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Raiding (or how we lost the war)
Kungaloosh1
Member Posts: 260
The following is my opinion only. Some will agree, some will disagree. Please try not to flame. Be constructive.
What has gone wrong in the mmo genre over the past decade? Many will cite different items, but i truly believe that the biggest bane to the health and welfare overall is the addition of raidmode.
Using Eq1 original release as a specific instance.....The game was released with the option to either go it alone or group with up to 5 friends. This left the vast majority of the game world to be played in and enjoyed by all. At release only two targets were considered "raid" targets, vox and nagafen.
When players reached the appropriate level, they would get several groups together and fight to kill these two beasties, randoming the booty between the groups. Everyone seemed fine with this, some groaning went out that they didnt get experience on every kill, so raidmode was created.
Players then became insatiable with raiding, demaning more and more content and special loot. The loot was obviously designed based on the difficulty of the encounter, making the character ever more powerful, especially in non raid settings.
So begins the never ending see saw balancing act, where devs tried and tried and tried to balance mob difficulty to meet the power of those in raid quality gear.
Incoming moans from the non raider. They are happily moving along, enjoying their group content when they find that the encounters become increasingly tougher to beat. Minds get together and come up with the holy trinity of grouping to compensate, leaving a soure taste in the mouth of anyone who did unconventional groups.
Lo we must have the cleric and the warrior and the enchanter, leaving the other three spots to fight it out for dps (sorry other fighter or priest, we already have one of you, you are sol).
So at this point much ire and angst are filling the message boards, people are unhappy, chaos has ensued.
As the years progress, mobs get tougher and tougher and tougher, all to make it some type of challenge to raiders.
The effect has spread to other games as well. It is commonplace, really.
Within the last couple of years, a big chunk of the mmo population has woken up and realized that they no longer can afford to commit the time and effort as they did in years past to raiding, let alone long dungeon instances with silly ass lockouts.
Now a common side effect argument has gone on for some time. Groupers want the raiding style gear, the raiders retort that they have no use for it since all they do is group encounters.
Yet in the same breath, the raider takes their overly powerful gear and spells into group encounter areas and dominates them with much more ease than the rest.
Reenter balance......
I guess at this point, i would like to see an mmo developer work their game to remove raiding from the genre.
bring the mmo gaming field back into an era of cooperative grouping and soloing, leaving the army to the rts games.
Thank you and sorry for the wall of text....
Comments
in my book any event be it raiding or other should be avail to 500 player per instance,phaze,dungeon or whatever skeem you want to call them!
so say your raiding world dragon in vanilla wow and blizzard phazed the whole thing,if 500 player can go in and duke it out, cool!
and since i know we can never go back to the way vanilla wow was!open world!(fucking too many player would be at one place)
i think a good compromise would be 500 player / instance it would bring back the massive into multiplayer online
and would allow server to survive and gamer to be happy!
I decided that I wasn't going to play another mmo that only offered raiding at end-game. I think that there is soo much more that an online world could offer, not just scripted raiding.... eh I'm over that stuff. Spent entirely too much time dealing with the frustrations of raiding guilds and the elitist basement dwellers that gravitate toward running them. I want more exploring, building of houses, forts, player cities, player shops etc. Until mmo's get over being little more that a time sync to get my money I'll just stick with other, more developed genres. I don't mind a game having raiding but I don't want that to be the only thing to do. Hell and while I'm at it, if there were raids I would want them to be less scripted. I didn't get much of a sense of accomplishment from perfectly scripted raids to the point where an add-on would tell you "Hey the boss is gonna spit fire now! Step to the Left and win!"
In the same breathe as allowing people to solo or group, you should allow for someone to raid or not. It ends up being just another option for the game to do (especially when they get to a high enough level that there is nothing else for them to accomplish).
I personally am not really one for shineys to dictate my love for a game. I played FFXI for years and raided one particular event called Dynamis twice a week for the better part of 5-6 years. I never did it for the items particularly, I did it because I found it fun and challenging. The best part about FFXI is that if you ever did get bored with one event there was always something else to do. If you can offer a lot of different content and re-playability as FFXI does offer you can appease someone like me who is just looking to have fun and all the while the people whose very existance in life is justified by some grouping of pixels on a computer monitor can go raid and have fun.
