I had to laugh when I read these two posts in the EQ Time Locked Progression Server forum. This apparently was not exactly what somebody meant when they started demanding that GMs intervene with raid target conflicts.
First, there is the litany of “creative” solutions from one poster:
GM showed up and told the two guilds contesting mobs to pick one person for each guild to duel for the rights? The other day a GM perma killed Yelinak. The time before that we were told to random for rights on raid mob, but the GM disregarded their own decision and left. Wtb Senior GM’s on Fippy? This is completely absurd.
And then there was more detail on the duel situation:
Ok, this is it. I’ve had it with this BS customer service. We’ve been dealing with it for months now, but its finally came to the point where its no longer possible to raid on Fippy.
Twisted Legion shows up to Statue of Rallos Zek spawn 45 minutes before Citizen shows up. Citizen petitions. GM-Sepki shows up and decides to give our guild leader 30 seconds to decide on someone to PVP for the mob? Are you serious, this isn’t Zek. This is Fippy Darkpaw. Make your GMs follow their own rules. You expect people to sit by complacency while GMs decide to change the rules on the fly?
Can we get a LEAD gm, or a SENIOR gm to come and give some consistent rulings. First its perma-kill mobs, now its duel for it, etc? BS
SynCaine proposed PvP previously as a solution, though I am sure he meant a wholesale guild on guild slaughter rather than champions representing their guild.
All Piestro from the EQ community team had to say was:
This action was taken with full knowledge and direction of the head of the EQ GM team. If a GM is forced to intercede, it is advisable to follow their direction.
So if a GM tells you to man up and fight for your raid target, you had best get out there and fight!
Is such a duel standard procedure in EQ or any place else when guilds come into conflict over a raid target?
Addendum: The big man, HeadGMKaeldread steps in and says… well… we can’t solve your problems.
Greetings,
The raid issues on Fippy are indeed sad, but not something that Customer Service has a good fix for. No matter what we do someone will be unhappy. We understand that, and that is the reason why our rules and policies specifically state that it is better for our players to come to an agreement between themselves.
In the case of Fippy, much like the incidents we previously had on Vulak, two of the major raid guilds do not see eye to eye on how raid mobs should be distributed. We understand this happens, but we simply cannot and should not be involved in these types of situations. Our customer service is to help people with the game or in the game, not to serve as a mediator to police each and every raid spawn, especially when both sides will either not compromise, or will not work with us.
When we come upon issues of this type a GM will quickly make a ruling and both parties will be asked to abide by it. At times we may simply make a ruling based on our observations, at other times the two parties will have to compete for the right to the mob. This could be a /roll, a duel, answering trivia questions, etc. If the GM does not feel either guild is willing to do what they ask the raid mob may be perma-killed. I did not feel comfortable leaving this with just a /roll, as recent history has shown that raids will start to take advantage of it in hopes of spending less time at a spawn point and still having a 50% chance of getting the mob. We cannot allow it to be a DPS race as that just ends up with guilds kill stealing each other constantly.
There are so many variables; at times a raid may have cleared 90% of the zone to get to a raid mob just be leap frogged. At other times the mob is already engaged and it gets stolen. Now throw in a guild that has spent 6 hours wiping on a mob, or people training each other and we have just started to scratch the surface of open world raids. First in force does not work as each raid mob has different levels of commitment to kill and with the number of multiple boxing raiders every raid mob could be permanently camped. Please keep in mind that making one policy for this is difficult, and it is not a simple issue. The simple policy is however, play nice and work it out yourself. Work to make it a win-win situation for the two raids, or the entire server community itself.
And then, because that was not enough:
If it comes down to one mob and two raids, and a GM has to be involved someone is going to be upset when they are asked to leave. This type of guild dispute has existed as long the game itself. If you are not willing to do this you will have to deal with a GM coming in game and deciding for you. It isn’t just a lone GM decision either, it will always be gone over with a supervisor and in many cases the game manager. We don’t want to have to decide and take action, we want this to be a great experience for all, after all it’s a game, and a darn fun one. But once we have made our decision it is final and if you are not willing to work with the GM, there are consequences to that decisions.
In this specific case we had today, a handful of guild leaders that refused to cooperate with the GM were suspended temporarily from the game.
I hope this sheds some light on the issue we had earlier today on Fippy, as well as the overall issue on contested MOBS.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 