I don’t get raiding.
Sure, I understand the pure mechanics of raids, but I must not have the raiding gene. To me, it’s the most obvious treadmill in a modern MMO; you do the same thing in the same place (usually with the same people at the same time every week) over and over, wishing for that one lucky drop and that concurrent lucky roll to make it all worthwhile. I’d just as soon get a free Flash slot machine and pretend that the coins are purple.
To be fair, I can sympathize with those who play the raids to test their mettle and see new sights. That much seems appealing to me. It’s really raid farming that I don’t get.
Why make a huge, sprawling world with millions of polys and gigabytes of data, and actively try to funnel players into a tiny fraction of it? It just seems very wasteful to me from a dev viewpoint, and as a player, I feel a bit slighted that the focus of modern MMO design is on the “endgame”. Why not put that level of interest and fun throughout the whole game world, for every player?
(There’s a tangent to be run there about how a leveling system makes it so only a small fraction of the world is relevant to the player at any one time, and how strong level differences amplify the effect. Again, that just seems like a big waste of resources when you’re world crafting. It’s no big deal when the game is meant to be played through and then left behind, but I thought these “virtual worlds” could offer more.)
Of course, I’m of the mind that I’d rather have a world in which to play rather than stuff to acquire, and that there should be as much (if not more) joy in the journey as in the fruit of labor. When that journey is repeated repeatedly in an effort to get more stuff, I lose interest. That said, I can sympathize with the mindset that sees raids as fun gameplay in and of themselves… but I still think that it would wind up fairly repetitious compared to the crazy sort of PvP that you might see in CounterStrike or TF2, or an interesting living, dynamic PvE world. Maybe I’m wrong on that, though. *shrug*
I don’t actually mind that raids are in MMOs (rather than complaining about how raiders are worthless), but I do find myself discouraged that such has become the major focus of most modern DIKU designs. It seems like such a shallow experience to me that I’ll never really play the raiding game, and I’m discouraged that devs aren’t trying to expand the notions of the MMO genre beyond crafting better treadmills.
Then again, I do understand it a bit from a business perspective. If you can get the bulk of your players to play with a tiny bit of your content over and over, you’re reducing overhead. I guess it just seems a bit dishonest to me to sell that sort of experience as a game world, rather than a series of multiplayer dungeon crawls. (And further dishonest to monetize it constantly, rather than allowing instanced experiences to be peer-to-peer free beasties, like most dungeon crawlers.)
Still, in the grand “raiders vs. soloers” debate that flares up every now and then, I’m firmly in the solo Explorer camp (as are both of those articles, by the way), mostly baffled with those who do raid, but content to leave them to their devices. I’m saddened that the potential I see in MMOs is largely squandered on such narrow gaming, but I’ve grown to believe that such is just the market. It’s apparently what people want, so more power to them. I’m just sitting this dance out, waiting for something more compelling. My wallet is with me.
I like to raid. I like single-group content. I like to solo. What does that make me?
What I do NOT like is being a “raider.” As a former WoW raider (and I’m certain some would say I was on the “hardcore” side of raiding at the time) I feel I can get away with saying there’s a huge difference between “I like to raid” and “I’m a raider.” I suppose if there’s a single good thing about my chosen profession, it’s that it prevents me from being a raider even if I wanted to be one anymore.
MMOs are all about dangling that carrot in front of you. Or at least, DikuMMOs are all about that. There’s always that next “power tier” be it armor, weapons, or some other virtual reward. We have to go through those static raids with 11-24 (or more) other players night after night, week after week, in the hope that finally we get our own little chunk of that next power tier. The same happens in single-group content, such as WoW’s instances while leveling (or in “Vanilla WoW” the Dungeon Sets (I think the “community” dubbed them the Tier 0.5 sets)) that non-raiders could get or up-and-coming raiders could get prior to starting their raiding career. Soloing is much the same. We have to grind mobs/quests/whatever for reputation. We learn the fighting habits of certain mobs so that each fight with them becomes a static experience. The only real change is perhaps *where* that static experience takes place.
It’s all the same, only different, as the old saying goes.
