Difference between revisions of "Raid History"

Revision as of 17:12, 17 October 2019

This page is an attempt to document the history of raiding on Project 1999.

IMPORTANT: This is not a place for "rants or flames"; it is meant to contain objective information only.

TODO: This page is just a very rough start, and needs lots of detail. Also because the history of guilds is a sensitive subject, this page needs lots of references (forum links, reddit links, etc.) to back up what it says as much as possible.

Eras

Raiding on Project 1999 has gone through different eras, based on two main factors: the fortunes of certain "uber guilds", and rules changes made by the staff.

Early Days (Pre-Kunark)

First Raid Guilds (and First Rotation)

When the server first launched, the first people to raid level formed Inglourious Basterds, making it the first dominant guild on the server. The guild included a Project 1999 developer, which resulted in drama.

A second guild, Transcendence, then arose, and the staff enforced a rotation between them and Inglourious Basterds. After them a third raid guild, Divinity entered the scene, by poopsocking Nagafen to get their first raid boss kill.

At this point the staff broke the rotation, and as a result Inglourious Basterds dominated. Fish Bait was formed, led by Salty (a VZ/TZ player). This guild was infamous for training other guilds over Plane of Hate gear. A mutiny occurred, and the guild merged with Eminence to reform as Dark Ascension. That guild came to rival (and arguably surpass) Inglourious Basterds.

Initial Raid Ruleset

At this time the staff instituted an (unpopular) ruleset which gave a dragon to the guild with the greatest number of players present and "camping" it, resulting in three days straight of 15+ players sitting semi-afk at raid targets.

During this time, attempting Cazic Thule was particularly interesting, as both guilds would be forced to simultaneously clear the zone while monitoring the rate at which the other guild cleared. Eventually, a raid leader would make the judgement call that enough had been cleared and an attempt on Cazic Thule was made.

Dark Ascension joined with Vesica Dei to compete with Inglourious Basterds, who then in turn soon formed a new alliance of their own.

Transatlantic Rampage

Shortly before the release of Kunark, Inglourious Basterds merged with Darkwind (a growing guild) and multiple European guilds (including Europa?) to form Transatlantic Rampage. Also Dark Ascension fell apart (due to drama?) around this time.

Meanwhile, a new guild called The Mystical Order grew quickly, through mass invitations. Initially they couldn't break Plane of Fear, and could only barely raid Plane of Sky, but thing soon changed ...

Kunark (Year One)

Raiding stopped briefly with Kunark's launch, as everyone went to explore and level up. The alliance between Dark Ascension and Vesica Dei ended with the launch of Kunark, and soon Dark Ascension broke up after their leader Durison was banned

Dark Ascension reformed with Dozekar to create Fusion, although many members instead joined The Mystical Order. Vesica Dei allied with Transatlantic Rampage.

At the start of Kunark, the Transatlantic Rampage/Vesica Dei alliance largely dominated. They used this dominance to farm Trakanon for his teeth, to get into Veeshan's Peak.

Veeshan's Peak Delay

Unfortunately for TR/VD though, Veeshan's Peak's release wound up being repeatedly delayed, and ultimately was stalled for about a year. During this time Transatlantic Rampage began to lose a significant number of members, resulting in the guild losing it's dominant position.

Meanwhile the nascent guild The Mystical Order was growing, and together with several of the Dark Ascension splinter guilds they formed a "zerg" force of their own, which they used to successfully defeat Trakanon. In addition, GMs gave the guild additional teeth to the guild in a GM event in Sol B.

Vesica Dei Hack and GM Scandal

Meanwhile, two dramatic and unexpected events reshaped the raid scene. First, a The Mystical Order player (Myuhari?n) gained access to Vesica Dei guild website, and posted real life pictures of the Vesica Dei guild leader. This prompted her to quit Project 1999 (and led to the current server policy, which bans the posting of such info).

At the same time a server scandal arose, because GM Amelinda was dating a member of The Mystical Order (although at the time the full details of this weren't known, the scandal revolved around the GM purchasing baked cookies from the player). This let to perceptions of favoritism for the guild (which were later confirmed by TMO members).

Because of these events, and impatient over Veeshan's Peak, Inglourious Basterds left the server for EQMac, and Vesica Dei dissolved, with most remaining members joining Bregan D'aerth.

