Call to Arms! STAND DOWN!

[Darkoan]

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STAND DOWN has been POSTPONED till Tuesday, December 2nd

I've watched the Poll closely, spoken with many Warriors and friends and have ultimately decided to postpone STAND DOWN. When I proposed and organized STAND DOWN we had received nothing from SOE for a very long time. We were all desperate to be noticed, to be heard. My friends we were successful without even staging our STAND DOWN. My heartfelt thanks to the Warriors who spent time educating, argueing and championing our cause online over the last week.

Join me on the 24th for SOE's online chat discussing their upcoming Melee changes. It's important that we have a strong Warrior turnout, they are giving us a chance to be heard. We'll not squander it. Then, once the chatting has finished, lets discuss what we've heard and decide if STAND DOWN is still necessary. If so, we do so on Tuesday the 2nd of December.

Yours in Arms!
- Darkoan

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Fellow Warriors,
I know that I'm no formal leader of the Warrior community. I'd love to see someone like Furor or Brutul take this up, but still I can't stand by and watch this anymore without taking action!

After years of watching us erode into what we are now. Years of seeing the parses, the breakdowns, the explanations of how sad balance and particularly our class has become. Here's where I personally am at on this:

I'm willing to be banned to make a statement!

If you are as upset about our situation as I am, then lets do this:

On Tuesday, December the 2nd, beginning at 9AM (EST) lasting until 9PM (EST) Warriors of all levels will stage a STAND DOWN at or around the Plane of Tranquility stone in the Plane of Knowledge on all Servers.
- We will bag our weapons, save for Warrior Epic (a ceremonial weapon of decoration). If you have the Jagged Blade of War, please wield it for this event.
- We will /join serverwide.standdown:warrior
- We will /feedback, /bug and /afk the same message: "I am a Warrior/Monk/Rogue. Hear my plea. I demand a statement be issued concerning Melee balancing! Until then, I will stand here and wait."
- We will /lfg using the LFG window to use the message text of: Standing Down
- We will periodically notify the zone of our purpose using Shout or OOC, but will ignore hecklers globally addressing them via /tell or in channel only.
** Recommended SHOUT text: "Today we STAND DOWN in defiance of the pure melee class imbalance that exists, and has existed, in Norrath. May Rallos strengthen our plea to the Gods!"
** Recommended OOC text: "PURE MELEE STAND DOWN! serverwide.standdown:warrior! BALANCE THE CLASSES!"
- We will allow access to the Tranq stone (if we don't SOE staff will remove us from the zone and possibly from the game)
- Any GM communication that originates should be directed toward serverwide.standdown:warrior which will be moderated by leaders of the Warrior community.

[COLOR=royal blue]* STANDING DOWN previous to the event on the 2nd *
A surprising number of us are already STANDING DOWN. If you don't want to wait for the 18th and wish to show support starting NOW here are the variations upon instructions above:
- We will /AFK the same message: "PURE MELEE STAND DOWN! serverwide.standdown:warrior! BALANCE THE CLASSES! goto www.thesteelwarrior.org to sign up!"
- We will periodically notify the zone of our purpose using Shout or OOC, but will ignore hecklers globally addressing them via /tell or in channel only. [/color]
** Recommended SHOUT text: "The time is coming, soon few will become many. The Gods can ignore our call for only so long. The STAND DOWN approaches..."
** Recommended OOC text: "PURE MELEE STAND DOWN! serverwide.standdown:warrior! BALANCE THE CLASSES! goto www.thesteelwarrior.org to sign up!"


What are we after?:
- Acknowledgment of the existence of a pure Melee class imbalance.
- Clear statement that the imbalance will be corrected, with a best guess of timeline.
- The acknowledgement and statement(s) must be posted in the following locations (offhanded remarks by Absor or fan faire GMs have not and will not generate results!):
EQLive - Upcoming Updates
EQLive - Future Plans

