Yeah, there was definitely a split attitude in Faceless Conquest. Some of leadership wanted to go at it with Amtrak, some of leadership didn't.
A lot of the members, maybe even most of them, wanted to compete. I did, I think you did, etc. So we ended up in this weird fugue-state where the members were competing but the guild wasn't going all-in, while Amtrak definitely was. Selo would have been more competitive if the directives had been clear from the get-go and people weren't confused about whether we were competing or not. A lot of the FC membership was there primarily to compete, and they likely would have had fewer members if they clearly stated that they weren't competing from the get-go. Plus the server in general would have been less-interesting under those circumstances. Goal-hedging also dulled the embarassment of losing the initial race. So maybe there were other reasons for FC's stated mission going back-and-forth throughout the launch, I don't know.
I get that Sieger and Zaide had different ideas and I also get where both of them were coming from, and that Sieger was pursuing more of a Dima-style ideology. Not being critical of any of the above people, they're all solid leaders to me. However I do think there are takeaways from Selo about the importance of having focused and clear goals as a guild. Either "our goal is to cede open world, be drama-free, and make it to live" or "our goal is to embrace drama and kick the other guild in the teeth".
I think I've been pretty honest about this--and I think it's either something I've mentioned a number of times with my guild, and maybe haven't posted here (but I think I've posted it on here before), I was serious about competing for Luclin, but after that my only goal was to reach live. My perspective was from several prior TLPs, where expansion launches are incredibly grueling, time consuming, social life killing, spouse enraging, etc things. But they happen every 12 weeks so you get em done. My hypothesis was that if we attempted to do regular TLP style launches not every 12 weeks
but every month we would implode
. Amtrak did exactly that, and what happened? They did implode in like month 7 or something. BTW a lot of those dudes joined us and are my good friends these days, I respect Amtrak made up up thru DoDH raiding like that, but I was 0.0% surprised they didn't keep going. We were told one of the major reasons they stopped is Drill called out the officers and was like "who is going to step up to lead raids this week" and no one did. I'm not shocked though, it's hard to keep energy to run a guild like that with monthly unlocks and never letting off the gas.
If Selo had been Mangler with regular unlocks I would have been 100% on board with hardcore, mega crazed launches every single expansion. But I also likely would not have made a guild there, and would have just been a regular raider. After Agnarr I went back to Lockjaw to do later era TLP, and I hit a point where I decided I was never making a TLP guild again unless there was something really unique about it. Selo one month unlocks was that unique opportunity, and I specifically decided not to treat it like a regular TLP.
Now what I have 100% copped to elsewhere if I haven't mentioned it here before, is to a very big degree I used a lot of the people we recruited on Selo. I 100% knew that the way we promoted the guild was going to make us the big zerg, and I knew a lot of those people would really just want to autist batphone and contest shit for a few months. But I also knew most of those people would leave. I wasn't building my guild for you, but I wanted you in the house. Why? Because I knew some % of you, but not what %, would convert to long term raiders. I had no way to know who would before hand or how many, so I just wanted as many of you as possible. It really didn't matter to me that I'd be delivering a guild you didn't like, because I didn't make the guild for you. Dick move? I dunno, I think I have a right to make a guild how I see fit, running a guild is work and bullshit, and the person running it gets to make these decisions. Selo FC was not an officer council guild, it was a dictatorship. Now the sort of lawyeresque thing I did try to do, if you go back and look at my recruiting posts, I never explicitly say "we are going to compete for every server first" in fact my post focuses heavily on longevity and past Faceless accomplishments. Did we hype up the Amtrak shit early on? Absolutely, and I fully admit that gave a lot of people a (deliberately) deceptive impression of our long term goals. To which I respond--read the fine print! On some level for someone like you, it probably felt shitty. My defense is I built a guild for people who wanted to do every expansion, and I delivered on that. I don't know that many other people have ever done that in EQ aside from Dima. Dima did it in a different way than I did, but he was on a different ruleset than I was on.