to be made. However, reading the forums lately, most of you aren't asking, you are demanding, and I don't think that's a reasonable position to take.

It really comes down to whether DBG is trying to sell nostalgia or sell EQ.

If they're trying to sell EQ, we've been down that path before, and we all know the ending. People will get tired of being bored and quit.

If they're trying to sell nostalgia, raids should be instanced. Most people playing on these servers are either looking to raid content they haven't been able to before, or they're trying to raid content for nostalgic reasons with a potentially very different real life situation than they were in before.

The TLP servers will last longer if raids are instanced because it keeps more people involved and playing. It's not like grouping to level and guilds will cease to exist, and that's really the backbone of EQ.