Seeds of Destruction flagging - 6 keys per week?

SoF has two tiers so based on your logic it would take 10 weeks out of 12. Do you not seem a problem with that?

SoD is 6 per week. That is 9 weeks out of 12.

This is a problem because these were 1 year expansions so the flagging is tuned around 1 year of in Era game play. Not 12 weeks.

My point is: during live, only a small % of guilds per server were raiding end game in era expansion content. So actually, yes, this tracks logically with how things worked during live.

The guilds that have large member base and can split will get to end game quickly, smaller guilds will make it by the end, casual guilds won't make it at all... EXACTLY like how it worked back in the day. There's no rule that says every guild needs to experience all content in era. Just progress at your own pace.

What point in "live" are you even talking about? Sure before GoD not many guilds were raiding current era content, because they had to wait for open world targets to spawn and then compete with other guilds for those few targets. But once DZs were the main form of raiding if you had a competent guild then you could flag and raid the end-game zones within that year with plenty of time to spare. You need to stop comparing current content with time gating meant for a year on TLPs with classic EQ.

And a major reason for that was that a small number of guilds could lock down all the raid mobs from the current and older expansions preventing others from attempting current raid content. It wasn't because guilds didn't have the skill or desire to raid the content but that open world mobs could be kept on lockdown by a handful of guilds preventing others from attempting the content. If all of that content was instanced like it is on modern TLP servers you would have found a lot more players doing it while it was current.

59 guilds beat SOD in era during EQ's lowest population era ever lol. What are you even talking about? It's arguably the easiest expansion in EQ history. How does it make sense that a non-splitting guild only has 3 weeks to do it only because they arbitrarily blocked by a stupid decision to make the previous tier only drop 6 keys total per clear?

And how does it track logically when the same guild on live would have 10 months to clear Tower of Discord vs 3 weeks on a TLP? Do you not understand how your logical ratio is way out of whack?

What guilds split raided back in the day? I was in a top 10 serverwide guild during EQs highest population eras and we never split raided. What kind of nonsense are you making up?

You know what we did do? We purposely blocked other guilds from beating raids in era because they were open world and we beat them to the target and locked it down. You want that garbage to come back?

This is kind of you to say, but it is in no way true. You hadn't been capable of preventing raiders from progressing for several years by the point SoD came out. SoD was still before the death of the mid and low tier raid guilds. It specifically was because most guilds lacked the skill, numbers, and/or class disposition to raid the content, that they did not do it. There were tons of

Sure raid guilds did that back during PoP and earlier expansions, and to a lesser degree during GoD and OoW with the few raid targets in static zones. But by the time DoN and DoDh came out, there were no guilds going back and locking down the PoP flagging to keep guilds from advancing. And Post-OoW there were no expansions that you could lock down a target and prevent a guild from advancing. By the time that SoD came out there literally was no way to do it at all because all of the raid content was instanced, as was the majority of the content that unlocked the raid request was also instanced. Numerous guilds split raids during the SoD era; several would do two hard raids to get more gear, as the hard raids had a lower than cap than 54 (want to say 36). Many Guilds coming out of the Velious, Luclin, and PoP eras could field raids of over 100 people. They most definitely did split their raids and do two raids. By the time SoD came around those guilds had been whittled down to around 70 some, but they could still easily split and do two of the same raid at once. SoD introduced hard mode raids, with the max number of raiders allowed in a hard mode raid being like 36 (maybe 40) I want to say. The top end guilds at the time routinely split their raids when making a point of flagging over gearing up. Some also had one focusing on gear and the other on backflagging.

All his examples were pre-POP which was what I was referring to. I'm well aware of how the raids went in EQ. I've done basically all of them in era on live.

Basically no guild split raided anything that required flagging in instances. Stop talking about hard mode raids or open world pre-POP nonsense which were mega zergs anyways.

