Question for those of you who "want to raid"

There was nothing fun about being cawk blocked by higher guilds, there was nothing fun in a dps race to see who would get the loot, there was nothing fun in having your phone ring at 3:30 am after you got to bed two hours prior (because of a raid), there was nothing fun about waiting for a higher tier guild to release content, ad nauseum...

Years ago the Dev team insisted there was a certain prestige involved with getting the end game loots and maybe there is for the players, but is that prestige diminished just because you got that gear in an instanced zone as opposed to an open zone? Of course not, you still beat the event and earned your gear.

fair enough.

i raced for targets "back in my day" and its become increasingly apparent the experience varied wildly by server. for the most part on my server, guilds did not train each other, or leapfrog over another guild that was there "in force." yes, it happened, but it was the exception and not the rule. that kind of consideration just does not happen anymore from what i see.

i was in guilds that won and lost races both. even winning races i found more stressful than fun, throw in the current mindset of "competitive raiders" and its just not worth it.

I like it the way it is and not just because I am at the top of the food chain, I've been at the bottom before. Vanilla - PoP EQ for me is like a really good book or movie/series. The people playing create a story. It makes you run a gamut of emotions and mixed feelings. That feeling when the underdog gets his triumph or the character you love is killed off... it is all a part of the story. The good and the bad go together. There is love, hate, envy, pride, joy, sadness, adrenaline rushes, and the sting of defeat among many others. WoW never gave me the full gamut because really you are pretty much stuck in a private bubble most of the time. You only really get top dogs that you envy or look up to or hate or bottom feeders you feel sorry for or look at with jealousy with their blissful ignorance or their love of the simple and mundane in a game like EQ where you actually interact with other guilds and players. The ability to go from being a nobody on the server to a hero or villain is pretty unique.

I hate Apok, they are the scum of the earth guild for our server. Yet I do not know if things would be so involved or interesting if there was no guild to hate and despise. It would probably be pretty damn boring. Yet if everything was instanced and available to everyone on demand, that would disappear. They would be in their bubble and we would be in ours.

This chance at a story is limited and short lived. We only really get to have it until PoP, after that we are all separated into our own personal bubbles, never bumping into each other, never stepping on each others toes, never banding together to accomplish anything outside of our own guild. The story disappears and becomes as hollow as a reality TV show, completely forgettable. I remember events that happened on The Tribunal, I remember events that happened on Fippy. I played on Xegony after instancing..... I have no memories of anything that happened outside of my guilds activities...... nothing, and even those are fleeting. Same thing for playing WoW, nothing outside of my guild and bubble. Ultima Online and DAoC I remember because there were no bubbles (or very few in DAoC's case). WoW, LoTR, FFXIV, and every game with heavy instancing.... nothing outside of the bubble, no story, just motions.

This will likely be my last EQ hurrah. Let me have one last story before the curtain falls.

Don't forget.

In order for it to make sense, the sense of achievement the ubers get from keeping me from killing something must be at least as great as the combined senses of achievement of both of us getting to kill the same target.

I don't buy it. Competition engenders bitterness and toxicity, not a "sense of achievement".

The stubbornness and stupidity is on the part of the dev team, not you.

The competition I spoke of is something I'm guessing you haven't experienced. A pvp environment takes your "competing, planning and dedication" to a whole new level. Try hitting a raid target only to have another raid show up with it's only intent to stop you from killing the raid mob. Many times this happened AFTER you engaged the target so now you have to kill an enemy raid that is hell bent on wiping you out and you still have your raid target engaged. While you may not consider this competition, it is certainly far harder than playing on a carebear server.

For those of you that do bat-phone, how the heck do you do it?

My wife get disgruntled when I get a call at 3am for a world-wide service issue at work. I can't even imagine the conversation that justifies waking us both up in the middle of the night so I can play a video game.

This is a seventeen year-old game. We aren't in college anymore. Most of us have spouses and kids. I just don't understand how people can accept getting 3am phone calls as mature adults, or why that is even a desirable part of the game.

Most either don't have families, or have crazy schedules from what I've seen - i.e. Frenzic is a male nurse for a prison or something like that, obviously crazy hours involved so his woman is already accepting of such crazy hours.

