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Where has my hardcore raiding gone?
teldath
Member Posts: 104
My dream MMOs have all gone. FFXI, EQ, Lineage 2, EQII; i miss games like this, because i miss raiding. Its seems to me that every developer is running away from making games that involve raiding and i cant find a single new game on the horizon that promises good raids.
Is it just me or is their something worng about grinding all the way to the level cap, only to hit it and have to grind some more. dont give me WOW raiding, an instance is the same thing as grinding, your just doing it with other people in a focused enviroment. I miss staring down an 80 foot dragon that i know could destroy my entire alliance if i made a wrong move!
are there any games on the horizon that seem to be offering good raiding?
Comments
um people got a life and devs decided it was pointless?
playing an MMO is pointless, and if you really had a life you wouldnt be playing an MMO, so your point is invalid.
and if you dont raid then all you have left is pvp, its too 1 dimensional
Ehh well there is always WoW lol J/K.
Im guessing people are tired of raids,as for me I like the occasional dungeon. But what I hate is doing the same damn thing over and over and over again just to get this gear I want. I like options to getting my gear be it raids, from the AH or making it myself.
ony could kill your whole group easily i don't get what your point is
Maybe it went to Hell where it belongs. Maybe someday solo quest grinding will go there too.
Ok, maybe I can sympathize that games aren't giving you what you want anymore but it would be a lot easier for me if they were giving me what I want, which is good pug grouping like in old EQ before the focus on raiding destroyed the game.
It's in WoW, and hopefully it stays there. That crap and the community that developed around it was terrible. The "epic encounters" were fun, but thats about it. I can do without listening to some whiny self important tool order around 80 people who have been "carefully selected" based on cookie cutter builds for what eventually becomes a "by the numbers" process after the first run.
Personally, any large encounter should take no more than 24 people, and anything over that should be a faction/community wide event where its pretty much the mob vs some crazy powerful god/archdemon/whatever. The "small group" thing LoTRO is almost perfect.
Bans a perma, but so are sigs in necro posts.
EAT ME MMORPG.com!
Define "hardcore" please?
"World of Warcraft is the perfect implementation of this genre." - Hilmar Petursson. CEO of CCP.
I don't think I'll ever really miss raiding. There were definitely fun aspects, but the fun aspects just didn't make up for the hassles of bad internet connections, parents leaving in the middle for family reasons, wipes and retarded runs back, lag wipes, late nights well beyond the working man's bedtime, trash mobs that took 40 people to kill, etc etc etc. Such a waste for loot that was gonna be replaced in nine months anyways. Bleh...
I'd raid again, but I'd never play another game where raiding is *the* end game. Alternative advancement is necessary. That's really all there is to say about it.
when i say hardcore im being pretty liberal, id be happy with 1 raid a day, wows raiding doesnt do it for me, its too easy and to gimmiky
Thing is back with Everquest you were a geek who didn't go out or you were at school and had forever to spend on games. Now mmorpgs have been opened up to the masses most players these days have jobs or lives outside games so they only want to spend a few hours a week playing. The problem comes when they need a giant raid and a whole weekend to dedicate to it then they freak out.
The easy solution is to make it so raids offer gear equal to the top gear gained in smaller groups but to make it look different so people who want to make themselves look leet can do. That way people can do smaller group instances, get the same stat gear and not feel left out.
A good mmo has a lot more to do than raiding and pvp. Seriously, man.
A good mmo has a lot more to do than raiding and pvp. Seriously, man.
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Can't say that I see your reasoning here.
WoW was made for raiding. I believe it was even made by EQ players who wanted a more raid-oriented game. That's how it came into being. Instancing was just a tool to ensure that they could prevent outside interference from screwing a raid group and to enforce limits on the players that contributed to the kill.
It allowed them to make raid encounters more complex and challenging.
Outside raid bosses (ORBs) don't really equate to "hardcore raiding" in my opinion. I consider that to be what WoW had at level 60 when you needed 40 people to give up 30+ hours a week in blocks of ~5 hours/night for several months.
