It has been a while since I have posted any news (as Jolene was so kind to remind me every other week *sigh*). While I have to admit that part of this lack of inspiring words from the fearless leader of Raging Fury (aka. me) is due to my own sloth (there is a reason why I get called Slackrahil by some), that is not the only cause. More about that in the second part of these news, at first I want to get the important information out: Raging Fury is back on track by downing Tower of Rot (the first and only event in Tier 2a) finally!

OK, so why is this important? I mean, RF has been a high end guild for so many years and now we are happy about beating an event more than a month after two other guilds on AB (grats to them!)?

The answer is: yes, we are happy because we have recently been able to welcome a considerable amount of new friends into our guild which for the first time gave us the possibility to attempt this with a full raid (on most tries before we were 45 people on average). I won't even complain about the insane lag some people experienced in this event, that was the same for every guild, although it might be easier to overcome such obstacles with a full raid. Even after the lag issues were fixed, we never really had a complete evening of trying this event with even 8 groups, so people got a bit frustrated. Even certain attempts to motivate people didn't work:

Anyway, coming there with a full raid was invigorating and apparently lead a certain Shadowknight to premature... death:

After that everyone was awake though and it was easy to see that the difference it makes when trying an event with a balanced full raid force versus missing almost 2 groups and having people bringing in bots for certain classes is tremendous. So we got the event down on the very first attempt yesterday, which I found really impressive considering quite a large number of the new guild members had never even seen this event before - great job everyone!

To prove how totally smooth it all went, a cleric got the killshot:

There is a reason, why Illandra is called the "paladin classleader" in RF!

As we were on a roll we went and had a first short look at the first event in Tier 2b with the proper name "Burn Out". Once again a Shadowknight was the first one down:

Seriously guys, we know your class is nothing compared to the shining knight, the epitome of chivalry and greatness (and mostly curing) known as the paladin, but no need to commit suicide - it's OK, we like you anyway!

I am pretty sure we will be able to beat the two last remaining raid events in reasonable time and I might actually post another update then (no promises!), but for now I would like to explain why RF had to struggle the last months (and why I fear that this might be the same for some other guilds too).

With the change in the release strategy by SOE from releasing an expansion once a year (or twice for those who remember the REALLY old times) to releasing tiny bits of expansion parts all over the year the whole attitude has changed. This is at least as I myself perceive it. In former times a new expansion came out and the high end guilds rushed forward to get the lower tier raids beaten to proceed steadily through the tiers to finally get into the end zone, where (depending on the expansion) they would either find candyland (like during PoP) or the final true challenges (GoD anyone?)

Whatever it was, everyone knew that this process would take a bit of time to get through and that even if the expansion was released on a Wednesday it would not be a huge disadvantage to have your first raid day after that on Sunday. 3 days more or less wouldn't make or break the success in total, it was something between an 800 to a 10000 meter race until you finally beat the expansion and felt something like accomplishment (well, not so much after beating Lord Brekkt, what a poor excuse of an endboss, he must be the laughing stock of his colleagues Tunat, OMM or Triunity, heck even Vishimtar).

After beating this you knew that you would have a break from learning and struggling for a time, simply farming around. As long as it wasn't as long as during SoD (11 months of farming was really a bit TOO much relaxation), some things just take long...

Nonetheless having a farm time was OK, especially during the summer months when people were on vacation, enjoyed an evening with friends or watched the football worldcup (yes, I did my part for the victory of Germany, drinking and cheering with friends! *feels like a world champion himself, almost like Naedion:)

Anyway, fast forward to the current state of the game... expansion release was October 8th 2013, all available raid content was beaten by the very first (RoI and MS) the same day. Pretty much the same picture with the releases of tier 1b, 2a and now 2b. First day out - finished. Feels like 4 50 m dashes instead of the race length described before. Don't get me wrong, I am sure RoI and MS would be the first two to finish also if all content was released at once and if some sort of flagging would be involved, stopping them from finishing all on the very first night.

The way though it is now is simply a bit demotivating for many people used to a different setup. Add to this the general attrition during summer and you get a dangerous mix for many raid guilds who cannot relax during the summer by farming known content with low numbers as they used to. They need to beat newly released content (hey, they consider themselves high end after all), but have issues getting enough people online because people do other things during summertime too, not only EQ (see above). So now they can't beat the new content, thus people who are still online get frustrated and don't log in, others leave for greener grasses (as even some of those finishing earlier now face number issues) and the end result is that a former high end guild is struggling.

This is something which could be totally avoidable by not bringing out new raid content during the summer months and I really hope SOE can rethink their strategy on releases, because the current course is dangerous.

And now, the final quote for those who have actually taken the time to read till the end, I hope you enjoyed some of it:

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