Aug 12 2008
Fed up! Raiding sucks as a sole form of end game content.
I love MUDs, MMOs, virtual worlds, (insert your favorite term). I love making them. I love playing them. I love talking about them. I hate raiding. I hate the current obsessive focus on a MUD’s “end game.” There shouldn’t be an end game. The draw of open ended, online multiplayer worlds is that they don’t end. But the constant dumbing down of MMOs is such that people expect to be able to race to level cap and then participate in the “real game.” I’m going to put aside the fact that I find this absurd, and focus on the current popular form of “end game”: raiding. Oh, and I intend to utterly savage the concept of raiding as currently implemented in MMOs.-
Ok… I lied a little.
Alright, I lied a little. I don’t hate raiding. Sometimes it can be fun. What I hate is the way raiding is currently implemented in MUDs (graphical or text), and the fact that raiding is generally the ONLY serious end game MMOs offer. (Yes, I am using MUD and MMO interchangeably. See my Gaming Terminology page. This is my subtle ruse to get people used to the term MUD and use it instead of MMO.)
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I know a lot of you out there love raiding, or at least claim to love it. I know there are things about it that are enjoyable: the shared experience, the challenge of figuring bosses out, the sense of accomplishment when you beat a boss or finish a dungeon. But raiding, as currently implemented on most MUDs (like WoW) is horribly flawed, and does not even do a good job of maximizing the positive elements people claim to enjoy.
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Raiding as a Concept is Horribly Designed.
1) I play games to PLAY THE ACTUAL GAME. I don’t play games to load up a web site and read a step by step strategy for how to defeat a boss. Sure, you don’t have to use raid walkthroughs, but you have to be masochistic not to. Raid encounters are generally designed to require an extremely specific set of maneuvers in order to defeat them. Bob has to stand on point A and hit 1, 2, 3 in succession. Joe has to stand on point B and hit 1, 2, 3 within 2 seconds of Bob hitting his 1, 2, 3. Cindy has to stand EXACTLY behind Bob, face backwards, kneel, alternate between the Macarena emote and a focus change macro, and press the 1 button exactly every 10 seconds. Frank, the raid leader, has to constantly bark commands over Teamspeak/Ventrilo to make sure nobody get distracted from the raid and does something foolish like trim their nails for some excitement.
Raid encounters feel like crappy community theater to me, not epic game play. I feel like an extra in a low budget Hollywood fantasy movie where the producers are only making the movie for the tax write-off and don’t care about how illogical the directions are. Uwe Bol ’s action scenes make more sense than even the best raid encounters on WoW and most other modern MMOs.
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2) An hour of killing trash for the “reward” of a 10 minute, scripted boss battle is like suffering through a root canal for the reward of a prostate exam. Oh, and if something goes wrong in that boss battle, you very well might be clearing that same hour of trash to take another shot at it. Why they make the trash mobs so pointless and worthless is beyond me. You have a capitive audience of 10, 25, 40, 50, or 100 players and you make them spend an hour each (25 man hours of trash killing for a standard WoW raid) doing something that is DESIGNED to be a pure, boring time sink. That’s good game design? That makes sense to ANYONE? How about we swap that? I’d rather feel uber clearing pansy minions for 10 minutes and then fight the boss for an hour. I’d find that a lot more epic, frankly.
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3) There is no room for error or improvisation. Everything has to be done in a completely orchestrated way, and for the most part nobody can screw up. If someone makes a mistake, it is generally a wipe for the whole group. If someone pulls aggro that shouldn’t, it is almost always a wipe. If someone attacks the wrong thing or in the wrong order, wipe. If someone kinda spaces out for a minute and lets off on DPS or healing, wipe. I am fine with games punishment bad execution or inattentive play, but the problem is it only takes a very small mistake on the part of one person to cause the other 9, 24, 39, 49, or 99 a lot of pain, suffering, misery, and wasted time clearing trash. And with each person’s role so incredibly explicit, there is rarely the possibility of someone else picking up the slack. If Bob sees Joe is slacking off, what can he do? He can’t pour on more DPS, because he is already expected to be at maximum DPS. If Cam the Tank loses aggro to a crazy DPSer, there’s nothing he can do. He can’t be a hero, because he is already operating at maximum threat and most likely the boss is immune to any snap aggro taunts anyway (another gripe, but I digress). If Cindy the healer isn’t healing enough, Kalli the healer can’t make up for it, because she’s already healing at max efficiency and even if she could heal more she’d either run out of mana or pull aggro.
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4) So may elements of boss encounter design are absurdly arbitrary. I have fought bosses who did incredibly ridiculous things that were clearly designed solely with the idea of nullifying a specific class, tactic, or ability for no logical reason other than the devs thought it would be funny. I have fought raid bosses that were immune to all sorts of standard abilities for no apparent reason other than to make you feel impotent. I have participated in raid encounters where mages had to tank a boss… just because. People don’t make mages because they like tanking, folks. They make mages because they like to make things go boom. I have fought bosses where they you have to interrupt some of their spells, but not all of them, because being too good at interrupting their spells triggers some kind of Uber Spell. If the boss possessed the ability to perform this Uber Spell, why isn’t he just doing it all the time? Why punish people for being GOOD at a core mechanic (interrupting spell casting) with this arbitrary result? I have fought bosses who cast spells that require NOBODY in the entire raid move a single pixel, and then randomly follow it up with an attack that makes people stagger around against their will. And this boss in particular gets us back to #3. If one member of the raid accidentally hits their D button (move right), the raid wipes. That’s good design? The tiniest little finger twitch by one person and everyone dies and starts over? Huh?
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5) Loot. Hopefully soon I am going to write an entire post about how stupid I think current loot systems are in games, but I’ll hit this one briefly now. So 10, 25, 40, 50, or 100 people work together to mindlessly clear trash, follow their little script of brain disconnected button pushes to beat the boss, and now he drops 2 or 3 pieces of loot. This loot will often be useful/needed by multiple players present, so someone loses out. The same item might drop many times in a row, resulting in certain classes feasting while others enjoy famine. Or sometimes loot will drop that nobody can use, and it just gets blown up or sold to an NPC Vendor. NEVER is the entire group happy with the loot that drops or the way the loot gets distributed. There are always people unhappy with what happens at REWARD TIME. This is BROKEN. At the moment of ultimate success, there should be happiness all around. Not happiness for 10% or less of the participants. I have a variety of suggestions for improving this, but I’ll save those for the previously mentioned LOOT post I intend to make.
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6) Raid encounters have very strict requirements for the classes you need and the numbers you need. This results in a lot of friends and guildmates getting left out on a regular basis. It results in arguments and hurt feelings about who gets “rostered” to go on the raid. There are arguments about who will get rostered to kill bosses 1, 2, and 3 but not bosses 4, 5, and 6. Sometimes a player will only want/need loot from boss 4, 5, or 6 and thus will not want to even go on raids planned to kill boss 1, 2, or 3. But you have to cajole such people into joining because you need their class. The amount of heartache involved in creating rosters for who gets to raid is absolute misery. You are lucky if half the people are happy with the system you use, and at some point everyone is likely to be very pissed off by a roster decision. Since raid dungeons have lockouts and reset times, you can’t simply run the same raid 2 or 3 nights in a row so everyone gets a shot.
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I could continue, and I probably will in the future. But I think I’ve made a pretty clear case for how incredibly flawed at the core modern MMO raiding is. The worst thing about this is the fact that far too many MMOs have pretty much hatched their cart to the concept of raiding and that’s all you get for end game content. If you agree with any of the above points, most MMO developers pretty much don’t care about you. Your desire for more varied and interesting gameplay will be completely ignored and discarded. They will tell you “join a raid guild” or “roll an alt.” That attitude is ridiculous, absurd, and terrible for the industry as a whole.
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So… what do you think? 
Lots of stuff to comment on here so I might return later on.
The main thing here is the hate for the raiding system of games like WoW and I agree with that one 100%.
I hate the fact that most players only use very few of their skills while raiding and the real challenge is in getting 20+ people to do their part and most importantly not screw up.
The best time I have ever had in WoW was just after the last expansion where I got together with four friends and we did lots of 5-man instances without reading anything about them online. Now that was good fun.
I know the game designers has to come up with some content that will keep a challenge and a goal for people who play more than 30 hours a week. And I honestly don’t know if any content as small as the raiding instances would be able to keep such a huge amount of people playing a game as these raids have shown to do.
Speaking about boss fights in particular, FFXI has hardcore fights which redefine the meaning of hardcore. Oh, and of Bad, Irresponsible and Outright Stupid Design too.
Probably worth a read, in the context. Just make sure you’re seated before.