I am on-call with a pager and 2 phones 24/7, adding a 3rd phone isn't that big of a deal. You can build up a tolerance for sleeping on the couch to avoid the wrath of the spouse, too!

Not trying to take your feuds away. Feud all you want. Instance one server and not the other. I'm glad eq makes you happy, but that's not a reason to deny casuals the ability to play their way, especially when there are two servers with different rulesets.

If things were instanced, they wouldn't be available on demand, we would have lockout timers.

Why do we need someone to hate/despise? I would much rather be on friendly terms with everyone.

I've never had a problem with that concept, I really wish they would make LJ the instance server and let everyone transfer between the two to get the experience they want.

Honestly, EQ has never been a "play their way" game. If casuals want to choose to play in a way that doesn't allow them to see end game content, that is a perfectly valid choice to make.

Did you just admit to being a drug dealer on here? Heh - what field uses a pager anymore?

(Kidding, it's obviously medical but still...)

s

sounds like you already lived the story, no point in reading it again, let everyone else get a piece of the pie, i have stated lots of times on these boards i will not wake up at 315 am to kill a dragon or neglect my family to play EQ, instancing would allow me to enjoy some raids and my family both, i am way to old to live on EQ for 12+ hours a day

Its pretty simple for me, do what it takes to make her happy. If i have to log on for 20 minutes during the night, whatever. Cazic Thule the other night was interesting though, considering it was the first time I had really done it, she wasn't too impressed. Aside from that, she takes it in stride, she knows I enjoy playing the game, and its not like I'm ignoring her, or we're not doing things together.

As an aside to people saying buff the already buffed raid targets. You did hear that, we... TL, wiped to Nagafen last night with a full raid, right? The buffed targets are where they need to be, and im sure the ones coming mid-july will be where they need to be aswell. When things are rushed, or people don't pay attention, it is very easy for these encounters, currently, to snowball out of hand. Right now, is the perfect time to try and contest for these mobs, because its not like we can show up and in 5 minutes be ready to "Slay the Dragon(TM)". It takes real prep-time, so if you can prep faster, who knows!

Really, this issue is between the community and Daybreak (the community's majority should speak for it, which is the instancing faction), not between instancers and anti-instancers. Now, we can't blame the hardest core guilds for wanting to retain the system, but neither is it necessary to debate them; they are really just cheerleaders applauding Daybreak's decisions, unaware of the significance that Daybreak's reasons for not changing things aren't the same as theirs.

Just as an aside, there are non-instanced keying raids well past PoP. Remember being KSed on Vule once, and that's in DoDH. I have no doubt that folks will want to content block, so even if key mobs don't drop the best loot, can still fight over the keys.

Also, there was a time when being a member of specific guilds seen as something to be "proud" of. Or when you saw someone with something like a Cloak of Flames, or purple armor, or epics, it was like "Wow, this guy put in a lot of work, thats amazing". Now its "Lol, neckbeards have no life, they must suck, why can't I have that?". Why and when did that happen? =/

Citizen farmed Keleborn and Vule endlessly on Fippy to keep TL and Darkblood from getting into Demiplane lol. Its pretty hilarious in retrospect honestly, but then again, that was par for the course on Fippy lol.

If by casual you mean the server would have instanced raiding then yes say good bye to the current model of TLP's. Perhaps this is the real issue the devs have with instancing. What would they end up doing with RF and LJ?

Since we're doing thought experiments try this one. First replace the term casual with PvE, then replace contested with the term PvP. With a few technicalities this is truly the reality of these servers until the later expansions when instances naturally become prevalent enough to remove the indirect pvp we have atm.

Which type of TLP would draw the crowd and which would go up in flames?

PvP server or PvE server
Contested server or Casual server
Non-instanced server or Instanced server

The options (can you think of more?) all trend towards one direction as far as I can tell.. however id be more than willing to put it to a vote to shut me up once and for all.

The "PVP" crowd is perhaps, the craziest. This is in no way PVP, and in fact, its the way that quite a few servers were back in the day. Consider the other guilds part of the enviroment. If you're killing something in Commonlands, Sgt SLate might come KS you, same way with fighting near a city zone, or any other zone where there are opposing factions within the same small area. You calling it "pvp" to justify that it isn't what you want is incorrect. So stop?