Aug 17 2008
Raiding Provides a False, Deceptive Sense of Real Accomplishment
I had so much fun trashing raiding as it exists in current graphical MUDs over here, I might as well take another hack at it. I will explain how raiding as it is generally implemented in graphical MMOs provides a false, deceptive, and personally damaging sense of accomplishment.
False Sense of Accomplishment from Raiding
One of the very serious, negative effects of the current design of “raid content” is the false sense of accomplishment it gives people. I was checking a couple of WoW blogs recently, and many of them have gigantic, gushing stories about the enormous sense of glory and accomplishment they felt when they finally downed some boss that had been wiping them for weeks or months on end. The way posters glowingly patted themselves on the back you’d think they had just earned a huge promotion at work or won the Nobel Prize.
Accomplishment is Good to a Certain Extent
Now, it is wonderful when games give people a sense of accomplishment. In fact, this is important for a well designed game. But raiding really exaggerates this feeling in the way it sucks people in. All the guild drama, arguments, roster debates, loot arguments, planning sessions, strategy sessions, video viewings, strategy readings, experimental tests, and wipe after wipe make it seem like something far more important is happening than a pile of pixels being killed.
The Effects Can Be Very Real, and Very Negative
Why does this matter? Because this is one of the ways MMOs can actually cause real harm to the lives of its customers. According to Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, self actualization is the ultimate need that people have. They need to feel successful in life. Most healthy people fulfill this need through accomplishments with their family, marriage, child rearing, career, education, etc. These are very productive ways to fulfill this need. People that get massively sucked into raiding fulfill this need through raid success. As a result, they often have less of a drive to work on their family, friends, children, spouse, job, or school. So the actually important things in their real life suffer because this crucial need is being satisfied through MMO raiding.
My Own Personal Vortex
I experienced this phenomenon myself in Dark Age of Camelot. The Realm vs. Realm combat was so incredibly engaging, and felt so meaningful, that successful RvR nights actually made me feel “good about myself.” My work suffered, and the time I spent with my family suffered. It did not just suffer because of the time commitment, it suffered because I felt self actualized through the game. That’s bad.
What Can Developers Do to Limit This Effect?
There is not much game designers can do about this. Their job is to make the most engaging game possible. But the one thing they CAN do is not foster an environment where raiding is looked upon as some Holy Grail type activity. In many MMOs, if customers peep up on the forums saying they’d like to do something besides raid, they get shouted down. Raiding is held up as the most awesome, challenging, uber thing you can do. If you don’t want to raid, you suck, and if you are good at raiding, you are a god. Developers should squash that type of mentality whenever they see it start to grow.
I wanted to point out links to something really outrageous:
18-Hour Final Fantasy XI Boss Induces Puking
Final Fantasy XI Guild Spends 18 Hours Fighting Boss, Suffers Physical Torment
I think one of the things they should do is provide alternate methods for end-game advancement. They have to have the willpower to ignore the raiders that insist that raiding should be the only way to get good gear(or whatever else they are using as end game character advancement). Pvp, rvr, and crafting should be equally viable substitutes to raiding as far as character advancement goes. If raiding is no longer the only or the best way to advance your character, it loses alot of it’s prestige and it’s no longer seen as the most uber thing you can do.
I know an absolute TONNE of WoW players that claim the month before the Burning Crusade expansion hit was the most fun they ever had in WoW(I’m one of them, and Cambios is also one if I’m not mistaken). What went on in that month? They made pvp gear(which was fairly equivilent to raid gear) easy to get. Everybody and their dog pvped their ass off for that month basically. On my server, people were constantly talking about how it was impossible to fill a raid group in that time period. As soon as they were given a better way to gear their character than raiding, a tonne of raiders abandoned raiding and did that instead. These people really aren’t their for the raid content. They are there for the character advancement that comes from the raid gear.
That was a super fun month indeed. It was like WoW was new again and I felt like there was something fun to do that was also meaningful for my character.
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You’d think that would make the idea light go off somewhere. Most people don’t raid because they like to, they raid because it is the ONLY way to advance/develop their character once they hit level cap.
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So when they opened up the PvP gear to everyone, suddenly nobody wanted to raid. Why? Because raiding sucks for the most part, and for most folks.
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But looping this all back to the main topic, I agree with you that the better idea is to create multiple paths to whatever your “end game” development system is. That takes away from elitist prestige from raiding, and also helps not make raiding success feel as much like Real Life success. That’s good for the long term health of the players as well.
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OH! I forgot to specifically ask this in the main post:
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Do you know of any situations where you or a friend got a sense of accomplishment so great from raiding that it actually felt like real life success?
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Did you or someone you know take significant personal pride in downing a raid boss, running/leading a good raid guild, etc.?
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I think either of the above reactions is evidence of gaming gone awry.
I returned to WoW right at that patch as well and had a great time in the start. Must admit that doing the same pvp area over and over again gets me bored as well, but it surely beat raiding.
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Best time for me is a challenging 5-man instance, but I am actually one of the few who love to grind as well. It is relaxing in some strange way to just plow through the mobs. The only problem with grinding in WoW is it caps very early when it comes to advancement. Only real need for grinding is to help cover your raiding expenses.
I was sharing an apartment with two friends. One of these friends were in one of the top 10 raiding guilds in the world if I remember right.
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From my experience he optimized his life very much around the raids, but he still made sure he had time for friends and still handled his job well. He never braged about progress or anything like that. My experience is that he just won’t bother with the game if he don’t plan on being among the best.
I myself fall squarely into that large pool of players who would like to raid but simply don’t have the time to do it. I’m definitely a ‘casual raider’. I would love to be able to PUG larger raids, or to have a raid encounter that didn’t take four hours to finish. Part of the reason that Kara was so exciting to me was that the first boss, Attumen really WAS just about half-an-hour into the dungeon…if you didn’t wipe.
Being a casual player, it was extremely exhilirating to finally take Attumen down. It took our ragtag guild two weeks before we managed that, and it was very satisfying.
Killing Moroes was even harder, and when HE went down, Vent lit up.
Let’s be clear: the hardest part about raiding is not the encounter at all. It’s the level of pre-planning, coordination and human involvement leading up to the raid that’s the problem.
I agree with the general point of the OP that the game SHOULD be exciting, it SHOULD challenge you and give you a rush when you win. It’s just that so much of the end-game is designed to be totally innaccessible unless you can devote a huge amount of time to it.
Sure, you could probably clear Kara in under five hours between two days, but how long did it take to get that down? How much coordination, sacrifice, practice went into doing that? When did it stop being about fun and turning into a job?
That’s why I can’t raid. That’s probably why I’ll never raid. I’m not sure an encounter can be designed that is a serious challenge to ten players and not require extensive practice to master (or, in the case of Attumen, an arbitrarily short respawn timer that artificially extends the learning curve).
Blizz’s stance seems to be that they’re afraid people will rush through the end and stop playing if things like trash respawns and raid lockouts weren’t in place. That’s only going to be true for that 5% of players who do nothing BUT play Warcraft, and even they are limited by needing 24 other players in similar situations to progress.
If raids were more accessible (even a ‘Normal’ vs ‘Heroic’ version…), it would go a long way to alleviating the social burdens MMOs impose on their true apostles….and would perhaps change the way gamers in general are perceived in society.
Ultimately, your argument boils down to “moderation is important, and focusing on WoW to the detriment of other parts of your life is harmful and a bad idea”. To which all but the hardcore raiders would say “Uh, well, yeah.”
However, I disagree with the notion that WoW-related achievements do not warrant _any_ pride at all. They’re manifestations of a skill that’s no more productive and no less harmful than any other hobby; apart from the issues of fitness and exercise, there’s no significant difference in feeling proud of a boss kill in WoW and feeling proud when your amateur sports team beats their competitors. Neither actually achieves anything meaningful, neither makes your life better in a concrete way, but they don’t do any harm if they’re kept in their rightful place, and self-actualization from any hobby isn’t a bad thing.
I’d also argue that leading a guild or raid group to success _is_ something to be proud of, because it’s a demonstration of a number of RL-relevant skills: organisation, time management, leadership, negotiation, and conflict resolution, off the top of my head. You’re not taking pride in the boss kill, at that point; you’re taking pride in the successful application of your skills, and there’s no difference between that and taking pride in the work you do for your job except the paycheck.
Peter: I love grinding too. I hate the bad rep grinding gets these days. Quest grinding is no better, imho, from a design stand point. For me, quest grinding is worse because you spend so much time running around.
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Siha: Thanks for posting!
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I think there is indeed a huge difference between raiding and other aspects of leadership in real life. In real life, a huge part of leadership is figuring out how to accomplish a task with the people you have. In WoW, that is not an option. You MUST have the required class configuration in your raid group or you fail.
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Part of leadership, or planning something difficult in real life involves… well… planning. Raiding in WoW involves one guy reading 12 strategies and watching 15 videos and then barking orders over vent. People do not really benefit from the “leadership” experience they get in WoW raiding because it doesn’t translate into actual real life. The only reason most people raid in WoW is for the loot, so they put up with a lot of hell and BS they wouldn’t otherwise. They aren’t inspired or led, they are just along for the ride for the purples.
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Another major aspect of leadership is figuring out how to maximize your stars to make up for the members of your team that are weaker. Again, that is not an option in raiding. If one person is weak, or one person makes a mistake, everyone wipes. There is no opportunity for better people to make up the difference.
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And lets be honest… the level of “skill” required in WoW is laughable. The main skill involved in raiding is the ability to stand on an X and press the 1 button. You don’t adapt to changing situations. You don’t have to make quick decisions. You are doing something completely by rote, and most likely doing something that was developed by 12 other raid guilds who already did the encounter when they were exclusively invited to beta test it.
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When WoW folks talk about “skill”, I seriously invite them to try some MUDs or some earlier MMOs (EQ, DAoC, UO). Then they can get a better idea what skill really means.
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But…….. with all of that said, my point is that WoW creates such a massive aura around raiding that it knocks things out of balance. As Siha said, the problem is one of moderation. I am a firm believer in the virtue of Aristotle’s Golden Mean, and raiding in WoW is nowhere near that mean. WoW’s raiding design pretty much forces you to eat, drink, and breathe raiding if you want to have success.
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You can’t raid once or twice a week. You’ll make zero progress that way. At the peak of our raid guild, we were raiding 3 nights a week and that was BARELY enough to make any progress. And to prep for those 3 nights there was grinding for potion, food, and rink mats, grinding for gold for repairs, etc. The level of commitment was enormous just to have ANY success at raiding, and that exaggerates the sense of importance raiding has.
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Raid lockouts, respawns, etc. are all a huge part of that. But the design is a huge part of it also. The fact that raiding is the ONLY way to develop your character is raiding. This makes the community believe that raiding is more important than anything else. It shouldn’t be that way, and it doesn’t have to be that way. MMO developers can create other “end game” activities and set them up to be just as important.
“Because this is one of the ways MMOs can actually cause real harm to the lives of its customers.”
Boo. Double boo. Why not trot out the old D&D made me kill myself argument. You can never plan for people who are unbalanced. Balanced individuals may temporarily get carried away, but they quickly right themselves. Your own personal anecdote proves that.
“Developers should squash that type of mentality whenever they see it start to grow.”
Developers are in business to make money. They are not there to provide guidance on mental health. You can’t plan around the insane.
Sentinel
http://www.forgottenlegion.net
135 IBM employees played WoW as a test their leadership abilities.
I originally read about it in a local paper, but found the following article through Google search.
http://tinyurl.com/5bvod2
The original study is from Harvard Business Online, but only the first page is for free.
http://tinyurl.com/6mynld
Sentinel: I think Cambios is saying that developers should squash “L2RAID NOOB” mentality.
A developer that is in the business to make money isn’t in the business to make great games, and he should be criticized and decried until he either delivers are stronger game, or gets run off.
Your D&D argument is a little off the mark. ‘The old D&D made me kill myself,’ bit was driven by hyper-conservatives and fundamental Christian zealots, and not an argument being made by guys like Gygax, hence it bears no merit. Also, D&D is always played in very small doses when compared to the average raider’s habits.
Here’s the thing, graphical MMO raiding is really only an exercise in human conditioning, not skill, not pluck (no death penalties) and not wit.
Watch this and see what happening with modern raids:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_ctJqjlrHA
While you are right that people are ultimately responsible for themselves, I look at customers as a valuable, important resource. If I design my game in a way that massively encourages them to ruin their lives, they won’t be my customer for long. I don’t want people to wake up one day, realize my game has destroyed or harmed their marriage or career, and then quit forever.
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You can never design for the insane or the psychologically damaged, but the way raiding works right now gradually sucks “normal” people into its vortex. I am not saying MMOs are like a drug, but there are definitely some drug-like elements there. The thing that bothers me, as someone who works in this industry, is there are developers who seem to be DELIBERATELY modeling drug addiction as a way to make their own games more addictive. The false sense of accomplishment that modern raiding creates is just one small part of this. Scheduled reinforcement is another aspect of this. That is how casinos get people addicted to slot machines. These are things MMO designers should avoid rather than focus on.
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I’d rather be reasonable with my game design so I can potentially have a customer for life. I think this is why Threshold has so many 10+ year customers.
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Hahaha. At the same time I was posting about scheduled reinforcement, witchkiller posted an excellent video quoting Skinner talking about it. Excellent!
Peter: I have read about that study in multiple locations. The interesting thing is that in that study, the business people weren’t raiding. The places where they found leadership skills to be valuable were in the general non-raiding elements of the game - organizing groups, doing instances, etc.
Great minds think alike…apparently so do ours.
My son reads this blog daily and refuses to comment so I am doing it for him. He says that you for the great information and wants to know which of the new games coming out would you recommend as far as graphics?
Can a traditional business succeed with nothing but marketers? Nope. Can a modern military succeed with nothing but an artillery? Nope. Can a baseball team succeed with nothing but pitchers? Nope.
