PoP Back-flagging, Cal/Teh/Sam/ON etcFollow

So my guild is just starting to feel the pain of back flagging, with maybe 60% flagged for Sol Ro Tower and the rest missing bits and bobs here. We only raid three times a week, but do pretty well as we have no competition during Euro times.

I am sure one of you mentioned something about having arrangements with other guilds where you would share backflagging raids amongst guilds that had proved they can kill the mob - these arrangements were even with direct competitors iirc. Would you mind expanding on how these arrangements worked, what rules were in place to ensure you didn't become the back-flagging ******* for other guilds etc?

Thanks in advance.

/hug Leiany

It was easier to work deals when PoP first came out, just because in the first few months only a few guilds had access to rune dropping mobs. We traded spells to other guilds for flags for a long time, so that was a decent deal for all concerned.

Now it's more of a gunboat diplomacy, where our attitude is like, "We only have four people who need Xegony, be a shame if we had to monopolize her just for that when your guild could surely use the drops."

The only flagging we're doing these days is Ikkinz trials, and if another guild could backflag some of our new/returing members for an elemental god we'd probably eventually get a couple of their people through the Ikkinz trials they've missed. Problem with those trials is that they're one group only so you need to know you're not dragging dead weight, and you need a pretty carefully balanced group. Not like taking a group of unknowns through a raid where you can say, "Just stay in the back and don't touch anything, we'll tell you when to hail."

The obvious general stuff first:

Sure, what I did was extend the olive branch first. Most guilds on Veeshan hated one anothers guts, and had a history of racing for spawns, but it was pretty obvious if we all kept that up nothing would get done. It probably make it easier to work out a deal when it was noted it was in all of our best interests.

It might be a little bit harder for a european guild, since you can't just say, 'We'll all end up fighting for these mobs for 2-3 flags otherwise' as easily. Though you could always point out that, well, you raid first, and you WILL kill mobs like Bertox, Mithaniel Marr, etc for SINGLE flags if you have to, and you'd rather not be monopolizers if you don't have to.

Here's what you do- contact all the other guild leaders. Let them know you'll be flagging on what early, and find out if their early birds can log people in for flags they really need. Offer them flags. Be the nice guy and do the first step, in my opinion. Likewise, share info like mad among people you are sure you can trust. Log in your euros late for US raids, get them on their raids after you've given flags. Just talk extensively with the other guilds' leadership, offer them flag, talk about how you don't want to have to dominate the spawns, make sure they understand it's in their best interest.

A lot just depends on the personality of other guilds' leadership. If they are totally unreasonable, well hell, you are euros, just lock up the spawns until their members replace them or bail. If they aren't, so much the better, it saves you the problem of dealing with backflagging.

Now more specifically. My biggest rule was obviously they had to have beaten the mob first, and it was implicitly understood they had to be capable of killing it on their own. Secondly, it won't always be even. Some guilds just suck at backflagging and you don't want to offer them flags if you know their guild is flat out lazy and will never, ever do it. I tended to cap any single guild at one group of flag leaches they could send on a raid. Be apologetic if you have to, say you can only afford to take one group and so on, but keep the raids under control. I didn't treat all guilds equally- friends I'd flag for any reason, no questions asked, other guilds they would have to ask for any member. Really each guild had their own arrangement, but it was all understood that generally we'd flag one another when we gotten around to it. For a specific example, after we were elemental, we flagged Fires of Heaven twinks and so on for RZ, but wouldn't for another elemental guild that had slipped and were chain-failing to RZ again. After they killed RZ again, we would. My rule of thumb was they had to have at least killed the mob once in the last month to show they weren't blowing it off completely, unless they were spotting us for other flags. Another specific example- one euro guild had fennin locked down TOTALLY. To this day we have only 3 fennin kills I believe. But since we flagged them on xegony, they flagged us on fennin, since it was increasingly obvious we could walk over fennin whenever we wanted to.

The trickiest part is flagging relationships are mostly about good will. If you ***** about it being uneven, chances are it's going to collapse. Most guilds by DEFAULT distrust one another, so at some point you'll probably have to stomach at least some annoyances to get it rolling.

Leaders of several guilds on my server routinely backflag for each other. They have a Leaders channel so communication is easy.

The main rule is that only leaders can arrange for backflagging, can't have leaders getting spammed with requests.

Also no one is permitted to Hail the PP until told to do so.

Has been working really well for some months now, but of course there's always some guild that doesn't want to know about it.

On one occasion, one guild did RZ, while my guild handled the adds. We got 24 new flags from that one.