TODO:

- Bregan D'Aerth (sp?) becomes #2 raid guild of server by default since only guild to do upper sky islands etc. Leftover IB/VD join BDA. - TMO happy about BDA competing. Then BDA actually gets some mobs. TMO then declares BDA is scum and is secretly IB/VD in disguise and needs to be griefed off the server as well. - One happy Trakanon attempt, TMO wipes their first engage. BDA calmly clears juggs and goes in, TMO snipes FTE and petitions that their 6 rez effex'd half-naked people running into it were a raid force, they want the loot. GM gives them the loot. TMO brags in RnF and claims they'll do this to BDA scum every raid from now on. - BDA adopts the FTE over all strat. Starts to just port random teams of monks to Hate to jav Inny as TMO is engaging, petitions, actually gets loot. TMO cries foul in RnF and how unfair this is. - BDA actually puts up a fight, recall taking 3 VS in a row. Internal drama happens, VD/IB populance wants more strict raiding requirements etc DKP and whatnot. - Forceful Entry splits off BDA. Fights with TMO, takes time to get off, actually starts to dominate content outside VP. TMO brags how VP is all that matters and they need to come there to fight. Train wars are the best thing in game says TMO. - FE goes to VP. TMO parks their entire raid out of zone boundaries so they don't get trained cuz train wars are the best thing in game (?!). - FE can't compete with the zerg # and all the bought toons with rez sticks and whatnot preparked in the zone. Sloan is a goof and spends 20h play sessions with some other dudes wasting time training Necrious and whatnot all day long. Guild leadership neglects rest of targets, people get fed up, results are bad. - FE falls apart as such. Scrapes some crap mobs here and there. Sloan poofs. Horrible times of career idiot Shinko as guildleader. - IB starts to come back to server after waking Sleepy on EQmac and ruining their lives there. Teams up with FE to compete with TMO again. - IB/FE vs TMO is trucking along, whatevs, same old. VP still under TMO controls sans some random dragons here and there sniped by preparking. Phara Dar once, big deal apparently. - Froovygate happens. Major TMO members caught duping and RMTing, also one of their top officers (I think?) decided to ninja loot some Druushk loot when salty and mad about losing it. Rogean raid suspends TMO for like a month or something. - Zeelot ragequits server when seeing the writing on the wall. TMO left in shambles. - Server raid suspended as playerbase meant to come up with their own rotation ideas to let everyone get merbs from here on out. - Weeks of nothing happening as any agreement is shot down by salty BDA leadership. - Rogean puts foot down and enforces a rotation with tier system. - FE/IB vs TMO leftovers, new raid rules, no VP training now, other humbug all around. Coth ducking is a thing now. Casuals get mobs too and form their own rotation for them. - Casual rotation falls apart due to too many alliances and small guilds joining in. Big surprise. BDA and Taken, the top 2 guilds, throw the rotation out the window and just eat all the casual mobs themselves. Divinity takes the rest. CSG is formed (think it was Europa, Omni, aaand something) to compete with Divinity over the leftovers of leftovers.

Veeshan's Peak (Kunark Year 2+)

When Veeshan's Peak was released, the staff instituted a "rotation", by forcing Transatlantic Rampage and The Mystical Order to roll to decide who got which dragons.

Inglourious Basterds Return and the Rotation Ends

After a long hiatus, Transatlantic Rampage reformed on Project 1999 with their original guild name: Inglourious Basterds. This leads to a break in the rotation, and to train wars in [{Veeshan's Peak]] (where they aren't banned). The bigger zerg force triumphs.

The Mystical Order began to dominate. For a while their their main rival, Inglourious Basterds, provided some competition, but eventually that guild left the server to play on the EQ Mac server instead.

This quickly resulted in The Mystical Order monopolizing almost all raid content, and preventing other guilds (Bregan D'aerth, Taken, Divinity, etc.) from getting any significant raid targets.

Temple of Droga Lock-Down

During this time The Mystical Order also locked down the Bind Affinity locket camp in Temple of Droga, but an embarrassing public wipe lead to that camp being broken.

Forceful Entry

Bregan D'aerth wasn't having much success with The Mystical Order, so their leadership tried using "dirty tactics". Those tactics didn't help, so many left the guild and formed Forceful Entry. This new guild allied with Inglourious Basterds to compete against The Mystical Order as best they could, but didn't have much more success than Bregan D'aerth, and if anything the two guilds fought over The Mystical Order's leftovers.

