Just because the majority of people think a certain way, doesn't make them right....
The fact remains that, with even a small amount of education in the matter, anyone can draw clear parrallels to raiding pre-WoW and raiding in GW2. The onus for not researching before mouthing off to more experienced MMO gamers (no matter how much the minority) rests on their heads, not ours.
Majority rules on word definitions is how language works (in practice). There are some twists and turns to this, given how words change over time (hence a mix of meanings), but yeah, the majority is right. If 90% of the population decided to switch the meanings of "white" and "black" tomorrow, then the meaning would change.
And drawing parallels doesn't mean the activities are the same or should have the same name applied to them. One can draw parallels between all types of PvP, but that doesn't mean they are all arenas. This is even more the case when you are trying to use an activity from what are now ancient MMOs verses what has been the standard for almost a decade. Especially when there are several very distinct differences between raiding from 8+ years ago and GW2 large-scale PvE.
But yeah, if you don't care about expressing yourself clearly so other people can understand you without doing research into games over a decade old, then you can say the onus is on everyone else's head to figure out what you are talking about.
Seeing someone with intelligence posting in forums these days is definately a breath of fresh air. You make good points and are very well spoken. I have nothing but respect for you. I fear we must simply agree to disagree on this topic.
Just because the majority of people think a certain way, doesn't make them right....
The fact remains that, with even a small amount of education in the matter, anyone can draw clear parrallels to raiding pre-WoW and raiding in GW2. The onus for not researching before mouthing off to more experienced MMO gamers (no matter how much the minority) rests on their heads, not ours.
Majority rules on word definitions is how language works (in practice). There are some twists and turns to this, given how words change over time (hence a mix of meanings), but yeah, the majority is right. If 90% of the population decided to switch the meanings of "white" and "black" tomorrow, then the meaning would change.
And drawing parallels doesn't mean the activities are the same or should have the same name applied to them. One can draw parallels between all types of PvP, but that doesn't mean they are all arenas. This is even more the case when you are trying to use an activity from what are now ancient MMOs verses what has been the standard for almost a decade. Especially when there are several very distinct differences between raiding from 8+ years ago and GW2 large-scale PvE.
But yeah, if you don't care about expressing yourself clearly so other people can understand you without doing research into games over a decade old, then you can say the onus is on everyone else's head to figure out what you are talking about.
Seeing someone with intelligence posting in forums these days is definately a breath of fresh air. You make good points and are very well spoken. I have nothing but respect for you. I fear we must simply agree to disagree on this topic.
Aerowyn I love all the effort you put into providing tangable proof and backing for things you post and I think you should put this in the OP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_(gaming). I know you posted a clarification later on in this thread but IMO it should be at the beginning for those new coming in. The amount of misinformation people are trying to spread just blows my mind so this can help direct people thru the lies starting at the OP. Just a thought ^_^
This will show that even though Guild Wars 2 doesn't classify the big boss fights as a RAID, the gaming industry can easily compare the content to any other games RAID content on an equal view.
Anyone can stretch their own narrow minded ideals but they are not logical or substantiated in any way, especially when half of my replies as well as yours in this thread that provided comparisons and logical reasoning were completely ignored by the trolls and could not be disproved with reasonable evidence. Its like they are refusing any reasonable argument and shoving their fingers in their ears, smashing their eyes shut and allowing their jaded gaming past to blind them to realistic factual evidence.
IamApropos See where adventure will lead you! My PC Specs: i5-3570k oc'ed @4.2GHz 8GB 1600 RAM GTX670 oc'ed @ 1.25Ghz Samsung 830 SSD.
Aerowyn I love all the effort you put into providing tangable proof and backing for things you post and I think you should put this in the OP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_(gaming). I know you posted a clarification later on in this thread but IMO it should be at the beginning for those new coming in. The amount of misinformation people are trying to spread just blows my mind so this can help direct people thru the lies starting at the OP. Just a thought ^_^
This will show that even though Guild Wars 2 doesn't classify the big boss fights as a RAID, the gaming industry can easily compare the content to any other games RAID content on an equal view.