Regardless, both ORBs and "hardcore raiding" have become niche mechanics.
Not enough people care about them to the degree where developers are willing to annoy the much larger majority who are fine with instancing and less time/organisation intensive raid content.
Playing: EVE, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2, Need for Speed: Shift
My fave raids were the seamlessly built into the world ones where you fought other guilds for so no one shared strategy on how to kill it. What i'd love now is to have open world PVP where clans would fight each other for the raid and even when you get to the boss you could all be killed and another guild comes along and takes down the boss.
Nice to see someone else thinking along these lines. I usually look at mmos through the eyes of a sandbox fan (although I like good old dungeon crawling and linear content too), so I see lots of great things that you could add to raids outside of gear. Novelty rare items, special artwork, rare player housing, larger schematic runs, the best components/enhancements (must be tradeable), special equipment for guild fortifications, rare clothing designs, rare resources, etc etc etc. There's all kinds of stuff that you can make unique to the raider without upsetting the balance of the game and forcing raiding as *the* endgame.
I don't get it why people say WoW's raiding is easy to be honest. Unless you are doing normal modes, hard modes are actually hard. If there's anything hard in WoW left at the moment, it's the raiding on hard modes.
Yeah youre right about some of the reasons why the massive raiding has been removed. That is actually one of the very good things that WAR has changed in some recent updates. Rather than needing to spend hours forming raid groups and crap in order to get top end gear, you actually have multiple options for gaining the gear, including completeing PVP tasks, so even someone who prefers to solo, or run in small groups and focus on the PvP aspect of the game can still match the gear worn by someone who may be in a large guild who spends most of their time doing raids.
A good mmo has a lot more to do than raiding and pvp. Seriously, man.
Thats the problem Zax.
So many of these people playing MMOs today think MMO = Raiding.
They have no idea that what made MMOs great was the fact that there were so many other things to do in game than just raiding. Hell even EQ wasn't all about raiding back in the day. Infact I think it took almost 3 expansions before raiding was even the thing to do.
MMO developers when making a game always use the term "Cutting out the filler and leaving all the fun" which somehow translates into "Removing all the MMO and leaving the raids". They bend and buckle to one aspect of the gameplay leaving the game to be a speed run to endgame for the "fun" to begin.
In UO there wasnt any of this raiding stuff. There were dungeons that you and your friends could attempt to crawl through and have a good time. There was also social aspects such as building communities and having guild battles. We had hours of fun doing any sort of thing we could in game and never really had to have content constantly pumped out to hold our attention.
Same could be said for EQ. Back in the early days of EQ there was so much to do and explore before even hitting mid level that you were always entertained. No one was in a hurry to hit 50, and no one really talked about raids. Everytime an expansion was released it was aimed at all levels (though sometimes more for mid to high levels). It included new dungeons and new lands to explore. There was no map, no Thottbot. It was all about playing to play.
Anarchy Online. In AO there were raid bosses and random world bosses on 18+ hour timers. Did we raid every day at max level? Nope. We had other things to do. We had tower battles, we could annoy clanners in low gas zones, or just hanging out in Rome Red chatting by the grid terminal. And its not because we were a small guild (in fact at the time we were the biggest Omni guild -BoB - over 800 members active (alts were in BoLB, our alt guild) )
Thing is, Hardcore raiding made up a very small fraction of MMO gameplay. Today its just the easiest content to design for an MMO. Because to be honest most players cant have fun in a game unless the designers tell them where it is, how to do it and how much fun they 'will' have. If you were to stick most MMO players today in a game built on the gameplay of older games such as UO or EQ at launch it wouldnt hold their attention for more than 10 minutes before they give up. Because with this generation, unless there is a strat site, leveling guide or complete roadmap, they will be lost and confused. And we all know thinking is lost in todays gamer.
There are 3 types of people in the world.