Rampage

Forceful Entry took a "if you can't beat them, join them" mentality and opted to partner with The Mystical Order to form a "mega zerg" (eg. 120 player Xygoz raid).

Meanwhile Inglourious Basterds was left with 20ish people, and then their Guildleader Getsome disappears on a fishing trip. This lead to the guild joining The A-Team and Idiots and Savages to form Rampage.

The Mystical Order Plat Duping Scandal and Ban Wave

The Mystical Order was hit with a mass ban wave as some of their members were found to be duplicating plat. The guild's leader (Zeelot) and many other high ranking members (eg. froovygate) quit as a result.

The guild then split: part was then taken over by Rampage, while part formed a "new The Mystical Order". Rampage and the new The Mystical Order would remain relatively even in terms of strength for the next two or so years, during which time the class system was implemented.

Forceful Entry and The Mystical Order Merge, Reform as Forsaken

Forceful Entry and The Mystical Order formed a raiding alliance, which eventually lead to the two merging. Their combined force was the main competitor to Rampage.

Eventually this force reformed as Forsaken, which notably gets suspended in their very first week.

Class System

The staff then instituted a new "class system", which allowed guilds other than The Mystical Order or Inglourious Basterds to see significantly more raid content.

Under this system a guild could be labeled "competitive" or "restricted" (Class C and Class R respectively), and a raid mob would cycle between being available only to Class C guilds, only class R guilds, or Free-for-all (FFA). "Class C" effectively amounted to "descendent of The Mystical order".

Casual Guild (Voluntary) Rotation

Among the casual guilds (Class R), an initial rotation was created so that all casual guilds would have attempts at raid mobs. However, after awhile, some of the larger casual guilds thought it unfair that smaller casual guilds were teaming up when their turn came about in the rotation because they had an insufficient number of raiders for the targets.

This led to situations where, for example, three smaller guilds would consistently team-up and thus receive 3 "spots" in a raid mob's rotation, whereas one guild of equivalent player size would still be restricted to their 1 spot. The rotation was ended in January of 2015, when seven of the ten guilds involved voted to do so, after negotiations failed.

The larger guilds (BDA, Taken, Divinity) won a majority of class R raid targets from that point on. While the rotation ended, the overall class system lasted until the launch of Velious.

Velious

Post-Class/ "AA"

For most of this era two guilds dominated the raiding end-game. At first these two were Aftermath and Awakened (later it became Aftermath and Tempest) so the term "AA" guilds was popularized.

Current "Rooted Dragons" Era

Likely as a result of the loss of GM Braknar (and resulting fallout), the staff instituted a new system by changing the in-game rules of Temple of Veeshan, so that the dragons would be rooted (despite this not having been done on live during the classic era).

Work in Progress

Eventually tmo started getting their shit together and all the fun started to dwindle. After 7-8 months of total domination of velious rampage called it quits. But not before waking the sleeper and bouncing out in style. Afterwards taken merged with the remaining rampage to make awakening, tmo merged with asgard? And another guild? Cant remember. They struggled the first 6-8 months in velious but eventually got it fully together and birthed aftermath. Bda actually scored a handful of rampage bigwigs and for acouple months were trying to break into ntov stuff and did have alittle success but randomly the leader and 3/4ths the guild up and left the server all together. Which completely left the end game firmly in the hands of a/a. History repeating itself. Ib/tmo still dominates, just different names but strip it down and the same 2 guilds have run the end game since 2010. Nowadays csg cleans up the scraps and capitalizes big time everytime a/a gets banned as theyre fully capable of taking any target but other than that A/A still dominates. Is what it is. They deserve the best loot/targets as they put in twice the effort and yeah. Thats how ive viewed the end game within the server. I was in bda til death then part of csg before i quit and yet never had 1 issue with any particular tmo/ib member throughout 7 years. Kunark times were frustrating but that's what made it fun. Always being apart of underdog guilds made it so satisfying to finally get to kill some big targets, instead of a daily/weekly thing.