Anyone can stretch their own narrow minded ideals but they are not logical or substantiated in any way, especially when half of my replies as well as yours in this thread that provided comparisons and logical reasoning were completely ignored by the trolls and could not be disproved with reasonable evidence. Its like they are refusing any reasonable argument and shoving their fingers in their ears, smashing their eyes shut and allowing their jaded gaming past to blind them to realistic factual evidence.
problem is with wiki is well its wiki anyone can go in there and edit it which is why i don't use it as source of information usually. But growing up playing these types of games in any traditional sense of the word GW2 open world bosses classify as raid encounters.. but like someone said earlier call them pancakes if you want as long as they are fun that's all that should matter.
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
Aerowyn I love all the effort you put into providing tangable proof and backing for things you post and I think you should put this in the OP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_(gaming). I know you posted a clarification later on in this thread but IMO it should be at the beginning for those new coming in. The amount of misinformation people are trying to spread just blows my mind so this can help direct people thru the lies starting at the OP. Just a thought ^_^
This will show that even though Guild Wars 2 doesn't classify the big boss fights as a RAID, the gaming industry can easily compare the content to any other games RAID content on an equal view.
Anyone can stretch their own narrow minded ideals but they are not logical or substantiated in any way, especially when half of my replies as well as yours in this thread that provided comparisons and logical reasoning were completely ignored by the trolls and could not be disproved with reasonable evidence. Its like they are refusing any reasonable argument and shoving their fingers in their ears, smashing their eyes shut and allowing their jaded gaming past to blind them to realistic factual evidence.
problem is with wiki is well its wiki anyone can go in there and edit it which is why i don't use it as source of information usually. But growing up playing these types of games in any traditional sense of the word GW2 open world bosses classify as raid encounters.. but like someone said earlier call them pancakes if you want as long as they are fun that's all that should matter.
Totally agree - I can't wait to start enjoying "Pancakes"!!!!
IamApropos See where adventure will lead you! My PC Specs: i5-3570k oc'ed @4.2GHz 8GB 1600 RAM GTX670 oc'ed @ 1.25Ghz Samsung 830 SSD.
A raid in MMO terms, as it is commonly used, is something you see in WoW.
You know, not to nitpick or anything but you've been claiming the above all over this topic but I have yet to see any sort of proof that this is in fact true, except for your say so.
But if we are going to talk about raids in WoW, the game has a number of open world raid fights. Which should make it pretty easy for an average WoW player to draw a parallel with GW2's dragon fights.
A raid in MMO terms, as it is commonly used, is something you see in WoW.
You know, not to nitpick or anything but you've been claiming the above all over this topic but I have yet to see any sort of proof that this is in fact true, except for your say so.
But if we are going to talk about raids in WoW, the game has a number of open world raid fights. Which should make it pretty easy for an average WoW player to draw a parallel with GW2's dragon fights.
But that's not what WoW players mean when they talk about raiding. It's not what people mean when they talk about how GW2 doesn't have raiding.
I'm not pulling some rabbit out of a hat here. The raiding community in other games is centered around a very specific style of play. It's something that GW2 is not catering to at all (nor should it, imho). I'm not sure when it became fashionable to talk about GW2 "raids", but honestly it is rather silly.
Large-scale PvE in GW2 lacks several things all raids in MMOs have historical had. There's no restrictive class/role makeup that you must have, nor restrictions on how those roles must behave. There's no forming a group ahead of time required (whether manually or by computer selection). There's no significant time commitment, and in particular no need to schedule events ahead of time or otherwise manage time in some manner. Even open-world raiding in older games has required all these things. GW2 doesn't require any of them.
Nor is it going to have highly tuned difficulty in its raids; it can't since you can't tightly tune something so open to participation by random people. Indeed, the sorts of challenges GW2 large-scale PvE is going to have will most definitely have to avoid some of the mechanics other MMOs have, since griefing has to be avoided.
And this isn't even getting into how loot works and the highly progression-based and end-game-based play that raids have always entailed. Again, neither of those are in GW2.