Raiding guilds often are forced to cope with what they have when the available recruits does not offer what they need, but they have to at least exhibit planning and recruitment efforts necessary to actually build their raid to be successful. Much like a military or traditional business. The fact that you can’t see this proves your ignorance.
It’s not just one guy reading strategies and barking orders. It’s a few to several planning the raid’s roster with balance in consideration. It’s a few to several guys delegating tasks. It’s one to a few guys handling recruitment. It’s one to a few guys determining who sits on the bench for one fight and who comes in for others to adjust the class balance and put in people with the necessary skills to succeed. It’s one to a few people managing the loot system and making loot decisions. It’s people developing raiding schedules centered around the guild’s philosophies. It’s people interviewing potential recruits. It’s people moderating and solving problems.
On top of finding the players skilled enough if you want to succeed efficiently, as well as having those people play well on any given night.
A waste of time to some. Not to others.
Is that why some people pass loot to others? Is that why some people recognize the fact that when the next expansion comes out, all of their epics will go to waste because of the so-called “gear reset”?
Most people these days raid to raid. There are other games and other types of end-game for them to participate in if they don’t have the time or desire to raid. Because the gear resets with new expansions, and because new instances, PvP gear and badge gear often render many items obsolete in a very short amount of time, people have to enjoy raiding itself if they want to benefit from the activity the most. Most people understand this and choose to leave the raiding scene when they no longer enjoy it on a basic level. We’ve lost several raiders over the past several months for this very reason, as the activity no longer became a priority for them, or because the enjoyment they received may have been only temporary. But we also have people who have been raiding for the past four years. And they don’t care that their Cenarion, Stormrage, Dreamwalker, Malorne or Nordrassil sets are now obsolete. It’s the experience, memory and enjoyment of performing the task that matters. They play to participate in the content that has continued to evolve and improve over the past few years.
It’s become pretty obvious to me that you have no idea how WoW and other graphical MMO’s have advanced in just the past couple years. Because you don’t understand the changing dynamics of many encounters.
Yeah, on Kil’jaeden you just stand there and tap your shadow bolt hotkey. You never have to collapse for darkness of a thousand souls. You never have to respond to randomly spawning shield orbs and get them down as quickly as possible. You never have to dynamically react to randomly falling meteors later in the fight. You never have to plan your dragon breaths to prevent dart splash damage, replenish people’s mana and improve DPS. You never have to pick up a dragon and play a unit that had never existed in WoW until the encounter’s implementation.
That’s all sarcastic, if you didn’t realize.
There’s a guild on our server that raids only Fridays and Saturdays. They are currently working on the final boss of TBC. Indeed, you can’t raid once or twice a week and succeed. You’ll never progress.
Lume: Thanks for posting.
Just so you know, I’m not just spewing at the mouth here with no raid experience. I ran a raid guild in WoW and we were #4 in progression on our server for a long time. I look back on that time, remembering how much I actually cared about such an irrelevant thing, and it shocks me. Just for added info, I was the main tank for the guild and my wife (who writes the Virtual Femme blog) was the main healer. We also did *tons* of RvR in DAoC, and had the top 8 man RvR group for 3+ months at one point. I also think back on how obsessed I was of that group, and how “proud” I was, and boggle. We have also raided in numerous other MMOs.
Calling me ignorant is cheap and easy, but not accurate. I have run raid guilds. I have been an officer in raid guilds. I have been a regular member in raid guilds. I have run a successful business for over 12 years. If the issue is comparing raid guild management to business management, I’m one of the few people who is completely informed, experienced, and qualified on the issue.
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Running a raid guild is more like herding cats than running an organized business. The issues you deal with frequently boil down to managing exceptionally immature people that have no life and have WAY too much of their existence wrapped up in a game. You have drama over who gets left out of a raid, crying over miniscule differences in loot distribution, people being general jerks to each other, etc. The kinds of things people get away with in raid guilds - even the top raid guilds - would get them fired immediately.
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You can’t show up in the boardroom and say “yeah, well our competitor is gay. I am sure we’ll sell more product than those fags.” Good management requires a lot more subtlety, finesse, and understanding of people than “L2DPS fag” or “L2Heal you f’in n00b.” I have witnessed that behavior hundreds of times from the “top raiders” in the world. You couldn’t get out of the mail room with that kind of attitude in the business world.
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The main reason running a raid guild bears no comparison to running a business is the fact that the people involved are not even CLOSE to the caliber of people you deal with in the business world. The behavior of your average raider is so incredibly immature that they would never even get a job in corporate America.
Actually, that’s pretty much what it is. I read your blog, and the strategy you guys followed for all the bosses on your front page were the exact “accepted” strategy that everyone does. I’m not blaming you for it. Blizzard designs their raid encounters in a way that the only path to success is doing it THEIR WAY.
That’s patently false, and the realities of WoW show it. On your blog and others I have read the mass lamentations of guild leaders desperately trying to get people to raid. They can’t, because with the expansion coming soon they don’t think its worth raiding since the loot will be replaced soon. If raiding was fun, they’d still be raiding for the fun part, and the loot secondarily.
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When TBC came out, the same thing happened and it was even worse because they opened up PvP as a way to get loot. People had a lot more fun PvPing than raiding. Top raid guilds couldn’t even fill rosters for a single raid per week.
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This is on top of the fact that according to Blizzard’s own numbers, only 5-10% of their population is into raiding.
I noticed it, but I recommend you try a relic raid in DAoC. You’ll see there’s absolutely no comparison. People will do all sorts of crazy things you could NEVER imagine.
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I admit that we never raided Sunwell in my guild (we quit before it was released), but even on your site you lamented the retarded arbitrariness of those orb spawns. If you get the “priest ones” you were boned. That’s stupid raid design.
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All the other things you listed were extremely basic. Pick up adds, dodge falling balls of fire, rinse and repeat. I’m sorry but that’s super simplistic compared to MUDs and older MMOs.
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Perhaps Sentinel will explain some of the harder, more complex raids from EQ and you’ll see a dramatic difference.
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Challenge is not achieved through arbitrary randomness. That is lazy, uninspired design.
Kudos for them. There is also a guy who just won 8 gold medals in the same Olympics. Does everyone?
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You know as well as I do that the reality is, raiding 1 or 2 nights a week results in very minimal progression. The top guilds raid 3-5 nights a week. Some raid EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it.
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But again, thanks for visiting and posting.
Experience doesn’t compel me to agree with you. The fact that you found it irrelevant to your personal goals does not make it irrelevant to other people’s enjoyment of life.
And yet you still say leadership is nothing but barking orders, when you know damn well you wouldn’t have had a successful raid (relative to other raids) if you: a) never made a single recruitment post or pressured friends into raiding with you, b) never made any effort to resolve problems within the raid, c) never delegated tasks like DKP management or loot decisions, d) never cared to build a group with adequate numbers of healers, DPSers, or tanks.
No one will defeat K’J without performing such tasks. It’s that simple. And many guilds and raids fell apart for this reason.
I’ve run across immature people in every facet of life. At work and even in high-level Literature classes.
Obviously. But all you’re doing is generalizing a demographic, once again.
You’re taking this business analogy out of context and blowing it out of proportion. I only used it to dispute your claims that guilds only raid with what they have. To dispute your claim that it’s just one guy reading strats and barking orders. And all you really have to counter-argue is a reiteration of that statement.
Ask yourself these questions:
Can you run a successful raid with nothing but tanks?
Can you run a successful raid if you never make a recruitment post or pressure your friends to join the raid?
Can you run a successful raid if you don’t resolve problems?
Perhaps you can run a raid (finding people through /lfg and then barking orders), but not necessarily a successful one.
The fact that I correlated business practices and military operations to raiding does not mean I am comparing them in social hierarchy or relating their difficulties to each other. It was a device use to refute your exaggerations that raid leading is easy. Relatively easy to leading some businesses? Yeah. So what. That wasn’t my point.
And on the latter point, do you realize many strategies say Kil’jaeden doesn’t do fire bloom during the final phase, when he actually does? Do you realize there were no 100% accurate strategies posted until a month ago when EJ allowed people to begin discussing the encounter on their forums? Do you realize following strategies isn’t going to help you actually execute them well? I’m sure you do (at least on the latter point). I could read all the golfing strategies in the world. That’s not going to help me make the PGA Tour or even an amateur league.
Also, why would Blizzard come out and say they’ve been surprised at the manner in which some people have killed bosses if there’s specific strategies they expect to be employed. They didn’t expect anyone to kill Hydross by simply tanking the original version of him completely in nature phase.
Hell, my guild was the first to use a protection paladin to tank Illidan for our progression kill. Why? Because he wasn’t done with his FR suit and we only had three tanks available. And because we, as players, understood that holy shield would be adequate for shear. That’s something you wouldn’t have seen in the strategy guides available at the time. In fact, let me quote the old Illidan strategy guide on Bosskillers for you: “One well geared protection warrior, who will be your Main Tank on Illidan Stormrage in Phase 1, and in his normal form in Phase 3 and 4.”
We surely followed that to the letter, didn’t we?
So you’re trying to tell me how I think. I’ve lamented my frustrations about people who apply to raid and discover they don’t enjoy or don’t have the time to do it between other priorities. Such actions have created a situation that has created a glut of raiding guilds and a shortage of potential recruits. Most guild leaders lament this situation. I don’t know many who don’t. But I also witnessed this phenomenon in other games. In a game called Nox, many of my clan’s top players would stop playing during the summer months, leaving some of our lesser skilled players to pick up the slack. This isn’t exclusive to WoW or MMO’s.
People want to go on vacation. College students move back home. People get married. This affects more than just WoW. This affects people’s lives. Some play through it. Some move on. Some businesses hire temps and interns during the summer
Just because I’ve experienced frustration doesn’t mean I haven’t enjoyed my time raiding immensely. So telling me my thoughts are patently false is simply insulting. And that’s really what it comes down to with you. Lumping people into generalized groups, pretending to be psychologically keen with insight into our every thought.
I sure as hell haven’t quit raiding for a good reason. Simply because I enjoy it. And there’s at least 25 people on a regular basis within my guild who show up to raid. Many not for loot, either. Why the hell would people willingly pass to others even on the most coveted pieces of loot? Why have I passed at least seven times on Memento from Illidan, even though it’s still currently best-in-slot? Because they don’t care. Because I don’t care. Because I raid to raid. Same goes for a lot of people in my guild who follow the same logic.
It’s part of setting up your guild structure. If you don’t discourage greed, you allow it to fester. If you don’t discourage immaturity, it will persist indefinitely. Setting your structure early in an expansion’s cycle can help prevent these problems. But setting up a perfect system is the difficult part. And some people slip under the radar only to quit after receiving Sunflare, but not a Skull of Gul’dan. You can’t predict such behavior 100% of the time.
Most high-end guilds are set up in this manner, meaning a lot of those who have been raiding since release up until now have do it for the sheer experience of raiding itself and having fun with many of the people they raid with.
Not everyone and that’s an issue Blizzard should address in the future. But that’s part of game development and progress. I’ve yet to come across any MMO that’s perfect in every regard and having that expectation is unreasonable.
I played DAoC for three years. In one of my first few entries I talk about how I still feel DAoC in unmatched in terms of PvP. My guess is that WAR will exceed, but I haven’t played WAR. In my time playing DAoC, I estimate having gone on about 20 or 30 relic raids. And I know quite well all the sorts of things that go on during them: secrecy, deception, temporary realm alliances, dynamic decision-making, etc., as well as the crazy battles that can occur with relic carriers escaping by the skin of their teeth only to get ganked by some random 8-man crew before the raid returns to continue the escort. But then I also remember 8-man PvP where I was a cornerstone in one of the classic stun/PBAoE groups Midgard used to employ (I was one of the SM’s). As funny was it was to occasionally wipe entire raids not panning around to watch for the gank, the game itself was clunky, its controls awkward, and the systems outside of PvP I personally found boring or aggravating. A simple case of personal preference.
Some raids fell apart during this time. Some did not. There’s no way you can accurately come up with a statistic to support this view other than to cite people and guilds you’ve personally known that fell apart for this specific reason. But I, likewise, can cite people and guilds I knew that did not stop raiding. Top guilds, like Nihilum and EJ. Pretty much all of the top guilds on my own server did not stop raiding. I can’t think of a single one that fell apart for this reason. All my own guild did was PvP a whole lot between raids to augment our gear to succeed in raids. Something some of our raiders didn’t enjoy, unfortunately, because they prefer PvE over PvP.
I never said getting the priest spawns meant you were boned completely. I stated the arbitrary mechanics could all combine to create extreme variations in the encounter’s difficulty to a point where it can actually reach impossibility. Is that poor design? You bet. But it’s one encounter of many and it’s a freakish occurrence. The real issue is that the degree of difficulty each guild experience can vary in extreme fashion. But I also think there’s nothing they can do to the encounter without over-nerfing it beyond re-designing it entirely.
But such is the cost of progress. And the fight has its positives, as well. For one, many of the arbitrary mechanics force dynamic reactions are require smart play. Particularly with the meteors determining where people need to place the dragon shield and how to avoid getting hit by them between shields in the final phase. That is good encounter design, because it’s not impossible to deal with.
And Blizzard has tried to diminish those impossible occurrences by patching to get rid of certain conditions. Unfortunately, however, one of their stated fixes is bugged and he still does what the notes stated he shouldn’t.
But the point is that Blizzard does pay attention. And I’m not here expecting perfect encounter design every single time out. Especially given the extreme increase in difficulty for Sunwell over the rest of raiding in the history of WoW.
Not since version 1.0 of Vashj and Kael have I felt that they really dropped the ball entirely. What you saw in my post was simply nitpicking design decisions with the hopes that Blizzard will be careful to avoid creating such problems in the future.
Otherwise, I think Kalecgos, Brutallus and Felmyst are well-done. And I think version 1.0 of M’uru was perfect and the height of encounter design. Yes there are a couple of random conditions in that fight that can vary its difficulty, but the variance is just right and it never reached the point of impossibility.