People raiding don’t bother me because they don’t affect my game at all. They’re off in their raid, and I’m off doing whatever it is that I’m doing. The reverse applies as well, when I’m off in a raid I’m not having any affect on anyone else’s (who’s not there with me) experience. I suppose that could lead to an (probably poor but hey, it just popped into my head) analogy that soloing, grouping, and raiding are all various mini-games that are available to each player should they choose to set aside the time and partake of them. Free Realms has cooking, kart racing and snow boarding. One doesn’t affect the other, it’s just one common place for everyone to find their own preferences.
What I find sad is the reliance on the vertical scale and the Diku model. I think there’s something to be said for the Guild Wars series where 95% of the game takes place at level cap yet you’re still always able to advance on a more lateral level (with a slight uphill gradient) and always able to adapt yourself to a new challenge. I might choose/need to grind for some title for a specific bonus, or not, but I don’t have to grind away for months to get some Tier 1 armor which unlocks the Tier 2 raid, and so forth. It just makes all that work seem a waste, then we’re so amazed and upset when an expansion comes out that makes it all a waste without us having to grind for it! The nerve!
[...] segues into another point that has been tackled on a couple fronts in the past 2 days: Soloing vs grouping vs raiding. I guess Ysh’s post was originally inspired by the comments [...]
Scott, that’s a good way to frame it, with the raiding/soloing/crafting/whatever being separate minigames. I think I’d enjoy running a few raids to see what’s there and how they play, I just can’t get into the “chase the loot” mindset that would keep me doing those raids over and over. (And to be completely fair, I don’t like going the repetition of going back and forth in a “quest hub”, since it gets old pretty quickly. I like to be on the move, seeing new sights and taking screenshots. I tolerate the questing because if I don’t level up, I die in new areas.)
I think you’re also right to mention the vertical progression DIKU model, too; my problems are really more with that than anything else.
Edited to reiterate: I’m not against raiding, I just don’t find much appeal in it. I’m glad that a game can afford multiple playstyles. I *do* wish that WoW would balance a bit away from its heavy raid focus, since it has an inordinate effect on other MMO designs, and a more balanced approach would make for healthier, more sustainable games. I’ll never advocate removing raiding, though. I have a similar stance on PvP, actually. Not terribly interested, very happy it’s there as an option.
Speaking to your tangent, I’m having a bad week and can’t recall if you’ve sampled Free Realms, but one thing they do pretty nice is organize encounters into 3 difficulty levels, and then they scale the encounter based on your levels.
So a “1-pip” encounter is going to be easy, no matter what level you are. A “3-pip” encounter is probably going to need a group. You’ll never ‘out-level’ it because the difficulty scales with your level (or size of your party). So at least from that point of view, the whole combat gameworld is open to everyone, no matter the level.
It’s an interesting idea; we’ll see how it works over the long run.
I was never a “Raider” but I did go through a phase where the little guild I was in would run the same 5 or 10 man instances over and over. (I guess those encounters aren’t large enough to be considered Raids.)
It was fun at the time, but at the time, it was all I had going on in my life. I’d been laid off from my job, was single, couldn’t afford to do a lot, and it was a cheap way to entertain myself. The reason I did the same instances over and over boiled down to the company, really. The game was just the underlying purpose…something to bring us all together so we could spent the evening chatting, laughing, and enjoying each other’s company.
But that’s not how I understand real “raiding” works. An ex of mine was/is in a hardcore WoW raiding guild and she likens it to her days of being a musician and being part of an orchestra. Even though her role is fairly specific, she enjoys the overall accomplishment of the group.
That’s foreign to me; I’ve always been sortof the ‘lone wolf’ type, but it at least gave me some kind of framework to understand what she was getting out of it.
Pete, I have checked out FR, and was in the beta, I just don’t have all that much time to play these days, and I can’t play when my little girl is around, since she’s exceptionally imaginative and afraid of monsters. I like the game, and would like to spend more time with it, but then… I’d like to play W101 more, too. Only so many hours in a day…
The pip level scaling dungeons sound like a smart idea, I hope they work out. It sounds like they should, so long as the rewards aren’t completely out of whack. I’ve long thought that scaling dungeons (with varied levels of difficulty) are a great way to get long-term use out of the art assets and game development time.
