Everquest Southern Armada Raids Week Seventy One

07/07/04 Week Seventy One

Tonight was cleanup night, we needed to clear out the three still standing from last week. So we cleared Tier One and headed straight up to Tier 5. We AOE'd the armies of the Gods and finally pulled Cazic Thule. The blind God of Fear was soon winging his way to whatever afterlife Gods go to after they have experienced the Southern Armada smack down. 

Next up, Innoruuk. The God that caused us such trouble when we couldn't wall him. Well, now we can and he is definitely in the farmable category. The toughest part of killing Inny is getting people into his room after he is dead as his adds don't despawn for ages. It would probably be easier to just kill them, but Rangers just LOVE to use weapon-shield and just don't feel comfortable when it is up.

Quarm. This is definitely getting faster. It felt a little shaky in places but I never thought we ever really looked like failing. I would say we will go to a one night clear soon, soon my pretties.

Smith Rondo. We came, we saw, we botted. I swear most of the Smith Rondo kill was made up of bot's we were trying to get flagged, hell even I was botting someone!. That was it really.

Friday rolled around and we were in for our usual Tier 1-5 pop of Time.

Terris Thule

Saryrn

Tallon Zek

Vallon Zek

Bertoxxulous

Rallos Zek

The Loot that is flowing out of Time is just incredible. Basically we are getting about 48 Loots per clearing. So everyone who turns up to raid on a fairly regular basis is going to get roughly 1.2 Loots every two raids. That is phenomenal considering we spent a year raiding to get to Time with 2-6 loots per week.

Its not just the sheer quantity of it either, its the quality of it. Every Time clearing increases the relative power of the guild exponentially. This is something we are definitely going to need when we challenge the next expansion, The Gates of Discord. We will need at least half a dozen 10K+ Warriors and the same number of 10K+ Knights. We will need at least a good dozen 6K+ mana pools in the Clerics and hopefully the same in Druids.

The whole equation changes in GOD. In fact the entire raiding schema changes. From the long convoluted 72 person fights lasting 2 hours or more that we have seen in the POP expansion, we change down to a 54 man raid with short sharp vicious fights lasting less than 5 minutes.

Changing the raid number was one of the stupidest things that SOE has down. Pre PoP most of the uber guilds were approximately 40-60 people in size. They were happy with that and the high end raiding of the time was aimed at those numbers. PoP changed everything and the number required for a successful raid was 72. Every fight was balanced against 72 people.

Most of the top guilds at this point were forced into a recruiting drive and added large numbers of extra bodies in order to bring a constant raid to 72. For Guilds whose numbers had been essentially static for the past several years this must have come as a serious shock.

Then GOD came along and the raid number has been reduced again to 54. Once again SOE proves that they have no idea how to manage their own game. Any raiding player on any server could have told them that changing the maximum raid number to 54 was a FUCKING STUPID idea.

But along with the rest of the Cluster Fuck that is the Gates Of Discord they did it anyway. This was the final straw for a lot of guilds and the whole system collapsed. Many of the Uber Guilds simply disbanded in the face of not only forced downsizing but the entire buggy, unfinished mess that was the raiding portion of the new expansion.

So when The Southern Armada begins to engage the new content we will be forced to leave some of our friends out for the first few raids at least. I believe its Trial's 7-9 that require only 54 people and then you can start up to 72 man raids again.


SOE fucked up with GOD and at the Guild Summit meeting they held with the leaders of the top guilds and the leaders of the player communities, they admitted it outright. They fucked the story line, they fucked the release (Tuned for Level 70 players but OOPs they forgot to allow players to actually get level to 70), they fucked the graphics (No special Models as Bosses, once you have seen the half dozen base models you have seen the entire expansion), they fucked the testing (Unfinished buggy untuned content).

They pissed off the entire player base by releasing a broken untuned, buggy expansion, then they had the gall to announce the NEXT expansion when the first one plainly didn't work.

In fact they generally fucked up the release of 2 entire expansion's.

It seems that somehow they ended up with a corporate culture where the people responsible for fixing, maintaining and expanding the game (The Developers) were afraid to approached the people in charge of the game (The management) due to the fear of losing their jobs. Now that is a completely fucked situation to be in and the only way that that sort of corporate culture evolves is from the top down. Yes Mr Smedley I accuse you.

You either didn't know what you're sub managers were doing for some years, in which case you are incompetent, or you engendered this culture yourself in which case you are not only incompetent you are an idiot.

I actually believe that the sudden about face in the SOE corporate culture in the last 3 months has been driven by Japan. I think Japanese management looked at their little cash cow, that just sits there and earns them not only money but Game Market Kudos, and they saw it hemorrhaging player accounts and thus, money. I believe they looked down from on high and said to SOE senior management, fix it, reverse the flow or go looking for other jobs.

I wonder how many jobs you would get with a reputation in the gaming market as the Man who effectively; killed the most successful MMPORG gaming franchise in history. Very few I suspect.