What it all boils down to is personal preference. You think Blizzard is dropping the ball on encounter design. Okay. There are those of us who don’t agree with you, those of us who agree with you to a point, and those who agree with you complete. You think raiding as an activity is pointless. Okay, same deal. Personal opinions, personal preferences.
The plain and simple fact of the matter is that WoW brings enjoyment to my life. I enjoy the raiding game. I take issue with the degree of cross-over between PvE and PvP and how they affect each other and promote change in that regard, but it doesn’t bother me on an overall level because I enjoy both activities. I sometimes play TF2 between WoW sessions and raids because I like a variety in my gaming habits sometimes.
So say what you want. Many of us just think you’re an overzealous muckraker trying to tell people what they’re thinking and how they should game. That’s not how you should market the games you create. You offer an alternative. People who choose not to play such alternatives aren’t gaming improperly because of it.
Designing a game to offer multiple ways to advance (whatever that may mean in any particular game) seems like a way to attract a wider variety of player types and keep them interested in playing.
One troublesome bit though is keeping things balanced because the power gamers will find and exploit the quickest route to advancement. For example, if a game has fighting stuff and picking daisies as ways to “advance” but picking daisies is a quicker way to level-up (or whatever is considered advancing in the game), then the power gamers will go that route. Of course, this assumes that choosing the picking daisies path doesn’t block them from doing certain other things they may want to do.
If in-game choices have consequences, then nobody may choose to pick daisies because they can’t use that experience to go do other things way want to do.
Wow… A lot going on here. This was a post I didn’t really initially intend on responding to since I couldn’t offer anything early on. But, what I see is a bit confusing here.
I guess I didn’t take the original entry to say that all raiding is bad and raiders are all the same. But I did take it as a general statement. A guild would and should feel good about downing a boss fight that is/was particularly difficult for them. I think you agree with that statement. What I thought you were saying, is generally it’s not healthy for a human being to derive all of their sense of accomplishment from a game. I would have to agree with this. This isn’t a WoW specific thing, this applies to all games. My guild was founded on that principle. Real life takes all priority.
I thought that the purpose of the post was to point out a problem where people get absorbed into a game and then offer a small resolution of denying a “raid is all” mentality by offering other content.
So correct me if I’m wrong here
I can’t tell if you hate raiding entirely or not. Personally I like it, but I also wish to have other options and content. I’m very much looking forward to the new WoW expansion since my guild will be able to fully progress through the game. We dont have enough people to raid 25 mans, and after trying it a few times with other guilds, I’ll be very happy to go back to just us. Most of the experience was just plain horrible, since we have to deal with the inmaturity of all the other people we ran into. Not all were bad, of course, but even some of the better experiences were marred by selfish inmature people. So, I think Blizzard is taking small steps to alleviate part of the problem. 25 mans raids are simply not reasonable to most of the playerbase. I would also agree that there needs to be another piece to end-game. If raiding is all there is, that’s all that people will do. And of course you will lose a lot of them over the long haul. So, hopefully the next mmos will take that into consideration.
I would also like to point out that if were able to fill a roster of 25 people we would certainly tackle that content. But we will never openly recruit, it just doesn’t suit our playstyle. But I think 10 man content will appeal to a larger group of players. Also the time commitment to complete raids and 5-mans are being addressed. It shouldn’t take 4 hours to complete a raid segment, simple as that. That opens up the door for players without as much time to commit. We talked about that in the last post.
Now here’s a question to ask of yourself and especially the poster Lume. Would you raid if there was no loot at all? Personally, I would. If progression were solely based on beating the previous instance, I would still do it. I believe you may feel the same way, but I bet a lot of folks that currently DO raid would not say yes. In the end, it would help you and I find more like minded folk to play with. This isn’t a reasonable answer to fix the problems, but it does get you thinking about it. There are a ton of loot whores and raid snobs in WoW. I wouldn’t say all or most, but there are certainly a lot. Offering another form of progression based on PvP and other community based “things” seems like a superb idea. Then everyone could easily ignore the morons because raiding simply wouldn’t be the only progression.
Another big issue that I think was being touched on is: Why tolerate morons in a raiding guild? I don’t think every guild does, but there are so many guilds with horrible people in them. I think they tolerate them because they feel they can’t replace them or doing so would set them back for too long. Ding ding ding! This is a core problem in raiding. Raid leaders shouldn’t be put into that situation and it should be something possible to develop around. DPS should generally be fully interchangeable. Given the holy trinity (until we can get around that too), it shouldn’t matter the kind of tank, healer, or dps in a given encounter. It should be possible to defeat an encounter with all hunters, or all rogues as dps. It shouldn’t be easy, it should probably be near impossible, but to do otherwise is a failure, imo. We can’t defeat this boss because we don’t have X class is an utter failure. Players should be able to get together and defeat any boss with a handful of classes, not specific ones given tank, healer, and dps. Here’s the boss, here’s his abilities; now you figure out how to kill him. Giving a boss abilities that negate ranged or melee dps is just plain stupid. Gruul is a perfect example of a poorly thought out boss. You should be able to bring your tanks and healers and all melee dps and defeat Gruul. But you can’t because of splash damage, and that makes an encounter lazy on the devs part. Why not make it so you have 5-8 seconds to get away from each other before the ground pounding? That’s not a hard fix, and makes it possible for melee to be nearly as useful as ranged. Another example, Kael’thas in MgT. Nearly impossible with 3 melee dps. Why? Give more time for dps in beween gravity distortion. A melee group will deal with more overall, but the encounter would still be beatable without being way overgeared. It seems so simple to make all encounters beatable by any mix of classes.
Lastly, there is a lot of merit to the over simplification of stand on X, and press 1. When you start, the boss fight is hard, when it’s on farm the boss fight is the exact same thing every time. I don’t care how complex the Kil’jaeden fight is, it’s all memorization. A random event is the same event every time. you learn how to deal with it, and everyone gets to the point where it’s all just the same fight over and over. The hiccups happen at different times. This is the biggest hurdle to overcome. How can you make a truly dynamic fight that is also satisfying? Again, not on me, that’s the job of the developer. I have said that I think those kinds of encounters are great for the lower tiers of a raid. Working your way to the lady Vashjs and Illidans should be a little more arbitrary. But the big bosses should be something really special. Adding in random shield spawns or whatever is artificially inflating the difficulty, which a lot of guilds just overcome eventually. I’m bored with kara, it was really fun to learn all of the fights, but now they are repetitive. It was a great introductory instance for learning to raid. But, I’m sure most people get bored with repetitive content. How can you make raiding more dynamic? I’m not entirely sure, but if it means a human being takes control of the big boss, then so be it. How satisfying would it be to beat a boss that no one else has, and they can’t do it the way that you did it? Maybe that is an answer. But for the content to be anything other than Scheduled reinforcement it needs to be drastically changed.
I do get a little miffed about the word skill being thrown around as well. It’s very subjective, and I don’t think skill applies in every situation it’s used. Being in a guild that has progressed farther than I have in raid content ≠ skill. A guild defeating a tough boss has some skilled players, and it has tag alongs as well. But yet you see it time and time again; We beat X boss, so we are more skilled than Y guild. And a guild will jump to the defense of their unskilled tag alongs when someone calls them out. If skill boils down to researching how to play your class and your role in a raid, than no one who plays the game is more skilled than I am. Many are the same skill, but no one can surpass me. Now, there must be some merit to this, since the vast majority of players don’t even know which attributes they need and what priority. This is the fundamental problem with claiming skill in raiding. Either skill is researching your class and the fight mechanics, or skill is an individuals ability to adapt to a situation and use their skill set in the most effective manner in any given situation. But where does the monkey training end and the skill begin? You can teach unskilled players just enough to get you through a raid encounter, even if the majority of the raid is unskilled. Why? because you make a conditioned response. Given a set of variables, you teach the player to respond to those variables. Don’t move in the flame wreath, monkey training. Fearing off a mob that is chewing on the healer (while your focus is on the boss), skill. This is purely subjective, and it’s one person’s opinion. I think PvP is arguably the best place to throw the word skill around with any merit. One player can visibly be better than another player. Those who can use their skill set quickly, and respond to more changing situations are going to be better at arena. This is funny because I am not a big PvPer. But I can see skilled players beating less skilled players. Raiding doesn’t ever seperate skill from scrub. You only have to be good enough, as a group, to beat an encounter. This is where work should be put. How do we make it easier for a skilled group (not a GEARED group) to defeat an encounter? How about more customization of a character? If every mage, warrior, and priest have the exact same spec/gear/enchants then I think you’ve failed. Why is there 1 single best? Why can’t there be more individuality leading to more varied encounters? Which is better, a priest that casts slow big bomb heals, or a priest that casts quick, small heals? Neither imo, why can’t we have both? Let a player have an actual choice in how their character turns out. It should be up to blizzard to supply more, but appropriate, gear options. I should be able to gear for high healing power, quick spell casts, high damaging spells, quick melee strikes, or any other combination and have them all mean something and be perfectly viable. Then we can talk about skill in raiding. While you can min/max all day, it shouldn’t matter. If playerX was actually able to be good at their class, they can be one of the best without worrying about spec and gear. The gear especially should be secondary to being good at your character’s abilities without having to be told what to do.
From reading your post and your reply to Lume that it sounds like you had a really bad experience of raiding with Highschool level morons. If you took the time to find a good group of adults (I have only raiding in 18+ guilds where there is a policy of if you are an immature person then you are /gkick’d promptly) you would see that raiding and the “accomplishment” one gets out of it is a great thing.
Don’t blanket an entire group of people just because you had some bad experiences with 12 year olds. I don’t know anyone in the raids I went to that talked the way you did in your examples to Lume. If they did they got kicked right away and we would run short a man.
@Siha
Well said, I wrote a response to this on my blog before reading yours… glad I had not or my blog would have went another day without a post. O.o
@Valthan
Also well said and very true. I play with other adults mid to late 20’s all the way to their 40’s.
As far as being a 12 year old and playing with 12 year olds… kids will be kids, sticks, stones, or pixels… doesn’t matter.
PS Cambios, not to take away from the topic at hand, but I just found your blog from Jace’s and added you to my reader, but it makes me click through to read your posts. Is there anything you could do about that? Thanks
Oh it shouldn’t. But you said I was ignorant. On this issue, it is fact that I am not ignorant. We can still differ in experiences, conclusions, etc.
Of course I am. But the sub-issue here was all about generalizing. It was a discussion of whether or not raiding or running a raid guild teaches useful business leadership skills.
These questions are not similar to what you do to run a business. As a crack dealer, you resolve problems. That doesn’t mean selling crack is a good way to get experience for working in the business world.
But at least different golfers have wildly different tactics and strengths. Raid guilds in WoW have a nearly identical configuration of classes and gear. There are some SMALL variations, but that’s it. They are small.
Because it fits their business ends to do so. They don’t want to admit their raid encounters are so heavily scripted and laden with retarded immunities that there is basically one way to beat them.
They don’t want to admit that the challenge of their raid encounters mostly boils down to dealing with absurd randomness.
It is really funny that you think this is a significant difference in strategy. It just points out an extreme difference in experience. You really should play some other MMOs sometime.
Just for comparison, the level of tactical differences other MMOs offer would be equivalent to you figuring out how to use a ROGUE to tank entire raid dungeons, because you had the right combination of defense and crowd control.
No, you are spot on.
But as you can see, there are a lot of people out there for whom WoW raiding is a sacred cow. They like the status quo, where 90% of Blizzard’s financial resources go into developing content for the 5-10% who raid. They don’t want people to see that the Emperor has no clothes.
I like raiding as a concept. What I hate is when raiding is the *ONLY* true path to advancement or the only true end game content.
I also dislike WoW’s raid design. It relies on randomness, arbitrariness, and adding difficulty by haphazardly making various character’s powers inoperable. That is bad design, in my view. It also does not reward creatvity and imagination. It expects you to follow one basic method to win, and you cannot diverge from it. Class roles are extremely rigid, and a single person’s mistake will frequently wipe the whole raid.
And then there is their philosophy of constantly forcing you to clear an hour of trash just to get to a boss (and then reclearing it if you wipe without a DI or a soulstone up).
When I first read about this I thought it sounded encouraging. But the bait and switch is already there. The 25 man versions get more bosses and better loot. So really, this changes nothing. It just moves the wall a tiny bit farther away. And I have read nothing about them improving the QUALITY of their raid design.
I think that is an excellent question. When I raided, I can only think of maybe 1 person I knew who would answer this yes. My answer is no, not with the way Blizzard raids are designed.
But there are a lot of MUDs and a few graphical MMOs I have played where I *would* have raided even if there was no loot. Heck, RvR in DAoC never gave loot but I could do it all day and night and have a blast.
I agree, and this is a serious flaw with Blizzard’s class design. Every class is so incredibly specialized that you really can’t get by without certain classes. How many successful raid guilds could function without a shadow priest, for example?
Absolutely.
Thank you! I am glad that someone was able to see that while it was an oversimplification, there is a core truth to it that points to a serious problem in modern raid design. Too much of raiding in modern MMOs is a bunch of people doing things by rote while they listen to a raid leader bark orders. That’s not good design! It is not fun when people don’t get to use their own imagination and creativity to respond to situations.
Another spot on point. One of the most interesting things about TBC is the way it splintered people off to run all the new quests and such. I would occasionally group with people from the “Top Raid Guilds” for quests or 5 man PUGs, and I was shocked at how UNSKILLED these people were as players. These folks held themselves out as highly skilled uber raiders. But they really had average skills at best.
Valthan: I believe that is because of the -CONTINUE READING- tags. I use those so the front page is not scrolled off with huge posts. If you check the front page here, you’ll see how it helps. Unfortunately, it does require that you click to read the whole post via RSS. I don’t know if there is any sort of fix for this. If there isn’t, is this a huge problem that would make you not interested in reading the posts?
Also to Valthan: I wish the immaturity thing were just an isolated experience. Our raid guild was 18+, and you only need 1 or 2 people like that to ruin things. And like Gustov said, the raid design makes it so you can’t just kick people.