Great articles, Michael, keep it up.
‘End Game.’ I play games that ‘end,’ on a console, and usually alone. Replay value is upped on console games for some through achievement systems, but that’s about it, and no one would subscribe for years (even months) on end to play Gears of War over and over, trying to get every new achievement being released. Unfortunately, that is what I see going on in the mainstream MMOs today. The consumer will pay money every month, to ‘play’ a game in the exact same manner as everyone else, with the exact same avatar, hoping for the exact same rewards.
There is a fun factor in the beginning, you’re leveling and earning some rewards and actually PLAYING the game. But that end-game specter looms up to tell you that you are wrong, and you are not having fun. You need to quit using ability X and only use ability Y. While you’re at it, get rid of that silly concept in your head of what a fighter is. You don’t kill stuff with those 3ft of gleaming steel, you are a body-guard! Get used to it, or you won’t win etc etc.
There is not a single community game on the radar right now that interests me in the slightest. Because I know that it’s going to be a grind. Whether for loot, levels or any other achievement, the ‘end-game,’ is the same.
I would have to agree with all of the macro points that you’ve made.
1) I think the idea of reading the boss encounter on paper, sounds incredibly stupid. But, as an example, last night I was raiding with 9 others and we couldn’t beat a scripted boss encounter that we’ve beat several times before. The makeup of the group was very different and the tactics, or website strat we’ve used before simply didn’t work. We didn’t want to walk away empty handed so we moved on and later found another strat that may or may not have worked for us. At the time the encounter was still challenging for us. No one person made any mistake, the mechanics of the script made it impossible for us to defeat it the way we were trying. The point is that the challenge is there, but one day it will be gone. I think there is room for scripted encounters, as long as there are multiple ways to beat them. I don’t think I would want to necessarily abandon them completely. I think they make one good form of a boss encounter for the lower tier of an instance/dungeon. And I like the way progression works, where you need the gear from the lower tier bosses to beat the upper tier ones. It works for me, and certainly for the company (it keeps you playing longer). I would say I want the the big boss encounters to be the more dynamic ones.
2) I do like the idea of keeping trash to a minimum. For me, trash is all the mobs you fight between instances, that’s certainly enough. I don’t know that I want many boss fights to be a whole hour, but I like the idea of long fights with the bosses versus the pulls right before the boss being generally harder than the boss themselves.
3) I don’t know how to make it work, but it’s on the devs not me. I think that’s the best thing you can do to make these games better. Dynamic encounters that should be skill based, not robotic memorization based.
4) I think rogues are largely screwed in WoW because of the nature of boss fights as they are. I don’t play one, but it seems you can always get along without one. This also applies to dps warriors and other melee dps that are largely hard to use in many encounters; that is a big failure I believe. You should be able to handle any encounter regardless of the makeup of your dps. I don’t mind needing a holy trinity, but requiring specific classes (or excluding them) is a failure, in my opinion.
5) 100% agreement. There should be no random loot from raiding, it’s a waste. Tokens seem to be a good alternative, but I’d rather see non class based ones. Eventually you still have a raid with no paladins and both of the other 2 classes that are eligible have the piece already. Again you are blowing them up or selling. I think Warhammer may have implemented this, and I intend to find out.
6) This seems to be a bigger deal for bigger raids. I like a 3 day cooldown on instances, like ZA. There has to be a cooldown for big loot doesn’t there? I’m not asserting it, I just haven’t thought about it much. I guess since TIME is the limiting factor on these, maybe that’s good enough. You aren’t going to line up 24 other people every day, and if you do, that’s to your credit (or dismay). Maybe no lockouts then? I think the lockouts are to keep guilds from progressing to fast, but it only really applies to hardcore guilds.
What other type of things do you see for endgame? I think PvP is one option, but it certainly doesn’t work for everyone. I think it has to be a progression of sorts. One path is Raiding, another is PvP, and another is ??? I don’t have a good idea for that either. Dynamic encounters seems like a good idea, how about player controlled bosses? Or maybe something like that. Company controlled bosses, instead of GMs, boss employees. Haha…
I think what your trying to say here Mike is that MUDs should be more like Diablo. Where mechanics are there but the gameplay is to a point where you stop worrying about the math involved and you just play, and you don’t get people telling you how many seconds you should wait between your whirlwind attacks. Everyone just levels at a steady rate, finds cool shit and has fun.
The end game sure you farm items or whatever, but you grab 7 other people and you just go in and lay waste to crap, you don’t worry about Bob and Cam doing everything in sync, they just play how they think they play best and everything will pretty much work out as long as your not all pants on head retarded.
I agree with everything stated above. Raiding to me is a glorified 25 man square dance. It’s really sad that it has become the default “end game” for mmos.
It’s my belief that the only good way to do an “end game” is to have it be player generated. Most commonly this is done through either pvp or rp(though none of the big mmos have gone the rp route that I’m aware of). I don’t like the endless treadmill of character improvement that comes from raiding and such. Why are you raiding? To improve your gear. What are you going to do with your improved gear? Raid more to improve your gear.
Personally, I like a character to be “done” at some point. I like to know I’m at my full capability, and nobody else is going to have an inherint advantage over me. From that point forward, playing the game becomes about improving -my- skill, not my character’s. I’m kind of liking AoC for the moment for this reason. I’m nearing level cap now, and I’ve already pretty much maxed out my gear. So I can go into pvp and work on integrating the various combat features into my playstyle rather than continually grinding out gear.
Somebody mentioned Final Fantasy XI earlier. While generally I view it as a pretty crappy game, they do have one feature I wish other games would incorporate. A single character can level up every class, but only has access to abilities from two of those classes at a time. Ultimately this means that the people who want to advance their character endlessly can basically do so by trying to level up every class on that character to maximum, and those that want to be able to be “done” can just level up the 2 classes that they want. The one looking for endless advancement would wind up more flexible, but not neccessarily more powerful than the one that wants to be “done”.
I agree that raiding could use improvement, however, I do feel as if many of the points are not solely the result of developer design, but of player culture.
1) From my understanding, prior to WoW, boss raiding and strats were kept secret amongst guilds and sharing the “how to’s” was something that was rarely done. In the early days of WoW, recognition for a certain boss kill was not awarded as the hardcore raiders believed should been and as “revenge” they began sharing the strats. Thus, a new cultural standard was created by players themselves. (I am more than happy to supply the actual guild and boss name, if it is important).
The “read strats and execute” culture of WoW is not a requirement to raid in WoW. Afterall, someone has to trailblaze the strats in the first place after trial and error. This aspect of raiding is something that is really in the hands of the players. While this can be controlled through rules and the administration of a much, much, much smaller game, such control is not possible by game developers of mainstream, commerical MMO/MUD’s, such as WoW.
2. I agree that the work and time that players spend attempting a dungeon/boss is something that is difficult to design around different player goals, especially when you have two major player cultures to contend with: Casuals and raiders. Casuals want content that is quick to do and provides a comparable reward to hardcore raid content and raiders want difficult content that takes some time to complete and worthy of bragging rights.
Pre-BC WoW was very brutal about this, designing raid content almost completely for the raider culture of players, with instances that last hours upon hours. BC introduced more casual friendly features, such as the raid i.d. system which allows you to attempt raid content in more manageable chunks. With WotLK, raiding is undergoing another change, with several of the raid instances planned for 10 and 25 versions, which allows for even more players to view this raid content.
That is the most important thing, in my opinion, when designing raid content. Make it tough enough to challenge hardcore raiders, but still accessible enough so that a very large portion of the community can experience it.
3/4. Boss design is also another tricky one. While it can be frustrating, I can also see why a boss caliber NPC would be immune to certain abilities. Kinda hard to be a boss caliber NPC when the same taunt spell that works on Hench #123421, also works on you. By the time you’ve reach boss status, it is not unreasonable to expect that the boss has learned how to ignore some crazy armored guy screaming at him.
With regards to scripted fights, I believe this gives the player more of an understanding of why they just borked that fight. The issue with boss fights that have a set list of abilities that are triggered arbitrarily is that a fight can go from a sure win to a close one or a close one to a bork without knowing what went wrong or being unable to prevent it. People hate losing, but at least knowing why they lost makes them feel a bit better.
5. Loot, loot, loot. While killing the boss and saving the princess is a reward on its own, loot appeals to our more materialistic nature. So, how do we make this work so that everyone wins? I think one of the better ideas to allow everyone to be rewarded are, as someone mentioned, the tokens for armor sets and the Badge of Justice tokens. While it is true that there are limited numbers of armor set tokens per boss, all bosses could be equipped to drop the Badges of Justice items. These are used to purchase armor/weapons/trinkets/etc. from special vendors, giving players more control over what they want.