1.) Those who make things happen
2.) Those who watch things happen
3.) And those who wonder "What the %#*& just happened?!"
A good mmo has a lot more to do than raiding and pvp. Seriously, man.
Thats the problem Zax.
So many of these people playing MMOs today think MMO = Raiding.
They have no idea that what made MMOs great was the fact that there were so many other things to do in game than just raiding. Hell even EQ was all about raiding back in the day. Infact I think it took almost 3 expansions before raiding was even the thing to do.
MMO developers when making a game always use the term "Cutting out the filler and leaving all the fun" which somehow translates into "Removing all the MMO and leaving the raids". They bend and buckle to one aspect of the gameplay leaving the game to be a speed run to endgame for the "fun" to begin.
In UO there wasnt any of this raiding stuff. There were dungeons that you and your friends could attempt to crawl through and have a good time. There was also social aspects such as building communities and having guild battles. We had hours of fun doing any sort of thing we could in game and never really had to have content constantly pumped out to hold our attention.
Same could be said for EQ. Back in the early days of EQ there was so much to do and explore before even hitting mid level that you were always entertained. No one was in a hurry to hit 50, and no one really talked about raids. Everytime an expansion was released it was aimed at all levels (though sometimes more for mid to high levels). It included new dungeons and new lands to explore. There was no map, no Thottbot. It was all about playing to play.
Anarchy Online. In AO there were raid bosses and random world bosses on 18+ hour timers. Did we raid every day at max level? Nope. We had other things to do. We had tower battles, we could annoy clanners in low gas zones, or just hanging out in Rome Red chatting by the grid terminal. And its not because we were a small guild (in fact at the time we were the biggest Omni guild -BoB - over 800 members active (alts were in BoLB, our alt guild) )
Thing is, Hardcore raiding made up a very small fraction of MMO gameplay. Today its just the easiest content to design for an MMO. Because to be honest most players cant have fun in a game unless the designers tell them where it is, how to do it and how much fun they 'will' have. If you were to stick most MMO players today in a game built on the gameplay of older games such as UO or EQ at launch it wouldnt hold their attention for more than 10 minutes before they give up. Because with this generation, unless there is a strat site, leveling guide or complete roadmap, they will be lost and confused. And we all know thinking is lost in todays gamer.
Amen brother. It's a shame that many newer MMORPG players will probably never have that feel.
Raiding was dedicated to the hardcore players who had several consecutive hours free every evening. When companies realized that they could make -far- more money by appealing to the general public, they switched to more accessible content.
Dood! Will you have my babies?
Seriously.... I'm not kidding..... Especially the stuff in red. I just hope you have a good flame retardant suit....
No required quests! And if I decide I want to be an assassin-cartographer-dancer-pastry chef who lives only to stalk and kill interior decorators, then that's who I want to be, even if it takes me four years to max all the skills and everyone else thinks I'm freaking nuts. -Madimorga-
A good mmo has a lot more to do than raiding and pvp. Seriously, man.
Thats the problem Zax.
So many of these people playing MMOs today think MMO = Raiding.
They have no idea that what made MMOs great was the fact that there were so many other things to do in game than just raiding. Hell even EQ was all about raiding back in the day. Infact I think it took almost 3 expansions before raiding was even the thing to do.
MMO developers when making a game always use the term "Cutting out the filler and leaving all the fun" which somehow translates into "Removing all the MMO and leaving the raids". They bend and buckle to one aspect of the gameplay leaving the game to be a speed run to endgame for the "fun" to begin.
In UO there wasnt any of this raiding stuff. There were dungeons that you and your friends could attempt to crawl through and have a good time. There was also social aspects such as building communities and having guild battles. We had hours of fun doing any sort of thing we could in game and never really had to have content constantly pumped out to hold our attention.
Same could be said for EQ. Back in the early days of EQ there was so much to do and explore before even hitting mid level that you were always entertained. No one was in a hurry to hit 50, and no one really talked about raids. Everytime an expansion was released it was aimed at all levels (though sometimes more for mid to high levels). It included new dungeons and new lands to explore. There was no map, no Thottbot. It was all about playing to play.
