I was a member of Onslaught. We were small guild focused on gearing up in dungeons, gathering the best possible gear in preparations for raids. We had maybe five to seven 60s online at a time, but that was enough to clear Strath, Scholo, and grab a few extras to pug UBRS some nights. A few of us had gathered most of the best dungeon drops, but we didn't have the numbers to do raids.
A week ago we merged with Volatile, the only North American guild who seemed to want to raid. The first time we grouped with Volatile we hadn't merged with them and still didn't have a full 40 in the raid. Several raiders still weren't 60 yet, but we had no choice because this is a small server with an even smaller NA population. I joined up late and killed a few bosses with them, but we had to leave because someone said the raid was resetting soon. We headed out and back in, killed more bosses and ended the raid for the night.
The next night we were prepared to kill Ragnaros, but we entered and apparently the entire instance had reset, raid ID and all. One of our members submitted a ticket about it, but it was never answered or acknowledged until yesterday. We had our entire guild ready to kill Ragnaros, so we had to clear the instance again to get to him. I was there for a few Ragnaros attempts, but we didn't kill him. I think it was the next day they downed him, but I wasn't there.
In the mean time I'd been running dungeons with my friends who came from Onslaught and also people I'd just met from Volatile to finish our sets from 5-mans, farm gold, get rep so we could access to new enchants, etc. Tonight I was helping my brother with his Fury spec and gear because he'd never actually played a fury warrior, so we were excited to see what he could do with his current gear. Right after we'd put a spec together for him and he'd started practicing against mobs in Winterspring, we both were kicked from the server. Turns out we we're both banned for two weeks from playing on the server. Asked other people in our mumble server; same result. Banned.
I've played on other Vanilla private servers before. Scriptcraft was a blast and I raided with Alixium to get server firsts. I first experienced the instability of private servers while playing there, including bugs with raid lockouts and resets. Guilds would clear raids when they were up, sometimes twice or three times a week at the most unstable times. The GMs acknowledged the inconsistencies but never punished anyone for clearing available content. This also happened on Valkyrie, another well-scripted Vanilla server. We'd clear content when it was available and the GMs punished no one for doing so. None of my guilds had any malicious intent. We just wanted to gear up and play the game together, and so did the rest of the server.
Before any of this happened, I'd already seen the conduct of the staff here and it made me wary. Bans for PvPing in towns, GM's showing up in town randomly, GM's taking part in casual world conversations...these things never happened on other servers I'd played on; even servers with terrible scripting. The scripting's pretty good here, so people would mention this stuff warily but keep playing.
Not any more.
When a GM admits that they ignored a ticket submitted about a raid lockout resetting but blames the player for not submitting a SECOND TICKET, something's very wrong. When they admit they knew about raid ID's resetting but only AFTER handing out bans, something's very wrong. Screenshotted conversations with the GMs in IRC/Email exist, and I hope they surface. They show the ridiculousness of the Kronos staff's behavior.
Kronos: you've not only lost a major portion of your North American players because of this. You've lost a motivated conglomeration of players that organically banded together under one guild to down raid content; not to mention the active PvPers included.
Goodbye Kronos. You've shown how you run your server, and the word's spreading.
IRC screenshots of conversation with Kronos GM:
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2ntb9y0 ... VHxOvlVhBc
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=2r3frdc ... VHyQ_lVhBc
Here's the response from my Onslaught GM that ties it all up nicely:
The funniest thing about it is we in Onslaught (myself, Peasemold, Ruktuku, Futilian, Smooth, Tenebrae, Deadasfuk, Slater and Agusto) literally joined Volatile the day before.
We had no idea Thursday was a raid reset day. In fact, most people in Volatile are under the impression that raids reset on Tuesdays when honor resets. This wasn't even made known until recently. The fact that it reset last week when honor reset and other guilds downed Onyxia as many as 3 times in a 7 day period and aren't "punished" is laughable.
I bet you my MC gear I earned outside of Volatile will be gone too. I have nearly 30 days played on my character already and ran UBRS enough times to get Peasemold a Felstriker AND get a Black Blade from Drakk, ran BRD enough times to get an Ironfoe for Futilian, and have accumulated all gear for all shaman specs and configurations/resist sets.
What's worse is the confusion. Volatile is practically a conglomerate NA guild, there's no website, no core communication, at least 4 guilds merged into it. Most people aren't very elitist, the opposite of try hard and many don't even play a lot. Almost no one understood what was going on, myself included. To find out that raid IDs resetting when honor resets was not a normal thing was never ever communicated.
If you think anyone is returning from this 2 week suspension is a joke. We're all moving on.
Some of us have discussed transferring to Nostalrius since this happened.