Again, WoW has been notorious for loot issues in the past. With WotLK, they are streamlining how loot is designed to allow greater utility for more classes. Gone would be the days of General Drak/Nefarion/etc. dropping that rogue/mage/druid helm over and over and over again. Now, most items that drop will be useable by someone that is present at the raid. Granted, it may not be the absolute best item for that gear slot, you will not be walking away empty handed. Which is a good thing.
What I think you want to avoid is players attempting a boss once, getting everything they need and then never going back. Sure, they got the instant gratification of getting what they wanted, but afterwards, they have nothing to look forward to.
6. I touched earlier on how raid content/encounters should be experienced by as many players as possible. WoW was definitely bad about specific group composition in Pre-BC WoW. Really, though, this only matters to hardcore raiders. And if you are all there for hardcore raiding and all that this entails, then the players playing at this level should be a bit beyond hurt feelings because a certain encounter only needs x number of y class. If you are experiencing this content with friends to simply experience it, then do that. Again, this is partly an issue of game design but also of raid culture as well.
As I said, I can see many of the points made by Michael and how they affect certain populations of your community when designing raid content. I think a good philosophy to have overall with regards to raid content is: Make it tough, but not impossible and make it so a majority of your community can see it, not just the guys who “raid or die.” Furthermore, players should be more responsible and accept that some of the issues and gripes with raiding are caused by the way they approach it. Have fun with it and remember that it is a game! After that, everything else is gravy.
Wow. A lot of interest in this topic. That’s great. I am going to try to respond to everyone (since you all took the time to respond to me), so this comment will be a bit long. Here goes.
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TO PETER:
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Yes! I also hate the way raiding turns people into such a tiny fraction of what their character can and should be. Most characters end up using 2 or 3 abilities 90% of the time, and in the same exact order over and over again. That gets incredibly boring.
I also really enjoyed working through the 5 man instances with a relatively set group of friends. I played a prot warrior, my wife played a healing priest, and we had a support paladin, a warlock, and either a hunter or a mage. It was great fun until we hit the instances that had “DPS test” bosses. Then all of a sudden our defense heavy team was utterly incapable of defeating some of the bosses. 2 DPS simply wasn’t enough. I thought this sucked hugely. Even at the 5-man level they started having bosses that you had to kill in X time or you’d wipe. There was no real option for outlasting the boss, or winning through defense.
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TO GWAENDAR:
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I will definitely check that article out. I found FFXI fun at first, but then quickly seemed to want you to be hardcore or nothing. I bet I’ll find that article very interesting.
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TO WITCH KILLER:
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Yeah, I got so focussed on the sucktastic nature of raiding itself that I didn’t get a chance to come back to my general dislike of this whole “end game” concept. Online RPGs don’t end. They aren’t supposed to end. The whole game should be fun. Levels 1->X shouldn’t be a pointless time sink you slog through to open up the “real game” at level (X+1).
Bravo! I need to discuss this issue as well at some point. The pigeonholing of certain class concepts that makes people so hyper specialized that they suck at anything other than one very specific task. Tanks that take 10 years to kill an orc make no sense to me. Healers that die in 2 hits from trash seems excessively punitive. DPS that have no utility are boring. If someone chooses to completely and totally focus on nothing but being a damage sponge, that’s fine. But you shouldn’t have to completely give up all ability to deal damage just to be a good tank.
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TO GUSTOV:
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That is so frustrating. I’ve been in that same situation before, and it just drove me nuts. Very early on (when Karazhan was at its hardest), our raid guild got suck on the Curator in WoW for a few weeks. We just couldn’t take down the flares fast enough, and couldn’t do enough damage during mana-regen phase. As some of you know, there is a hard time cap on killing this boss. That’s another dumb, overused boss concept but I digress.
Then one of our guild members switched his priest to a shadow priest, ran a few 5 mans to gear up, and we rolled over the Curator with ease. Adding this ONE class (aka mana battery) completely transformed everything. We had read that a shadow priest was virtually required to win, but had foolishly tried to do it without one (since we didn’t have one). The utter inflexibility of the boss encounter made it so you pretty much had to forget about success if you didn’t bring this one specific class. Lame.
Right. I was engaging in a bit of hyperbole, but you saw through that and got the point. I’d rather spend more time on bosses and less on trash. Bosses can be fun, epic, and exciting when done well. Trash killing feels like doing my taxes.
I agree 100%. I liked their Badge of Justice system, but at the time the prot warrior stuff you could get with them was worthless. I think this was intentional, since they know limiting tank/healer effectiveness is the easiest way to limit progression… but again I digress.
I have read that they fleshed out that system more, and that’s encouraging. But in my opinion, ALL raid loot should work that way. You could either go with completely universal tokens (like Badges of Justice), or tokens based on that instance specifically. So you kill a boss in the Black Temple and everyone gets a Black Temple Token. Then you can go to an NPC and spend your Black Temple Tokens on loot from the Black Temple loot table.
Class based tokens (like the tier tokens) do indeed create some of the same problems. I remember there was a time running our raid guild that we actually had to change some of our roster decisions based on the tier token issue. It was something like all of our mages and warlocks had the tier 4 (something), so we had to make sure if we did a certain boss we had a hunter along. Otherwise if that token dropped it would be wasted. Having your roster decisions affected in this way is just stupid design.
I definitely plan to address this at some point with a post of its own. But briefly: customizing your house (this presents hundreds of hours of potential, but sadly Blizzard doesn’t feel like investing a tiny % of their massive income on this much requested feature), meaningful PvP, RP, global events (invasions, NPCs that would conquer conveniently located towns that you could take back), etc.
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TO KHAOSAI:
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I’m not sure making MUDs like Diablo is what I mean, unless you mean the fact that any group of classes could go out and find something fun to do in Diablo. If that’s your point then yes, I think that would be a better way to go.
I don’t mind the “Holy Trinity” concept. I don’t mind the base of a group being tank, healer, and dps. But it shouldn’t be that you need an exact, specific combination of classes to do things, or an exact number of dps or healers to do something, and if you try a different combination you’re hosed.
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TO OUTSIDER:
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This touches on a new mantra of mine that I want to write about at some point as well: PLAYERS *ARE* CONTENT.
Player generated content is virtually limitless. Give players the tools to create content for each other and content for themselves. I don’t mean NWN dungeon making type stuff, I mean things they can do to create interesting fun stuff to do with other people. PvP, RvR, and RP are good examples. But they need to be meaningful. Battlegrounds and Arenas are fun and all, but they lack meaning. Once the BG ends, it means nothing. RvR was awesome in DAoC because it mattered to the game world. Taking bases in Tabula Rasa was awesome because it mattered.
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TO AMUNEKATENON :
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A lot to respond to here. I am going to reserve this response for a new comment.
TO Amunekatenon :
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Btw… thanks for posting. You gave me a lot to think about and talk about.
I believe I remember that early raid guild that started releasing strategies like that. I seem to remember a huge controversy when Blizzard punished them for “exploiting” in Molten Core, but all they were doing was using warlock summon to skip some trash (they’d summon the guy who aggroed a boss, and the boss would come to them without aggroing trash, if I recall).
That may be how things started, but honestly the situation would be even worse if there were no online strategies for these bosses. The raid encounters are so arbitrary and illogical in their design, the alternative would be every single guild having to wipe for weeks or months on an encounter to figure out what random combination of weird abilities/standing positions were needed to win.
To use a very basic example: most of the Opera events (while moderately fun, to be honest) would make NO SENSE AT ALL if you just stumbled in there on your own without reading a strategy. How would you know that Romeo and Juliet had to be killed within 10 or so seconds of each other for them to stay dead? There really aren’t any hints about it at all. And how would you know that the lion was the first boss in a thousand raid bosses to be fearable? Why do fire spells make the scarecrow run around instead of just burning him to a crisp? And how in the heck would you figure out the totally random situation that is the Big Bad Wolf event? It is not like they stick to the lore when they borrow from real world stories. And its not like you can rust the tin man.
I think this presents an inaccurate and negative view of what casual players want. Casual players want their gaming time to be meaningful, even if their time comes in short doses. And by short, I mean less than 3 hours at a time. This shouldn’t be something people have to lobby for. Games should be designed to be enjoyable without a 1-2 hour warm up time every time you login.