People use the raid gear as their rewards for playing the game. Most people can't accept playing a game where enjoyment is the only reward (look at the achievement/trophy systems). You don't play Mario Bros. to have fun jumping on turtles you play Mario Bros. to save Princess Peach (who just happens to always be in another castle). It is a sad truth and I wish it wasn't. Raiding extends a players time in a game. Then once they get all the gear they can raid for then they will wait for the next challenge to get more gear and more gear until they finally burn out and go find a new game to play. Maybe if there was something to do other than raid end game or if people who enjoy the journey more than the destination ....
I don't completely agree with your analysis but I do hate raiding. The thing which depresses me is that while raiding survives and soloing has become even more common, ordinary day-to-day grouping has almost vanished from mmorpgs. Developers seem to be obssesed with the extreme ends of the curve while ignoring the middle.
Another way to look at this discussion (and this is pointed to developers mostly) is how you split dev resources.
Manhours are not something that comes cheap these days. With the economy in the toilet, mmo devs are forced to cut back on employees. So with fewer employees available, you have to stretch them even thinner. I should say that you have three main areas of dev focus solo -group -raiding. Add to the mix dev time needed for tradeskills, fluff, etc...
So concentrating on the three combat spheres, if you had only two spheres (solo and group) you could put that many more people towards them, which makes squashing bugs easier, balancing content easier, coming up with NEW content easier, etc...
The more hamburgers on the griddle, the more flipping the cook has to do.
I am not anti raid at all, i am upset with the side effects of raids.
On another thread out there, someone had mentioned a way to counteract balance in making equipment and spells lower from raid quality to group quality in the appropriate areas. While this would be a massive task, it COULD be a solution to balance.
If you think about it, if dungeons and overland areas could be balanced based on groups and soloers, they would have a much stronger chance of getting the job right the first time instead of rebalance, rebalance, nerf, boost, nge, etc......
*edit* and to the guy above me, i concur. I am not a big grouper anymore because quest grouping sucks something awful. If devs could come up with a way to flatout streamline quest grouping, make it so people don't have to everwalk all over hell and back in the middle of a group, it would make grouping much more viable.
That was one thing that made eq1 so group friendly back in the day is that people just went places and murdered crap for however long they felt. Some call this grinding, i call this a dang good reason to get together with friends!!!!!!
Raid or Die!!!!!!!!!!!!?!??!?!!!!
LOL! jk
Seriously, I have no issue with raiding.
As a solo/Small group casual player now I have no need for that awesome raid gear since I can solo mob and repeatable quests in basic quality armor.
Oh and why should I give a shit if Raiders could kill solo and small group content faster?
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
Raiding is fun, requires teamwork and allows a community to work together to accomplish a common goal.
"The question that sometimes drives me hazy: Am I, or the others crazy?" - Albert Einstein
I realize that i wrote a jumbled wall of text, but let me clarify.
It isn't a problem that they can kill a mob faster than mr solo guy. The problem lies in the developers doing target balance based on how a raider is geared and his stats and his higher quality spells. They tune those mobs and non raiders go up against them and get their proverbial butts handed to them more often than not.
The idea is, group content should be tuned and balanced on what the average group player is wearing and has, not the raiders.
I realize that i wrote a jumbled wall of text, but let me clarify.
It isn't a problem that they can kill a mob faster than mr solo guy. The problem lies in the developers doing target balance based on how a raider is geared and his stats and his higher quality spells. They tune those mobs and non raiders go up against them and get their proverbial butts handed to them more often than not.
The idea is, group content should be tuned and balanced on what the average group player is wearing and has, not the raiders.
Isn't it already? I mean small scale dungeons aren't balanced for Raid geared players their designed for entry level players at a particular level, the same with group quests and anything else outside an actual raid.
Do you have an example of a solo or small group encounter that was messed up because it was balanced for top of the line raid gear?
Edit: I need my coffee, maybe I'm not understanding you right.
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
While I don't have a problem with raiding per se, I do agree with many of the OP's points. Raiding does cause some balance issues but the raiders have to put the time and effort into going and getting that gear so it seems fair they get some advantage for that.
However, I think that scaling dungeon difficulty and loot gen is also an option. WoW had the "heroic" system and have changed the pve experience even more since I left last June. I found DDO's system of dungeon difficulty to be good in some ways, more mobs, tougher mobs, and mobs using different skills.
