Roshen, tell us more about your enforcement plans.

That's my point, there is no chance in hell that a rotation/sharing of raid targets is going to work out. And everyone that has played on TLPs knows it. Daybreak is going to have to step in, it is unavoidable unless they relent and decide to instance the zones. All increasing the spawn time will do is give that guild that is locking it down more loots.

Dunno, I said the same for getting people off of using the hack program on TLP - and after the harsh crackdown (much like this is threatened to be) that happened of swift punishment, it seems like most people that had been using it either got banned or were too afraid to risk using it for quite a while.

It was a reasonable cure for a few months. (They just honestly needed to do another "sting month" every couple months to keep the fear fresh in hacker's minds which they didn't follow up on)

I'm hoping they do drop the ban hammer quite generously on guilds that don't share the targets, I can say the same for the greedy a'hats that sit on one camp forever just so they can sell the loot item. Or the loot rights. Only thing I think would be better than a ban is anyone in that zone gets deleveld to level 1.

My personal wishlist would be a "banishment" second server that basically anyone who gets deemed a jerk by their actions gets their characters sent to and login to Ragefire revoked.

All the jerks can FFA themselves until they're blue in the face (should be fun for them if they truly want competition like that - rather than abusing the respectful after all) against other jerks.

Funny thing is we already know which guilds are going to be the guilty ones, If Daybreak would like a list it would be easily supplied.

Make things more interesting:

1. offence = delevel to 1, strip gear and inventory, plat and bank
2. offence = moved to Oblivion (a FFA server) as lvl 1 no gear/inventory/bank/plat revoke access to Ragefire.

publicly announce who got punished on the forums

end of story.

Well, they are instancing the starting zones and removing the server cap so they can funnel people into one server rather than two.

If raid rotations are enforced, you are better having three 'sister' guilds of 33 people, rather than one guild with 100. Sooooo . . . my 'guestimate' of 10 guilds was on the conservative side.

You can't really compare the number of kills to the TLP 2.0. They may have only received 6 to 8 kills, but they got those kills in a much shorter time frame. Hence, they were not waiting a month or more between kills.

You also have to take into consideration, that one boss kill per month per guild means actual gear from those encounters is going to be few and far between for any single guild.

What do you think is going to happen with VP keys from Trakanon? If he still drops 3 to 5 teeth on average, how may rotations will you need to get through to flag your guild for VP?

Releasing Classic and Kunark together with an adjusted experience gain would spread leveling out and increase targets. With just Classic on the horizon, increasing respawns would not be a bad idea.

When Kunark was first released, we only had three guilds on the server taking out raid targets and we paired up with one of those guilds. The Ragefire experience is going to be different even compared to Fippy.

Well, in short for all those sorts of things there would have to be things hashed out in the agreements - i.e. sister guilds to abuse slots if caught if I'd be part of the deciding council or whatever would be grounds for removing all of the "joint guilds" from the rotation for a penalty timeframe.

On Trak that would probably be staggered (IIRC he's been 5-7 since the TLPs though) - first in rotation would get Trak until they've got their first force set up, ad nauseum.

Yes, it would be complicated to set up a good solid agreement, but it's doable - if people don't want to press their luck with the Old Testament style solutions DBG is implying.

Personally i'd say go with the Old Testament style solutions, but in reality I don't think they would have the balls to do it.

I could easily see them doing "King Solomon" and despawning a mob for a month or something if raids are being obnoxious about contesting it - as one of the most mild OT versions I can think of. [Not that they mentioned OT mind you, but I love OT analogies for harshness]

We have all the data we need on how this "you guys work it out" scenario works from the time on Fippy/Vulak. The people who matter in this discussion (the ones with the time/determination to lock everything down) have responded "No."

