gbaji wrote:
On the one hand, this was the way things were "back in the day", and that was a period when EQ was really really fun. And, as you mentioned, this worked because there was sufficient progression in raid difficulty, that each guild was working in their "area", through that progression (especially around the Luclin/PoP era). The problem, however, was that the natural selection wasn't as fair as one might think. Basically, it really penalized players who lived on the west coast vs east coast. Due to the way spawn timers worked, east coast guilds could basically ensure that they were the only guilds that mattered, or could compete within any given area. I know the pain of having to log in at 4-5AM on a Saturday just to have a shot at a raid target that spawned that day/time. It sucked. Even when I was younger and had more flexible hours it was difficult, and I'd never have been able to join a hard core raid guild. Today? Totally would not happen at all. Even in a more casual guild. I mean, they'd let me join, but I'd miss 90% of the raids.
Understandable and why guild recruiting officers can be key. Having been in leadership of a guild with a similar situation, I valued our PST people for their ability to extend our raid window. When the East Coasters tucker out, the West Side folks are just getting warmed up. For those of us who were timezone agnostic, that gave us the best of both worlds. I recall a few times where the East Coast members complained because we got lucky and managed to find Burrower and most of the big named in Ssra (High Priest, Creator, Cursed cycle) up after the East Coasters logged off for the night. With the way spawn timers worked, that wasn't all that uncommon. I believed then (and still believe now) that time zone issues only exist for the unimaginative. Heck, we even had 16 people from Australia inguild. The combination of timezone and work hours (not everyone is a 9to5er) allowed us to be extremely flexible and it let us hit more targets. Like:
Raids start at 7pm (EST). Around 9-10pm, the West Coast folks pile on. Within an hour after that, the East Coast folks are logging out. With enough targets available, we could be raiding until 3am (again, EST) because of our timezone balance (while our competing guilds are either quitting or just getting started at 10pm). We also had a window of about two hours where we'd have our full raid force available, so we could try new encounters.
It had nothing to do with epeen waving either. For me, it was all about hustling (or, in more common parlance, making the most of any given situation). We were never going to be cutting edge but we could be the best possible group at our tier of progression. The people who played more got more (as it should be) but everyone could advance without sacrificing other areas of their lives. Even when we were breaking into Vex Thal and wiping in early PoP, we were still doing Kael and ToV and Sleepers because folks still needed stuff from there.
Trust me, I understand what you're saying. For several years, I played on Torvonnilous where a Euro guild competed with and then flat out passed us in progression before eventually imploding (many of their top people either ebayed or moved to Antonious Bayle). I know many people in other guilds who complained about timezones being unfair to them (some of them I poached for our guild, of course). I also understand how instanced raids just come with a level of convenience that works for the vast majority of people playing nowadays. I get it, that ship has sailed. I also don't think I'd ever be as relentlessly hardcore now as I was back then (20+ active accounts? Hell no!). But when I thought about why I don't raid in EQ anymore (despite the fact that I very easily could), I came down with the "it's not fun" conclusion. And the 'why' got me to this whole idea.