The distinction you should make here is between raiders and non-raiders. I have no idea when “raid content” of the type that exists in games somehow became the only legitimate challenge in a game. To be honest, I find raid content pretty easy compared to DAoC RvR, figuring out how to efficiently level up/grind, building a name for yourself as a crafter, and many other aspects of MMOs. For most members of a raid group, being a good raider is little more than paying attention and pressing the 1 button really fast. The raid leader, the main tank, the main healer, and occasionally the puller (when the puller is not the main tank, which is rare due to idiotic class design in modern MMOs) are the only ones truly getting pushed to the limit skill wise. And even then, a lot of what they do is pretty rote.
I disagree because non-raiders don’t want to raid. They don’t care how hard or easy you make it. They simply don’t enjoy being one ant in a colony swarming over a raid boss. I don’t really get a thrill from being 1 guy in 25 taking on content. I enjoy teams of 2-8 players a LOT more. In smaller groups, each member is required to do a lot more. Their jobs and roles often overlap as well, so people can pick up the slack from each other and help each other out. It is possible for a single person to do something heroic and save the group from a wipe. That’s awesome. That’s fun.
What’s not fun is clearing trash, engaging a boss, and then Raid Member #38 doesn’t press button #2 at precisely 2 minutes into the encounter and thus the raid wipes and they start over.
What non-raiders want is an alternate path to the same quality of content that has the same reward to effort ratio. Here’s some basic math that never made sense to be.
Assume 25 people who raid for 4 hours get 10 epics (they also get a bunch of rares along the way). That’s 100 man hours for 10 epics. That’s 1 epic per 10 man hours.
If 5 people do an instance for 2 hours, that is 10 man hours. They get 3-6 rares. Shouldn’t that yield ONE epic of equal quality to one of the 10 the raid group got?
If not, why not?
The reality is that each member of that 5 man group probably worked a lot harder, put in more effort, and used a lot more skill than a single member of that 25 man raid group. In that 4 hour raid, at least 20 of those 25 people probably only paid full attention for maybe 30-60 minutes of that entire 4 hours. In the 5 man group, all 5 had to pay attention for pretty much the whole time.
Yes, I can see this in moderation and when it is logical. Giant Flame Elemental bosses should be immune to fire (or have huge fire resistance). An ancient warrior of legendary weapon skill should be immune to disarm. That’s fine. But in most modern MMO raid encounters, they just go berserk with the immunities. They don’t think about the boss they designed and figure out what sorts of weaknesses and immunities would be logical. They just get a laundry list of the most effective and popular abilities people rely on, and pick 50-80% of them and make the boss immune. Yes, a few immunities end up making sense, but that’s almost just random chance rather than planning. So the first time you engage one of these raid bosses, you spend half your time firing off abilities just to make a list of which ones work and which don’t. That’s dumb.
We have a slight misunderstanding here. I am not decrying the fact that boss AI is scripted. It has to be. Unless you program a self-aware AI (and please don’t, that’s scary), then your boss has to use some type of script to act.
What I meant was I hate when the PLAYERS have to follow a specific script and cannot diverge from it lest they fail completely. I don’t like it when I feel just as scripted as the NPCs I am fighting.
This is totally the way to go imho - and not the tier token system, but more like the Badge of Justice. But from what I have read, no MMO is going to this type of loot system primarily. They just throw it in as an add on with the “Real Loot” following the same old, annoying, lame method of distribution.
The thing is, the overwhelming majority of MMO gamers don’t like raiding. I’ve seen Blizzard release stats on how many people raid, and it generally falls between 5% and 10%. I remember Nick Yee using WoW Armory to do some analysis of how many people had at least one raid epic on their level 70 character, and his results showed it was even lower.
So most people don’t really like raiding, and yet that is the only type of PvE content major MMO developers are focusing on. This is a ridiculous producer-to-consumer disconnect.
If 90-95% of your customers don’t raid, why is the only substantial content you produce for your game a new raid dungeon every 2-3 months? That’s asinine.
Raiding is a minor feature enjoyable by a small percentage of the gaming population that has gotten WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY too much attention and developer priority. The problem is, the hardcore “lifers” that dominate game forums tend to be in that 5-10% who like raiding. So they berate anyone who shows up saying “hey, how about something besides more raid dungeons? I don’t like to raid.” The inevitable response is “shut up noob, you just suck at the game.” Well most of these MMOs are painfully, laughably easy. So these raider types should get off their high horse. I’d like to see them play some old school MUDs where every time you die you lose half your xp… not current xp, half the xp you ever gained with that character. They’d run home crying to mommy and jump into a nice, comfortable, scripted raid, begging the raid leader to tell them exactly what to do next.
Wow what a long post and ugly post.
Personally, I dont think you’ve made a clear case for anything. You’ve just vomited your cynicysm, arrogance, frustration and superiority all over your blog. I think your comments are largely irrelevant, and I shudder with disgust at the internal state of your mind, that you would feel compelled to rip something apart so viciously.
How can you be so vicious and angry about a LEISURE activity that you CHOOSE to participate in? Dont you think that’s insane?
(Unless your post is some kind of clever parody of self importantant blogger irrelevancy. In which case I’ve entirely misread you, and you’ve done a fantastic job. I apologise)
I came here from a link you left somewhere. I shall not be returning. Next time you leave a link on someone else’s innocent, happy, flower filled wow blog, please leave a warning that you are a frustrated arrogant nitwit.
YUCK
I see we have just been visited by one of those 5-10% lifers who can’t hack truly challenging content where you think for yourself instead of just obeying a barking raid leader. God forbid there be people out there who think this heavily scripted, raid-centric end game concept is not for them.
By the way John (in case you do some back and check), this post was flagged from the beginning with the “Arrogance” category. That is one of my blog categories. So calling my post arrogant is kinda pointless, since I already labeled it as such. My internal definition for the arrogance category reads:
I wish John had addressed the issue, because it might have been interesting to read his viewpoint. If there are flaws in my analysis or argument, I enjoy having someone point them out. It gives me the opportunity to improve my analysis and in the long run make better games.
“Sure, you don’t have to use raid walkthroughs, but you have to be masochistic not to.”
I think this is a failure on the part of the player and a self-inflicted negative experience. Figuring out how it works is a huge part of the fun. I think of it like this. If you go buy a box of Betty Crocker, follow the directions, and then bake a cake - you haven’t really baked a cake. You just combined the ingredients and got something suspiciously similar to cake, but it’s absolutely nothing like a truly home made (i.e. figured it out yourself) cake. The former is bland and uninspired. The latter is heavenly and memorable.
“Frank, the raid leader, has to constantly bark commands over Teamspeak/Ventrilo to make sure nobody get distracted from the raid and does something foolish like trim their nails for some excitement.”
That’s a very poorly run raid where the leadership does not trust their group. It may sound organized because one person is barking orders, but, in reality, 99% of the raid is bored stupid while one person does all the thinking. Raiding organicly is far more interesting and fun. This usually happens after a group has gone through several run throughs with the barking leaders. Sadly, this fun is fleeting because it usually takes a large number of run throughs to achieve this familiarity, and, by that time, most of the group is bored with the encounter.
“An hour of killing trash for the “reward” of a 10 minute, scripted boss battle is like suffering through a root canal for the reward of a prostate exam.”
I don’t mind the trash mobs, but there should be alternative ways to clear them. The brute force method should absolutely work, but there should also be more subtle methods like stealth. Giving players a variety of ways to face challenges creates interest and fun. The problem, in my opinion, dates all the way back to Zork. Each room was an exercise in figuring out exactly what words to type to solve the riddle despite the fact the answer is obvious - that’s frustrating and bad design.
“There is no room for error or improvisation.”
I’ll take your word for it on WoW with this. In EQ, there was a large mixture of raids. Some were highly scripted and required highly orchestrated action while others were far more forgiving. A lot of that slide factor from wipe to forgiveness rode strongly on the quality of the raid group. Better groups could recover from mistakes that would wipe lesser groups. That is a great reflection of skill and teamwork which I always enjoyed. It’s a shame that isn’t happening in WoW.
“I have fought bosses who did incredibly ridiculous things that were clearly designed solely with the idea of nullifying a specific class, tactic, or ability for no logical reason other than the devs thought it would be funny.”
Many devs have confused frustration with difficulty. I guess it’s a fine line that is easy to cross.
“Loot.”
Yes, you will definitely need a post or three dedicated to just this topic. Itemization and distribution are massive challenges to developers. How do you create a meaningful distribution system that adequately rewards participants without creating huge item farms? It’s a tough nut to crack.
“Raid encounters have very strict requirements for the classes you need and the numbers you need.”
I’m not sure this is a function of raiding as much as a function of classes. After all, if you narrowly define my class role to be damage, then what am I to really do in a larger encounter? Broadly defined classes lead to broadly defined roles. Open systems naturally stratify into these roles anyhow, but it’s very nice to have the freedom to let people fall into the roles they choose as the game develops; as opposed to locking them into a role ala a hastily made creation decision.