The notion of camraderie makes sense. Sort of like an in-game Cheers, as it were, with a little more to do than sit around and joke. It’s not really all that appealing to me for a handful of reasons, but it makes sense. Thanks for that view.
The orchestra notion is interesting. That sounds like what I mentioned about people liking the actual *gameplay* of raiding. It still seems rather overly repetitious to me, but then, so would being an orchestra performer. And aye, I’m more of a lone wolf sort, too, so trying to slot myself into a machine like that doesn’t interest me much.
Still, the idea of executing well and working as a team makes sense. I can imagine something similar with a football team that relies heavily on a few key plays. It doesn’t really interest me much, since I’m more interested in variety and exploration than in execution and repetition, but at least I can see how people might be approaching it. (And why it’s really not something that needs to be “fixed” or deleted.)
Thanks!
As a former raider, I approve of this metaphor. A good raiding guild is a team where everyone knows the encounters and each other so well that the right things happen automatically, and the wave of the conductor’s baton is simply a formality. In other words, the group as a whole attains the state of flow.
One thing I personally enjoy is figuring out the raid ourselves. Yes, it’s repetitious going in again and again, and yes it’s frustrating when it feels like you’re beating your head against a wall and coming away in failure and an expensive repair bill. But when your groups finally comes together and figures out a working strategy, there’s nothing else in an MMO that duplicates that feeling. Ever.
You know how when you’re soloing, those times when it’s a close fight and you feel you really had to pull those moves out of your ass otherwise you’d have been dead? Don’t those always feel more exciting and fun than the encounters where you’re never in any danger and you’re just going through the moves? Take that level of Fun Factor and multiply it in a group (not necessarily a raid) if a situation arises where you not only saved your own ass, but those of your buds when you’re able to show how creative you can be with your class’ abilities. In fact, I’d go so far as to say those moments are the ONLY time in any MMO when you can truly be a hero. All raids do is make the content even bigger, better and more badass. Raids turn group content to eleven, as Nigel Tufnel would say.
However, once the entire raid is on farm status, the Fun Factor spirals rapidly for me personally. It’s no longer about seeing new content, synergizing as a group and learning new strategies. It’s just about zerging through as quickly as possible to get someone a new Shiny.
Aye, that sounds like what I was imagining… but stated better.
That’s why I clarified that I don’t really get raid farming, rather than the raid itself. I’m still more of a lone wolf player, but I can imagine having fun with some good friends, getting things to click as a group, for those rare occasions when I feel like playing with others.
Ha, I could not agree more. Once I downed a boss I really do not feel the wish to do it again. Most likely because I hate the wait a lot and then raid phase and the team speak discipline (stfu) and raiding often with players that I hardly know. I also guess that I do not have the raiding gene. I do harder Guild Wars dungeons and areas with friends regularly, but doing Kara Speedruns was more a duty and service to guild members than anything else to me, for sure not that much fun. The only fight that really made me furious was Kael’thas, as I failed to tank Capernian till I finally got it.
This said, I do no longer play WoW for probably this reason, raiding alone does not float my boat, give me something else.
I feel there are only few TRUE raiders out there.
But what about the others? I am sure there are more players than just me, Tesh and a few others that feel like that, I dare even to say a huge majority of players that do not like raiding per se.
Most of them just do it for the loot. For this group they tuned down difficulty enormously, yet it is only a bandaid and no proper solution.
I think I’d enjoy running a few raids to see what’s there and how they play
This, and other comments you’ve made in this thread make me think back to… 2002? 2001? I was running one of my prior blogs at the time and I’d written a lengthy article about MMORPGs. A buddy of mine at work happened to find it (he never did tell me how, I guess Google?) and told me that while the article itself was well-written and even made some good points as to some of the aspects of MMORPG playstyle, it was also obvious that I’d never actually played one myself.
He basically challenged me to put up or shut up!
Perhaps unfortunately, I decided to put up, and contrary to what I thought (and what I’d written) I’ve been hooked ever since…
So I’ll issue the same challenge: hold off on the next anti-whatever post until you’ve done the whatever in question?