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We had one particular player who loved to constantly toss around the whole gay/fag thing (this was particularly bad since we had an openly gay guild member who didn’t take kindly to this). This player was our highest dps and played almost 24/7 (which meant he was always on for any raid or heroic instance). And his RL friend (who was a super cool guy) was also one of our top DPS and had a good off tank in the guild also. So kicking out this one guy would have required some massive recruiting to replace them.
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That sucks. That’s part of what is so horrible about raid design in WoW. You get certain people and you *NEED* them. If you kick people and it means you have to take a week or two off raiding while you recruit, more people might quit the guild. Once you are raiding and working on progession, there is nothing else your guild can do. They can’t PvP because most classes need a total respec/regear for PvP. They can’t do heroics, because once you’re through tier 4 the heroics are mostly garbage. So you get stuck in this situation where you have to keep jerks in your guild if you want to keep moving on.
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And I saw the same thing in other raid guilds I was a part of in WoW, AoC, and other modern MMOs. This is not isolated to WoW unfortunately.
“When I first read about this I thought it sounded encouraging. But the bait and switch is already there. The 25 man versions get more bosses and better loot. So really, this changes nothing. It just moves the wall a tiny bit farther away. And I have read nothing about them improving the QUALITY of their raid design.”
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Umm, where is that said? Yea they said that the loot would be different and the bosses a little more difficult in 25 man vs the 10 man (think of 10man as a reg and 25 man as a heroic). They HAVE said that all the bosses will be present in both iterations! The bosses will be tweaked a bit so that 10 people can beat them, but they will all be there. At the end of Wrath, 10 people will be defeating Arthas. Don’t say stuff that isn’t true.
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I also see you keep harping on the perfect Raid makeup. Back in Vanilla WoW that was true, back at the start of BC that was true, with Sunwell you don’t need the Perfect raid to beat it (just something close to it)… and it has been said multiple times that they are bringing things very much more in line come WotLK so that you can use any make up you want as long as you have 3-4 tanks (2 for 10 man), 6-8 healers (2-3 for 10 man) and 13-14 DPS (5-6 for 10 man).
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There was something else, but it has vacated my mind… I might be back again with it…
Hey Gustov, I think lots of people would ‘try,’ raids if there were not leet purples, but I’m fairly certain that most days of the week the raids would all be silent. You mentioned yourself how boring it gets once you’re on farm status. Except for guilds competing in some sort of ranking system, I wouldn’t expect many to be raiding.
Lume, I read some of your blog, and you indicated there is a pretty strong friendship in your guild. Real friends are the only thing I can see that would make me enjoy raiding again. When I lived in Korea, the Americans with me all started playing WoW, and eventually we raided. It was fun then, because my friends were around in-game, but once we started getting things down on farm status, pretty much everyone left it for PvP, and then most just left the game.
Onto the topic at hand, “Raiding’s false sense of accomplishment…”
When one raids, another should always ask, WHAT DID YOU ACCOMPLISH!?! There are no death penalties, there is no gear loss, there is no risk other than wasting time. You didn’t do anything? Games need risks to be exciting, loss of levels, loss of gear (when you’re looted, or when a monster eats you) and other features to make death BAD.
No, it won’t stop me reading, just is a bit of an annoyance.
I remembered what I was going to say, I have done raids down a member or 2 (by this I don’t mean we ran 23 or 24 people, I mean that we had some dead weight), its a little harder, but it does work. As long as the dead weight tries to contribute then it will go fine.
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Hell, there is a guild on an RP server that is running a contest to be taken to kill Illidan as dead weight for someone who will never get to see the encounter but wants to. How is this possible if the raid requires that all members do what needs to be done when it needs to.
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Well guess what, when starting that guild, the philosophy(sp?) should be laid out and that should be part of it. If you are an “asshat” then you are /gkick’d. Then your members are aware of it, and it is accepted.
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So they are kicked… you (as I pointed out earlier) can still run (it is harder, but can be done with dead weight, or someone not as good as the person kicked. You should have someone available because I don’t know any raiding guild that had 25 members and that is it. If you did, that is another planning problem on your part. For 25 man raiding you should have 30-35 raiders, that way you have subs if someone can’t make it, or you have to kick them.
To Valthan: On this blog I speak about concepts generally. I know there are some people out there so Uber 3l33t that they can drop a useful member for a full DA (Drag Along) and succeed. Keep in mind those are often the most heavily geared out folks in the game. We are speaking about the general concept here, not the exceptions.
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For the overwhelming majority of people who raid in WoW, there is a standard set of classes they MUST have and that’s it. They *need* certain buffs. Some bosses *need* a specific type of debuff. Against some bosses melee (or ranged) DPS is almost impossible. Most guilds absolutely *NEED* a shadow priest or they’ll be OOM within minutes. These are facts about WoW’s raid design. (Well, not just WoW, AoC is the same way, and so is FFXI).
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I don’t hate raiding. I feel like I am not making that clear. I love it as a concept. I just think the way it is implemented in modern MMOs is horribly, horrible flawed. Just to quickly summarize, the main reasons I find it to be so flawed are:
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1) Hyper scripted content that forces players into scripted roles like actors in a play. They stand on the X, press 1, and try not to fall asleep.
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2) Extremely specialized classes limit variety and options. You *need* certain classes.
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3) A freakish reliance on randomness and arbitrariness as a source of “difficulty.”
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4) A super painful tendency to just pick 10+ abilities that a boss is immune to - often with no logical connection to the lore behind the boss. This makes first encounters with a boss largely about figuring out which of your powers work and which ones don’t. That’s just dumb.
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5) L2RAID N00B mentality in the community. Blizzard, Funcom, and Square all foster this. They should instead be stamping it out. Most people do not enjoy raiding. Blizzard’s own numbers put the raiding community at 5-10% of their population. Of those who raid, many would rather do something else but raiding is the only way to advance.
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6) Raiding Uber Alles design attitude. Why is raiding the only way to advance in the end game? There should be 5 man dungeons that have the same epics-to-man-hours ratio as 10 or 25 man dungeons. But for some reason, there is this mentality that raiding is the only way people should be able to advance. This is ridiculous. You can create just as much challenge (and often MORE challenge) in encounters designed for less people. Also, in smaller groups, each member has more jobs which usually means they worked harder for their loot. In a small team, it is almost impossile to have Drag Alongs.
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7) TRASH and TRASH RESPAWNS: I really should have this higher on the list. This is absolutely brutal and brain dead. Imagine if it took someone 1 hour to zone into a dungeon. Would they just accept that? Heck no. But that’s pretty much what an hour of trash killing is. It is rarely a challenge, the rewards are virtually non-existent, and it sure as heck isn’t fun. As I said in a previous post: “clearing 1 hour of trash for a 10 minute boss battle is like enduring a root canal for the reward of a prostate exam.”
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And trash respawns are almost as stupid of an idea as bind on pickup crafted items. WHY???? If people have wiped on a boss 2 or 3 times and used up all their DIs/soulstones, is it really necessary to kick them in the teeth and force them to mindlessly clear trash again?
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The folks defending WoW-style raid design are people currently raiding. I’d love to see some of these folks come here a year or so after they have quit WoW and see if they are still defending it.
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I haven’t played DAoC in 3-4+ years, but I still remember how awesome the RvR was. I loved almost every minute of it. But most people who quit WoW - especially those who raided - will go on a 2 hour tirade about how much they hated raiding. That should tell you something.
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You totally ignored everything I said.
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Sure the Rp contest is with geared out people, but I have brought dead weight in runs because of kicks or burn-outs on many progression raids when I used to raid and it was harder, but it was still doable.
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Notice I said USED to raid, past tense… I stopped to level another toon on another server. I miss raiding a lot. So… umm… nope, I still think its awesome (except trash respawns, I agree with you about that).
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Now I have never been a healer or ranged DPS, but as a tank, offtank and melee dps’er I never had “Stand here and hit 1″ encounter.
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As a tank, I had to get and maintain aggro (more than one button) as well as make sure my trinkets and on use skills were going off reliably, as well keeping up with everything going on in case I had to hit an “oh shit” button. And all that is while moving around to avoid the fire. Sure there are some tank fights that you want to keep a boss in a certain position, but usually in those there is stuff happening to make you need to constantly reposition that boss in that position.
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As an offtank, see above, but add in DPS rotations for when my mob goes down or when I have a great threat lead on it that I can go do something else to help burn something else down (or start to get threat on that target). Included here are all the threat, oh shit and proc rotations.
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As a DPS STAY OUT OF THE FIRE is lots of movement, keeping up with the tank to stay behind the target so you don’t Parry-gib them, high dps rotations wiht procs and pots, and as a druid, powershifting.
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And for the record, no you don’t need a shadow preist, there is chain potting, Seal and Judgement of wisdom, I think the hunters have a way to give back mana, there is the shammy mana totem… you are being stubborn and as my friend Lume mentioned ignorant… ignorant of how things have changed and evolved.
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If you aren’t going to reply to my points but instead dance around, you might want to save you wrists and hand joints the pressure and not reply to me anymore.
I think you are right, and WoW’s own history shows this to be true. Whenver people are given an alternative to raiding, people jump all over it and gleefully stop raiding.
I am with you on this. The only consequence to failure in WoW is a huge waste of your time. That’s boring imho.
I am glad someone is pulling us back to the main topic here. Thanks Witchkiller.
People get so wrapped up into raiding because of all the ancillary pain that is involved in it. All the recruiting you have to do just to be able to start. Developing a loot system that people won’t pee their pants over every day. Managing whiners. Dealing with loot whores. Replacing people who quit for whatever reason. Farming consumables. Farming food mats. Farming drink mats. Farming potion mats. Farming gold to pay for repairs. Farming gold to pay for enchantments.
The things people have to do just to BEGIN raiding overwhelm them so much that they get massively invested in the idea of raiding. So when they finally stand tall over a fallen pile of pixels, they get a far greater sense of accomplishment than is really called for.
What is dangerous about this is when it replaces the need for accomplishment in real life. When people start to feel satisfied with their lot in life because of victories over raid bosses and thus don’t feel the need to work on relationships, career, school, etc. This happens very, very often and it is a real problem.
It would be wise for game designers to acknowledge this and avoid deliberately designing their game systems to require such a freakish and excessive life investment.
Valthan, I addressed your point. I’m sorry if you feel I didn’t address all of them, but I addressed the ones I felt were most interesting.
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Everything you described is still just a couple of buttons, and they are still going to be pressed in the same situations, for the same reasons, in pretty much the same order. I’m sorry but that’s just the facts for WoW raiding. Please play DAoC, EQ, or a variety of MUDs where every encounter requires that every players think on their feet and adjust their own tactics accordingly. I’m telling you, it is nowhere near the same.
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I have already stated that “stand on X and press 1″ is an oversimplification. It is hyperbole: an exaggeration to make a point. I was the main tank for my raid guild, and found it to be absurdly easy compared to anything I have done in games previous to WoW. You use a couple of abilities, and a couple of trinkets, and that’s it. It is very repetitive.
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DPS classes do almost nothing. I think I’d shoot myself in the head if I had raided exclusively as DPS. Aggro is barely more than watching a threat meter, and the amount of moving around is extremely minimal. It is so minimal that boss battles that require movement are a “big deal.” In DAoC RvR, you are moving almost constantly.
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Please note I said quit WoW, not quit raiding. Very few people that have actually quit WoW have anything positive to say about raiding. Yes, there are probably some, but they are the exception not the rule.
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But nothing significant has changed and I am definitely not being ignorant of anything. You can disagree with me - that’s fine. But calling me ignorant is cheap, easy, and wrong.
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Everyone still uses the same class configs and the same strategies. I read through Lume’s site, and for almost every boss battle they use the same “accepted” strategy that everyone else uses. The best example of a difference he could come up with was a pally tank instead of a warrior tank for 1 boss. That’s nothing. The very fact that he feels that is a significant difference PROVES my point.
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I recently visited the web sites of the top 30 ranked guilds for progression. Every single one of them used a shadow priest, and 90% of their classes were exactly the same. Then popping through the WoW armory, they had almost identical gear AND almost identical builds. Its really quite hilarious if you take the time to go through it all.
I still think you’re ignorant. Ignorant because you choose to ignore the real positive experiences people keep relating to you by trying to tell people how they really experience something and really think. Ignorant because you seem to think every single raiding experience is exactly kin to the ones you personally experienced. And ignorant because you don’t understand that analogies themselves don’t suggest an exactness in degrees of similarities exactly, but rather simple relations that augment the real point at hand.
Where I can admit there are people that play WoW who exude immaturity, all the while saying there are some great people who play the game, you simply focus on those who are immature and ignore any real positive relationships and experiences that people relate. Even if they have had a few frustrations here and then.
You say you read my blog, and yet you write off statements like “Criticisms about the Sunwell aside, playing through this level of raiding has been one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had in my time gaming. Thank you, Blizzard. And thank you, Lunacy!” By simply telling people it’s a false sense of accomplishment. Because you personally think it’s pointless.
Personal opinion. A topic you’ve chosen to ignore entirely. Among others.
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By the way, I played DAoC, AC2, UO, and Horizons each rather extensively, and have tried EQ, EQ2 and GW for short periods of time. There were elements of each I didn’t like that caused me to stop playing. I will likely try WAR, as well. So don’t try to tell me I should play other MMO’s. And stop trying to tell me how I really experience the games I play.
And you don’t read my blog. You’ve only read portions of my blog and focus on imperfections I’ve highlighted. Problems I’ve highlighted merely to provide a critical voice amongst those who *do* enjoy the game, regardless. And yet you don’t seem to recognize any positives I’ve written about. Or you just write them off as false. Patently.
I’m done here.
In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya: I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Look, you are reacting emotionally. You are resorting to insults. That really doesn’t help your point. It actually just bolsters my point about the maturity level of your average raider. You might want to think about that.
You mean like people who go to the blog of someone who has worked successfully in the gaming industry for 12+ years, and run raid guilds, and call that person “ignorant” repeatedly?