Sentinel
Exactly. Unfortunately, most modern MMO raiding isn’t like that. There is no room for improv or figuring things out on the fly. Trying to do that will be a wipefest.
Now, I don’t mind dying to a boss many times to figure it out in general. But it isn’t this simple in WoW, AoC, and other more recent MMOs.
In these MMOs, you wipe to a boss and you are very likely to have an hour of trash respawns to clear again.
In these MMOs, if things are going poorly there is rarely an “evac” or a “reset” so you can pull back, regroup, and change tactics.
As frightening and amazing as it might sound, “raiding” in City of Heroes is actually better designed than it is in WoW/AoC/etc. Trash doesn’t reset, so if you wipe to a “raid” encounter you can come back to the boss (the only exception I can think of in CoX is the Arachnos Flyer, but that’s a constant threat, not a specific trash respawn). If things are going poorly, you can retreat and try something new. And if you do wipe, you aren’t hosed out of super expensive (both in gold and time) consummables that you used on that last attempt.
That’s because EQ (and MMOs from the same generation, DAoC, UO, and MUDs) were far better designed. Skill was a HUGE factor. Skill could save the day. Skill could turn a wipe into a success. The same is not true of the current generation of raids: WoW, AoC, etc.
I think you are right here. WoW has terrible class design (so does Age of Conan), which impacts their raid design as well.
People’s roles are so incredibly specialized that you need an exact combination of classes to do anything. There is very little room for alteration in class config. This is yet another flaw in the current generation of MMOs and thus in the current generation’s raid design.
Thanks for posting Sentinel!
WoW is all about gear, ask people in those raiding guilds how many are really playing for content. Once people get a full set of T6 they drop out and role another character. Your level of gear determines your proximity to “end-game”, “end” as in the end of your interest in improving your character. I don’t imagine anyone would run around all day living their life in WoW, most people play it to get uber gear. That’s why you see people getting power leveled to 70 and hit Kara in all green to dress up. No one in all honesty is going to be content in rag-looking gear and getting obliterated in PvP.
Sorry, said all that before getting to the point, which is why raid encounters are designed to be almost impossible if you don’t maximize the effectiveness of your group. If it is that easy to gear up your character everyone would have tried every single class and unsubscribed by now. Game companies need to feed their people so they have to put road blocks on progression and give them breathing room to develop more. The fantasy world of a game is built on rules governing the real world, however illogical it seems to the player.
Regarding raid boss being immune to alot of abilities, that could be very frustrating at first because you feel a certain degree of flexibility has been taken away. But to really think about it, which key skills are you not able to use on a boss? Fear, CC, movement reduction, casting speed reduction, interrupt? I’m not sure if I left anything out, but of all the above, if a player could really utilize all these abilities then every single boss would be tanked by a kiting shaman, you might as well bench all the tanks. I think the bosses are designed so that you really need a combination of players to finish it so you can’t have say a group of 25 rogues and stun the boss to death.
I do agree with you about the monotonic fighting during bosses though. For example mage and warlock could be so boring, that if you look at Recount after a boss fight, you’ll see a total of 2-3 skills being used the entire time, and one of them accounting for 95% of the damage delt. These class would actually enjoy some trash waves in between bosses so they can workout their other 3 fingers. This is extreme of course, but pretty often in end-game. You’ve got give the developers credit that they didn’t make the encounters any more complex because only this way they’re able to attract people of all ages/sex into this game, this is smart.
The real solution would be creating some content so that players can feel accomplished without entering a raid. I know they’re coming out with the achievement system in wotlk, but I think that’s bs, a line of text showing on your head is not good enough for hours of hard work. There has to be something a player can show to others in order to satisfy the materialistic nature of people. But on the other hand, you have to carefully tune the balance between all aspects of end-game. Like now, that PvP and PvE gears are pretty much tiered in the same fashion in stats and design, so that neither group feels inferior.
If you want one game to suit the interest of all people and at the same time make everyone feel successful, that’s one tough job. Human psychology does not permit that, for most, satisfaction develops under the feeling of being superior.
Crack: Thanks for visiting and posting!
This is the modern belief, but the history of online gaming shows it is not true. People will stay with a game for many years if there are compelling things to do, a good community, and FUN to be had.
Threshold is a game my company created. It is over 12 years old, and I am the first to admit that in many areas of gameplay it shows its age. But we have customers that have played for 10+ years. It certainly isn’t for the uber loot (every 6-8 weeks when the game reboots, all gear is wiped). They play for the community, the role play, the ongoing story, etc. It is very possible to make games that are about a lot more than an “end game” that will eventually expire.
The sad thing is, it isn’t that extreme. You are pretty much on. Rogues use a couple more buttons. Tanks MAYBE use a few more. And now healers will be back to 2-3 buttons with downranking eliminated from WoW.
If it was so smart, more than 5-10% of their customers would be raiding.
WoW is a huge success because it is accessible, looks nice, and has a lot of 1->69 content. They have proven to the industry that those things alone will deliver success. But the fact that they invest 90% of their development resources into content for the top 5-10% is ludicrous.
I agree. I read about that and thought “Wtf? That’s it? Just a title? LOL.” Even City of Heroes did a better job with their similar badges/achievements.
Why do you think that just because 5%-10% of players have raid-epics that the other players don’t/wouldn’t have fun raiding? They didn’t ask the players now did they?
Maybe its because most players don’t have the time to commit to raiding, just maybe? Maybe its the grind you have to do in order to be able to participate in raids (fraction-reputation or pvp-grind in order to get THAT trinket or just gold for the buff-foods/flasks …).
I don’t know where the 5-10% of players raid came from. If you could link the source I would appreciate it.
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Well I tried to do some number crunching myself to figure out the percentage of players who raid.
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Raiding players are those who do instances that require 10 players or more, so Karazhan and up. End game is when you reach the level cap (level 70).
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There are more than 10,000,000 subscribers in WoW. [source] That is including accounts owned by: Gold Farmers, Gold Sellers, accounts for those lvl 1 characters that spam general chat with gold ads, players who aren’t 70 yet and *can’t* raid yet, and even accounts created just for the zebra mount.
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There are 4,200,000 players listed on WoWJutsu with gear from raiding instances. [source] That is including characters that are alts from a shared account. WoWJutsu gets their stats from parsing data from the WoWArmory, and currently only lists US/EU data.
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From this information, the raiding populaton is more than 5-10%. The information I collect isn’t 100% correct of course. And there might be stats posted by Blizzard that I don’t know about. So forgive me if I’m wrong.
The source of the 5-10% number was from Blizzard on numerous occasions. It was in their own releases so many times that it has become an accepted data point in the academic MMORPG arena.
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Nick Yee, a pretty well known member of the MMORPG academic community did his own study as well that verified this estimate.
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Those numbers sound about right for the 5-10% raiding population. Every raider I knew had at least 3-5 character they had taken on at least a few raids. Some have as many as 8 characters that have at least one piece of raid gear. And I quit a year ago, so the number of characters PER RAIDER with a piece of raid gear has only grown. Keep in mind that 10,000,000 subcribers translates to as much as 80,000,000 characters. If you only assume the average is 6 characters made per account, that’s 60,000,000 characters. So 4,200,000 *characters* with a piece of raid gear makes for right around 7% of accounts with a piece of raid gear.
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And that’s just people with a SINGLE piece of raid gear. Keep in mind that some of those people are those who went on a couple raids, thought it sucked, and stopped. Look at the huge drop off on WoWJutsu. 98% of raiders have at least done Karazhan (obvious). But only 47% have even made it to Gruuls! And just 3% have made it to Sunwell. So if the raiding population is 7% of total population, and 3% of those made it to Sunwell, this means they invested enormous resources into creating the Sunwell instance for a whopping .21% of their population. Well that’s just a BRILLIANT investment of resources (not!).
The 5-10% figure is central to the discussion, yet again.
Tuna’s numbers are far more compelling then Cambio’s oft-repeated quotes from work he didn’t do, taken from sources he can’t confirm.
[quote]If you only assume the average is 6 characters made per account, that’s 60,000,000 characters.[/quote]
If you’re forced to assume that the MAJORITY of the WoW population have over 5 level 70 alts to support your position then it’s time to rethink it.
Yes the percentage of CHARACTERS that raid might be 5-10%, but the percentage of ACCOUNTS and PEOPLE who raid are much higher (if we are still using the information I found).