It took 2+ months for the best guild in the game to beat SoD. Guess how long it takes roughly to flag for Tower? About 2 months if doing it on a weekly basis. If you look at the times beaten Korafax and Tower you'll see they were raiding non-split but doing it based around unlocks. It lines up basically perfectly with that.

You missed my point. You were only keeping 1 maybe 2 guilds at most from doing the high end content of any of those expansions. The rest of the guilds were not going to be finishing the content in the 4-8 months before another expansion. Furthermore, the reason why in era, it took the best guild 2 months to beat SoD was because they not only had to have their raid learn their method of beating the raids but also had to figure out how to beat the raids. People don't have to do that now. People have had less time for these expansions and still got flagged and beat the expansion before the next came out on TLP servers. You don't get as much time to gear up everyone, too bad so sad. If you want to do that then raid more times a week, do he previous expansion while doing the new one. People act like guilds stopped raiding the old content the instant that a new one came out, instead of doing both for a time.

I don't understand your rambling nonsense at all.

What does it have to do with the fact that the keying for SoD is tuned around giving guilds an entire year vs 12 weeks? Even if a guild takes 8 months on live to beat SoD, they still would have 2+ months more to farm it than some of the fastest TLP guilds.

Flagging/keying should scale with the time it was original tuned around vs what's available. It's a pretty simple concept. Not sure what your pointless posts are arguing against. If the minimum it takes for a guild on live to flag their raid is 2 months of 12 months availability being end-game in era then it shouldn't take more than 2 weeks for TLPs out of a 12 week cycle as a minimum.

Your post honestly strengthens my argument beause many guilds had 6+ months on live to farm SoD and they needed to actually LEARN THE EVENTS. A tlp guild that never wipes and clears it on lockouts shouldn't gatekeeped for the same amount of time that live guilds were when they were brand new events. It makes no sense.

These flagging issues in SoD, or SoF, or other future expansions are nothing at all comparable to flagging for anything that was ever on agnar. I am well aware of what getting ground spawns for VP was like on that server and it is not even remotely the same kind of issue as the flagging issue is for SoD, on so many levels, its not even apples to oragnes, its more like apples to neckties.

In PoR has static zone raid targets need for progression, Legendary Bone mobs, everyone needed an Inspiration from one of the ToB minis, and there requestor needs a few drops from the dragons and Portio in Relic. Relic and ToB have an AoC on progression server because of this. I didn't raid during PoR during live, so I have idea if they actually happened, but it was possible (legendary bones mob can still be locked down on TLP).

Also you could definitely slow down guilds from being able to access the Frostcrypt raids by trying to hold down Telgrith spawn in DC. I don't know if anyone did that in era, pick zones help with it on TLP's.

And I brought it up because of the original excuse was in PoP when it was still very possible. Claims that people where raiding SoV-SoL while PoP was current and ignoring the fact that it was possible to prevent others from raiding PoP content because of open world mobs. You are also ignoring the fact that guilds had an over an entire year to flag and gear up from SoD to UF as there was 14 months between those expansions.

Now that expansions are unlocking much faster guilds just want a shot at completing the expansions faster.

The only difference I can see between SoD and SoF as far as flagging goes is the fact that once you are able to get a raid force into Tower, you can flag the rest of the raid/guild as long as you can take down Brekt. How lucky would we be if killing Kerafyrm flagged people for Crystallos?

I see two sides to this argument. On the one hand, SoF on Aradune was beaten faster than it has been on any other TLP - 4 days. It took a TON of work and coordination to accomplish that, and it was quite fun if I am being totally honest. On the other hand, I am not a fan of tuning things for the top end, since you will sometimes leave some more casual/family style guilds out in the cold, and this is not good for the overall health of the server.

Every guild that is actively raiding on a server and completing current content should have a chance to finish the expansion in a reasonable amount of time. Here is where the real question lies - what constitutes a "reasonable" amount of time? Should all guilds, regardless of size and/or effort be able to finish content in one week? Two weeks? I am not sure of the answer here.

