Another vote has come and gone to open up the Gates of Discord expansion on the Fippy Darkpaw time locked progression server. Having failed on May 7th and May 21st, this was the third unlock vote.
I’ll keep coming back until you say “Yes!”
It appeared that the raiding guilds decided to drop the obnoxious behavior and actually try to build a coalition to get the Gates of Discord expansion vote to go their way this time as they faced up against the “no” faction.
An “Occupy Norrath – Vote No” sit in
Feeling better about their chances, the raiding guilds were online early in the morning waiting for the expansion to unlock.
They were disappointed.
The anti-GoD faction won out again, but only by the smallest margin possible. Per Piestro:
So in a stunning turn of events, the Fippy vote resulted in an exact tie. People voted yes and no in exactly equal numbers. In order to unlock an expansion at least 51% of the populace must vote yes, so GoD was not unlocked. I’ll be very anxiously awaiting the results next time.
A dead heat. The hope for an unlock is not in vain with things running that close. Still, it will be June 18th at the earliest now before the unlock can happen.
Meanwhile, over on Vulak, which has caught up to the Fippy Darkpaw server and now has its vote running in parallel, chances of an unlock look dim. Piestro relayed the results:
For Vulak, it was 56% no, 40% yes, 4% don’t care.
And so the time locked progression servers run on with the Planes of Power, Lost Dungeons of Norrath, and Legacy of Ykesha as the last set of expansions to be unlocked.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
So I might be an idiot here, but has the vote has failed because the raiding guilds haven’t finished the current high end dungeon content they are working on now? Is the stuff from the current raids what they need to complete the stuff for Gates of Discord?
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The two big raiding guilds have finished the content and clearly want to move on to the next expansion. There is, however, a faction that wants to slow down the progression. There has been a call to vote “no” by people at every vote from Kunark forward.
Gates of Discord happens to be a crossing the Rubicon moment in EQ history, as it is the expansion where raids go from open world contested fights to instanced encounters. That and the fact that Gates of Discord is remembered as a bad expansion due to it being very broken at launch, is probably propping up the resistance to going forward.
The irony is that, having read the forums for a while, I have noticed some overlap between those who want to stop all progress forward to new expansions and those who complain loudly when SOE doesn’t step in and police behavior when it comes to competition between guilds for open world raids.
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They could probably get a faster Yes vote if they would open a pre-GoD locked server that would never progress to GoD and beyond. I’d wager once they do get their vote and open GoD, they are actually going to lose a sizable number of the non-high-end raiders. Not a majority, but probably enough that everything past GoD will be easier to get a Yes vote on opening.
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The Wikipedia entry on GoD is pretty accurate, at least as I remember things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EverQuest:_Gates_of_Discord
The guild I was in at the time it launched was a sizeable non-raiding guild that had been able to do enough Planes of Power group content not to feel completely out of the loop. After the first few days of GoD we couldn’t get anyone even to attempt the basic missions. It was more than most of the guild could do to get to the mission-givers.
I was clericing at the time and I did manage to do a couple of the Trials, healing for PUGs with raid-geared tanks, which was the hardest healing I’d ever done and no kind of fun at all. And that was just low-end GoD group content. We all pretty much gave up on GoD and went back to older content and by the time the next expansion, Omens of War, appeared almost all our guild were in EQ2 beta, from which few returned.
Even though they’ve fixed most of the bugs, not least the entire expansion being tuned for level 70s when the level cap increase only went to 65, I’m not at all surprised there’s less than universal enthusiasm for opening those Gates. On the bright side, at least Fippy players won’t have to wait eight months for Omens of War, which is a lot more fun.
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