Well, you’re looking at it backwards. More characters have raided than accounts. It is impossible for there to be more raiding accounts than characters. Since even if you only raid with 1 character that means 1 raiding account and 1 raiding character.
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Most serious raiders have taken MULTIPLE characters into raid dungeons and thus they have multiple characters with at least 1 piece of raid gear.
One more thing: when talking about the raid population, what is actually relevant is people that actively raid. People that have popped into Karazhan a time or two are not raiders. The fact that such people might have 1 or 2 pieces of raid loot actually inflates the numbers of “raiders.”
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That’s why the actual raiding population may be even LOWER than 5-10%. That’s what is kinda scary when you think about the fact that Blizzard invests almost all of their new content resources towards creating new raid instances.
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I mean look at those Black Temple and Sunwell numbers. That’s pathetic. The enormous amount of time and effort put into creating those instances was definitely a waste.
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The same was true of Naxx. Naxx was such a waste even Blizzard chose to recycle it for use in WotLK.
After serious pressure to back up his 5-10% figure, Cambios decides to raise the bar into the “Raider” club instead.
I see where this is going…
Doh! Apparently I fail at blockquotes. If you could fix that in my last comment, I had something to say about Sunwell and such.
I was looking at it like this. One player (person), one account, correct? There are 10 million accounts according to wow. 4.2 million characters are raiders according to wowjutsu. Say the average player has 3 characters. So the 4.2 million characters only belonged to 1.4 million players. That is 14% of all US/EU accounts that raid.
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Now there are many many many variables that will affect the numbers a lot. First off, we don’t know how many level 70s people I have. Some only have one (like me), and there are some who have 7 level 70s. Do you count accounts that are owned by Gold Farmers, and Gold Sellers? You know they don’t raid. WoWJutsu only keeps track of US/EU players, so none of the Asian or other accounts are being accounted for, but still count towards the 10 million worldwide total.
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I think there are a good percentage of raiders (people who raids, not characters that raid), but a really low percentage of “End Game Raiding”.
Yeah, it’s a bit tough to glean indisputable info from the numbers. However, the less than 10% does pop up quite often, but it may not mean anything.
Regardless of how many players do raid, I still think it’s a crappy end-game focus. Look how many people listened to The Back Street Boys, numbers may bring in money, but they don’t indicate quality or satisfaction.
I came across this player’s two copper while I was reading up on Nick Yee’s statistics…
http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/000858.php?page=4
Now that sounds like fun end-game, more players are involved, and it’s definitely more dynamic. Seems like the developers can do a lot more for the game outside of re-hashing Naxx, and implementing new instances.
Just stumbled upon this. Pretty good read and I mostly agree. The amount of time/effort/drama/money (both real and virtual) needed to clear 25/40 man raids in WoW, versus the tiny amount of loot rewarded is really broken.
There should be quests that reward 1 nice loot item, PER CLASS, that you get ONCE, in addition to random drops. After you get your guaranteed item that’s actually useful to your class, it’s up to you to roll the dice and grind out more gear.
It’s awful that players feel they need to experience this content instead of just rolling a new class and learning to play a new class.
Not that end-game raiding is a bad idea, it’s just executed poorly. It shouldn’t take weeks of wiping just to orchestrate a victory against a senseless raid boss encounter. A team of well versed, decently equipped players should be able to maybe struggle through a few wipes but eventually figure it out. Is it a bad thing if it takes you 3 months to level a character to 70 (theoretically), and another 5 months to ultimately complete everything task a game has to offer? No. There’s other games out there! In fact I wish I could experience more of them myself.
But since Blizzard is taking TWO YEARS to develop more content, I can see why people are resorting to the nuts-to-the-cheese-grater process that is end-game raiding.
[b]Northern[/b], I don’t see you providing any evidence that significantly more than 5-10% of the WoW population are raiders. And yet every attempt made by various sources all tend to boil down to this same number.
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Occam’s Razor would seem to lead us to believe that if most analysis all points to the same number range, it is likely that the number range is accurate or at least close to accurate.
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If you think you can provide any kind of data to show that 20%, 40%, or even 50% of WoW players raid, go for it. I’d really be interested to hear it.
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But I’ll ask this: if the raiding population was indeed more significant than the 5-10% estimate that Blizzard released years ago, and other sources have deduced through various metrics, why hasn’t Blizzard piped up? They have everything to gain by releasing such information, as it would justify their whole development plan of adding a new raid dungeon every 3 months and doing little else.
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At a game conference in Paris recently they slipped up and revealed how positively TINY their staff is for the non-loot parts of the game - holiday events and various fun things. If would behoove them to release data that large % of their population raids if this was indeed the truth. Their silence just adds to the reliability of the 5-10% estimate.
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[b]Mbw[/b]: Welcome and thank you for commenting. I agree with what you wrote. I don’t like the design concept that even highly skilled players who play together all the time should be expected to wipe repeatedly for weeks or months to down a boss. That kind of design means the boss is not about skill, but about some kind of marionette like script following that is not my idea of fun or engaging gameplay.
[q]Just stumbled upon this. Pretty good read and I mostly agree. The amount of time/effort/drama/money (both real and virtual) needed to clear 25/40 man raids in WoW, versus the tiny amount of loot rewarded is really broken…
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…But since Blizzard is taking TWO YEARS to develop more content, I can see why people are resorting to the nuts-to-the-cheese-grater process that is end-game raiding.[/q]
It sounds as if you last played WoW either shortly before BC or shortly after BC came out (something which I sense that is the case with the majority of the posters involved with this thread and similar ones). I do apologize if I am incorrect in my assumption, but I do not believe a current player who put thought to raid design in MMO’s would make these statements, especially if they kept up with content changes.
Since WoW Classic, raid design has improved substantially, with several shifts, including redesign of raid stacking/class balance, encounter design, encounter difficulty and encounter size.
Naxxramas was the last 40 man instance implemented and all instances since have been 5 man instances (with a normal and Heroic difficulty), 10 man raid instances (Karazhan and Zul’Aman) and 25 man raid instances. In Wrath of the Lich King, all new 25 man encounters will have 10 man versions and 5 man instances will be available again. Raid saving was another feature that became very prevalent in BC, which allows players to take instances and raids in chunks. This will allow more players to experience raid content without having to be “srs bizness” raiders.
Loot has also improved since WoW Classic, with set tokens and Badges of Justice (a currency acquired by killing bosses in Heroic/Raid instance used to purchase high quality gear) being implemented. It is set to improve once again in Wrath when itemazation is changed so that more classes will be able to make use of the same loot/items. This means that while the armor piece that dropped in this instance may be optimal for class a, class b will still be able to make use of it.
Instance and raid difficulty has become more intuitive, in my opinion, allowing players to experience a fight a moderate amount of times before they are able to work out their strategy. It is a totally different situation if, even with a strategy, worked out, the players are unable to execute it. In my experience, the majority of players that believe themselves to be “well-versed and decently equipped” are in fact, not either. Especially if you are not getting the encounter down within a few attempts, provided a sound and executable strategy. The majority of encounter released are doable by players and Blizzard has redesigned encounters if they see that it is too difficult for the majority of players. I think that is good business and good design.
A lot of what has been spoken about in this thread and similar ones was at one time right. I emphasize -at one time- What sets WoW, and Blizzard, apart from most MMO’s is the ability to improve on what they have. They have done this and continue to do this.
On a last note:
[q]But since Blizzard is taking TWO YEARS to develop more content, I can see why people are resorting to the nuts-to-the-cheese-grater process that is end-game raiding.[/q]
They have actually released a substantial amount of content since the release of the Burning Crusade. For example:
Halloween/Headless Horseman Encounter
Festival of Fire/Lord Ahune Encounter
Zul’Aman
Black Temple
Sunwell Plateau
Dustwallow Marsh/Theramore Isle/Mudsprocket expansion
They have recently announced a “pre-Wrath” content expansion to get the game world ready for Wrath of the Lich King, adding a harbor area in Stormwind, Barbershops and related features and other new zone additions. I could continue listing new content, but then I would have enough for an expansion the size offered by your average MMO. =)
I’m not sure if it’s entirely true that the development resources are dedicated almost exclusively to raid content. Sunwell Plateau was released at the same time as Magister’s Terrace - is there any information available on how many people have been through that?
Can’t really argue with the suggestion that it’s disproportionate at any rate though, at time of writing 168 of the 97,815 guilds Wowjutsu tracks (that is, guilds which have made it at least half way through Karazhan) have cleared Sunwell Plateau. I’m obviously unsure as to why this fraction even of the most hardcore players is targeted to such an extent by Blizzard - possibly the game’s industry is still adapting to the fact being a gamer doesn’t imply being hardcore anymore.
