Raiding as it exists in most current MMOs still sucks…
Raiding Sucks (click the picture for an even more disturbing image)
I have written about this topic many times before. The two biggest examples are:
Raiding Provides a False, Deceptive Sense of Real Accomplishment
Fed up! Raiding sucks as a sole form of end game content.
This would be a pretty dull post if all I was doing was encouraging you to go back and read those posts (though I do feel it is worth your while, as they are pretty good, and they provoked good discussions in the past). I bring those up because I am finally starting to see some of the same points being raised by a lot more MMO bloggers than in the past. It would appear I was at the forefront of this point, and I am very gratified to see it finally getting some traction.
I will cite a couple recent blog posts by Tobold, a well known, highly regarded MMO blogger (with a significant focus on WoW): Could you still dance with Heigan?
“What wiped raids in that encounter was the back and forth “dance” you had to perform correctly to avoid the floor erruptions, moving at exactly the right point in time, and neither too short nor too far.
…
And that is exactly what I don’t like about raiding in Wrath of the Lich King. There is no real “progression” from “easier” raid dungeons to “harder” raid dungeons. It is all just the same, various different encounters for which you and your friends have to practice the moves until you all can do them without fail. Places like Naxxramas become obsolete because of the loot they give, not because of a lack of challenge.”
and I don’t think Gearscore is the culprit here:
“The second factor is the nature of Wrath of the Lich King raiding, which I already discussed last week: Whether you play your character well, and even your gear, are not good predictors for the success of a raid encounter. The real difficulty of a WotLK raid encounter is “learning the dance”, practicing a fixed set of moves requiring sub-second reaction times.”
I have been making these points for years. I am glad other people are finally seeing it as well. The reason modern WoW/EQ style raiding is not actually epic or truly fun is because it is not about playing your character well – or even developing your character well. It is about following some rote set of moves designed by uber gamers who mastered the raid in beta before it was even released. You are all just puppets on a stage, following a Youtube script your raid leader downloaded and memorized. That is not fun. That is not epic. That is boring and dull.
Indeed. People at the local nursing home do such dances, and they are a lot like raids in a way. Interestingly, some still like them, some hate them.
Anecdotes aside, it is not only the way the encounters are set up. It is the whole machinery that requires fixed positions to be filled with an exact and set number of players, people sitting on the bench waiting for their chance, DKP mechanics and other loot distribution schemes and so on. And no other alternative for “endgame” content, the idea alone being a misconception that is the result of a pure progression and gear based quest-driven system.
At the same time I blame player mentality. Players got used to do whatever a quest giver or achievement system list told them to do, and they will do it, no matter how retarded and how small the reward is. But if there is no gear reward for something, you will have a hard time to force people to simply have fun…. :>
Actually, I am not exaggerating here. This is the current state of most MMOs.
I fear SWTOR will just add a story, they called it the new 4th pillar of their MMO design, but it could basically just be that Bioware transfers their fun singleplayer RPGs into a MMO setting and then notice that they did nothing else but that.
I put high hopes into GW2, but I fear they will make a lot of compromises to cater to the generic MMO gamer of today. Bartle was right when he said MMOs get designed by the wishes of their most noobish players.
Oh well.
It’s funny you bring up the Nursing home dancing. That’s what I was going to do (but not with nursing homes.)
Country ‘line-dancing’ is obviously group-think at its best/worst. It doesn’t even pretend to be anything else. (The movie ‘Antz’ made fun of that notion.) However, if you’ve watched swing-dancing, it looks completely different. It looks like they are just out there having a wild and crazy time, throwing caution to the wind.
That is, until you see them OFF the dance-floor. If you’ve ever taken any sort of dance lessons, or even tried to learn on your own, you quickly find that all dancing is just practice. You practice your moves over and over and over again. The only part where you do anything interesting is choosing which order to do the ‘moves’ in.
Raiding is pretty much the same, but even the order of the moves is fixed. Raiding is line-dancing.
But how do you fix it? The least creative way is to just randomize the boss behaviors, make them unpredictable? That would break most of the patterns, but would also make each encounter be a generic boring mess. I don’t vote for that way.
Personally, I think the problem is the repetitive nature. While you’re questing/levelling, 95% of the time you only see the content once. You might use the same area, and therefor fight some of the same mobs, but aside from grinding, you don’t keep repeating the same quest over and over again.