Hence the point of this blog article - the false sense of accomplishment. You feel like you achieved something, but I’m sad to say you didn’t. You played a game. You suffered through some atrociously bad encounter design and came out on top. Congratulations. I hope you had fun. But you did not ACHIEVE anything in a real sense of the word. The problem is, Blizzard makes the process so painful, time consuming, and hellacious that it *FEELS* like you achieved something.
I have read your blog for a few weeks. I admit that is only a snapshot. But in that time, everything you posted there only affirmed my beliefs about raiding. You pointed out the same flaws. You demonstrated that you have to use the same tactics.
I’m glad you have fun doing it. I *REALLY AM*. But you represent that very small part that enjoys raiding of the already small part that raids at all. You really should at least acknowledge that.
I hope not. If folks like yourself, who love WoW raiding, don’t post, then who will present the other side of the argument?
1) “Hyper scripted content that forces players into scripted roles like actors in a play. They stand on the X, press 1, and try not to fall asleep.”
I know this is just an exaggeration, but there is more than just “move to x and press 1 and repeat”. If it were so, all bosses would be killed by everyone already. There are many things going on during encounters which forces players to react.
2) “Extremely specialized classes limit variety and options. You *need* certain classes. I recently visited the web sites of the top 30 ranked guilds for progression. Every single one of them used a shadow priest, and 90% of their classes were exactly the same.”
Have you really been in a 25 man raid? There are 25 slots, of course you will have a Shadow Priest, of course you will have a Resto Shaman. Did you expect to beat every boss with 1 tank, 1 healer, and 23 DPS? Of course not. Did you only have 25 players in the guild which have no room to make adjustments? That is just poor guild management then. Are Shadow Priest needed? No. Do they help? Yes.
3) “A freakish reliance on randomness and arbitrariness as a source of ‘difficulty’.”
If the boss fights are scripted, then it wouldn’t be random right? Bosses have abilities which may randomly target a raid member which forces them to react fast by making them move, or use one of their abilities. First you bash how it is so boring ho you have to go through dance steps against a scripted boss, then you don’t like it if bosses make you react.
4) “A super painful tendency to just pick 10+ abilities that a boss is immune to - often with no logical connection to the lore behind the boss. This makes first encounters with a boss largely about figuring out which of your powers work and which ones don’t. That’s just dumb.”
It wouldn’t be a boss if you are able to Fear him or Freeze him would it? If you are talking about a Fire Phoenix boss being immuned to Fire spells, was it really that hard to figure that out?
5) “L2RAID N00B mentality in the community. Blizzard, Funcom, and Square all foster this. They should instead be stamping it out. Most people do not enjoy raiding. Blizzard’s own numbers put the raiding community at 5-10% of their population. Of those who raid, many would rather do something else but raiding is the only way to advance.”
Please link me where you got those numbers from. Also, raiding isn’t the only way to advance. Blizzard put in the Badge of Justice system in where you can just doing Heroics for gear equivalent to end game raiding. If you don’t like raiding, then there are other things in the game you can do. If you can’t find anything you like doing in the game, then why play?
6) “Raiding Uber Alles design attitude. Why is raiding the only way to advance in the end game? There should be 5 man dungeons that have the same epics-to-man-hours ratio as 10 or 25 man dungeons.”
Again, you can do heroics for Badges to turn in for gear which are equivalent to end game raiding gear. Raiding isn’t the ONLY way.
7) “TRASH and TRASH RESPAWNS: It is rarely a challenge, the rewards are virtually non-existent, and it sure as heck isn’t fun.”
I still have no idea what raid instance you are running where you must clear an hour of trash if you wipe on a boss. Also if trash is so unrewarding, then why do people do “trash farming groups”? I’ve also said this in my own post, players are complaining that there is NOT enough trash in Sunwell.
TUNA: Thanks for visiting and posting!
Well, for me, most people in WoW raids do exactly what the instructions tell them to do. People rarely have to make their own on the fly decisions. They are told either in advance, or during, *EXACTLY* what to do. I don’t like that system.
Thank you for being one of the few pro-raiders that is honest enough to admit this. That’s one of my gripes. There should not be specific class/spec combos that are de facto required.
As I said earlier, I mainly mean the fact that the PLAYERS are following a script. But even the bosses: they don’t react to what the players do. They just follow their little script with some potentially disastrous randomness dropped in. I don’t find that very fun or epic, personally.
Sure it would. Why should all of my powers be crap and all of the bosses powers be perfect? It gets to the point in WoW/AoC/FFXI raiding where the only thing that matters is dealing damage. The boss is going to be immune to everything else, so the only thing really worth caring about is soaking or dishing damage. That is super boring.
Why are fears, disarms, mez, stuns, etc. almost ALWAYS worthless? Blah, that’s so incredibly boring.
And no, I am not talking about logical immunities, like a fire phoenix being immune to fire.
I’m talking about crap like a boss’s lackeys being immune to disarm. Heck even trash in WoW sometimes has asinine immunities.
You can get tier 6 gear from Badges of Justice now?
As I said in another raid discussion, I think the Badge of Justice system was a huge step in the right direction. But most of the stuff you get from that is so-so at best. It is a good start, but its a very small start.
I do, however, give Blizzard full credit for at least this baby step.
That’s the thing though. There aren’t other things to do. Kill players or Kill raid bosses. Once you hit cap, that’s it.
As for why play… I don’t any more. I quit over a year ago precisely for that reason.
But they aren’t equivalent and you know it. There are a few pieces of badge gear that are decent, but the raid gear crushes most of it. You know this.
Um, almost every single raid instance has an hour of trash per boss. And if you wipe 2 or 3 times, then you’ll have trash respawns requiring another hour of trash. I’m not sure why you question this as it is a known fact about WoW raid dungeons.
There are a few that are trash light, and that’s great. But there shouldn’t be trash respawns in ANY of them. One of the whole points behind an instance is that it is a fixed piece of the world for your group. There is no need for trash respawns. They are just a punitive waste of time.
TUNA: Thank you tons for visiting and posting.
The reason I see why this is so is it wouldn’t make the fight any challenging at all. If a Warlock can use Fear on the boss the whole time, then the Warlock can pretty much solo the boss and never get hit.
I believe some pieces of gear are equal to Hyjal -> BT Tier 6 gear, but not Sunwell Tier 6 gear. That’s still “end game” right? If you are talking about iLevel of gear, then all of the Season 4 = Sunwell loot.
Sadly I have nothing to recommend here
Some people are just content with doing 5 mans with their friends and could care less about raiding or pvp.
Blizzard has implemented in WotLK to allow 10 man “experience” end game, though the loot difference will be there. For some people, the “experience” is enough for them.
I myself have been a huge Warcraft fan long before WoW was released, so all this lore and events that I see in raids is what drives me to keep going. Loot is extra (and is needed to advance).
“Um, almost every single raid instance has an hour of trash per boss. And if you wipe 2 or 3 times, then you’ll have trash respawns requiring another hour of trash. I’m not sure why you question this as it is a known fact about WoW raid dungeons.”
I probably just took one of your exaggerations as fact (about wiping once = reclear). Most trash don’t respawn for 1hr 30mins to 2hrs. Most boss encounters are less than 5 minutes. You have plenty of time to put in a Flasks worth of attempts if you are trying a new boss.
Although there are some trash clearing which are annoying, the do have some purpose. I think of them as a test to the guild. If the raid can’t clear the trash, then they most likely can’t kill the boss.
I remember in Molten Core, the first pull for a new MC raiding guild was huge. It tested to see if your Tanks could tank the two Giants, and if your Healers were able to keep them up. The next pull tested your DPS.
Same with TBC raids. If your off tanks can’t stay alive on trash, then you’re not ready for the upcoming boss (which probably requires and off tank).
It’s good to have a good discussion everyone once in awhile
As I stated before, I agree with some of your points, but just to a certain extent (though it might just be you exaggerating again to make a point).
I know there is a lot of comments going on (here and my blog), so its hard to find stuff you said sometimes, and some of what I said may have overlapped. So sorry if I am being redundant at times.
This is just a brief reply to hit some highlights in response to you, Tuna:
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Stuns/Fears/Mez: This gets to a core failure in WoW to develop good CC (Crowd Control) mechanics. In older MMOs, the first CC you hit a mob with was full effect. The next was half. The next was half of that. Etc. So it was possible to have CC as a viable tactic without it being, as you say, a warlock fearing it constantly. It is a shame WoW did not design good CC mechanics from the start.
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Badge Loot: From what I experienced before I quit, and what I have read later, the Badge gear is heroic/tier4 quality gear at the most, with a very few slightly better pieces sprinkled here or there. I also recall that the badge cost of some of these items is insane. Again, this is an area where WoW moved in the right direction. They just need to magnify this system by 100.
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WotLK 10 man stuff: I have read that this is kindof another WoW bait and switch. The 25 man versions still have the best loot, so the 10 man raiders are still the red headed step children.
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Trash Respawns: You spend ~10 minutes or so on the boss, you wipe, you spend 5-10 minutes rebuffing consuming, etc. Each attempt is at least 20-30 min. So after 2-3 attempts you’re over an hour. A lot of times trash is respawning by then, which is the same time you are running out of DIs and soulstones.
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Yeah, that’s good logic for the first clear. It is the respawns that I have a problem with. I don’t recall ever having “problems” per se with trash. But I do recall often having raids called simply because of a trash respawn. A few times we were super close to downing the boss, but the idea of another hour or more of trash clearing to try was just too annoying.
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But in general, I still think an hour of trash clearing is extraneous. 15-20 minutes should be plenty, imho. I don’t like raid design that forces you to spend so much time on a relatively pointless, time sink activity like trash clearing. Maybe that’s personal preference.
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Indeed. Please visit often! I don’t always trash raiding.
I care about my industry very deeply, and I want to see it move forward to make great games - not just rehashes of what has already been done. I also want to see existing systems (like raiding) get better and become more fun.
Stuns/Fears/Mez: Blizz does have something like this, but only for PvPing with diminishing returns on CC. So they probably could implement this on bosses if they felt like it.
Still I feel that bosses should be susceptible to CC. You are fighting someone which requires 25 people to kill him. He isn’t a weak mob which you could fear or sheep. It wouldn’t “feel” like boss fight if they could in my opinion.
Badge Loot: With the release of the Sunwell Plateau, new badge loot were added to the vendors, as well as gems and recipes which were previously only accessible by “end game” content. And yes, they are of T6 quality, but not better than Sunwell gear.
Blizz DOES allow players to access “end game” stuff, but they just let 25 man raiders have first dibs on them. I have a feeling that Blizz will update their badge loot one more time before the next expansion.
They do the same thing with Arena gear. When a new season start, the old season gear gets bumped down, and you can start purchasing gear with honor from battlegrounds instead of doing arena.
WotLK 10 Man Stuff: Blizz is doing this to let players experience “end game”. Players shouldn’t have loot as their only motivation to play. They should be playing for the experience and enjoyment.
Yes there are some players out there who don’t enjoy raiding and do it for just the loot, but you can’t generalize the entire raiding population like that. And those players would have stopped raiding long before “end game” if they truly didn’t enjoy raiding.
Trash Respawns: This differs between guilds and who you play with. Some guild can wipe and recover faster than others. It is annoying sometimes, but it is just something you have to deal with if you want to raid. Some players feel it is worth clearing trash for attempts on a boss. Then there are those who don’t think it is worth the trouble, and end up not raiding anymore.
Maybe it is because I am used to doing trash in the old raid instances (MC, BWL, Naxx) that I don’t mind the trash in TBC. Back then it really was an hour worth of trash, in TBC, it is nowhere near as bad.
I think if people enjoyed raiding for raiding sake, more than 5-10% of the population would raid. I also think if people enjoyed it for raiding sake, raiding wouldn’t plummet to almost nothing near the end of expansions.
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CC: It isn’t just CC, its tons of things. Taunts, disarms, various debuffs, etc. They just randomly make some bosses (and even some trash) immune to like 20 different abilities. I find it super frustrating to have my favorite powers constantly getting “shut off” in the battles that matter most.
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You’re right that trash was worse in the pre-TBC raids. Those are the bad old days. I quit the first time because of all that crap. Then TBC promised to be better… I came back, raided again, and it was better but just barely.
Cambios, you do offer some vaild points, but you do it wrong. Telling Lume and I that we are wrong and our experiences are the exception is bullshit.
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It sounds to me like you have barely gotten through Kara. Lume has beat the Sunwell, I have, before my guild went on summer vacation (since we are all old enough to have real lives and realize that the summer is more important than dedicating a bunch of time raiding) we were half-way through BT.
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We have seen more than you, and KNOW FIRST HAND what it is like.
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It sounds like you don’t care about lore, you sound like a lootwhore. I am not trying to be mean, but you keep going on about loot this and loot that. What about the lore of the game?
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Another reason the lootwhore word was brought out was because you keep mentioning loot instead of another real reason people raid. To have fun with friends. Yes just because I have never met them IRL they are still friends, anyone who ever tells me different is just plaing wrong. They may not be my “Best Friend” but they are still someone I can trust and confide in if I am feeling down.
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Don’t tell my DAoC didn’t give you loot, because if you just wanted that there are many guilds which run pre-made BGs which sounds pretty similar to your RvR stuff. There are 5 man Arenas (wow… only 3 less than your 8v8 you were talking about). And that gives you loot.
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So, honestly, how far did you go in TBC raiding… since you quit around a year ago, I would think you didn’t even get to see mag. Which is sad.
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One last thing, you keep saying people just read strategies and bing bang boom win. Where did the strats come from? Oh thats right… people being creative and reactive in a boss battle to figure it out and make a strat for others to use. Blizzard doesn’t release or endorse any of them. My guild would try then encounter for a week or 2 cold, and try to form our own plan, if we couldn’t get it we would do some research and figure shit out that way. As a team. NOT 1 person barking orders. A TEAM!