Rob, I wonder the same thing. And yes, the point is that the attention devoted to raid content is disproportionate. I don’t think anyone was seriously saying WoW does literally NOTHING else. The problem is the non-raid content is a pittance compared to the enormous time and money they devote to more raid content - content that is barely seen by their customers. 168 of 97,815 guilds is 1.7%. That’s atrocious.
As a current guild leader in the game World of Warcraft, I can definitely see your points here. For me, I do raiding foremost for the experience of seeing the content, and exploring the story, and any loot is merely a happy consequence. I joined this game after the Burning Crusade expansion was released (WAY after). I found it almost impossible to find people to go with me to the “old school” raids, like Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, even simple ones like Upper Blackrock Spire. Part of the reason I designed my own guild was to be able to see ALL content, not just what was currently considered the end of the end.
From my raiding experience thus far, I find old-school raids more fun actually than the current endgame for many of the reasons you mentioned that flaw them. Due to the level cap being 10 levels higher than what these encounters were designed for, tactics almost go out the window, you no longer are restricted to HAVE to be absolutely perfect in every regard, because your DPS can take a hit, even your healers can survive a quick beating, you have time to react, and you don’t need a top of the line computer to be able to have that insanely fast reaction time either.
The community as a whole bugs me, I think partly due to this flawed design of “endgame”. I also much prefered the classic style of where you could acquire gear via questing…. Epic quest chains fascinate me, I love the feeling that you go through a majorly epic story arc, culminating in an epic, or several epic battles, and ultimately rewarding awesome epics… it has both an epic experience to enjoy, and a GUARENTEED reward at the end, but unfortunately in the expansion, these type of quests are very rare or simply not to be found, and the awesome crafting recipes are now never the reward of a quest, but instead are a random drop from a certain instance.
I have a newborn son, whom I watch while my g/f works, and I simply cannot do anything that requires a 3-4 hour time commitment in WoW due to that, my life comes first, unfortunately I also feel that I am almost stuck. In WoW you can only gear up so much before the only upgrades are available within raiding.
I could continue on this tirade for awhile, but a lot of it is simply re-iterating what you already said. What I would like to see though, is not only the grievances of the current system, but suggestions for suitable alternatives.
I am primarily a veteran of single player RPGs, and so I am accustomed to being able to achieve a certain level of epicness solely on the merits of my own gameplay skill and effort put in. Raiding has become a rythymn game on par with Dance Dance Revolution, that forces you to set a new high score each time.
Vicera: Thanks for posting and welcome!
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You hit the nail on the head as far as WoW and raiding are concerned.
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I often thought about taking a 10 man team of 70s to try out some of the old raids. The problem was always a combination of interest and my own limited game time that meant I had to make the most of it.
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It really is a shame that the game is so massively focused on the gear grind that you literally feel like you are wasting your time doing anything “for fun.” I would probably enjoy taking my level 70s back to old content just to see it and enjoy it. But then I’d know I was always “falling behind”.
I happened across your site, and I felt I had to chime in. I played a Protection Warrior for a while, and did some raiding pre-BC, just into Molten Core and starting to touch Black Wing Lair. Then after BC did some raiding in Karazhan, before the leaders in the guild went their separate ways and we decided that without the awesome people we enjoyed raiding with, the game was just eating too much of our time with grinding to be ready to do stuff, instead of just doing stuff.
My brother and I, as well as other friends of ours who have also quit the game like us, all agree that the most fun we had were hanging out, having fun with people while doing stuff successfully, or at least moderately so. The Five-Man instances, where you could get a small intimate group of friends or people you’ve gotten to know online together and do something that really required each of you to play creatively, and allowed you to play flexibly, were probably the best part of the game in our experience.
You had interesting challenges that had to be adaptable to different class types, since with only five you couldn’t have all of them, and they were generally designed to be, on non-Heroic, fairly easy to beat. Which meant that we could get a basic feel for the dungeon with a run or two, then come back later and do it on Heroic, which required much more planning about how to precisely do it, and was very intellectually stimulating.
As for PvP… as a Protection Warrior I HATED, absolutely LOATHED, that I had signed up on a PvP realm (was glad it was RP though, after having seen the absolutely painful names on other servers). When I signed up for it originally it claimed that there were some PvP areas, with areas of non-PvP to adventure in as well. That held true for the first 10-15 levels… then became an utter lie. The fact that Prot Warriors were basically the red-headed stepchild of PvP didn’t help things any either.
As a Warlock, however, PvP was fun and interesting. I could, with minimum gear, regularly top the damage charts in Battlegrounds that he joined, and I hadn’t done the nearly the degree of “twinking” of his equipment that most did. Skill at lower level, where grinding Raid level equipment wasn’t necessary, since there was a set of “best” equipment at that level, became a determining factor. I wasn’t about to become a High Warlord (a whole ‘nother discussion in and of itself) but it was fun.
The point of saying all that? It seems to me that WoW is beginning to learn from some of these early mistakes and correct them. They have improved what is available from five-mans, with the badges, and they have been, it seems, been moving to do similar things with larger raids as well. As for narrowly defined classes that severerly limited what you could do - as a Prot Warrior I couldn’t even do solo PvE very well since my damage output was gimped to be able to Raid Tank - they seem to be moving away from that in a big, and good, way.
They have really gone to some lengths to make sure that it is possible to substitute one tank for another and make it possible to have different make ups of the groups, specifically saying that they are trying to avoid situations where you have to have one skill or the raid dies, while rewarding you by making it a little easier if you do happen to have that one at that moment. Balanced across a dungeon with several bosses, that means that each group will have an encounter that is easier, another that is harder. And they are finally realizing that PvP is something that everyone enjoys… when they are capable of it.
Player created content is a huge draw, as players can surprise you in ways no computer can, and when everyone has a roughly even set of abilities, which seems possible with the Arena ranking system in theory if you play an evenly ranked team, you could probably have a great time.
As for 40 man content… I just want to close by saying that I liked it. There was a lot of fun to be had hanging out with people talking in the tank chat, or holding a side conversation while people sorted things out, getting a little bit of down time, and I really like encounters where each person had a vital role to play… as long as there was a little slack so that if someone disconnected or if one of the people in your raids just didn’t quite get it, it wasn’t going to spoil the entire evening.
I’m probably going to log onto a friends account to check out the new content, and maybe I’ll come back to it, if it’s everything they’re promising it to be. If I can find some friends who’ll enjoy it as much as I do… because just joining a raiding guild for the sake of raiding is no fun. Sure, if I had 40 close buddies in an apartment building maybe, that would be awesome, but it just doesn’t work out that way, even with a much smaller 10 man. How often can you get your friends together to see a movie, let alone spend 4 hours on raiding. Give me more accessible content, and equal man-hours with equal reward, when the dungeons demand equivalent skill.
That’s my two cents, with interest.
I agree 100%. I had an enormous fun doing 5 mans both pre-BC and post-BC. There were no lockouts, no 3-4 hour time commitments, no absolute class requirements, and a lot more ability to just have fun. Now, a few of their annoying raid-concepts did start to creep into 5 mans (like DPS speed test bosses that meant you had to always bring 3 DPS), but those were not as widespread as they are in raids. Think about how many more awesome, fun 5 mans they could have made instead of raid dungeons for the top 1-2% of their population.
No kidding. I played a prot warrior as my main, and PvP was a joke. The only thing that was occasionally fun was Alterac Valley, because at least there were things a prot warrior could do. It was more like DAoC PvP, in which almost all class roles had the ability to contribute in a very meaningful way. In DAoC, you could actually “tank” by putting your guard and protect abilities on a healer (or other support character), and defending him/her from attackers. But in WoW, no such mechanics exist.
But the prot warrior still sucks at everything else. So they are taking away the one thing they had going for them, and giving them nothing real in return.
I agree. But there is none in WoW. That’s why player housing and guild halls would be a great, long awaited addition. I have a feeling this won’t happen until competition from another MMO forces them to actually dip into their mountain of gold to reinvest a little in their cash cow.
Thank you for visiting and sharing your own experiences, feedback, and views. Please visit often and speak up!
With regard to going back to old content, I find this an interesting thought; that sometimes the most enjoyment can be gleaned from not doing what the game actually wants you to.
Certainly the most fun I have had playing World of Warcraft was going through old instances with only 2 people, being challenged at each step but not insurmountably so, being, I suppose, able to set our own level of challenge rather than face some arbitrary trial by fire.
A close second was rushing through Ironforge as a Horde with the same guildie, and getting to the Stockade via the Tram - just doing something _different_, that lacks reason or reward, and satisfies at least partly for that very reason.