Dungeon scaling could go well beyond just making the mobs hit harder and have more health. Add new patrols, traps, ambushes, tougher mob set ups, different threat AI just to name a few... This way small groups can have the challenge and fun of harder and different experiences normally set aside for raiders only.
I found waiting around for others... afks, finding replacements, people showing up late (like 30 minutes etc) and all that to be a major turn off on raiding for me. I like the small group adventures better.
That and WoW killed premade team pvp a in BC which... was a part of the game I loved, but oh well.
Skaroth
See the violence inherent in the system!
I have no problem with raids offering the best gear.
What I do have a problem with, is overly restrictive raid mechanics that make raiding such a pain.
Lockouts and hard raid member caps are the two most frustrating aspects of raiding, and put people off of it the most.
Lockouts as implied, lock players out of doing the content again. But this is a problem when say, someone wants to go with two groups of friends in a week. This is even more frustrating when say, they plan to go with group A later in the week, so they have to decline group B, only to have group A fall through so they've lost any chance at participating in content for that period, short of pugging it.
The hard number caps are also a huge PITA, and can cause a lot of drama and hurt feelings between friends. So many raid encounters are designed around a specific numbers of participants, and then hard cap the amount of people that can go. Meaning you need to X number of people of the appropriate roles to do the raid. Problem is, not everyone is able, or willing, to fill their position each lockout period, which requires the raid to pull in extra people. This creates a situation where more people are on the roster than there are spots, specifically because the mechanics hardcap having that many people in the raid encounter. So now you get situations where people start getting left out, and don't get to participate.
Honestly, I don't see why the restrictions for raids can't been loosened up a bit. If a group wants to do a raid encounter with twice as many people as it's designed for, who cares? It just means they have to share the loot amongst twice as many people anyways, so what does it really matter?
I'm sure that if raiding were more accessible, people wouldn't mind raiding giving out the best gear.
Yeah... Lockout timers are lame.
They should only lock you out if you actually get something.
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
A game just can't revolve around a single aspect without people getting bored. You need raiding and pvp in a game as well as a balance between them. What the discussion should be about is why we only get pvp or raiding as options. There has to be more to offer.
That would be cool but what about the loot no one wants and is to be sharded (WoW example). The chanter get the loot but only to bust it up for the guild bank... They would get locked out.
Anyway, I am sure a solution to this problem could be found.
Skaroth
See the violence inherent in the system!
You mean builds "inter guild" community to work together for a goal. Raids offer nothing and have little benefit to an entire game server's community. It pits everyone against each other in a rat race. It would be nice however to see challenges that brought a server community together but for the most part any game with a really hard focus on raiding at end game pretty much destroys over all server community.
I don't hate raids ... I just hate the bullshit excuse that raiding and its horrorfic requirements is the only available type of end game in alot of developers minds.
You mean builds "inter guild" community to work together for a goal. Raids offer nothing and have little benefit to an entire game server's community. It pits everyone against each other in a rat race. It would be nice however to see challenges that brought a server community together but for the most part any game with a really hard focus on raiding at end game pretty much destroys over all server community.
I don't hate raids ... I just hate the bullshit excuse that raiding and its horrorfic requirements is the only available type of end game in alot of developers minds.
Well the thing is the general mmo community prefers the whole idea that you level up find a nice guild and work together to defeat raid encounters that further the games story as well as getting new gear. The funny thing is only 3 games have been successful at this formula in the P2P market.
What is this "Raiding" you speak of?
Give me liberty or give me lasers
An MMO without raiding is like a car without a radio.
Do you need a radio to drive? No.
But if the radio is free, why not get it?
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
Count me in the no raid camp. I just read STO Dev article today about how their end game consisted of raiding (small group albeit) and I became completely disinterested in the game. (was the final nail anyways)
I did raiding in WOW and decided not to play games anymore where raiding was the primary end game. Sadly this means I don't get to play too many games these days.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I realize that i wrote a jumbled wall of text, but let me clarify.
It isn't a problem that they can kill a mob faster than mr solo guy. The problem lies in the developers doing target balance based on how a raider is geared and his stats and his higher quality spells. They tune those mobs and non raiders go up against them and get their proverbial butts handed to them more often than not.
The idea is, group content should be tuned and balanced on what the average group player is wearing and has, not the raiders.