Are there parallels? Sure, I haven't denied that anywhere. But GW2 large-scale PvE is vastly different from traditional raiding in a number of ways. Imho, it is misleading to declare them raids in any remotely traditional sense. If you want to call them raids, fine, but it needs to come with a half-dozen footnotes so that anyone not familiar with GW2 won't think it means something else. Because just declaring it a raid is rather like calling a Archaeopteryx a bird because it had feathers.
As for supporting evidence, I merely point to various MMO raiding communities and how they aren't switching over to see what raiding in GW2 is like. Heck, for the last few years people of any opinion regarding GW2 all agreed it didn't have raiding. I guess it's gotten semi-popular to claim that it does have raiding now, but I'd note even in a sticky on this forum there's a link to how GW2 does not have raiding. Or you can take a look at the Wiki article and notice that all items that it states are commonly found in raiding aren't in GW2. Hmm, doing a google search, it seems like claiming GW2 has raiding might have started up around March of this year. A brief glance on anything before that is all about how it doesn't have raiding.
Now I'm not saying you can't try to extend the term "raiding" to cover GW2 large-scale PvE. I'm just saying that there will be a large amount of confusion and misunderstanding about it without attaching a lot of explanations to that declaration. I suppose we'll see how the term evolves over the next few months to a year, if it changes at all. Maybe people in the game will just end up calling them "boss fights" or something else. That's fairly possible. Personally, I'd rather we didn't try to co-opt the term raiding. Right now when one speaks of games designed for raiders and raiding guilds, we all know what is being discussed. If the term gets generalized, then we'll have to start specifying raiding subcategories. And as I am sure anyone can tell, I hate using more words than I have to.
A raid in MMO terms, as it is commonly used, is something you see in WoW.
You know, not to nitpick or anything but you've been claiming the above all over this topic but I have yet to see any sort of proof that this is in fact true, except for your say so.
But if we are going to talk about raids in WoW, the game has a number of open world raid fights. Which should make it pretty easy for an average WoW player to draw a parallel with GW2's dragon fights.
But that's not what WoW players mean when they talk about raiding. It's not what people mean when they talk about how GW2 doesn't have raiding.
Let's just agree that it's what you think that people mean. You can't possibly speak for the whole of WoW's raiding community. Besides, as I've said before, since WoW has open world raids, WoW raiders are well aware of what an open world raid is.
Raiding is raiding whether it's open world or instanced. It follows the same principles and it's not rocket science to figure this stuff out, man. Big Boss + large amount of people + epic loot = raid, regardless of where it's located. The people who say otherwise are simply misinformed or trolling or both.
A raid in MMO terms, as it is commonly used, is something you see in WoW.
You know, not to nitpick or anything but you've been claiming the above all over this topic but I have yet to see any sort of proof that this is in fact true, except for your say so.
But if we are going to talk about raids in WoW, the game has a number of open world raid fights. Which should make it pretty easy for an average WoW player to draw a parallel with GW2's dragon fights.
But that's not what WoW players mean when they talk about raiding. It's not what people mean when they talk about how GW2 doesn't have raiding.
Let's just agree that it's what you think that people mean. You can't possibly speak for the whole of WoW's raiding community. Besides, as I've said before, since WoW has open world raids, WoW raiders are well aware of what an open world raid is.
Raiding is raiding whether it's open world or instanced. It follows the same principles and it's not rocket science to figure this stuff out, man. Big Boss + large amount of people + epic loot = raid, regardless of where it's located. The people who say otherwise are simply misinformed or trolling or both.
Except it is backed up if you bother to look at other forums, other sites, or pre-March talk on youtube, any forum (including this one), etc, etc. No one was trying to claim GW2 had raiding then and we knew exactly how large-scale PvE was going to work for quite a long time. Calling what GW2 has "raiding" is a pretty new phenomena. Before what people would usually say is something like there are raid-like bosses in the world.... -- and then go into detail about what that meant since GW2 does so many things differently from standard MMOs.
