You won the initial races and it resulted in a ton of people with no real sentiment or attachment abandoning the merged conglomerations and joining you or others. You absorbed a ton of people as you even say, you poached based on initial success like most guilds do, you also had a fuckton who I have NO doubt were only there because times were good. If rampage had smoked you, you wouldn't have recruited anywhere near but a fraction of what you did, and you'd have lost a ton to whoever crushed you. Your crew is not YOUR crew. I don't think you understand that.
Whoever is leading TEB now, maybe he has that as a crew? I assume they've been together the nice long while to build such a thing, potentially. If you got them, sure, now you have your army if they're willing to bail and go. What you don't have and I don't know how to explain this because I don't want to put you down for it, I don't have it either, is a sizeable core that will follow you around the way some of these other guys do.
Also those guilds were not the kind of premier guilds that the 25th birdies or whatever the shit you're suggesting would pull. Who the fuck is/was rampage? Who cares? They were a thing at all apparently because of mergers too. They're nobodies outside the aradune pond. If the 25th pulls all the big names out of the woodwork, nobody's going to give a shit about single server success. It's all up in the air. And at that point, the far more established crews have more recruiting power.
I really just don't think you understand what I'm saying though so I'll leave that rant and try to move on.
Heh I know you are saying, I just don't think it comes from a knowledge of what was really going on. The vast majority of the original 120ish race group that were high enough lvl to raid to be in the race on Aradune in TEB were people I had been playing with and leading raids for from phinny up to mangler. They were the main people I could trust. About 80-90 of the people were mine and kubat's phinny crew + mangler crew. Outside of them, in the intitial week 1 race group, there were sprinkles of the sort of people you are referring to that had no real sentiment or attachment at the time, like people from AoS/amtrak that I had played with on Selos and some faceless people.
My original post about Vicious and I being able to pull more numbers was referring to prior to launch, not after a winner has been decided.
I don't really see what you mean in terms of premier guilds that the 25th anniversary would pull that weren't present on aradune. Most of the OW type people were there on Aradune. I guess it depends on what your definition of a proven "premier ow guild" is on modern day TLP's. From the way I look at it, RI is the only OW guild prior to Aradune launch that had actually proven themselves to be a top OW guild capable of competing in OW long term. Don't take that as a shot to anyone else like AoS, but until Coirnav there really wasn't any OW competition, so while we could speculate to whether or not prior to coirnav that AoS on phinny or Faceless on agnarr would have dominated even with constant OW competition, it wasn't there so they never had to prove themselves. Selos is really the only other time it could have been proven, but OW on there was so short lived and low competition that nothing really could be proven.
My assumption would be that if there was a big 25th anniversary push, it would be more likely than not that the "premier guilds" would all just combine in to 2 guilds. I could be wrong, but that is what I would bet. Do you really think you ever going to see like a TEB vs AOS vs RI vs Faceless server? I highly doubt it. Although I'd be completely down for it.
In the event there was a 25th anniversary push that all the big names came back for, I think it would be more likely to be some variation of guilds all merging in to 2 competing guilds. Even if it was TEB vs Faceless, it wouldn't be like an atabishi vs zaide thing. I wouldn't be competing against zaide. I would be competing against all of the real past leaders of faceless who are the ones responsible for pulling in their numbers. My understanding has always been from talking to faceless people that they join for those leaders, not zaide.
Ultimately though, if I did decide to play the 25th anniversary server and it was a classic start, the whole numbers debate, while entertaining to have now and kind of funny to already be shit talking about the next server, would be pretty irrelevant. I'm almost 100% confident that all I'd need is 72 people to finish classic in 4 days or less. Hell, bees is the hardest fight in the classic race and I did server first bees on mangler with a raid of 46.