Isn't it already? I mean small scale dungeons aren't balanced for Raid geared players their designed for entry level players at a particular level, the same with group quests and anything else outside an actual raid.
Do you have an example of a solo or small group encounter that was messed up because it was balanced for top of the line raid gear?
Edit: I need my coffee, maybe I'm not understanding you right.
Two specific examples, the last two expansions in eq2. Heroic (meaning group) dungeons, i found that if i wasn't grouped with a few raid geared players, the difficulty was just too much to stand. Kunark and the void expansions, the dungeon instances were tuned to be a challenge to those who raided the highest level content.
Those like me who never raided but didn't mind grouping were at the mercy of getting heavily geared and master level spell equipped players.
I think the OP is going through a bit of selective memory or didn't actually raid in EQ.
Yes, it's true you did not receive EXP unless you were in the highest damage group (the group that did the most damage in EQ got awarded the EXP, no encounter locking like in recent MMOs). However, it's absurd to think this was actually a concern for players and you act like there is some type of correlation between this and creating the Holy Trinity (which the OP is also mistaken on, but I'll get into later). Remember that up until Luclin (or was it Velious?) there wasn't even AA EXP, and when you raided these encounters you were typically at or around max level anyway so there was no need for experience. The OP also makes it seem as if "raidmode" as he called it was created as early as the original expansion, but an interface for raiding wasn't even created till the Planes of Power expansion.
If you happened to be in the highest damage group in raiding (and I typically was) you really didn't get all that much more EXP. Raid MOBs awarded just as much EXP as an equally conned MOB were, but took much more effort to bring down. It was much faster EXP to just group anyway since you can kill in larger amounts faster and get more EXP. If EQ turned off EXP altogether in a raid, nobody would care less. I think the raid interface was added for two reasons: To combat zerging (since you now had a limit of those you can check up on via the raid interface) and to provide raiders with an interface they didn't have before to assist with raiding.
As far as the Holy Trinity was concerned it ALWAYS existed in EQ. Raiding didn't create it. You typically wanted a holy trinity for any group you did (except AoE groups, which still had 2/3 of the holy trinity in it anyway) from the original EQ throughout all it's expansions. Did you do SolB with 5 rangers? Raiding didn't create that.
Also, the encounters/dungeons in EQ didn't get more difficult as the expansions came out, at least up until Planes of Power (many consider this expansion a step in the wrong direction for EQ, me included). EQ always had difficult encounters and you always needed decent gear to do them. Yes, Kunark brought a lot of raiding and Velious brought a lot more, but you didn't need raid gear to do all the single group content in Kunark or Velious, but you probably needed the Holy Trinity just as much as you did for Solb and in the original EQ.
What do you want OP? Do you want to point fingers at raiders and blame us for bad developer choices? Do you want every MMO to have easy encounters with no challenge (since you seem to be against games getting more difficult)? You obviously are an advocate of solo heavy MMOs: "bring the mmo gaming field back into an era of cooperative grouping and soloing, leaving the army to the rts games." yet, this is the exact direction MMOs are headed into and there are plenty of solo friendly MMOs (WoW, Champions Online, Warhammer, etc) so why don't you go play those MMOs that you apparently want?
Frankly, I can get solo gameplay and cooperative gameplay from most online games (with far better gameplay) like shooters, fighting games, etc. What's to set this apart from a MMO? Why even have the ability for tons of players to log into a world if you are just going to instance everything and make it so only 5-6 people can play together, hell even shooters typically support more people in a game than that.
Counter point. Original release Everquest 1. There was no raiding, pvp was only available on the pvp server.
Server communitys were teeming with activity, groups, both interguild and pickup, were abundant. The focus WAS grouping and people were basically happy and content.
But people by nature usually want and even demand the best of everything, so if raiding is introduced as the top tier, then raiding is what they will do, even if they don't like to raid.
Now if an mmo was produced that left raiding off but offered double or triple the amount of things to do and places to see, i think people would find themselves happy again. Sure, there would be a small portion of the player base that would be unhappy without raiding, they would still push themselves to best their gear and be the best of their game.
btw a small personal comment about raiders. Raiding takes a lot of effort on the behalf of those who plan them, coordinate the efforts, lead the charge, etc...while the majority of people in the raid basically ride the coattails of those who run them.