What is wrong with pure Melee classes? What do you suggest be done?:
- For Monk and Rogue concerns, please visit their forums to discern their imbalances:
EQMonks and Monkly Business for Monks
the Safehouse for Rogues
- As for Warriors, we have many items of concern. Most recently a prime example of our problems are most easily summed up by the "Who needs Warriors anyway?" chronicles being conducted by the Arch Overseers guild, wherein they've used Knights to successfully tank Quarm, RallosB, Bertox. All end game encounters previously thought to be War tankable only. Anything a Knight can successfully tank, they immediately become the preferred tank because of the reliability of their Aggro generation. We obviously are the 3rd or 4th preferred Exp grouping tank. Now we are becoming the 3rd preferred Raid tank. We have zero utility, we are the Tanking parent class, supposedly the undisputed Best Tank in the game. Itemization and boosts to Knights have brought them within a couple hundred HP of us, and equal or greater AC (Innate HP gap between Wars and Knights). So what really is our advantage (Advantage?)?
- The mission of this STAND DOWN is not to make precise demands, mainly to boost knowledge and awareness of the Melee class imbalance and motivate SOE to address the problem. However, many suggestions have been made within the following threads and all over the Steelwarrior forums:
BrainStorm (post ideas here)
How I'd fix warriors
What are the goals of the STAND DOWN?
Ideas to improve the Warrior class


If you don't want to use your Main, then create a newbie Warrior to do the STAND DOWN. If your friends want to join the cause, encourage them to also create a newbie Warrior. Use all your accounts, turn-out is important for this to work!

If you are in support and will join the cause, please respond and help us spread the word!

Various EQ News sites will be notified of the STAND DOWN on Friday the 14th.


**edit 11.07.03 - Shikarii**
Chat Channel set to serverwide.standdown:warrior .. Admin is set plus mods will be added. It will be strictly moderated to keep relevance with this thread's motion for group action.

**update 11.09.03 - Darkoan**
The STAND DOWN has already begun. If you want to begin standing down on your servers, do it! The /petition portion will be saved for the 18th, but match the AFK message listed here. One voice, One mission. Darkoan is now a fixture in the Plane of Knowledge.

**update 11.10.03 - Darkoan**
Due to overwhelming request /petition has been removed from the action items. It was never our intent to flood petition queues and possibly cause harm to other players. Also, made it a bit more clear what we are after with our STAND DOWN. Miscellaneous changes.

**update 11.12.03 - Darkoan**
Added ZhaoVizier's idea to use message text in LFG window. Clarified many things. Added a PRE-EVENT section. Added statement urgeing players be allowed access to Tranq stone, as SOE has shown a resolve in this area.

**update 11.15.03 - Darkoan**
Following the information posted on EQVault we are strongly considering Postponing STAND DOWN till after the online chat with SOE on the 24th. Please everyone vote using the link provided at the top of the post.

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STAND DOWN has been POSTPONED till Tuesday, December 2nd

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[corillis]

hey, crashing PoK sounds like a nice idea... count me in

[taenk]

As far as I'm concerned, civil disobedience is the only option left. Count me in. If this doesn't get their attention, then even more extreme measures are fine with me. I'm tired of SoE and tired of their silence. Polite obviously doesn't work, so maybe rude will.

[Antaran]

Well waiting around isnt getting us anywhere so I'm in.

[Aveen]

Why Tuesday the 18th?


I'm not opposed to this course of action. However, I don't see what it will gain us besides warnings for disruptions. Technically we can't be warned if all were doing is standing around. However, when a GM comes on because people are complaining, is he/she will start kicking people from the game or summoning them elsewhere and the leaders may get a temporary suspension for intentionally causing zone disruption. That is the possible consequences of this action if we follow it through.

So we have to ask ourselves, will it get us anywhere? Well it could. But only if we also threaten to all cancell our accounts (even if for only a half an hour, SOE will see the cancellations en mass) at the same exact time should we not get the response we hope for. Money talks and bullshit walks, and I think money is the only way to get our message across to SOE.

Also understand, that if we go this route, it is our last stand. SOE/VI will either listen and respond at this point or they wont. If they don't, they never will. And we are more likley to get the GM response of getting kicked offline instead of an actuall response.

Does it matter? Will it change anything? NO
If by some miracle the dev's decide to address us, changes wont be forthcomming. Paladins will still be able to tank everything in the game and be prefered for it now. We MIGHT (as in MAYBE) get looked into before the end of the year. But it isn't likely.

