A Kinder and Gentler Fippy Darkpaw… for Raiding Guilds

The EverQuest GMs have apparently given up on gladiatorial combat and trivia challenges in order to determine who gets a crack at which raid boss and have resorted to just posting a schedule.

Greetings citizens of Fippy!

Below is the outline for the current Fippy raid rotation. To get your guild onto this rotation you just need to petition with a time/date for your guild to prove it’s meddle. Each tier (current and future) will have its own, no-loot, raid mob to kill. I would suggest petitioning well in advance to ensure that both parties have the time resources available at the specified time.

Current guilds keyed to top tier Velious spawns:

Twisted Legion
Citizen
Dark Blood
Rosen Guard

Pending guilds:

Ascendency

Top Tier Raid Rotation: (The mob to qualify for this rotation is Vyemm.)

Current week rotation:

Cazic Thule – Twisted Legion
Avatar of War – Rosenguard
North Temple of Vesheen  – Darkblood
Tunare – Citizen
Ring of Fear – Darkblood

Second Tier Raid Rotation: (The mob to qualify for this rotation is Sontikar or Vyemm.)

Yelinak
Sontalak
King Tormax
Ring of Slime

The Rules:

#1. Each rotation with the exception of NToV consists of a 12 hour window. NToV will be given an 18 hour window to cover the spawn windows of the number of raid targets. If a raid target is not killed within 12 hours of it spawning it is open to any other guild on the rotation to target and kill.

Killing a raid mob outside of another guilds kill window does not change the rotation. The guild who was incapable, unwilling, or uninterested in killing the raid target essentially forfeits their kill of the target.

#2. Killing a raid target during the kill window of another guild will result in the suspension of the raid leader. All loot that was dropped by the raid target will be removed and destroyed. The raid target will then be re-spawned and the 12 hour window will restart.

#3. Interference with another guilds kill target during their window of time will result in harsh punishments for the offending guild. (I.E. if your guild is training another guild, your guild may become locked out of zones when a raids target it up, and it is not your turn to kill it. Don’t do it, it will not be worth it to you or your guild in the long run.)

#4. When a new expansion launches all raid targets will be at free for all status for the first 4 weeks or once multiple guilds have shown the ability to kill said raid targets, whichever is longer.

We have invented virtual instancing… if you just imagine that the server has only enough processing power to run one copy of the instance at a time… and that there is some sort of strange form of guild lockouts that affects only qualified guilds.

With raid conflicts now settled and the war on hacking still going strong, the Progression Server forums can get back to the real business at hand…

Complaining about how people who multi-box have completely ruined EverQuest for everybody for all time!

Only done in a non-judgmental and non-flaming way.  It says so right in the title.

Pushing for Numbers?

It was announced recently that on November 16, 2007 at 13:59 GMT, EVE Online passed the 200,000 subscriber mark.  A notable  achievement for a game that has continued to grow since its slow launch back in 2003.  You can see a posting here about it from CCP Kieron.

But I have to wonder what the makeup of the recent subscribers is.

More than a month before the 200,000 subscriber mark was hit, CCP ran their “Feel The Power of 2” campaign, where any current subscriber could get a second account for the bargain price of $49.95 for a six month subscription.  A campaign that was supposed to originally end on November 4th, but which got extended to November 20th.  That extension ran just long enough for the 200,000 subscriber mark to be hit.

Which, of course, raises the question I alluded to above: How many of the recent subscribers are conversions from 14-Day trial accounts and how many of them are “Feel the Power of 2” add-on accounts?

Not that selling to your installed base is a bad thing.  It is a popular and lucrative practice in most industries.  But how sticky will those second accounts be?

As part of the announcement CCP said that their next goals were 50,000 players in game simultaneously (the last record I saw was 37,481 on at once) and 300,000 subscriptions.  But will the “Feel the Power of 2” accounts stay active on the whole after the six month special has passed and the $14.99 a month reality kicks in?  Or will this lead to a dip in subscriptions when the time runs out on the special pricing?

And will the Trinity upgrades, which are bound to make the game more CPU and GPU intensive, influence this by making two-boxing manageable on a smaller populations of player machines?

Since I do not know of another MMO that has pushed two-boxing with a deal like CCP’s, they may very well be breaking new ground again by merely finding out the answer in six months time.