But by all means, I'm sure a friendly rotation can be agre...i'm sorry, the sarcasm in that statement was just too thick to wade through.

honestly the power guild members have been quite vocal about exactly what will happen. Detheb, DefenseEQ / Mabbu and lots more have been all over these forums lobbying for better raid policies and voicing their own concerns.

when even the guys who will be doing the socking (myself included) are hitting 200 posts about what a show it'll be, it is time to stop blaming them for everything.

if DB doesn't want to see those issues again, that is up to them to help us out with. i said in a post on reddit that i wouldn't be surprised to see 400+ in hateplane early on, crashing the zone repeatedly. this goes beyond the usual training/griefplay/socking issues. they're going to run into hardware stability issues if they continue to ignore contested target concerns.

This debate will rage even after GM intervention happens. Pushing all raiding guilds into 1 server….bad idea on DBG’s part.

Lets state FACTS.

Fippy, we tried doing rotations. The very first chance someone sees a loop hole that rotation will end. The very first time someone feels slighted, the rotation ends. These are facts because its exactly what happened with VSR, and Trakanon.

We tried doing a set time for FFA and then moving to a rotation. This failed because even with the agreed upon FFA timeline, we still had guilds petition GM’s.

Fippy was a server of about 4-5 raiding guilds and 3 bleeding edge guilds that wanted to do content. Keep in mind that was with Vulak taking another 2 guilds for sure that wanted to compete with each other. I am expecting 6-8 raiding guilds on Ragefire all wanting to do raid targets (Naggy, Vox, Trak, VP).

So let’s just do some basic math. I am doing some generalization since I don’t have hard facts on how many people and how many guilds we will actually have.

7 guilds * 50 people / 4 keys per kill = 87.5 rounded to 88 kills on Trak to key a guild for VP.

88 kills * 3 day respawn = 9.5 months to key all the guilds.

So right there, that isn’t even feasible to set up a rotation because no one will ever see VP prior to Velious. Please correct me if I am wrong on my math or I have the wrong respawn timers.

So there goes any rotation idea out the window, unless we limit the number of guilds that can participate in the rotation. Then the fun question becomes who gets in and who doesn’t.

The only way a rotation works is if there is so many spawns of a raid target that guilds are able to stay busy raiding between targets.

Let’s just use a “What if?” scenario. 1 day respawns on Classic raids.

Raid targets = Vox/Naggy – Sky – Fear – Hate. About 2 days of raiding of 4hr raiding to do all those targets. This would give 2 guilds no down time at all. 4 guilds 2 days of down time, 6 guilds 4 days of town time. Honestly, I am pretty sure a single guild could do all these targets in 24hrs easy if that’s how they played. This would be the only possible way a rotation could possibly work. Flood the raid scene with targets and install a rotation.

I highly doubt DBG would ever increase spawn rates to flood the raid scene, because that would just be un-“classic”. WTF is that ever suppose to mean this day in age. But, I digress.

Option 2 and to me the only true “classic” raid compromise I think that could work and fair to all guilds is a true race to targets.

Concept would be that ALL guilds agree to this. If a guild is going to make an attempt on a raid target, before they can engage the target they first must go to East Commons. Then race to the target. If multiple guilds reach the target at the same time, it’s a dps race. This promotes active players only, and guilds to be able to mobilize. It removes and spawn camping raid targets.

Order of operations
1) Raid target spawns
2) Guild forms up groups and starts a raid during the following steps.
3) Guild calls out target and everyone either gates or ports to EC.
4) As soon as they load EC they can then port to the next zone closest to the raid target and run there.
5) Upon arriving in the zone of the raid target. FFA is initiated.
6) Rush your guild to the target and DPS race it down.
7) Winner claims loot. The guild that has the best organization, best team work, and strategy wins.

If there is some question on how a guild arrived in the zone so fast, it’s very simple to look through logs and check zones on the guild members. If guild members cheated, that guild loses the loot and has a 7 day ban from raiding. This might take some GM involvement up front to make sure people are playing by the rules, but once it’s instilled it should be pretty straight forward.