Yes, WoW raiders know what an open-world raid boss is (but they don't call it a raid, in my experience). It's something you'd schedule people together, mayhaps have to wait for the spawn to grab it (which means keeping watch), ensure you have the right group setup because you'll wipe without it, and then follow the numbers in the fight. And you'll get some sort of tier gear out of it (and every game with raiding has had that with open world raid bosses or any other). That's not what GW2 has, like I said.
And I think it is safe to say I speak for the vast majority of the WoW raiding community when I say what they think a raid is. The entire game is built around that idea of what a raid is. Time invested, grinding, structured groups and fights, progression content, etc, etc. Even the rare raid bosses in the open world have dropped tier gear, required organization, time investment (to ensure you got them before anyone else), structured grouping, etc. All raiding guilds are formed for this purpose and require these things in WoW, because that's how the game works. Indeed, that's how every MMO with raiding has worked.
Raiding has a lot more baggage attached to it than just "lots of people, big boss, epic loot". And frankly, it's arguable that GW2 doesn't have the epic loot, so there's a problem with that definition right there, unless we also mess around with how we're defining "epic loot" and what that means (which we'd have to given the lot of progression content).
A more accurate "equation" that even covers EQ and the like would be: Big boss/encounter + highly structured and organized group of a defined number + progression/tier gear (and limited at that to ensure grind) + timesink. GW2 does not have this at all, and by slapping the label "raid" on it and trying to leave it at that, it doesn't clearly convey what GW2 does have.
But if you want to try a little experiement, find some MMO players who don't know much if anything about GW2. Go and tell them that GW2 has raiding, then ask them what that means. They're going to go away with a very different idea about it than just large numbers against a big boss. I still have some friends that play WoW and who have played other MMOs and to them it does not mean what you say it means. Heck, the wiki article or anywhere else you go that talks about MMOs are going to have reams of things that raiding has which GW2 doesn't have.
And if you still don't believe me about how the term is used, go look up ANY article on raiding written in the last 10 years (or longer for that matter). They'll all have those elements I described either explicitly stated or inherent to what they are talking about.
Again, I have no major problem with people trying to expand the meaning of the term. But acting like "raids" in GW2 aren't immensely different from raids in any other MMO is an extremely poor way to go about it. You have to explain what you mean when you say "GW2 has raiding" otherwise people will get the wrong idea. Because it is not a straightforward application of the term as people use it when they talk about how they hate/love/don't care/etc raiding.
Again, I have no major problem with people trying to expand the meaning of the term. But acting like "raids" in GW2 aren't immensely different from raids in any other MMO is an extremely poor way to go about it. You have to explain what you mean when you say "GW2 has raiding" otherwise people will get the wrong idea. Because it is not a straightforward application of the term as people use it when they talk about how they hate/love/don't care/etc raiding.
it really isn't like Heartless said raiding is a lot of people + big ass encounters + big ass loot.. for some reason the hardcore wow raiders are trying to make it so much more than it is.
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
Can they come up with any more contrived encounters than that??? They went from being fun fights (eg. BWL) to the squaredances they started introducing around AQ/C'thun time.
In the end, you didn't have to be a good player in WoW, you just needed to find enough people to fill a raid that could learn the dances and not stand in the fire. I think that is why they went from 40 to 25, it was easier to find 25 people who could walk and chew gum at the same time.
WoW has turned into the MMO for people looking for something to do while they chat, or watch TV...
Can they come up with any more contrived encounters than that??? They went from being fun fights (eg. BWL) to the squaredances they started introducing around AQ/C'thun time.
In the end, you didn't have to be a good player in WoW, you just needed to find enough people to fill a raid that could learn the dances and not stand in the fire. I think that is why they went from 40 to 25, it was easier to find 25 people who could walk and chew gum at the same time.
WoW has turned into the MMO for people looking for something to do while they chat, or watch TV...
ended up being like that in Rift for me.. I didn't do the raids but the harder modes for many dungeons I hardly had to even pay attention much once I knew the fights well and had a decent group.. was fun till then though
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
Again, I have no major problem with people trying to expand the meaning of the term. But acting like "raids" in GW2 aren't immensely different from raids in any other MMO is an extremely poor way to go about it. You have to explain what you mean when you say "GW2 has raiding" otherwise people will get the wrong idea. Because it is not a straightforward application of the term as people use it when they talk about how they hate/love/don't care/etc raiding.
it really isn't like Heartless said raiding is a lot of people + big ass encounters + big ass loot.. for some reason the hardcore wow raiders are trying to make it so much more than it is.