[b]Rob[/b]: Thanks for visiting and posting (I don’t recall if you’ve posted before).
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I completely agree that one of the most fun things to do in any online game is to “make your own fun.” Thinking of things you want to do, goals you set for yourself, etc. are always more interesting and more visceral than the game’s goals.
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It is therefore incumbent upon the developers to give you things to do. These are often called “sandbox” elements. They are game features that do not have any express purpose, but are open ended enough to be usable by players for expressing their creativity.
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This is another area where player housing comes in. Lets say you decide to collect something. Maybe they are items that have no game purpose. An example was a friend of mine in WoW (Nex) who wanted to collect every cat pet in the game. He had a lot of fun with it, but it was somewhat empty since he couldn’t really show it off. He had a bank full of cats (I think it was like 30+ cats), but nobody could see.
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If he had a house, he could put all his pets in there and display them. People could come over to his house and think “holy crap, this dwarven paladin really likes cats.”
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Developers should never hesitate to make fun little things even if they cannot foresee the direct game use of the item, feature, or thing. Given enough tools, players will amaze you with the fun and interesting things they can come up with.
Wow. What a long, and unexpectedly rewarding read this was. I unexpectedly found a link to this particular post on WoWWiki whilst browsing (ironically enough) for info about the pre-BC raid instances. A number of excellent points have been made about raiding, and what i’d like to add is this:
If you take a step back from the ‘flawed system’ arguement you are making (and i’ll certainly agree that it has its flaws - without hesitation) you will realize that there are essentially only two types of players in WoW. The large bulk, and i won’t quibble about numbers because i find it somewhat irrelevant, are the casuals. These are players that enjoy the ’sandbox’ aspect of the game.
The obvious minority is the hardcore raiders. These players race eachother through new content in order to say they did it before anyone else.
While i understand the point you make about WoW “catering” to these players by devoting supposedly massive resources to new raid instances, my viewpoint is as such:
Blizz HAS to cater to those players. Casuals don’t care about new endgame because they are amusing themselves collecting cats, perfecting dungeons, exploring old content, etc. But the raiders are racing through content as fast as Blizz can release it. As a game developer yourself, i’ll ask this: What would happen to your business if 5-10% of your subscriber base suddenly vanished? At 10 million subscribers, this figure would have Blizz losing between half a million and a million subscribers. That is an unseemly number of customers for any corporation to lose.
I’ll also point out that Sunwell was not released in and of itself. At the same time, there was a whole new area of the world opened up. The introduction of a whole new series of daily quests (certainly requiring no hardcore raid gear to accomplish) and a new five man instance. They also released new badge gear, a whole new faction to acquire rep with and tweaked several minor issues of class balance, etc. So in all actuality, how much of their resources were devoted to Sunwell? One new raid instance, and MONTHS of new content for the casual and semi-casual player.
Several of the points you make are well-founded about how Blizz could diversify and improve their content, and if it would help, i’d very enthusiastically add my voice to those of any others asking for it. Unfortunately, the vitriol in which they are encased will likely have them falling on deaf ears. Instead of railing AGAINST raiding, how about spending more focus on the aspects that could be improved? Speak positively instead of the rabid denunciation of something which at least 5-10% of Blizz’s subscriber enjoys.
Many players who are not hardcore still enjoy the occasional raid night. My guild’s friday night Kara runs became a reason to stay home on fridays because they were so much fun, but we never aspired to see BT or any of the true high-end stuff.
To be fair on that matter, i should also point out, however, I should mention that i have been on both sides of this issue. I was in a top-end raiding guild through BT. I left before SWP because i needed to take a more laid-back approach to my gaming when the hours and demands of my real-life increased.
As a top-end raider, i think i can speak for all of us that were slavishly devoted to our three to four raids per week when i say that, becoming a MACHINE that utterly devoured every boss encounter before us was what we loved. You rail against having to count on everyone to do their appointed task at *just* the right time. Being part of a group that skilled, that competent, that ON, was what we all ENJOYED. Yes, it is a bit like DDR in the respect that every encounter needed to produce a new high score. That’s why people play DDR, and that’s why we love raiding. Each encounter was a chance to test ourselves and push ourselves and our group to new heights. I don’t see an issue with that.
More time on bosses than trash? That would be phenominal, and would likely drag me back into the world of raiding. It would be a dream come true. But the trash pulls are necessary in a way, because it allows raiders time to not be their sharpest. “Downtime”.
On the other side of the coin, since i left my raiding guild and joined a more casual guild (that DOES still raid, just not as often or fervently), I have had just as much fun, though in different ways: 5-manning UBRS and MC come to mind. Also, the nights when the guild was generally bored and formed a 10 man team to dominate Arathi Basin, Alterac Valley or Eye of the Storm. I STLL laugh at both the times when we stormed into EotS and immediately capped everything, and hearing our main tank (who respec’d to DPS for those nights) say on our vent channel “well, we really screwed the pooch on that one” when we LOST all four capture points in a matter of about three minutes.
The point i am trying to make is that both sides are valid, and it does not seem to me (a current subscriber and avid fan) that Blizz overly devotes resources to one side or the other.
While there are certainly aspects they could add to make the game even more rich and engrossing, at the heart of it is this:
Raiding DOES suck at times, and it’s certainly not for everyone… But there is a WHOLE WORLD, and not just raids. WoW is what you make of it, and the people you enjoy playing with. It’s unlikely that i’ll see most of the new raid content, (at least not until they release the next expantion when my friends and i can go back to it over-levelled) but that doesn’t bother me. I don’t expect it bothers the vast majority of their subscribers either. Because if it did, Blizz and WoW would not be the juggernaut that they are.
Changes could make the game a lot better, but it’s pretty damn good the way it is. And the beauty is that if you don’t like PvP or raiding or even instancing, you don’t have to! Yeah, your gear might not be as impressive as the next player, but if you aren’t raiding, PvPing, or instancing… why should you care?
Azadar: Thank you for visiting and posting!
Q: What would happen to your business if 5-10% of your subscriber base suddenly vanished?
A: Not much, honestly. Would I like this to happen? Heck no. But if I was spending 90% of my budget to keep those 5-10% of my customers, that would be a titanic waste. I imagine there are far better ways I could spend all that money to keep the other 90-95% happier, and subscribing longer (or even attracting more people like them).
Case in point: It is my firm belief that a robust system of housing (especially if it included guild halls as well) would keep and attract many times more players than a couple of raid instances. The fact that this feature is still missing just boggles the heck out of me.
Furthermore, I think the raiders represent 1% or less, not 5-10%.
Unfortunately, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. I do not expect anything to really change with WoW. I don’t care at all about them changing, and in fact I hope they DO NOT change. I hope they keep doing the same things they keep doing. My goal is to educate other game developers so they will do things differently from WoW instead of emulating them with this same flawed design path. So in that regard, speaking positively serves no purpose. I don’t want WoW to get better. I actually hope it gets worse. From what I have read about WotLK, WoW actually started to move more in the direction of this blog post. But I expect it won’t be long until they cave to the demands of that top 1%.
That isn’t skill. That is 20, 25, or 40 people acting out their extremely specific role and pressing a button when told. Skill is when everyone has to THINK for themself, REACT for themself, and REALLY work as a team. What happens in WoW raiding is one guy yelling orders and everyone else slavishly following by rote.
That is not skill. That is robotic obedience.
No, it isn’t. This is a cliche that exists because it actually used to apply to more open games - like MUDs. WoW is a very specific thing. It is not an open or flexible world whatsoever. There is only one thing to do in WoW: kill stuff (either players or mobs). There are no significant features other than that.
The entire crafting system is just “press a button, out comes the item.” Play Everquest 2 if you want to see a crafting system that is actually a true feature of the game.
You do not even have much social support, with virtually zero clothing items or any real way to customize your appearance. Still no armor dyes… seriously??? No appearance slots to cover armor slots? Barely any social clothing?
No housing? No role playing? No way to actually change the game world?
Sorry, WoW is not what you make of it. WoW is what Blizzard made, that’s it and that’s all.
My entire outlook of raiding is like this: poorly designed from MY perspective. Heres why:
Time: Im a level 31 hammerdin in SP diablo ii. It takes me over 20 minutes to tackle diablo on normal, as such I will not attempt to run him till I can do it in around 15. So I really have no patience for hour long raids unless Im with friends and the raid is relatively easy.
Raid levels: IF IT SAYS LEVEL 15 IT SHOULD BE FOR LEVEL 15s! Level 25 human paladin and I COULDNT RUN DEADMINES without dying twice.
Im actually pretty cool with the loot system.