I say go ahead and advertise this on every single message board, in every single forum you can. Email it (not just submitting it to the Dev corner) to every public EQ/SOE/VI Email address you can find. Let them know EXACTLY what we want, and EXACTLY what we will do if we don't get it.

I may be beaten, but damnit I'm not dead yet.

[Darkoan]

Threats haven't gotten us anywhere. If we are at the point of actually cancelling our accounts, what is the difference if we are banned?

This is an interactive game, we can effect our environment in this game. So why shouldn't we? 50+ warriors all congregated for 12 hours in one place on every Server all with the same AFK message will make noise, it will get people talking. Posting this to EQ News sites will get more people to do it, more people talking. THEY CANNOT IGNORE THIS

If they do nothing, we do it again, and again. If they want to cancel accounts over this, they can start with me, I have 3 accounts. Bring it on SOE!

[Darkoan]

As to the question on "Why the 18th?". I just picked a lower count day so that we aren't affecting things as terribly as we would on Fri, Sat, Sun. The 18th is far enough out for us to get a feel of support on this topic and still get warning out on the 14th to the News sites.

Optimally everyone will login their Warrior toon, place him at the Tranq stone in PoK, set petition and afk messages and head off to work.

[Tharak]

I am not thoroughly convinced this will accomplish anything, i guess it would at least draw more attention to the problem than there is now. I would think all the efforts of the guild AO are drawing far more attention than a sit in would draw. I mean they are basically trivializing PoP endgame content in an effort to prove how obsolete SoE has made warriors. They can ban or kick us during a sit in, but are they really going to kick a guild because they killed Quarm with a <<insert class here>>, and i believe they cannot exactly ignore that their uber content is getting raped as we speak; while everyone laughs at Absor's lame "classes are not that out of balance" retoric.

I think I will attend, though by the time i log in on PST things will clearly already be done. I do however, doubt anything interesting will come of it. I think it would be more effective to also have more than just warriors showing up at any rally to support our cause. SoE is more than likly of the opinion that it's just warriors whining, get a few more classes involved and maybe they will take notice; probably not though. The only other thing I think they would notice is everyone /quit their accounts, or maybe if no warriors logged in for a day (or a week). Seems like if we left the game as it is now, it wouldn;t matter much anyway.

What is the release date of WoW again? . . . well i can hope can;t I?!

[Kaesorn]

Eh, might be fun. I'll even get on the Warrior whos name you see on the left.

Pretty sad when you find out making a character of the main tanking class means you really won't be able to tank any better than the SK you already have.

[Raaj]

I'd recommend you at least linking this on paladin and sk boards.

They might not want nerfed, but generally they do believe we need looked at. I wouldnt be surprised if you found some more people to help you out there.

[Aveen]

eqmail@soe.sony.com
eqtech@soe.sony.com
accounts@soe.sony.com
eqaccountstatus@soe.sony.com
appadmin@soe.sony.com
eqfeedback@soe.sony.com
eqbugs@soe.sony.com
eqtesting@soe.sony.com
eqwebmaster@soe.sony.com
eqmoderator@soe.sony.com
fanfaire@soe.sony.com

I suggest emailing all these addresses, and link them to the steelwarriors. I will try to find again Absor's email address (though I think it is absor@soe.sony.com ) as well as the higher ups email addresses. It would be ironic if you could submit this to EQNews on the EQLive site.

I'll be there, I may be truely afk but i will read my logs after.

[Tharak]

I'd recommend you at least linking this on paladin and sk boards.

They might not want nerfed, but generally they do believe we need looked at. I wouldnt be surprised if you found some more people to help you out there.
______________________

I'd add that unless something like that happens likely the event will be ignored by SoE for the most part. If the only one complaining about gimped warriors is well warriors . . . . then all we have to look forward to is the warrior fix coming later next year . . . . .

World of Warcraft

[Darkoan]

There's been some question as to the usage of the term "Stand Down". I went with that to infer that we refuse to participate in the game during the timeframe listed. We are, standing down.

[Barja Bardagi]

I'm in. 'Nuff said.

[Boleslav]

I support this, and will participate.

Boleslav Forgehammer
Paladin of Brell in his 65th Campaign
E'ci – Sacred Destiny