Anarchy Online. In AO there were raid bosses and random world bosses on 18+ hour timers. Did we raid every day at max level? Nope. We had other things to do. We had tower battles, we could annoy clanners in low gas zones, or just hanging out in Rome Red chatting by the grid terminal. And its not because we were a small guild (in fact at the time we were the biggest Omni guild -BoB - over 800 members active (alts were in BoLB, our alt guild) )
Thing is, Hardcore raiding made up a very small fraction of MMO gameplay. Today its just the easiest content to design for an MMO. Because to be honest most players cant have fun in a game unless the designers tell them where it is, how to do it and how much fun they 'will' have. If you were to stick most MMO players today in a game built on the gameplay of older games such as UO or EQ at launch it wouldnt hold their attention for more than 10 minutes before they give up. Because with this generation, unless there is a strat site, leveling guide or complete roadmap, they will be lost and confused. And we all know thinking is lost in todays gamer.
Amen brother. It's a shame that many newer MMORPG players will probably never have that feel.
TBH, LotRO comes pretty close.
I didn't play UO or EQ, but I did play text MUDS up until 2005 -- and you can still find that old school fantasy MMO feel in LotRO.
Part of it is because it is Tolken: people just seem to take it a bit slower and enjoy the environment. The dev's also added things like playable musical instruments ingame. Role Players are also respected, not mocked mercilessly as you see in other mainstream games.
Even LotRO, however, added hardcore gear raiding with Mines of Moria. (Players must raid for radiance gear to avoid cowering in the most difficult dungeons). This change was controversial with the old school segment of the player base though, so hopefully it may change in the future to a more optional system.
What are you even talking about with the 80 people bullshit? I guess you can't carefully select 25 people either right genius (and exclude you)?
Too bad shit MMORPGs like WoW don't offer real PvE content that is for skilled players. My guild was doing 40 mans, 3 zones ahead of any other guild on the server. Then they dumbed down PvE content because the average WoW player couldn't handle trivial zones like Molten Core or BWL. That is what 25 and 10 mans are, dumbed down instances for newbies. (Newbies who can't organized more than 10 people)
24 players? Lol. Raids should be set at 72 players, like in Everquest. The scale of the raids makes it more enjoyable.
although I guess they should have raid content for carebears and people who suck at PvE
A good mmo has a lot more to do than raiding and pvp. Seriously, man.
Thats the problem Zax.
So many of these people playing MMOs today think MMO = Raiding.
They have no idea that what made MMOs great was the fact that there were so many other things to do in game than just raiding. Hell even EQ wasn't all about raiding back in the day. Infact I think it took almost 3 expansions before raiding was even the thing to do.
MMO developers when making a game always use the term "Cutting out the filler and leaving all the fun" which somehow translates into "Removing all the MMO and leaving the raids". They bend and buckle to one aspect of the gameplay leaving the game to be a speed run to endgame for the "fun" to begin.
In UO there wasnt any of this raiding stuff. There were dungeons that you and your friends could attempt to crawl through and have a good time. There was also social aspects such as building communities and having guild battles. We had hours of fun doing any sort of thing we could in game and never really had to have content constantly pumped out to hold our attention.
Same could be said for EQ. Back in the early days of EQ there was so much to do and explore before even hitting mid level that you were always entertained. No one was in a hurry to hit 50, and no one really talked about raids. Everytime an expansion was released it was aimed at all levels (though sometimes more for mid to high levels). It included new dungeons and new lands to explore. There was no map, no Thottbot. It was all about playing to play.