I assume you have an extra negation in there.
I'm just saying that when people talk about raiding, they are talking about a specific sort of large group encounter. Heck, go to the general forums here and check out threads on raiding. They are about a very specific thing. You can stretch the definition, but if you do that, then I think you have to be clear that you are stretching the definition. Otherwise people from WoW, Rift, TERA, TSW, etc, etc, will have the wrong idea about what you are talking about.
I'm not some hardcore wow raider, btw. I did lead raids for my guild during WotLK (eh, the first half anyhow, before I got bored). That's about it. This isn't about WoW players, but rather the effect WoW has had on the industry and how certain terms have definitive meanings in the context of an MMORPG. It's not just the about raiding, but applies to such things as "tank" (which has a very different meaning originally), "healer", etc, etc.
.... find some MMO players who don't know much if anything about GW2. Go and tell them that GW2 has raiding, then ask them what that means. They're going to go away with a very different idea about it than just large numbers against a big boss. I still have some friends that play WoW and who have played other MMOs and to them it does not mean what you say it means. Heck, the wiki article or anywhere else you go that talks about MMOs are going to have reams of things that raiding has which GW2 doesn't have.....
This exactly! If real/active raiders would not consider the encounter a raid, then it is not a raid. Spurious definitions from non-raiders do not change the facts.
Sell GW2 on the good features it has, not on those it does not have.
(And I agree on the rest of your points too, Drachasor)
Comments
Seeing someone with intelligence posting in forums these days is definately a breath of fresh air. You make good points and are very well spoken. I have nothing but respect for you. I fear we must simply agree to disagree on this topic.
Fair enough.
Aerowyn I love all the effort you put into providing tangable proof and backing for things you post and I think you should put this in the OP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_(gaming). I know you posted a clarification later on in this thread but IMO it should be at the beginning for those new coming in. The amount of misinformation people are trying to spread just blows my mind so this can help direct people thru the lies starting at the OP. Just a thought ^_^
This will show that even though Guild Wars 2 doesn't classify the big boss fights as a RAID, the gaming industry can easily compare the content to any other games RAID content on an equal view.
maybe something like this maybe.
=======================================
Classification of what a raid is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_(gaming)
Comparible Raid content (WoW, Rift, so on): Post examples
Guild Wars 2 "Raid" equivalent content: (post examples)
=======================================
Anyone can stretch their own narrow minded ideals but they are not logical or substantiated in any way, especially when half of my replies as well as yours in this thread that provided comparisons and logical reasoning were completely ignored by the trolls and could not be disproved with reasonable evidence. Its like they are refusing any reasonable argument and shoving their fingers in their ears, smashing their eyes shut and allowing their jaded gaming past to blind them to realistic factual evidence.
IamApropos
See where adventure will lead you!
My PC Specs:
i5-3570k oc'ed @4.2GHz
8GB 1600 RAM
GTX670 oc'ed @ 1.25Ghz
Samsung 830 SSD.
problem is with wiki is well its wiki anyone can go in there and edit it which is why i don't use it as source of information usually. But growing up playing these types of games in any traditional sense of the word GW2 open world bosses classify as raid encounters.. but like someone said earlier call them pancakes if you want as long as they are fun that's all that should matter.
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
this i agree on
EQ2 fan sites
Totally agree - I can't wait to start enjoying "Pancakes"!!!!
IamApropos
See where adventure will lead you!
My PC Specs:
i5-3570k oc'ed @4.2GHz
8GB 1600 RAM
GTX670 oc'ed @ 1.25Ghz
Samsung 830 SSD.
You know, not to nitpick or anything but you've been claiming the above all over this topic but I have yet to see any sort of proof that this is in fact true, except for your say so.