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I have talked to many raiders and the majority of them talk like I do. I think you had some bad experiences and in fact that you are the exception not the rule. Hope you have better luck in the future if you ever decide to try it again.
First I’d like to to respond to this:
“WotLK 10 man stuff: I have read that this is kindof another WoW bait and switch. The 25 man versions still have the best loot, so the 10 man raiders are still the red headed step children.
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I think having a 10 man progression is a pretty big deal. It should be like this: Every expansion is 3 tiers of gear, 10 mans will max out at tier 8 whereas 25 mans will get the full tier 9. Why? Because it’s harder (logistically) to do 25 mans. Now, I do think it should be the other way around, but a lot has to change first. In my experience, which only extends to Mag/Gruul/TK/SSC in small doses, it is easier to pull people along in a 25 man. When you are not fully geared (as in just starting), Kara needs all 10 people to be near the top of their game to beat. But with a mix and match team of my guild (all kara geared) and another guild (some kara geared, some greens and blues) we were able to fairly easily beat the encounters. The tanks had to be good and the healers had to be good, but dps was pulled along in a few cases. Now I know you can pull people along in Kara as well, but not really without any gear to begin with.
I think a 5 man heroic is the measure of a player, that’s where you see how good they are, because a few of them require all 5 people to be very good. If you can go through them without wiping, that’s usually a skillful endeavor. Now, I think what Cambios is saying is that why, when 5 mans are harder because they expose your weaknesses, should those players get lesser gear than the 25 man raiders? If your argument is that they are harder, I disagree based on what I’ve just said. For progression raiding, you physically need better gear because you get hit harder, and the bosses have more health, so you need to do more damage to keep up. This is what he is reffering to as an arbitrary element. Shouldn’t the measure of progression be based on the dificulty of the fight, not just increasing the numbers?
This is where I don’t have any answers, just ideas. There has to be a way to make fights harder without requiring gear. How about the warlock being required to fear at certain points in the fight (or equivelent CC)? The simple fights, and there are a few, are the least rewarding, I believe. Prince is not a rewarding fight, it’s very easy. Your success is based on how fast you can kill him and if your healing can keep up. Most fights aren’t that simplisitic, but I feel like they are a waste. I play an affliction lock, so I have one of the more dynamic roles of dps in that I have a lot more buttons to press. But the hunter, who basically presses 1 button ( a macro) and I are doing the same methodical thing over and over again until the boss dies. Boss fights should have a hunter and warlock doing more then pressing a button, and moving from point A to B to C and rinse repeat. How about throwing in a need for a hunter/warlock/others to have to use a bunch of abilities in a fight? Give the tanks something to do other than stand/move out of the way.
How about Intercept being a required skill in boss fights? The boss peels off because the mage just critted and he’s pissed off. Aggro tables aren’t dynamic enough when you can just watch it and make sure you don’t pass the tank. How about a boss fight where the raid takes DoT damage the entire time? (maybe there is one
) A fight where dps/tanking is almost irreleveant, it’s all on the healers shoulders, maybe it’s a timed event where you have to survive for 10 minutes, there is no boss, just adds. Lets vary the encounters greatly, not the bosses abilities but the circumstances of the boss fight. Make a player use most of their abilities in a boss fight, don’t make it all dps based. Bosses don’t need 6 million health if you have a hard time getting to the boss to begin with. How about a castle courtyard with adds streaming in constantly, so much so that you can’t afford to put more than 1 dps on the boss and only a pet can be afforded to tank the boss? The boss is fearable, sheepable, but so what, until he’s dead, those adds are gonna keep coming. We should be asking for more dynamic content, make the boss fights feel very different from one another. That’s one step towards an epic boss fight. I would imagine a boss like Gruul or Mag to have a lot of hit points since they are big hulking messes. But a lot of other bosses are just tall 
But one thing that just sits sour with a lot of players is gear disparity. If I can only play for 2 hours at a time, other than speed of earning the items, why should I not have access to the same items other do? Or because I only have enough friends to put together 10 man raids. Players are not created equal, but gear puts people into castes. If you are not able to raid prior to joining a raiding guild, how would you get in? You could never be in a top raiding guild, unless you betrayed another guild. Why are the mechanics of the game built that way?
If you believe that 25 man raiders should get better gear because they “deserve” it, imo that is straight up loot whoring and cat assing. That’s 5-10% of population. Do an armory check on Kara geared folks, low numbers based on total population. We could satisfy cat assing by giving 25 man raiders, 10 man raiders, and 5 man players different sets of gear. Stats nearly the same but completely different visual style. Then everyone would still know you and your chums downed Arthas in a 25 man environment. And the rest of us could continue to not give a crap. I will continue to raid 10 mans, get my cat assing gear, and be perfectly happy. If you can’t be happy with an arrangement that gives more players access to the same stats, why? They have played for just as long and deserve to have their content eased for beating it. All it takes is a system that rewards in different ways, but still requires commitment. For the raiders, they need gear to drop in successive instances, no problem there. For non raiders there has to be a system to build an entire set of epics equal to the other sets but they don’t need to get there as quickly, but they still ought to be able to get there. 25 mans, quick progression based on downing bosses. 10 mans, medium progression based on downing bosses and badge system. 5 mans based entirely on badges with slow progression. If a 25 man raider wants the badge gear, it’s still there. And 5 man and 10 man players just take longer to accumulate their sets. I see no harm no foul. You could even make 25 man stuff have like +10 stats, 10 man stuff +5, so that there’s a tiny margin of improvement. Or how about the raid bosses have abilities that the gear addresses? So raid damage reduced by 5,10, 15% as you progress, making the current dungeon easier, resetting with each new instance area. The 5 mans would become easier based on location also. The new gear incorporates all previous content, but needs upgrading. Maybe it’s a set bonus
Anyway, ideas to improve the arbitrary difficulty slider and rewards for all, not some. How about some more ideas?
@Gustov
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Adds streaming into a courtyard… sounds like Mount Hyjal to me!
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Dots the entire fight or different mechanics… you mean like in Reliquary(sp?) of Souls where the first phase everyone has a debuff that is -100% healing done to you
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Or the Mother (or is it blooboil… been a while) fight where every minute or so 3 people get a shadow debuff that does raidwide damage (in high ass numbers) until the 3 people get far enough away from eachother (all have to run in different directions)
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Or Kael with after the weapon phase you have to pick up the weapon you can use and equip it, and make use of the “on use” ability to defeat him.
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Or the way Supremus randomly targets someone in the raid and chases them around ignoring aggro tables.
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Or the jumping around and platform hopping that is required by the tanks and healers in A’lar.
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Like Teron where you get killed, and become a shade and have to kill the constructs with abilties you have never seen before, and you don’t get time to read the tooltips, you have to figure it out on the fly.
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Almost the whole of T6 (MH, BT, and from what I have heard the sunwell) has boss fights with cool little things in there that need to be dealt with on a reactive basis.
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As I said earlier, yes there are mods to help, yes there are strats, but you do NOT have to use them. It is possible without it. Hell had to be done without it for those mods and strats to be made. I have done bosses of this caliber by figuring things out on the fly, so do NOT tell me that it can’t be done without mass wiping. Yes we wiped… yes it took us a day or 2 of attempts, but it was worth it. Yes I feel acheivment. No I don’t think it matters in the “real world”, the same way I know my team winning the adult pickup hockey league regionals doesn’t matter in the “real world”. It is still something I accomplished with a team of my peers that makes me feel good, and is not FALSE.
Oh and the “look at the armoury for that 10% rule”. Is the dumbest thing I have heard. I have 1 raiding toon, I have 9 alts. All of them are on the armoury. None have been in a raid. So using that as a statistic is flawed and wrong, as I have just shown since 10% of my toons are raiding toons, yet that is not an accurate statement since play time (when I was raiding and not trying to get an ally to raid ready status) was 75% raid / raid related and 25% alt fun.
All this chest thumping by Cambios about his exceptional qualifications reinforcing his world view reminds me of other such Luminaries ..
Like John Romero and Alan Emerich
…also dislike WoW’s raid design. It relies on randomness, arbitrariness, and adding difficulty by haphazardly making various character’s powers inoperable. That is bad design, in my view. It also does not reward creatvity and imagination. It expects you to follow one basic method to win, and you cannot diverge from it. Class roles are extremely rigid, and a single person’s mistake will frequently wipe the whole raid.
And then there is their philosophy of constantly forcing you to clear an hour of trash just to get to a boss (and then reclearing it if you wipe without a DI or a soulstone up).
I can’t argue this, I assume it is this way just to make finishing the game harder/take longer which gives them more bang for their developer buck. As far as class roles go though it is just like any other team competition when the failure of just 1 position and play can cost the game.
Valthan: I never told you that you are wrong. But it is a statistical fact that your love of raiding is the exception. I really can’t waste space to go over that for the 5th time.
Hahahaha. There it is folks. The “L2RAID N00B” mentality. Whenever these raid lifers get backed into a corner, they ALWAYS fall back on this attitude of superiority.
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I’ve been through Black Temple, and before TBC up to Naxx. I’d say that’s plenty far to understand WoW raiding.
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I don’t need someone to hit me in the head 47 times to know I don’t like it.
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Here is a little clue: the fact that you’ve wasted thousands of hours in order to take down 15-20 pixel bosses does not make you a better person than anyone else. It doesn’t make you smarter. It doesn’t mean you know the game better. It just means you were patient enough to drive a railroad spike slowly into your skull and survive. So drop the superior attitude.
But see, that’s the point. Most people don’t raid to have fun with friends. They can have a lot more fun with friends doing actually fun things that aren’t painful as hell like WoW/AoC/FFXI style raiding.
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If people do it for the fun, how come raiding turns to crickets and tumbleweeds when the game is a few months from an expansion? Or when they do something like open up the PvP system for loot?
DAoC had loot, but you didn’t have to raid for it. You could cap all of your stats and resists using player crafted loot.
No kidding. But the thing is, only 5-10% of the customer base raids, and of those who do even a smaller portion do it for the fun of raiding. Think about that, and think about the fact that every time there is a looming expansion, most people quit raiding.
I think you know why, Gustov.
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Because the raid lifers (not all raiders, just the ones who cop this superior attitude) *NEED* their raid guilds to give them some way to feel superior to others. It is evidenced in the way they post once they can’t win an argument on the facts.
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These are the people who have indeed put aside efforts to succeed in life and are getting all of their sense of accomplishment from raiding (I love when things circle back to the main topic). If you take away their ability to feel superior to everyone else, then the real life they’ve allowed to atrophy suddenly comes back to haunt them.
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If people who actually care about their family, school, career, etc. are also “allowed” to get epix, then you’ve taken away the only place these raid lifers get to feel better than everyone else.
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It is sad, tragic, and pathetic, but that’s the life of the cat ass raid lifer.
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NOTE: Many raiders do indeed do it for the fun, are not “cat ass raid lifers”, and do not take this superior attitude. A perfect example of that right here on this blog is Tuna. But the ones who take the absurd, “l2raid n00b”, superior attitude are the ones I am referring to.
Dude,
Stop assuming your personal experience is common to everyone.
It’s not.
Stop thinking we all play for the same reasons you do.
We don’t.
And puffing up your personal opinion by tacking on nonsense like “it’s a statistical fact” is the kind of thing that gets you called ignorant.
1. Show me a REAL statistic that proves raiders are an exception.
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2. I only raid 2 nights a week for 3 hours, I did not waste thousands of hours raiding, everything accomplished I have done in that time frame. I never said I was better or knew more than anyone becasue I downed a boss, maybe you didn’t see what I wrote earlier… let me paraphrase it for you… maybe in easier words for you to understand.
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“I equate accomplishing something in a raid the same way I do when I win with my pick-up hockey team. It means nothing other than we had fun and made up some strategies to beat the other team (the boss).” That means I don’t think I am better than anyone. Don’t put words in my mouth when I said the opposite earlier on this page.
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3. In my experience, every summer has lots of raid downtime… maybe you seeing pre-expansion downtime is just because both expansions come right after summer (scheduled anyway) in order to cash in on Christmas sales.
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4. It is not “L2Raid N00B” mentality to point out that you are pulling things out of your ass. Up to Naxx, I would agree with the things you are pointing out about WoW raiding. Once in T5+ content I say you are wrong.
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If you got that far in BC, wouldn’t that put you in World (or at least server) progression fights since you quit at least a year ago? And barely anyone saw Naxx… so… using Strats would have been hard since they would have been incomplete and rough around the edges. So… then… how is it just 1 person reading strats and barking orders (which I am assuming is you since you said you Raid led (pretty sure I saw that somewhere on your site))
Guys: Go look at Blizzard’s press releases. Seriously. Look at Nick Yee’s demographic research. There has actually been a lot of serious, peer reviewed academic study of the fact that most players have little or no interest in raiding.
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And for the 10th time, try to explain why as soon as people are given an alternative to raiding, they jump at the chance and quit raiding en masse.
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The L2RAID mentality is part and parcel of this false sense of accomplishment. Whenever raid lifers have their way of life attacked, they puff up their chests, act superior, and disregard everyone else as “losers” who aren’t “good enough” to raid. It really isn’t hard to read a strat, obey a raid leader, and press the 1 button for 4 hours.
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Logic = win.
Give me a link, I find it very hard to believe that Blizzard would cater to 5-10% of their playerbase and risk alienating all the others. To me that is just bad business, wouldn’t you agree since you have your own?
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I always choose RL over Raiding… RL >>>>> WoW. But it does not mean I cannot take pride in my raiding. It does not mean that others need to do it if they don’t like.
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I also don’t believe that the people that do raid don’t like it, why then would Blizzard (and the other game makers of this time) make raids if the only reason people do them is “becasue they are there” which is what you are saying since all raiders drop raiding as soon as something else comes up.
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Summer has many variables, students go back home and work (usually a night job when raids are), people in the working world take vacations, or go out at night since instead of getting dark at 5pm it is still light till 9. I really think you are holding on to one concept and not paying attention to anyone else.