They offer little more than button pushing and doing what they are told when they are told.
I know that when i was running raids in eq1 back in the day, it was always the same few of us doing all the planning but everyone else showed up and in the long run looked to us for their entertainment. That got old quickly.
Counter point. Original release Everquest 1. There was no raiding, pvp was only available on the pvp server.
Server communitys were teeming with activity, groups, both interguild and pickup, were abundant. The focus WAS grouping and people were basically happy and content.
But people by nature usually want and even demand the best of everything, so if raiding is introduced as the top tier, then raiding is what they will do, even if they don't like to raid.
Now if an mmo was produced that left raiding off but offered double or triple the amount of things to do and places to see, i think people would find themselves happy again. Sure, there would be a small portion of the player base that would be unhappy without raiding, they would still push themselves to best their gear and be the best of their game.
btw a small personal comment about raiders. Raiding takes a lot of effort on the behalf of those who plan them, coordinate the efforts, lead the charge, etc...while the majority of people in the raid basically ride the coattails of those who run them.
They offer little more than button pushing and doing what they are told when they are told.
I know that when i was running raids in eq1 back in the day, it was always the same few of us doing all the planning but everyone else showed up and in the long run looked to us for their entertainment. That got old quickly.
How can you counterpoint something that's a complete and total lie? You even mentioned Vox and Nagafen in the original thread. /faceplam.
More raiding was added in because people enjoyed it. Some people actually enjoy doing all the organization and planning required to be on a raid. Some enjoy taking on that massive encounter. It felt like a MMO, it felt like you needed other people. It didn't split the community on the server.
"They offer little more than button pushing and doing what they are told when they are told." and how is single and small group content any different?
By raidmode i wasn't referring to the UI element added later on. I should clarify that i was talking about the addition of plane of fear and then plane of hate, entire zones dedicated to raids.
As for getting exp during raids, people would raid minus exp, sure, but they still felt left out and felt more connected to the actual event when they saw a result on their screen for every kill. This is mostly psychological.
Regarding the holy trinity, this is false. This is a mindset that became the norm later on into the game. Speaking specifically about original release eq1, groups generally had a healer and 5 of anything else. I can testify to my 6 man paladin groups in guk. They were a blast!
No, i am not blaming raiders. I am blaming developers. As i said in my last response, players will always want the best, and if best is in raiding, they will raid, if the best is in grouping they will group.
The entire point of this is i bet a years salary that if a company developed a rich mmo world filled with a multitude of things to do with nothing more than a group, it would be ultimately successful.
You can disagree, that is fine, but do NOT accuse me of asking for dumbed down or watered down games. This has zero to do with soloquest.
Counter point. Original release Everquest 1. There was no raiding, pvp was only available on the pvp server.
Server communitys were teeming with activity, groups, both interguild and pickup, were abundant. The focus WAS grouping and people were basically happy and content.
But people by nature usually want and even demand the best of everything, so if raiding is introduced as the top tier, then raiding is what they will do, even if they don't like to raid.
Now if an mmo was produced that left raiding off but offered double or triple the amount of things to do and places to see, i think people would find themselves happy again. Sure, there would be a small portion of the player base that would be unhappy without raiding, they would still push themselves to best their gear and be the best of their game.
btw a small personal comment about raiders. Raiding takes a lot of effort on the behalf of those who plan them, coordinate the efforts, lead the charge, etc...while the majority of people in the raid basically ride the coattails of those who run them.
They offer little more than button pushing and doing what they are told when they are told.
I know that when i was running raids in eq1 back in the day, it was always the same few of us doing all the planning but everyone else showed up and in the long run looked to us for their entertainment. That got old quickly.
How can you counterpoint something that's a complete and total lie? You even mentioned Vox and Nagafen in the original thread. /faceplam.
More raiding was added in because people enjoyed it. Some people actually enjoy doing all the organization and planning required to be on a raid. Some enjoy taking on that massive encounter. It felt like a MMO, it felt like you needed other people. It didn't split the community on the server.
"They offer little more than button pushing and doing what they are told when they are told." and how is single and small group content any different?
Vox and naggy were a once per 7 real life days spawn. It was a special event, made more special by the rarity of it.
The eq producers could have continued on this route and people would have been fine.
The premise of this is that if you have three combat spheres instead of two, you weaken every sphere.