Difference between revisions of "Raid History"

Revision as of 19:25, 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

In the very early days, if a guild was doing a non raid-mob planar clear, usually no other guild would zone in to compete . However, IB and DA broke this informal convention, which led to the staff instituting a new (and ultimately unpopular) ruleset.

The first raid force with fifteen active players present and "camping" the target was guaranteed it ... as long as they kept 15 non-AFK campers present.

This resulted in three days straight of 15+ players sitting semi-afk at raid targets. For example, both guilds would have players sitting in Fear waiting for Draco to spawn, calling out AFK checks to ensure the other side was present.

Attempting Cazic Thule was particularly interesting. 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.

After ? months 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 weren't AFK in Fear]

New Guilds and Alliances

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.

The Mystical Order

Meanwhile, a new guild called The Mystical Order grew quickly, through mass invitations. They quickly ruffled feathers by breaking conventions, and this way of operating soon became what the guild was (in)famous for.

Again, while the top two guilds didn't respect this, all other "casual" guilds left the planes to the guild which broke them. However, when another casual guild (ED: who?) had already broken into Fear, TMO showed up and took the armor mobs (Harpies) from them. This lead to one of the first server "memes" about TMO being unable to break into Fear themselves.

Despite these ignoble beginnings, TMO would soon become a massive monopolizing force on the server, in Kunark ...

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).

Bregan D'aerth Grows

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. This made BDA the #2 raid guild on the server (eg. the only other one able to do upper sky islands)

BDA vs. TMO

The competition between the two top guilds heated up, both on the forums and in petitions to the staff.

On one Trakanon attempt, TMO wiped on their first engage. BDA cleared the juggs and went in. TMO managed to be first to engage Trakanon despite this, so when BDA killed Trakanon anyway they petitioned ... even though they only had a handful of just-rezzed half-naked people and not an actual raid force when they engaged.

The staff awarded TMO the loot (again, encouraging perceptions of favoritism), TMO bragged in RnF, and a new precedent was established. BDA then began to focus entirely on being the First to Engage. For instance, on one occaision they ported a teams of monks to Hate, and those monks then engaged Inny just before TMO was about to. When TMO killed Inny anyways, BDA petitioned, and got loot.

The two continued to compete for awhile.

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.

Train Wars

The staff decides to completely step away from Veeshan's Peak at this point, which means that guilds are allowed to "train" each other with mobs. This leads to the biggest zerg force triumphing ... which meant 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 was having far less 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. While they were able to get some significant targets, TMO dominated in Veeshan's Peak.

Forceful Entry then tried to compete seriously in Veeshan's Peak, but found that TMO, with numerous rez-stick wielding pre-parked support characters, was better at "train wars".

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 (Froovygate) 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 suspended raiding, and asked the player base to come up with their own rotation ideas, to make raiding less exclusive .. but (in typical Project 1999 guild fashion) no agreement can be reached. BDA leadership is blamed.

After weeks of failure, Rogean put his foot down and established the "Class C/R" tiered rotation system. This system allowed guilds other than The Mystical Order/Inglourious Basterds and their descendants to experience 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).

The staff also institutes new raid rules, and bans VP training. CotH ducking is established.

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 largest casual guilds, BDA and Taken, won a majority of class R raid targets from that point on, with Divinity coming in third. Although the casual rotation had ended, the overall class system lasted until the launch of Velious.

CSG (Casual Scum Guilds

To try and compete (somewhat with BDA and Taken, but more so with Divinity) a new alliance between Europa, Omni, and ? was formed. This alliance was known as the "casual scum guilds" CSG), to embrace a term that top guilds had used to dismiss them.

Velious

Velious Launch

With the class system abolished, Rampage dominated early Velious (roughly the first 7-8 months), gaining all raid server firsts, locking down Sleeper's Keys, etc. TMO did compete with them, but was not very successful.

However, because those two guilds focused so heavily on North Temple of Veeshan, Sleeper's Tomb, and similar top targets, they weren't competing with the smaller guilds for lesser targets like Derakor the Vindicator or Kunark dragons. After the "dark days" of TMO monopolizing Kunark, just about everyone was able to get loot.

CotH Ducking

(ED: Parts of this are from memory, and may need details fixed.)

It's worth noting that the main competition mechanism of this era was Call of the Hero ducking. This meant that Magicians from competing guilds would position themselves near raid targets, and start casting Call of the Hero to bring in allies when the raid target was in window.

However, the rules only allowed a certain number (2?) players near the raid target spawn location, until the mob spawned. Those players weren't allowed to engage the mob: only the summoned players could.

So guilds would cast Call of the Hero, duck to cancel, and repeat that cycle until the mob actually spawned. At that point they wouldn't cancel, and the person they summoned was allowed to race to engage the mob before any competitors.

FAT Alliance

Eventually though TMO started to become more competitive (with both Rampage and the rest of the guilds). At the same time Forsaken allied with Asgard and Taken, to create the FAT alliance (a large "zerg" force).

Taken was the first to leave the alliance, to team up with Rampage (double-check this)

The Sleeper is Woken

With new competition from TMO and the remainder of the alliance ("ForsakenGard") Rampage was facing the end of it's dominant period. The Forsaken/Asgard alliance managed to snipe a Vulak from them, and then got a server first Gharn's Rock of Smashing (double-check this).

Rampage made the decision to leave, but before they did they wanted to do something which would leave their mark on the server forever. On Sunday, January 31st, 2016, Kerafyrm (aka The Sleeper), was woken by Rampage.

The guild's leadership left the server afterwards, and with Rampage gone, TMO was able to once again dominate the remaining competition ... briefly.

Awakened and Aftermath: The A/A Era

The remaining members of Rampage formed Bacon (double-check this), which soon merged with Taken to form a new guild: Awakened.

At roughly the same time TMO and "ForsakenGard" merged. They chose the name "Aftermath" to come before "Awakened" alphabetically. Although they struggled at first the guild quickly became competitive, and soon the two guilds were together dominating all high-end raid content for the next couple years.

Bregan D'aerth Leaves

Bregan D'aerth actually scored a handful of Rampage bigwigs and for a couple months were trying to break into ntov stuff and did have a little success but randomly the leader and 3/4ths the guild up and left the server all together.

This completely left the end game in the hands of A/A.

Divinity, the oldest guild on the server at this point, also leaves afterward, making Europa the current oldest?

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).