Heh, this isn’t an anti raiding post, it’s an “I don’t understand the appeal” post. It’s good to hear from those who do like it, and why.
I don’t claim that the game would be better without it because I don’t know that, and because I don’t believe it even from my standpoint.
I *do* think the obsession with raiding has skewed WoW design in unhealthy ways (and the industry as a whole as a result), but I do see it as one of several healthy “minigames” that really *has* been a good element of MMO design in the balance.
Hmph, if my ideas of a levelless/classless design come about, I can see raiding, the current “endgame”, being a vital component as one of several ways to play. In MMO design especially, I can learn to understand other players’ desires without sharing in them. I already know that raid farming isn’t interesting to me, just as I know I have no interest in Team Fortress 2 or PvP in MMOs. That doesn’t stop me from wanting to know why other people like them, and it doesn’t stop me from seeing someone else’s view.
…which is why this isn’t a “we don’t need no stinking raiding” post, it’s a “I don’t understand the appeal, it doesn’t work for me, I refuse to pay to play to confirm that fact, but I’m happy to see others who like it” post. I’m very grateful that responses here have been informative rather than combative.
I’m not out to blame raiders for the ills of the world, I’m looking to understand something that has no personal appeal, that I might better understand my fellow players and how to better craft an MMO to serve everyone.
…which should be clearer in the original post, but I think the discussion has been healthy.
…I know I have no interest in Team Fortress 2 or PvP in MMOs…
[Tangent Alert] That’s two very different things right there.
PvP is not PvP is not PvP, if you know what I mean. Would you say there’s a difference between playing say, UNO or Hearts is the same as playing Football (real or Madden) is the same as playing Team Fortress 2 is the same as playing a sandbox shooter is the same as WAR’s RvR is the same as what you’d see in EVE/Darkfall?
For that matter, look at the Zombie plague in WoW. People complained that it was PvP and they were enduring emotional hardships because someone else could affect their game. /cry Would you consider running around with your high-level character in WoW and killing all the quest NPCs in the opposing low-level towns to be PvP? You’re fighting NPC’s the entire time, but you’re affecting the opposing players who can’t turn in their quests now until the NPCs respawn. EQ guilds camped and competed over rare world bosses to either ensure their guild got the boss and therefore the loot, or to blatantly ensure an “opposing” guild could not. Sometimes even PvE can be PvP.
I’m not typically a fan of what passes for PvP in DikuMMOs because what works for combating mobs (auto-targeting, standing still to cast, progress bar abilities, etc.) does not successfully make the translation to combating thinking (notice I didn’t say “intelligent” haha!) players.
In TF2′s case, it’s so noob-friendly and casual if there was ever a shooter I’d recommend to non-shooter players, it’d be that one.
As for what type of people PvP attracts… I think it’s not just PvP but also the conditions and experience of the PvP. Darkfall is so-called “hardcore” PvP. But then so is EVE. Perhaps I’m just sheltered, but I don’t read EVE players coming off as the nastiest, most childish dregs of society and contempt like Darkfall players do. If I were to be snarky… oh who am I kidding? I am snarky… I’d paraphrase Bartle and say “I’ve already played Darkfall, it was called Halo,” because the two “communities” (and I use that term as loosely as possible) are very similar. I don’t see that in TF2 and I sure as hell don’t see that in the sandbox shooters that I prefer any day over an arena shooter. I suspect, like LOTRO for example, those games just attract a more mature audience where the “my core is harder than yours” games attract the immature ones. It’s all PvP, but vastly different experiences from one to the other.
Agreed on the PvP tangent. Those are two very different flavors, which is why I mentioned them separately.
I’m not terribly interested in either of them, as it happens, but most definitely, PvP comes in several different flavors. Good call pointing out the differences.
@ Scott: “In fact, I’d go so far as to say those moments are the ONLY time in any MMO when you can truly be a hero.”
I respectfully disagree. I’ve felt heroic at times when soloing, PvPing, grouping, and raiding. Really it just comes down to a combination of overcoming a very difficult challenge while achieving a state of flow. Some people are wired only to really appreciate this solo, some only like groups, some just don’t care unless they’re fighting another player, and some are deeply invested in the raiding mechanism.