Anarchy Online. In AO there were raid bosses and random world bosses on 18+ hour timers. Did we raid every day at max level? Nope. We had other things to do. We had tower battles, we could annoy clanners in low gas zones, or just hanging out in Rome Red chatting by the grid terminal. And its not because we were a small guild (in fact at the time we were the biggest Omni guild -BoB - over 800 members active (alts were in BoLB, our alt guild) )
Thing is, Hardcore raiding made up a very small fraction of MMO gameplay. Today its just the easiest content to design for an MMO. Because to be honest most players cant have fun in a game unless the designers tell them where it is, how to do it and how much fun they 'will' have. If you were to stick most MMO players today in a game built on the gameplay of older games such as UO or EQ at launch it wouldnt hold their attention for more than 10 minutes before they give up. Because with this generation, unless there is a strat site, leveling guide or complete roadmap, they will be lost and confused. And we all know thinking is lost in todays gamer.
Dude, what EQ were you playing?!? Depending on your definition of "raiding" and when you started playing... you must have missed out on camping RUBICITE... and not to mention Plane of Hate/Fear and that's just EQ classic.
"Same could be said for EQ. Back in the early days of EQ there was so much to do and explore before even hitting mid level that you were always entertained. No one was in a hurry to hit 50, and no one really talked about raids.
When you put the words "Early days of EQ + so much to do + explore" together I assume you mean UO or AC.
If by "explore", you mean "run along the zone edge line so you don't draw aggro from the crap in kithcor at night", or "swim for 20 minutes trying to locate the island in OOT because the clipping in the boat you were on for some reason dropped you into the water" then our definitions of exploring differ greatly.
If by "so much to do", you mean "spend literally hours LFG or in a player-made queue for groups camping specific stuff because you can't do it on your own", or "shouting TRAIN TO ZONE 30 times an hour in Unrest scrunched up against the wall everytime someone pissed of *a festering hag*", or " using your macro button /loc 400 times to find your corpse... so you could hit your macro button /corpse 400 times and drag it out of aggro's way" then again, our ideas differ greatly.
When you say "No one was in a hurry", I think you mean "it was impossible to hurry". The only person I know of that could hit 50 on a brand new server was a halfling druid who always went by the name Kenzen. He had kiting down to an art and he did it solo, on the Quellious server. If you were on that server, then you know of "Dragons of Asia", with all the guild members named things like "Gansow" and "Ganbaba"... everything "Gan". So just to clarify, YES I was there, it did happen. But even at that, it took more than weeks for him to max out. Outside of him, you had to group, and there was no such thing as "hurry"... because it couldn't be done AS a group.
"There was no map, no Thottbot. It was all about playing to play." True, there was no in game map whatsoever. But there was Allakhazam, EQAtlas... and The Cackling Klaknak. If you remember the story about the "Three-Legged Mule drunk on cheap scotch." Then kudos to you!
But no... just to clarify... "hardcore" raiding, DID exist back then and yes it was a very big thing... ranging from Naggy to the PoH/PoF.
"There is only one thing of which I am certain, and that's nothing is certain."
A good mmo has a lot more to do than raiding and pvp. Seriously, man.
Thats the problem Zax.
So many of these people playing MMOs today think MMO = Raiding.
They have no idea that what made MMOs great was the fact that there were so many other things to do in game than just raiding. Hell even EQ wasn't all about raiding back in the day. Infact I think it took almost 3 expansions before raiding was even the thing to do.
MMO developers when making a game always use the term "Cutting out the filler and leaving all the fun" which somehow translates into "Removing all the MMO and leaving the raids". They bend and buckle to one aspect of the gameplay leaving the game to be a speed run to endgame for the "fun" to begin.
In UO there wasnt any of this raiding stuff. There were dungeons that you and your friends could attempt to crawl through and have a good time. There was also social aspects such as building communities and having guild battles. We had hours of fun doing any sort of thing we could in game and never really had to have content constantly pumped out to hold our attention.
Same could be said for EQ. Back in the early days of EQ there was so much to do and explore before even hitting mid level that you were always entertained. No one was in a hurry to hit 50, and no one really talked about raids. Everytime an expansion was released it was aimed at all levels (though sometimes more for mid to high levels). It included new dungeons and new lands to explore. There was no map, no Thottbot. It was all about playing to play.