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As a gamer I find that very upsetting since you are in the industry, and are one of the ones makeing the future games for us to play. Developers need to listen, and when they don’t they have failed. You are still not listening, I get the feeling you don’t even read what is written anymore.
Just because I disagree with you doesn’t mean I’m not listening.
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I’ve presented you with a lot of information, facts, analysis, and opinion. You’ve presented some of your own experiences and opinions.
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I’d call that a successful discussion, no? There’s no reason to be grumpy just because we disagree.
I don’t really see much value in your post.
Every activity takes away time that you could spend on other activities. You claim that gaming is bad and family is good. Why is family good or better than gaming?
What if I fished the entire day for fun just to get that big fish? Or if I trained the whole day just to get a medal some day? Or work the entire day just to have big pile of money some day? Or to stick with family: What if I raised a boy just to see him become a genious when he grows up? Why is a real-life-accomplishment better than any virtual accomplishment. It’s only an accomplishment if it is one in YOUR head - no matter where it comes from. Everything is just in YOUR head.
Oh and they did mass PvP back then because everybody knew by then that raiding was senseless because those green questrewards in HFP would be way better than anything they could get in the old world.
A PvP-player in all s4-PvP-gear was patient enough too. Patient enough to waste tons of hours to play a game while he could do other things. A millionaire was patient enough to watch the AH … errr … market or whatever to collect that much money. No difference - patience/determination is usually part of going for an accomplishment.
Reading some of your comments in this post makes me believe that your post isn’t really about virtual accomplishments but the people feeling superior because of them.
I see more superior attitude in real life. Isn’t it as bad in real life? Why should it be different in a game?
Valthan, I can’t find the article from a Jeffrey Kaplan interview where he stated the less than 15% figure, but it’s out there. Anyway, he was being generous, just look at wowjutsu and do the math for how many people have dropped Attunmen:
51,287 guilds ran Kara,
512,870 players ran Kara
84.45% dropped Attunemen
433,118 Players total out of 4,205,277 (US&EU Servers)
9.7% of players have raided.
Granted those numbers are from the summer, but it’s still a pretty compelling snapshot. Anyway, if I find the Kaplan article where he himself states that less than 15% of players raid I’ll send it over.
No one here is against gaming, Cambios IS a game developer, and obviously everyone of us who has taken the time to comment is an avid gamer. The main point of this post was to bring more light to what Cambios thinks of as a flawed design aspect, raiding and the false sense of accomplishment from raiding.
Every blog I’ve found praising raiding, and defending it against ‘attack,’ (mostly from casual gamers it seems) use the keypoints of: It takes dedication to study strats, to set up class combos, to set up gear and specs, to farm proper resist gear and consumables. These things are what us on the other side of the fence are calling out as a pigeon box, and not good game design.
Dear Cambios,
I think you misunderstand both raiding in WoW and human nature. It makes me think that your blog is rather poorly researched. If you were one of my students, I would send you back to the data-gathering stage. In addition, you’ve got a hysterical tone going that does not exactly inspire respect. This is a rant, pure and simple, and you’ve done neither the research to quantify your assertions about human psychology nor bothered to investigate what WoW raiding is all about. Siha’s point is actually correct–the skills one learns organizing a raid transfer to real life. No one has an ideal team of raiders–we all work with what we have. Try reading up on the subject! There is a lot of good information out there if you’re open to it.
And about casual gamers: every WoW raider I know is happy that there are non-raiding aspects of the game to enjoy. A lot of us do things outside of raiding or raid prep, and we’d be thrilled if there were even more fun little things to do. I personally loved the Midsummer Fire Festival quests. It made me play more that week than usual–and it was a purely “casual” pursuit. Most of us know, respect, and like purely casual players–I am glad to see anyone play my game of choice and enjoy it, regardless of the particular content they enjoy. However, raiders are also glad that WoW allows the possibility of raiding. The game does not have to be one thing or the other, and its greatest strength is its variety.
@ WitchKiller
WoWJutsu is not a good example to use to try to find the percentage of players who raid. 100% of the players listed on that site raids. Plus I think you are doing the calculations wrong. Here is a look at a more recent parse:
This is the total number of players and guilds that are listed on wowjutsu. The 98.83% is the percentage of players who have received loot from that instance.
This is the total number of players who has gotten loot from Karazhan, listed on wowjutsu. As you can see, there are more players who has received loot than there are actual players that are listed. This is due to players with alts getting gear, or players who are unguilded getting gear.
You can read about how the website functions here: http://www.wowjutsu.com/faq.html
Fights where you don’t need to plan ahead, set up and prepare for, would be too easy. WoW as a game, is already easy to begin with. If fights didn’t need any strategy or could run in with just a random group of players wouldn’t be challenging or fun at all (to me).
Let’s use Chess as an example of a game with good design. If you compare it to raiding, they aren’t too different. Good chess players think many moves ahead. If x piece moves here, you respond by moving y piece to spot z. You can’t just randomly move pieces and hope for the best and expect to win.
Yeah I was a little reluctant to use wowjutsu. I read that it had become much more accurate, but you know how off anything from the armory can be.
I quit playing WoW after we finished AQ40, so I haven’t seen any BC stuff, that’s why I haven’t commented on boss fights specifically. I’m sure that all TBC raids are challenging in a sense, but it seems to me that they could be set up in a different, and more dynamic fashion, that would still be equally challenging. I’m not a game designer, and I honestly can’t say exactly what it is that would make me enjoy the raid itself more, but I do believe that MMOs as a whole would be better off if raiding wasn’t the sole end-game. If the game’s goals were more player driven, and player institution driven, then the chance of them becoming stale would be greatly mitigated. Of course for this to work, a lot of serious core changes would have to be implemented in the general MMO scheme, IE: death penalties, player killing and player looting, player politics and player justice. I think that these things will come in graphical MMOs in time, after they become cheaper to develop, and maintain. We’ll see.
@tuna:
Yeah my math was off, my operations were correct (thanks windows calculator), but my process was just silly…I think it’s all the pot and heavy metal in my life finally addling my brain.
Sydera: I am pretty sure the post was speficially flagged with the “rant” tag. And please cut it out with the personal insults. I am an industry expert. That is why I was hired to write this blog and I am paid to write this blog. I am also paid by a number of other web sites to write articles about gaming. I’ve done my research. So please cut it out with that insult as well.
Well well. Since you say it is correct, then it just is, right? You really backed that point up! (not!)
Well, there aren’t. With the exception of a few extremely minor or temporary things, all there is to do in WoW is kill players or kill mobs. This is a pathetic feature set compared to MUDs or even early generation MMORPGs.
Chess and raiding couldn’t be any more different. In chess you don’t win by reading a strategy and following it EXACTLY every single time. Once you read and practice an online strat, it will work every single time from that point forward. Chess requires constant thought, analysis, planning, etc. Raiding requires none of that on the part of most members of the team.
Comparing Chess to Raiding is like comparing Rocket Science to Tinker Toy building.
WitchKiller: Your numbers weren’t really that far off.
I posted about this in the other raid thread, but WoWJustu’s numbers point to the same ~7% raiding population.
Appealing to credentialism won’t improve the cogency of what you’ve already posted.
If you’re too lazy to support your own position with facts you already have, that speaks for itself.
And if you haven’t figured out that much of the flack you’re deservedly getting is due to the inane and unprofessionnal tone of your replies, then perhaps your employers aren’t getting their money’s worth.
Northern, this blog is about analysis, not research. Blizzard, academic study, and our own “back of the envelope” math all point to the 5-10% number. If you just want to stick your head in the sand and ignore all that, fine. Nothing I say, post, or link is going to change that.
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I really don’t feel like I’m getting a whole lot of “flack.” I feel like there is a lot of interesting discussion going on. So I am very happy with what has taken place so far here.
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And whether you want to admit it or not, even you will keep in mind some of the things I have written here as you continue to raid in WoW and other games.
Analysis - data = speculation
Keyboard - brain = spam
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Wow. That was easy, wasn’t it? Insulting people on the internet is challenging!
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I know what I have read in the past. You can choose to call me a liar if you want, but I have no reason to lie. I played WoW and I had a lot of fun most of the time I played. Blizzard, academic research, and simple analysis through the few tools we have all point to the 5-10% raiding population. The scary thing is that it might even be lower.
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But thats the thing, the fight NEVER happens the same as the previous attempts. All raid members still have to constantly analyze the current situation and adjust to the variables.
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If the random raid members take damage for whatever reason, healers have to adjust to keep everyone alive. If the boss gets moved around, the raid has to readjust their positions. If the main tank takes too much spike damage and dies, an off tank would need to quickly switch to shield and board and pick up the tank while the rest of the DPS stops and lets the new tank get situated. This is all unscripted.
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I know chess isn’t the best comparison that I can come up with, and that they are light years apart in terms of strategic thinking and analysis. But they both have some sort of planning, analyzing, and reacting portions to them.
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Raiding isn’t just read strategy and execute, heck there weren’t any raid strategies for when I was doing most of these bosses in this expansion. I usually had a guide which told me what abilities the boss does, and when he does it. The rest we had to figure out for ourselves. We had to learn how to counter each abilities ourselves.
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Yes it takes many many wipes to achieve this (which I know is one of your gripes), but it is part of the learning process.
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You know what would be cool though, if bosses could actually react to what players do and adjust themselves. Kinda like a learning AI. Actually, after writing that idea down, it reminded me of Terminator, then it got pretty scary.
At this point it’s a question of credibility and professionalism.
Not to mention how the loss of both would reflect on your employer.
Way I see it addictions like WOW raiding or slot machines are actually indicative of a far deeper problem with modern society in general. That is the fact there is very little to nothing in most people’s lives to actually give them a real sense of accomplishment.
Work in particular is the worst culprit here, most people have jobs that place a premium on putting in time on mind numbing tasks, or running around after other people trying to get things from them or fix their screw ups. Advancement tends to be heavily dependent on “loyalty” aka how long you’ve been in the job.
I myself currently work in statistical analysis/programming, but I”m getting out of the field. Fact is the vast majority of my work requires about a fifth the mental effort of a good tactical PVP battle. This is for a job most people say is complicated. I turn my brain back on when I game.
You can’t blame the game devs for doing what sells the most copies which is gameplay that is based on the same sort of repetitive mundane garbage people fill their days with….only adding on an extra “ding”/accomplishment. It’s all a symptom of a society that supports conformity and mediocrity. Get up, go to work for 8 hours of mindless monotony, come home for hours of domestic monotony and TV, if you’re lucky you have 2.5 children and a house. No wonder people turn to cyberspace to fill the emptiness.
SERITH!!!!!!! Thanks for visiting. I hope you’ll become a regular reader and contributor. You always have a unique take on things, and I consider it very important as a game developer to hear opinions from many different types of gamers.
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I think you make an apt analysis of a systemic problem that affects all elements of people’s lives. For a number of reasons, people don’t seem to be terribly fulfilled by their normal life, so they seek out things like MMOs, gambling, casual sex, etc. to give their live some meaning. The result of all such additions is usually a disaster.
I think the need for change can be most simply stated as a requirement that Blizzard change its development focus.
The raids are constructed the way they are precisely so a small number of groups can reach the top, because the game wants a small number of people to reach the top. Is it fun for them? I daresay it is, it’s nice to be on top, to be the first guild on your server to clear ‘x’, to strut around Orgrimmar with your full tier 6 gear on display.
I think it’s a similar situation with the season 4 PvP gear with the arena rating requirements; I cannot conceive of the amount of time needed to accumulate the number of points and the rating to get the most expensive bits of gear.
As I see it, while Blizzard continues to see these hardcore groups as paramount to their gaming experience all the other problems will continue. Essentially the issues you have with raids can be envisaged as hurdles, and only those with an incredible, possibly unhealthy amount of time to dedicate to the game will be willing and/or able to pass them.
Rob, I couldn’t have said it better. In a game of 10,000,000 people, developing content with the purpose of making 1% of those people feel awesome is wrong headed design.
Blizzard has a very broad development focus, though. The game world itself is very large and every system in the game is rather extensive. Raiding is there for people who want to invest the time in it. Do you have to raid? No, but it is accessible (and grows more accessible with each content change) to anyone who wants to do it.
As far as Arena PVP gear is concerned, the reason for rating is because in a system designed for player versus player competition, people weren’t competing. You had teams called, “In for 10″ or “Just for Points” who would queue into games and lose every single one, just to farm points to purchase high quality items. The Arena point system rewards players who compete and try, giving you more points the more you win. Players who try and win points through competition get access to the quality gear fairly quickly.
With 10 million players and growing, it is a very hard thing to say that all they care about is hardcore raiders or hardcore PVP. In fact, you can’t say it at all. What you can say is in your opinion, the development emphasis is not to your liking. That is a fair thing to say. But Blizzard design is successful and I think their growth, staying power and numbers support that.
> every system in the game is rather extensive.
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What game systems? Combat? That’s basically it. What other “extensive” systems do they have?
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Player housing? Nope. Totally non-existent. Disgraceful.
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Mini games? Nope.
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GM run events? Nope.
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Other events? Nope… at the Paris show they revealed the infinitesimal size of their staff that does the handful of holiday events each year.
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Cosmetic customization of well, anything? Nope.
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Support for player run events? None.
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Crafting? One of the worst crafting systems out there. Try EQ2 and see a quality crafting system. Or ATITD.
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ARENA: I’m not sure who you were replying to. They are moving towards a good idea there, but the whole system is flawed because only a handful of classes and builds are viable. And the fields of play are tiny, which further limits tactics.
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> it is a very hard thing to say that all they care about is
> hardcore raiders or hardcore PVP. In fact, you can’t say
> it at all.
I can say it, I did say, and I’m not the only one saying it. The majority of their content development goes towards high end raiding, and all the numbers show only 5-10% participates in that. And the super high end, where all the most recent development happens, is about 1-2% (Sunwell).
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They get away with it because WoW has become the golf of gaming - everyone you know plays, so you might as well play too so you can hang out with them. The accessibility is an amazing USP, and nobody can touch it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t disgraceful that they don’t invest anywhere near a reasonable percentage of their monstrous profits back into the game.