I raided a bit in EQ back in the day, then did a fair amount in LotRO (mostly 6-man stuff, though I made a lot of visits to the Rift with 12-man groups and a handful of 24-man Helegrod runs). I do appreciate the feeling of overcoming obstacles that are well beyond my personal capacity by working with a well-organized group. That’s fun for me and I think for pretty much every self-defined raider as well. What I don’t much care for is the tedium of doing the same thing again and again and again while waiting for the RNG to pop the piece of loot that whomever seeks. I bought into the concept a decade ago for a while in EQ… got my Nagafen drum and my planar armour… then realized I really didn’t care for the process of raiding much at all in that game. There was so much waiting, plus I often felt like a meaningless cog in a huge machine, then too there was usually some drama involving arguments over loot, and some self-righteous jackass would strut around telling everyone how to play their characters to the point where it really wore on me.
I think Bartle’s recent IGDA discussion really summarized the raiding concept for me; basically raiding is a linear theme-park game nested within another game (which is usually in turn a linear theme-park). The raiding game simply provides a new set of goals to grind out once the characters have escaped the leveling treadmill. The goal is of course exactly the same as leveling: increase the character’s relative power level. What fails to excite me implicitly about raiding gameplay is not only its static and repetitive nature, but the linear progression model itself, which doesn’t really allow for much emergent play.
Raiding would probably be more interesting -long term- if the dungeons were programmed to have random trash mobs and random boss locations which scaled with the groups meta-level.
When I first played Left 4 Dead I was disappointed upon learning that the game only had 4 levels but my frustration turned around once I realized that while the maps didn’t physically change, the encounters did. I’ve played the same map multiple times now and had completely different experiences based on the skill level of the players in my group, the way the level is randomized, and the difficulty setting we choose. In my opinion L4D sets the bar for replayability quite high.
The same method, if applied to raid dungeons, would mean that instead of being half asleep, my tank would always have to be alert because I wouldn’t be able to predict when a mob may come charging at the healers. And instead of having all the tanks at the front of the group, your group better have one posted in the front, rear, and another patrolling the side or it’s wipe time. Couple this with a difficulty slider-heroic option?- that automatically calculated the groups total spell power, armor, attack power etc, and adjusted mob/boss stats accordingly, and the amount of times the same dungeon could be used becomes infinite.
Frankly I’m surprised that Blizzard hasn’t tried this since the Diablo series had randomized mob placement throughout the entire game.
Who knows, maybe Diablo 3 will offer some kind of endgame that is *not* raiding?
I personally find small group fights to be more exciting.
In terms of PvP, I try to think of a way to incorporate it in a MMO that is not all about combat… and find no solution.
It is either destructive or it gets too restricted, to battlegrounds and arenas. And I actually loved fighting for ore.
BTW, the most intense fights I had in Wintergrasp were during the breaks after the battles…
People were fighting like mad for the titanium ore spots…^^
Hmm… Wolfgang, you did it now.
Random ==> replay? I know I’ve got some articles in my bookmarks folder on just that. Time to go digging.
Tangentially, in EQ I felt WAY more like a hero when I killed gods than I ever did in WoW killing their “gods.” In EQ there were 72 people in the raid killing 1 (or 2 or 8) monstrous thing at a time and they were truly epic, even if it was just tanking a mob in the corner. For some reason the game just felt epic. WoW feels “meh, we killed a god. Yay us,” to me. Dunno why.
I think Left 4 Dead is an excellent example of technology that could easily be incorporated into MMOGs to give an impression of dynamic play. Personally, I’d get a kick out of, and my interest level would be higher for a longer period of time, dungeons that used something like L4D’s “AI Director” to randomly spawn mobs at various times, watching what we were doing (Big Brother alert!) and monitoring our level of progress to determine the difficulty level.