Compare that to what happens when you reach ‘raiding’ status. Instantly the name of the game switches to ‘repetition.’ Your whole experience is focused on the same small bit of content every session, until you’ve mastered the encounter and each person has gained the loot they want, then you move on to another bit of content to endlessly repeat.
Why does the ‘end-game’ differ so greatly from the content? If the ‘bosses’ weren’t the end-goal of the dungeons, and rather there was a ‘moving goal’ or changing quest that took you into the dungeon, then the bosses would become an obstacle and a distraction. People would be tempted to find another way to their goal.
I’ve never liked raiding. Never saw a glimmer of interest in being a pawn in that dance. When my MMO switches to raiding move, that’s when I switch off. If you guys come up with a working solution, then I’d really like to play MMO’s again.
There’s one thing that’s not being considered here, from what I’ve read. That is that the players are the ones choosing to dance to the tune of what they’re complaining about.
For example, comments like Naxxramas becoming obsolete because it doesn’t give good gear comparatively, not because it isn’t challenging… Naxx is only obsolete if you choose not to go there. If you still find it to be a challenge, then go there and enjoy the challenge, don’t make the choice to only go to ICC because you want better loot.
As this seems to pertain to WoW mostly I’ll give a personal account. Recently myself and a fellow player, both fairly well geared level 80’s, went back and did Molten Core with just the two of us, we had a blast, I even managed to die once, and there were good fun encounters that were even challenging at times.
I also recently went back to Ulduar with a group of 9 other guildmates, all very well geared (most of them Kingslayers) to do the hard mode fights. One of these fights (iron council) we wiped I think five times before we managed to get it done, and not just because we had to ‘learn the dance’, it was genuinely a hard and challenging encounter.
I do see the point of the posts above, and agree to some extent, but there is plenty of other fun to be found in these games. It seems a little hypocritical to be dancing a certain way (when there are other ways to ‘dance’), and then complaining about always having to do that particular dance. That’s a choice that you as the player are making because you are going along with what the company making the game expects you to do, and that is attempt to max yourself out with the best gear and achievements, so it caters primarily to that. But you don’t HAVE to do that, it’s only required if you have that particular goal in mind.
Worth mentioning that you can also get pretty damn well geared in WoW in particular solely through PvP, which I’m not a huge fan of myself but there are a bunch of battlegrounds, arenas, areas etc. which give you the honor you need to buy some kickass gear that is the equivalent of drops you get from ICC and then some.
Yeah, I’ve been calling it glorified squaredancing for years. Raiding is crap, and the gear has never been good enough to force me to sit through it. Gearing through PvP is the way for me. It’d be nice if they got rid of the endgame gear treadmill completely though. I want my character to be ‘done’ at some point, so I can be pwning people at full potential.
@Marc Hawke: Good point about the repetitiveness of raiding. WoW dealt with part of that problem by making all top end dungeons somewhat equal in utility through the badge system. Perhaps they should do the same with raids? I believe that is one of the suggestions Tobold made on his blog as well.
I don’t really think this is player choice – unless you are saying they choose to play the games that have this. But I’d argue that the dominance of WoW, and the utter failure of so many companies to create alternatives, have made it so a lot of gamers have very little choice. The last 5 or so AAA MMOs to come out were plagued by WoW-clone-itis, and even a lot of the quality F2P MMOs have the same problem. Runes of Magic, as good as it is, is basically WoW but a few years behind. That’s not much of a choice.
Should people have to totally give up on the fun of character advancement/development just to have a little content variety?
I could go off on a huge tangent here, but I’ll try not to. A lot of this loops back to the whole problem with Bind of Pickup/Account gear. WoW totally destroyed the value of its otherwise universal currencies: experience and gold. The majority of the game is played at level cap, where xp is worthless. Gold is also of limited value, since you cannot actually buy the things you use most. This is one of the huge flaws in the whole WoW-style gear system. The two universal currencies (xp and gold) that can be theoretically obtained anywhere, are basically worthless for most of the game.
@Outsider: I am with you on the whole “being done” concept. They had this in DAoC and it was nice. Every stat had a cap, and once you hit the cap you were golden. The only problem then is that if you have no other form of character development, the RPG elements of the game quickly feel stale.
I like the Guild Wars style continuing advancement. You can pick up about 200-250 skills for your character, but you can only actually equip 8 at once. You can pick up the 8 skills you want and be “done” as far as power level goes. Or you can keep picking up more skills to open up more flexibility and builds.