But if we are going to talk about raids in WoW, the game has a number of open world raid fights. Which should make it pretty easy for an average WoW player to draw a parallel with GW2's dragon fights.
But that's not what WoW players mean when they talk about raiding. It's not what people mean when they talk about how GW2 doesn't have raiding.
I'm not pulling some rabbit out of a hat here. The raiding community in other games is centered around a very specific style of play. It's something that GW2 is not catering to at all (nor should it, imho). I'm not sure when it became fashionable to talk about GW2 "raids", but honestly it is rather silly.
Large-scale PvE in GW2 lacks several things all raids in MMOs have historical had. There's no restrictive class/role makeup that you must have, nor restrictions on how those roles must behave. There's no forming a group ahead of time required (whether manually or by computer selection). There's no significant time commitment, and in particular no need to schedule events ahead of time or otherwise manage time in some manner. Even open-world raiding in older games has required all these things. GW2 doesn't require any of them.
Nor is it going to have highly tuned difficulty in its raids; it can't since you can't tightly tune something so open to participation by random people. Indeed, the sorts of challenges GW2 large-scale PvE is going to have will most definitely have to avoid some of the mechanics other MMOs have, since griefing has to be avoided.
And this isn't even getting into how loot works and the highly progression-based and end-game-based play that raids have always entailed. Again, neither of those are in GW2.
Are there parallels? Sure, I haven't denied that anywhere. But GW2 large-scale PvE is vastly different from traditional raiding in a number of ways. Imho, it is misleading to declare them raids in any remotely traditional sense. If you want to call them raids, fine, but it needs to come with a half-dozen footnotes so that anyone not familiar with GW2 won't think it means something else. Because just declaring it a raid is rather like calling a Archaeopteryx a bird because it had feathers.
As for supporting evidence, I merely point to various MMO raiding communities and how they aren't switching over to see what raiding in GW2 is like. Heck, for the last few years people of any opinion regarding GW2 all agreed it didn't have raiding. I guess it's gotten semi-popular to claim that it does have raiding now, but I'd note even in a sticky on this forum there's a link to how GW2 does not have raiding. Or you can take a look at the Wiki article and notice that all items that it states are commonly found in raiding aren't in GW2. Hmm, doing a google search, it seems like claiming GW2 has raiding might have started up around March of this year. A brief glance on anything before that is all about how it doesn't have raiding.
Now I'm not saying you can't try to extend the term "raiding" to cover GW2 large-scale PvE. I'm just saying that there will be a large amount of confusion and misunderstanding about it without attaching a lot of explanations to that declaration. I suppose we'll see how the term evolves over the next few months to a year, if it changes at all. Maybe people in the game will just end up calling them "boss fights" or something else. That's fairly possible. Personally, I'd rather we didn't try to co-opt the term raiding. Right now when one speaks of games designed for raiders and raiding guilds, we all know what is being discussed. If the term gets generalized, then we'll have to start specifying raiding subcategories. And as I am sure anyone can tell, I hate using more words than I have to.
Let's just agree that it's what you think that people mean. You can't possibly speak for the whole of WoW's raiding community. Besides, as I've said before, since WoW has open world raids, WoW raiders are well aware of what an open world raid is.
Raiding is raiding whether it's open world or instanced. It follows the same principles and it's not rocket science to figure this stuff out, man. Big Boss + large amount of people + epic loot = raid, regardless of where it's located. The people who say otherwise are simply misinformed or trolling or both.
Except it is backed up if you bother to look at other forums, other sites, or pre-March talk on youtube, any forum (including this one), etc, etc. No one was trying to claim GW2 had raiding then and we knew exactly how large-scale PvE was going to work for quite a long time. Calling what GW2 has "raiding" is a pretty new phenomena. Before what people would usually say is something like there are raid-like bosses in the world.... -- and then go into detail about what that meant since GW2 does so many things differently from standard MMOs.
Yes, WoW raiders know what an open-world raid boss is (but they don't call it a raid, in my experience). It's something you'd schedule people together, mayhaps have to wait for the spawn to grab it (which means keeping watch), ensure you have the right group setup because you'll wipe without it, and then follow the numbers in the fight. And you'll get some sort of tier gear out of it (and every game with raiding has had that with open world raid bosses or any other). That's not what GW2 has, like I said.