Anarchy Online. In AO there were raid bosses and random world bosses on 18+ hour timers. Did we raid every day at max level? Nope. We had other things to do. We had tower battles, we could annoy clanners in low gas zones, or just hanging out in Rome Red chatting by the grid terminal. And its not because we were a small guild (in fact at the time we were the biggest Omni guild -BoB - over 800 members active (alts were in BoLB, our alt guild) )
Thing is, Hardcore raiding made up a very small fraction of MMO gameplay. Today its just the easiest content to design for an MMO. Because to be honest most players cant have fun in a game unless the designers tell them where it is, how to do it and how much fun they 'will' have. If you were to stick most MMO players today in a game built on the gameplay of older games such as UO or EQ at launch it wouldnt hold their attention for more than 10 minutes before they give up. Because with this generation, unless there is a strat site, leveling guide or complete roadmap, they will be lost and confused. And we all know thinking is lost in todays gamer.
Dude, what EQ were you playing?!? Depending on your definition of "raiding" and when you started playing... you must have missed out on camping RUBICITE... and not to mention Plane of Hate/Fear and that's just EQ classic.
"Same could be said for EQ. Back in the early days of EQ there was so much to do and explore before even hitting mid level that you were always entertained. No one was in a hurry to hit 50, and no one really talked about raids.
When you put the words "Early days of EQ + so much to do + explore" together I assume you mean UO or AC.
If by "explore", you mean "run along the zone edge line so you don't draw aggro from the crap in kithcor at night", or "swim for 20 minutes trying to locate the island in OOT because the clipping in the boat you were on for some reason dropped you into the water" then our definitions of exploring differ greatly.
If by "so much to do", you mean "spend literally hours LFG or in a player-made queue for groups camping specific stuff because you can't do it on your own", or "shouting TRAIN TO ZONE 30 times an hour in Unrest scrunched up against the wall everytime someone pissed of *a festering hag*", or " using your macro button /loc 400 times to find your corpse... so you could hit your macro button /corpse 400 times and drag it out of aggro's way" then again, our ideas differ greatly.
When you say "No one was in a hurry", I think you mean "it was impossible to hurry". The only person I know of that could hit 50 on a brand new server was a halfling druid who always went by the name Kenzen. He had kiting down to an art and he did it solo, on the Quellious server. If you were on that server, then you know of "Dragons of Asia", with all the guild members named things like "Gansow" and "Ganbaba"... everything "Gan". So just to clarify, YES I was there, it did happen. But even at that, it took more than weeks for him to max out. Outside of him, you had to group, and there was no such thing as "hurry"... because it couldn't be done AS a group.
"There was no map, no Thottbot. It was all about playing to play." True, there was no in game map whatsoever. But there was Allakhazam, EQAtlas... and The Cackling Klaknak. If you remember the story about the "Three-Legged Mule drunk on cheap scotch." Then kudos to you!
But no... just to clarify... "hardcore" raiding, DID exist back then and yes it was a very big thing... ranging from Naggy to the PoH/PoF.
Running along the edge of kithicor at night was scary, what is wrong, can't handle MMORPGs that have some risks associated with them? Maybe a padded wall WoW is your type of game.
At least you could train other groups in Everquest. I guess you want an MMORPG where each player has their own little instance magically separated from everything else in the game? That way if each player has their own instance they can't be trained by other groups. It's too bad that MMORPGs have shared zones right? We need massive single player games. Sure there are other players in the game, they are just in other instances.
In any case, instancing is an idiotic idea. I'd rather have shared zones where I get trained by other groups than be separated from the other players who are on my same server by these idiotic instances. Too many new MMORPGs don't have shared PvE content where you have multiple different groups within the same zone. That is how MMORPGs should be. I want to play in an MMORPG where I actually know the different players on my server.
And for raiding, I'd rather challenging content than dumbed down content that any newbie can handle (WoW).