New/random raid rules were created such as 15 non-AFK players on a spawn guaranteed you the spawn. For example, both guilds would have players sitting in Fear waiting for Draco to spawn. Eventually this raid rule was removed and replaced with ___________? [Author's note: I remember guilds camped along north wall calling out AFK checks to ensure other guild's players wen't AFK in Fear]

In these early classic days, if a guild was doing a non raid-mob planar clear, usually no other guild would zone in to compete (exception: IB and DA). However, this started to change when TMO entered the raid scene late in classic and armor mobs became contested in regular planar clears among casual guilds. [Author's note: I remember TMO zoning in after my guild had cleared / "broke into" West Wall camp in Fear and TMO immediately went for the armor mobs (Harpies). This led to several accusations/jokes about TMO being unable to break Fear by themselves which ultimately led to the expression "TMO Break Fear Yet?" which was further immortalized by the use of tags on P99 Forum Posts - or maybe it was a tag first?]

Taken had a really good run, they absorbed other guilds, a lot of refugees from Venom and Acyrid who split from Poison, who themselves had a few peace pipers, got big named targets, I think they were sometimes top 3. They were doing well when I left and quit 99 for a while.

Velious - The C/R/FFA system is aboloshed and Rampage dominates early Velious for the first several months, Forsaken allies with Asgard and Taken to create the FAT alliance in hopes of competing against Rampage. The FAT alliance starts to chip away slowly at Rampage's dominance, Rampage leadership decides to stop playing, and wakes the sleeper before disbanding the guild. Taken grows tired of being treated like a third wheel by Asgard and Forsaken and they merge with the remnants of Rampage to form Awakened. Forsaken merges with Asgard to form Aftermath, the not so great era of A/A is born. The A's compete against each other for the next 2 years or so, neither guild being substantially better than the other.

Awakened makes the fatal mistake of breaking a mans heart, and is forced to change leadership in order to survive. Tempest is born from the ashes of Awakened, but a general dislike of the new leadership causes many of the "core" players from Awakened to split away and form their own guild called Core which focuses on smaller content. Tempest struggles to compete with Aftermath, and with Tempest members becoming increasingly disappointed with the new leadership the guild starts bleed members to both Core, and Aftermath. Aftermath starts to dominate content for the next year or so as Tempest slowly dies, and Core remains focused on smaller content.

Eventually the GM's grow unhappy with the current raid environment and decide to root dragons in ToV, Aftermath having grown accustomed to quick zone line pulls begins to lose members who aren't interested in spending hours crawling through ToV to receive their pixels. Smaller guilds like Core, Paradigm Shift, and Azure Guard start to chip away at Aftermath's dominance, and eventually Core, and Paradigm Shift merge to form Riot. Aftermath continues lose members due to increased competition, and a general dislike of the new crawl meta. Riot quickly overtakes Aftermath, and that is where we are at today.

I left a ton of shit out, I didn't mention many of the smaller guilds, there were way more "raid meta's" than I mentioned including No CSR VP, Mario Kart, Kunark Footraces etc. but I didn't want to turn this already long post into a full fledged novel.

Wrote with a train of thought of what remembers. Some recollections of events are hazy and some weren't there for since played other servers for varying times. Some remember fairly well since they were highlights, such as the dumb FTE wars and the Rampage/Forsaken formation suspension drama hilarity. And biased obv.

- VELIOUS LAUNCHES - - Serverwide tier system rotation gone completely. - Rampage runs the show and gets most everything. Locks down ST keys. Farms content for some months for free. Gets all the relevant server firsts. - Forsaken teams up with Asgard and Taken to zerg it up. Trains and dramas and whatnot. - Coth ducking wars and other lame nonsense and zerg rushing. Think Taken ditched the Forsaken&Asgard team and teamed up with Rampage? Don't remember this part too well, I ragequit due to the good vyemm eye going to a shaman (he had the wrong face too /nod). - Rampage calls it quits after Forsakengard snipes a Vulak and gets server first Gharns I think? Wakes up Sleepy on their way out to piss people off. Good riddance monk robes. - Leftover Rampage form Bacon or something. Teams up with Taken and forms Awakened after a bit. Forsakengard merge to form Aftermath because they wanted to be earlier on /who all guild searches or something stupid. - BDA leaves server. Bye. - Divinity also vanished at some point. RIP oldest guild on server. Think Europa has that crown now? - Some departed IB comes back to form Rustle because ???. Didn't get the big red carpet hero welcome invitation to Awakened that they expected, got salty, dedicated their time to petitionquesting against Awakened and teamed up with Aftermath and told them how to kill Tunare and how to do the ring war. - Bunch of petitionquest wars occur. Tons of suspensions and nonsense. - Current state. Alot of casual guilds have died down. Rustle seems to be pretty much gone. CSG seems to be trying alot less. A/A farming server with same old back and forth.