And I think it is safe to say I speak for the vast majority of the WoW raiding community when I say what they think a raid is. The entire game is built around that idea of what a raid is. Time invested, grinding, structured groups and fights, progression content, etc, etc. Even the rare raid bosses in the open world have dropped tier gear, required organization, time investment (to ensure you got them before anyone else), structured grouping, etc. All raiding guilds are formed for this purpose and require these things in WoW, because that's how the game works. Indeed, that's how every MMO with raiding has worked.
Raiding has a lot more baggage attached to it than just "lots of people, big boss, epic loot". And frankly, it's arguable that GW2 doesn't have the epic loot, so there's a problem with that definition right there, unless we also mess around with how we're defining "epic loot" and what that means (which we'd have to given the lot of progression content).
A more accurate "equation" that even covers EQ and the like would be: Big boss/encounter + highly structured and organized group of a defined number + progression/tier gear (and limited at that to ensure grind) + timesink. GW2 does not have this at all, and by slapping the label "raid" on it and trying to leave it at that, it doesn't clearly convey what GW2 does have.
But if you want to try a little experiement, find some MMO players who don't know much if anything about GW2. Go and tell them that GW2 has raiding, then ask them what that means. They're going to go away with a very different idea about it than just large numbers against a big boss. I still have some friends that play WoW and who have played other MMOs and to them it does not mean what you say it means. Heck, the wiki article or anywhere else you go that talks about MMOs are going to have reams of things that raiding has which GW2 doesn't have.
And if you still don't believe me about how the term is used, go look up ANY article on raiding written in the last 10 years (or longer for that matter). They'll all have those elements I described either explicitly stated or inherent to what they are talking about.
Again, I have no major problem with people trying to expand the meaning of the term. But acting like "raids" in GW2 aren't immensely different from raids in any other MMO is an extremely poor way to go about it. You have to explain what you mean when you say "GW2 has raiding" otherwise people will get the wrong idea. Because it is not a straightforward application of the term as people use it when they talk about how they hate/love/don't care/etc raiding.
it really isn't like Heartless said raiding is a lot of people + big ass encounters + big ass loot.. for some reason the hardcore wow raiders are trying to make it so much more than it is.
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
That rag strat video is exactly why I left WoW.
Can they come up with any more contrived encounters than that??? They went from being fun fights (eg. BWL) to the squaredances they started introducing around AQ/C'thun time.
In the end, you didn't have to be a good player in WoW, you just needed to find enough people to fill a raid that could learn the dances and not stand in the fire. I think that is why they went from 40 to 25, it was easier to find 25 people who could walk and chew gum at the same time.
WoW has turned into the MMO for people looking for something to do while they chat, or watch TV...
ended up being like that in Rift for me.. I didn't do the raids but the harder modes for many dungeons I hardly had to even pay attention much once I knew the fights well and had a decent group.. was fun till then though
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
I assume you have an extra negation in there.
I'm just saying that when people talk about raiding, they are talking about a specific sort of large group encounter. Heck, go to the general forums here and check out threads on raiding. They are about a very specific thing. You can stretch the definition, but if you do that, then I think you have to be clear that you are stretching the definition. Otherwise people from WoW, Rift, TERA, TSW, etc, etc, will have the wrong idea about what you are talking about.
I'm not some hardcore wow raider, btw. I did lead raids for my guild during WotLK (eh, the first half anyhow, before I got bored). That's about it. This isn't about WoW players, but rather the effect WoW has had on the industry and how certain terms have definitive meanings in the context of an MMORPG. It's not just the about raiding, but applies to such things as "tank" (which has a very different meaning originally), "healer", etc, etc.
This exactly! If real/active raiders would not consider the encounter a raid, then it is not a raid. Spurious definitions from non-raiders do not change the facts.
Sell GW2 on the good features it has, not on those it does not have.
(And I agree on the rest of your points too, Drachasor)