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I wouldn’t care if they made 500 raid dungeons a week if they were at least investing a reasonable amount of resources into non-raiding content and non-pure-combat content. But that’s all they do: new raids and a few very small non-raid things sprinkled here or there (but these tend to be combat related as well).
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> But Blizzard design is successful and I think their
> growth, staying power and numbers support that.
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Well, there’s no point in ever discussing WoW if the ultimate comeback is “they have 10 million users, their way is the right way.” I mean, didn’t we learn anything from AOL?
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AOL and WoW both did an incredibly important thing right: an accessible, easy to use product. You get that right, when most other folks are fumbling around in that area, and you get to be King.
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But history shows that even that is not enough in the long run. Eventually the product itself has to be up to snuff.
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The last few years of development on WoW have not been up to snuff. They have ignored the majority of their customers and they have barely re-invested back into their own game. Instead, their stockholders have feasted on gigantic profits. That’s great for them, but it definitely stinks for the players.
From the company’s point of view, there is only so much they can do to prevent people from destroying themselves. Allowing people to set up control on their own accounts that they have to go through a series of steps to change can help.
More importantly, more content needs to be focused around making casual gaming the standard, not hardcore hours and hours and hours per week.
Whether you play 10 hours a month or 10 hours a day, they still receive the same amount of money each month.
And if you’re playing 10 hours a month, it’ll take you a lot longer to get through the amount of content they can develop.
I mean, think about it. How often do you go to the movies?
If you’re a real movie buff, maybe once a week, at most? Maybe watch a movie you’ve already seen at home as background to doing something else, like laundry.
They make quite a pretty penny, and they’re counting on you seeing their movie maybe once, or a second purchase if you get the DVD.
So why does a MMORPG / MUD have to eat your soul?
You’ll have less player burn out, it’ll become more widely accepted, and your player base will keep it’s size at least, and possibly widen.
As has apparently been discussed elsewhere, the hardest core raiders make up a surprisingly (to me at least) small number of the population. And if you supported more things to allow them to do other things as a guild they’d probably pursue them, similar to the opening of the Ahn Qiraj gates in WoW. That was a big thing with everyone on the server able to feel like they were involved somehow. True I didn’t do it all, and some played much larger roles than others, but it was cool to have played some part in it, as well as having reaped some of the rewards.
To sum up, play it cool and keep it casual. You can do that while keeping the hard core crowd interested.
>To sum up, play it cool and keep it casual. You can do that while keeping the hard core crowd interested.
Quoted for Truth.
So much of the content in the comments here which seeks to detract from Cambios’ point in this article seems to summarize as, “You’re not l33t enough to ‘Get it’, n00b.”
Um, fuck you? The thought of having to waste HOURS and DAYS preparing for something which is going to take even MORE hours to finish, at the end of which I MIGHT get a piece of virtual clothing is the biggest exercise in futility I can fathom in a game. The end game lore content is probably about the only thing which would compel me to do it, but considering how often Blizzard have been buggering canon to introduce new Uber-Bosses, I’m not sure it would be worth it anyway.
I can pretty much say the other members of WoW’s oft-vaunted “Ten Million Plus” who classify as ‘casual gamers’ feel the same way. All you have to do is read the forums to see that non-raid players are getting REALLY BORED!
Ignoring the elephant in the room won’t make it go away, lads.
I ask myself this question constantly. Why does “fun” have to come at the end of a 4 hour torture session? How is that good for anyone?
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I am sad this happened during a time I was taking a break from WoW. It sounds like one of the few interesting things they did as far as any kind of world changing event.
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As you note, the 1-2% who constantly push the envelope will most likely participate in non-raid content as well. These are hard core, catassing lifers. They will consume whatever content is put out there.
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So why ONLY make raid content? Why not make more things that other types of folks might enjoy? The super hard core will still be entertained. Why make things that will ONLY entertain the hard core, when you could make content that entertains them AND others.
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And yes, they’ll complain, because they are only happy when everyone else is left out. For these kinds of people, WoW is their life. If other people get to enjoy it, then they lose the one thing they feel they excel at. Then the lack of a life outside of way is brought into stark contrast.
Hehehehe. My sentiments exactly. I particularly loved the guy who asked me in this thread or one of the others to share my armory profile. As if my gear was proof of whether or not I could legitimately analyze MMO mechanics or know what “fun” was. Absurd.
I wish more people would understand this. The amount of drudgery they make you go through for a single, tiny, momeny of joy is just amazing to me. It is like having to run a marathon just to eat a donut hole.
Easiest way to make raiding in particular more satisfying and less time consuming is bringing back the skill component. Make raid bosses more trigger/random timer based and less scripted. Ideally, the way it should work is that everyone doing thier job and reacting properly matters more then how much gear your main tank has.
Look to older games for inspiration where in boss fights you reacted to what the boss “telegraphed” or patterns…and took advantage of openings. There is some of this in raiding now, but it is very secondary to the gear factor. When skill and reaction time matters alot more, it also limits the raw amount of time people can continually do a task. Compare say playing streetfighter or counterstrike to raiding.
But yeah it’s high time skill came back to mmos in it’s true form rather then masquerading as a massive grind.
I enjoyed reading your original post. I probably spent the last 45 minutes reading the back-and-forth after. I’m going to try to avoid commenting about things outside of your original post.
Just as a little background for those that require it, I play a holy paladin healer. I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since the Burning Crusade expansion was released and have been raiding literally since the first day I hit 70 starting with Karazhan. While working through Sunwell, I was raiding with a hardcore raiding guild that was world ranked 12 (not server rank, mind you) at the time I quit raiding with them. I’ve done everything from Attumen to Kil’jaeden, from raiding one night a week to six nights a week.
Outside of WoW I’m a network engineer for an ISP and technology consulting company. I have a bachelors in computer science and have several professional Cisco certifications (CCNP being the most “noteworthy”). I am single and own (rather, I’m still paying for) my own house. I’m 24 years old.
Back to the feedback though, I agree with some of the points you make but with varying degrees. I don’t think that raiding provides a negative false sense of accomplishment. Learning a second language or running a successful business are accomplishments that are generally accepted as “valid”. My point is, not everyone takes pride in these things and I think that you should respect the fact that everyone has varying opinions on self-worth.
Just because one person uses accomplishments in a video game and another in the office, doesn’t make one person better than someone else. I think you’re simply saying, “I don’t care that you killed Illidan because of X, Y, and Z reasons. If you’re an accomplished swimmer or linguist, then by all means, take pride in yourself.”
I understand that you might identify with yourself as a successful business owner, which I would agree is impressive. But I think you’re being a little elitist to simply say, “I’m better at life for running a successful business and all you did was beat computer pixels.” What is impressive or important to you might not be to everyone else.
Now, what you will probably think is, “the fact you see killing computer pixels as impressive or noteworthy in life is sad in general.” Well, it might be sad to you, but they don’t need your pity. In the end, we’re all just dead anyway. Whether you die a millionaire or die as a member of the best WoW raiding guild, you’re still dead. Who decides that your life was more “accomplished” because you did X or Y? Or that mine was less because I didn’t or because I chose to spend my time doing something else? What difference does it make in the end on how the world viewed your legacy? You’re still dead, you won’t care at all.
I find those kinds of bosses fun. There are some in WoW that do things like that, but then they go and add something lame to it and ruin it. A good example is Moroes. When he gouges one tank, the other tank needs to pick up aggro. Also, he has some kind of voice acted statement, something like “Now, where was I? Oh yes…” which means he is vanishing and is about to put the big nasty DoT on someone.
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Cool, right? The problem is, you can’t remove that DoT nor can you prevent it. So you know things are coming, but you can’t really react to them. In the first part, the off tank has to already be 2nd on the hate list. There is no telegraph to the gouge, so you can’t even prepare for it or try to avoid it. The DoT cannot be avoided, nor can it be removed by any external cure or other method (a few long cooldown, self powers work, that’s it). This effectively makes Moroes a speed test, because otherwise all of your characters will have it eventually.
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Precisely. It is very frustrating to me that skill matters so little in modern MMOs.
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Dan, if this is your first visit: welcome! Thanks for posting.
Now to respond.
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Actually, I do think accomplishments in work, or in an area of exercise, or something else that has physical benefit is better than an accomplishment in a video game. Those are PRODUCTIVE gains. They advance your career, help you make money (and provide for yourself or your family), improve your physical health, etc.
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Obviously, I make games. Equally obvious, I believe games have value. I also think fun has significant health benefits. But raiding goes beyond fun. People who hard core raid routinely call it “work”, and treat it as such. I think most (not all) of the fun has been sucked out of the game long before someone reaches Black Temple or Sunwell. I am not saying there is no fun to be had, but there is definitely a lot of misery, drudgery, drama, fighting (with “friends”, not mobs), etc. There is a reason only 1-2% of the population makes it that far, and I don’t think the main reason is skill or a lack of interest.
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The problem is that like it nor not, some accomplishments are objectively better than others. Things that improve your lot in life, or your health, are objectively superior to things that serve no purpose outside of the context itself.
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Doing well at work benefits you OUTSIDE of work.
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Doing well in a sport or with an exercise regimen benefits you OUTSIDE of the gym.
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Doing well at raiding does not benefit you anywhere OUTSIDE of WoW.
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Again, I am not saying people should not enjoy their accomplishments in a game. But there is a dangerous point where people get their real life, self actualized worth from their successes in a game. This is bad because, as I said, success in WoW has no benefits OUTSIDE of the context of WoW. If people get their “quote” of fulfillment from a game, they stop seeking it elsewhere - and that elsewhere is probably something a lot more productive and important for their own life. Success in many other areas have a lot of benefits outside of their own context.
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I think that is a very crucial difference.
I agree with your point. My wife and I were both in WoW together, and quit when our guild merged with a high-end raid guild. We had both done our share of raids, but when you have a full-time job and two kids, you don’t have five+ hours a day, three-to-five days a week to play a game.
You play when you can.
And yes, that’s a fairly accurate percentage…the percentage of players of any MMO that are regular raiders is very low. A much larger percentage will dabble in it a time or two, but the group of players that regularly raid is much smaller than most people think.
And WoW did not base their game on the wants of a small percentage of their market…that’s why WoW is one of the (if not the most) soloable MMO on the market. Blizzard achieved the massive breakthrough in subscription numbers it did due, in large part, to being more casual-friendly than other MMOs on the market.
Raids are not, I repeat NOT “casual friendly,” and no amount of discussion will change my opinion on that, no matter how much farther into the high-end instances you think I should have progressed to “get it”.
However, Cambios:
[quote]Doing well at raiding does not benefit you anywhere OUTSIDE of WoW. [/quote]
Well….absolutes are not your friend. True, the “outside world” benefits are far less numerous than the same benefits from the other activities you listed, but…well….
[url=http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.04/learn.html]Stephen Gillett might take exception with the word “anywhere” in your quote.[/url]
I’m definitely on-board with the idea that the benefits are extremely few and far between, but apparently there are [i]some[/i].
I have read a few articles like that, and I find their effect worrisome. While such exceptions exist, I think they are up there with the whole “Got caught hacking, got hired by the Defense Department to be their million dollar uber hacker.” Such hires may exist, but they are super rare. It is worse than the kid who spends his entire life trying to be a pro basketball player, and is shocked when he can’t cut it.
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I totally agree that the 1->69 (or originally 1->59) game is completely different and casual friendly. It is that stage of the game that really drew in people by the millions. That is all the more reason why I feel the bait and switch that happens at 60/70/80 to be particularly appalling.
I went back and read some of the posts I skimmed over when I posted, and Cambios, ignore the detractors, you’re right on target. From what you’ve said about yourself, it seems like you’ve got plenty reason to be secure anyway, but just thought I should say that. Keep rockin’.
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PS. As the previous address of an e-mail has been removed also all letters on it have been lost I is compelled to make this dispatch once again.
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PS3. Your addresses of an e-mail are not necessary to me, you can create an e-mail through free service and send me yours url through this e-mail
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to: Cambrios
[quote] The problem is that like it nor not, some accomplishments are objectively better than others. Things that improve your lot in life, or your health, are objectively superior to things that serve no purpose outside of the context itself.
[quote] Doing well at work benefits you OUTSIDE of work.
[quote] Doing well in a sport or with an exercise regimen benefits you OUTSIDE of the gym.
[quote] Doing well at raiding does not benefit you anywhere OUTSIDE of WoW.
While I wholeheartedly agree with all of the points in your disagreements with Blizzard’s raid model (in another post, not this one. XD), I think some of the grumpiness you’re seeing here might be because the tone of THIS rant devalues something people find important to them.
I understand where you’re coming from, saying that raiding doesn’t benefit you outside of WoW… but to then throw the pride that people take in it, if they do take pride in it, in the trash - seems to be a bit much.
I paint (digitally) these days, and I don’t do it for a living (unfortunately). Because I don’t make money from it, and I don’t get anything from it, and as digital paint, it’s ‘just a bunch of pixels’, does that make it a worthless pursuit, and me a ’sad’ person for doing it at all? Obviously I don’t (like) to think so. XD
Sooooo to reiterate - while I dislike Blizzard’s raiding model greatly (they’ve basically turned me off PvE raids in MMOs), maybe some of the emotional negativity you’re seeing in the posted replies is because you’re perceived to be unrepentantly denigrating something that others view as a part of their self worth.
Just my two cents!
This was a great read. I’ve actually SEEN this happen. A few of my best friends are into WoW, and they all raid constantly. And now when they get tossed into very real life situations, such as not getting enough hours from their respective jobs, or needing to find a place to move into, they really don’t do much about their lack of income, they just sit back and play WoW all the time.
Now I’m not an MMO player, and I don’t knock the genre. I have plenty of friends who are all into games like this, but they don’t let it get in the way of their livelihood. I can understand fully the sense of accomplishment from taking down a ridiculously hard challenge, but at the same time, your priorities need to be correct.