The two biggest issues I saw on RF/LJ were the six month timers (dead horse) and the faster respawn rate of raid mobs.
To be the "Top Guild" in early EQ you've got to do the following:
- Get the "server firsts" i.e. beat content the fastest
- Get the majority of all relevant raid content
- Defeat the most difficult encounters
On Vulak and Fippy this was much easier. The respawn for most raid mobs was 72 hours w/ 12 hour windows. This meant you could roll with a relatively lean guild and had a ton of extra play time to do whatever you wanted in real life or in game. On LJ and RF the respawn timer has been about 24 hours with a 24 hour window. Trakanon and VS are 16 hours... That's a lot of content to "lock down" and it puts an immense strain on the crews that track these mobs literally 24/7. Then they added the buffs to the raid mobs so you could still kill them with like 35 people BUT the "Top Guild" needs to be able to kill these mobs in sub ten minutes from spawn around the clock. That means you need to have a huge force to make sure you get the numbers there asap. The existence of krono only enabled this further. I never boxed before Lockjaw but there were times where I was running 20+ characters on Lockjaw.
Obviously the solution that jumps out at you is to just "share the content" like why bother locking it down? A few things come to mind but a big factor is inertia. You've been playing EQ for 15 years and every top guild ever (pretty much) has locked down content. When you start trying to share and be nice etc you begin to feel like you're fucking up. Also remember you need to have a huge force to mobilize around the clock, which means you need steady recruitment and if you're sharing content relatively evenly there is no reason for people to join your guild over another guild. Getting the "server firsts" isn't going to be impressive enough to carry a recruitment through six months of content.
Remember you're also spending the whole expansion compensating for attrition, a ton of players only do the first 1-2 months of an expansion when it's fresh and new. Once you've killed Trakanon 90 times and you're only half way done a lot of people won't show up for the next 90, especially when they're at 4am on a Monday. So you recruit to compensate for attrition, when means you actually need these mobs to gear the new members so you're not just locking people out, you're taking care of your guys.
Then finally the new expansion launches and all those bored players come back, suddenly you've got 300 man raid forces. On Fippy and Vulak people got sick of the content more slowly because they did it less. They also had the shorter timer which meant you could get bored at the two month mark and say "well it's only a few more weeks before XYZ" and you had much less attrition. This combination of six months + daily respawns is toxic.
In terms of politics, Thraka is right and it can get pretty crazy. Like if you were a top raiding guild on these servers and you didn't read the forums one day you would have logged in and found out your whole guild was suspended. The mandatory rotations were a joke doomed from the outset. Even rotation guilds were getting butthurt near then end when it was a two week wait for a Nagafen/Vox kill. It was like you got two of each raid mob before the "council" met again to change up all the rules. And those rotation meetings were like 8 hours, it was hilarious. The period of mandatory rotations was the only time that EQ ever truly felt like a job to me. We were signing documents and shit and talking constantly for nothing.
I remember watching all the drama MM was creating on the forums during the forced rotations and I loved every bit of it. Roshen and the other staff had to deal with that shit. That's like one or two dudes trying to trudge through hundreds of pages of shit, including our like 40 page "leaders chat" with Roshen and the guild leadership. My whole mindset during that period was that if these guys just kept crying and blowing up over every perceived slight or mishap, guilds making some minor or trivial error then eventually the burden of dealing with the nonsense would cause DBG to totally bail on the rotations and that was exactly what happened.
The last time I spoke to Roshen before the rotations ended he was pretty frank, basically saying he was staying at work several hours late regularly just to deal with the rotation drama (This was like a Friday night at 7pm PST too..) and that there was little he could do in the face of the giant mountain he was expected to deal with in addition to all his normal working duties.
In EQ raiding is just one part of the equation. The metagame is fought in petitions, emails, forums and twitter.You've got to play on all fronts if you want to win, even if the best players from all time created an unbeatable raid force, if they neglected those other areas then the "competition" would get them canned by using DBG Staff and public opinion against them.