I believe these are the only 2 truly fair ways of allowing anyone the chance at raiding on Ragefire. Without directly forcing people to play the game they way they don’t want to. I believe that since everyone is paying for this server everyone has a right to play, but how you play and what you doing with your time here is squarely on you. I don’t think your $15 a month buys you the right to unlimited access to all raid content. It gives you the option to do raid content if you put the time and effort into it. If you bust your a&& put the time in, you will see raid content…if you can’t due to RL, well than this is “Classic” enjoy your time here, play slow, level up slow, and enjoy the game. When Kunark comes, you can raid “Classic” at your leasure. There has always been a separation between guilds either due to lack of content or guild ability to kill raid targets. Some guilds just have to wait an expansion. There is nothing wrong with this. In all aspects of life, real or virtual, there are segregations of people. You need to find out what segment you are and enjoy yourself there.

Sorry but we can only take the actions of these people from the previous TLPs, not their words on what will happen. And from the actions we know what is going to happen.

I think that the point was that their words and what happened are one in the same.
Every raider knows what the server is going to become at the high end.

everyone is here admitting what is going to happen. if there is no PNP or raid rules system in effect that is being actively enforced, playing nice only hurts yourself and your guildmates. a classic prisoner's dilemma!

This scenario could be the most hopeful thing I've read on these boards......possibly ever.

One other thing that folks are forgetting about:

All this talk about raid-blocking and PS-ing targets is not as important for the casuals. In fact, go ahead and PS the top raid content in an expansion. Fight over it. Have your drama. I don't care. As a casual, I want you to flood the market with trickle-down gear. I want to enjoy the journey. I'm not in a race to the destination or the top.

I want to be 1-2 expansions behind you in raid targets. So race ahead. I'll follow along at a leisurely pace and you will all fight with each other on the next expansion, losing interest in the one I am aiming for.

When you are fighting over raiding in Kunark, I'll be ready for original. When you are fighting over Velious, I'll be ready for Kunark.

Someone gets it.

that is all fine and good. i am going to be much more casual this time around also. the long unlocks will alleviate a little bit of the issue by themselves, but as i've said in other threads you're still going to have to deal with RMTers locking down long after the content becomes irrelevant to progression guilds.

There won't be 6-8 raiding guilds (not hardcore ones, at any rate). Once the lesser raid guilds start losing, their members will jump ship, and be absorbed into the better guilds (same thing happened on Vulak/Fippy). Fippy had 3 Raiding guilds in classic/kunark (3 raiding guilds that were able to compete, at any rate). Twisted Legion, Citizen, Armageddon. No one but these 3 were doing Nag/Vox/CT/Inny. Halfway through Kunark, Armageddon disbanded and most of their active raiders joined TL.
Between Kunark and GoD, Twisted Legion and Citizen were the only 2 truly competitive guilds. Some guilds like Darkblood etc snagged smaller targets here and there, but top end raid targets all went to Citi/TL.

It's going to be very similar. There will be 3-4 competitive guilds tops, and without GM interference, the best will climb to the top and dominate content pretty quick, leaving the others to fall further and further behind

Increasing spawn times wouldn't help. The top guilds will simply dominate the same targets more often. You're underestimating the amount of time these people will put into the game.

Sure.. this is "fair", but it's akin to saying "only 1 guild will get to raid targets 90% of the time. This is how Fippy STARTED. It was all about mobilizing and racing to targets before the other guild. Why didn't it last? Because not all guilds are equal. One guild will come out on top when it comes to mobilizing to a target. They will begin to win nearly every time. THis is when Pewpsocking/DPS racing originated on Fippy, when the guilds unable to get their fast enough got tired of losing the mobilization battles. I was originally in one of those guilds. We were one of the first to start pewpsocking. It also didn't help that GM's gave a few targets away because "this guild was here first".

I really think you are championing the top raid guilds at this point. THis is exactly how Fippy worked out. The top guilds are going to put in the most time and have the most dedication. They will win by whatever means the game/GM's allow.

Anyhow I agree with your last bit.