The keying of SoD is NOT tuned around giving guilds an entire year, it is tuned around guilds getting keys at a set rate, which is less than the length of time that is allotted for the expansion.

You don't have to learn the events, everything needed to be known is already known. By SoD your guild should have people competent and able to do the content. If you and they are choosing not to use the vast wealth of existing knowledge that's on you. Several previous TLP servers with the same or even less time per expansion were able to do it fine, I am quite sure that yours can as well.

12x7/4 = 21, 9x6=54, 21-9=12 Don't limit your schedule as much.

There is no reason or benefit for a guild that already has those pieces for everyone who needs them to go out of their way to kill those mobs just to keep other guilds from progressing. The reason it was done in early expansions was specifically because those other guilds could keep you from being able to do the higher tier raids, that is not true post GoD. The guild is better benefitted by doing the higher content and getting better gear from the instances.

The issue is actually more so that a lot of the guilds want to play on a TLP server but expect to be able to raid on a relaxed schedule like on a Live server. You can get by raiding 3-4 times a week on Live, on TLP servers you need to be raiding on the Lockout Timer's schedule rather than a set day of the week, if you want to finish the expansion and be geared up before the next expansion unlocks.

Nothing is stopping guilds from completing the expansions faster other than the guilds not being willing to put in the work to do it. If you aren't willing to raid on the lockout timer's schedule rather than your own, then you don't have anything to say in the matter. Nothing and no one is preventing every guild from completing every expansion. They might be doing raids in two different expansions for a while, but most guilds did that then and many still do that now.

Not everyone got fully geared up before the next expansion and numerous guilds, especially those who only raided on specific days were still working on gearing up members in SoD gear well into UF, and UF well into HoT. They did UF raids while the SoD raids were locked out and vice versa. There have been TLP servers which had shorter timers for expansions (8 weeks per year expansion) and they got it done. Want to be able to get more flags faster, ask them to have the Hard Mode ones also drop flags.

Not sure who told you this, but on Aradune, we raid heavy at the launch of an expansion, then go down to 2 raid nights per week. We realize that we will probably have to increase that to 3 nights per week in SoD, but 2 nights per week works fine for SoF. One night for MMM and one night for Crystallos, with other T3 raids on nights we finish early. What guild do you know of that's raiding more than 4 times per week on TLP in this era?

I never said something was stopping them from doing it, just that an expansion that was tuned around a 1 year expansion cycle and lasted 14 months on live might need to be reviewed under a shorter unlock schedule. The fact that other content unlocks faster is a reason to look at this to decide if it should be adjusted to allow people get flagged faster. When you are talking about a game that is close to 25 years old and an expansion that is over 14 years old and has been repeated many times is there really any need to slow it down?

That's such bull snot and you know it. If they kept all flagging identical from live to TLP, some expansions are close to impossible to beat in Era without literally raiding around not just around same day of lockout but same friggin minute of the 4.5 day lockouts. TBL requires 21 checks of each tier of raids. That's 7 full cycles or 27 days per tier. That gets you to 54 days out of 56 days. I would love to see a tlp guild beat pre nerf mereatas in 2 days

If you raid just in the day and lose that 12 hours you literally could not sniff T3 until TOV launch. And based on what you say...that's reasonable? Take a hike.

Edit: if it required you to raid 2 hours per tier per night you have a whopping 22 hours to beat Mearatas lmao

I dont understand this opposition to flags being given to characters who participated and completed the flagging missions/raids.

Nobody is asking for flagging requirements, tasks, missions, or raids to be made easier. The request is simply to provide a more reasonable amount of flags for completion more in line with the number of participants allowed to partake.

Why exactly is anyone so against this? What does it change other than allowing more players to experience and use additional content without having to do the same task they have proven capable of doing multiple times.

Its like the GoD tradeskill quests. Make 10 of this item, now do it again, and again, and a fourth time, oh wait, one more. Ok cool now you may do the next item, wasnt that fun?

No, nobody ever said that was fun.