On the other hand, while “some” people raved about the Diablo series’ randomly generated dungeon maps, it made zero difference to me. Diablo never struck me as a real RPG with exploration, etc. It was just a mouse-clicking hack-and-slash, and I couldn’t have cared less if one time the door was on the left of the room and this time the door was on the right. It didn’t matter. If something moved, I clicked it until it was dead or my mouse button broke, whichever occurred first. But that technique worked well enough for Diablo’s 2.5D isometric world. However, when that same technology was applied to a 3D world that we’re actually down inside of and becomes a part of the game experience — Hellgate: London — it didn’t work at all.
CoX had scalable instances, LOTRO is getting them with the next content update and it sounds like Turbine is retrofitting every DDO instance to be scalable soon as well. Why not go the extra mile and make an AI Director clone for those games? I guarantee they’d come in more useful for those, and future, games than trying to clone Warhammer’s over-hyped Public Quests…
Aye, Scott, I’ve wondered about the further uses of the AI Director before. I do wonder if it’s feasible in an MMO, though, just from a tech standpoint, considering lag. It’s definitely something I’d like to see explored.
Interesting notion on the Diablo experience in 3D (Hellgate). Does the different avatar/player distance (and control) have a significant effect, or is it primarily just the gameplay that creates the immersion?
Wiqd, what are the mechanical differences? Or… is it a case of “you never see another quite the same as your first love”? Now you’ve got me curious. Y’see, I’m not terribly interested in playing these things myself, but I do have a desire to understand them. I’m grateful for those of you who have chipped in with insight.
There is a better alternative, IMHO. Warning Forever is a shoot-em-up where the boss evolves to counter the tactics you’re using against it. If you shoot it from the front, it’ll have more armor on the front side next time. If you move a lot, it’ll have tentacles that track you. If you die to lasers, it’ll have more lasers the next time.
TotalBiscuit has also talked about this, but his solution was a branching raid dungeon design. If you defeat a boss with a melee-heavy raid, the next boss is a melee-oriented one. A caster-heavy raid would instead face a boss that is harder on casters. Of course, the downside of this is the same that prompted Blizzard to move away from the class quests: They’ll end up making content that not everyone sees.
@Tesh: From my personal perspective, yes,randomly generated dungeons worked for Diablo *because* the player was always looking down from above and had full view of the room and even the next rooms. We were busy looking for monsters to click and treasure to click. The decor and design of the individual rooms didn’t make a difference. But in Hellgate, now we’re down in those dungeons with our characters. We can only see what they can see. Suddenly we’re actually down in those rooms and hallways and have no choice but to pay attention to them. We rapidly learn that for any given environment there is only a handful of individual “roomsets” (my made-up word for a 3D tileset) that are randomly strung together each time to create the “dungeon.” It is very noticeable and in the end, seemed cheap.
@Hirvox: I wouldn’t see the Warning Forever approach as “better” at all. In fact, for a (massively or not) multiplayer game, it screams exploitable easy mode. If I know in advance that killing one boss one way makes the next boss tougher to fight that one way, it becomes simply a matter of putting together the perfectly balanced group and essentially trading off which combat types takes priority on alternating bosses. I’d rather see something like L4D’s AI Director which manages things live and on-the-fly, taking into consideration the group’s composition, maybe even getting into level and gear, and their ability to progress. It’s still exploitable, taking a long time on trash mobs to trick it into thinking the players aren’t skilled so that the boss is easy, unless that is also taken into consideration, which I suppose is where Warning Forever would come in: if we suddenly spring into Badass Mode and quickly and easily down a boss the AI Director made easy for us, then every mob and every boss afterwards will automatically be increased. I guess I’d just prefer an experience that was dynamic all the time, not just upon every boss kill.
@Scott One of the things I looked at when designing encounters for my game was having bosses be able to pull from a pool of abilities, almost like Chromaggus in WoW, but to a larger extent. Of course, for my game those encounters were only meant to be done once per server, and every server pulled from one pool, so if one guild kills the boss on Server A, Server P would have a totally different experience because the abilities the boss used on Server A would be gone. Also, these encounters were based on a permadeath system for the boss, so YMMV
@Tesh I can’t honestly say WHY I feel EQ makes me feel the way I do about the raids. I mean, those who looked on were usually bored considering it was “Pull mob to corner, position it with Monk Dragon Punches, let the warrior build hate for about 10%, then open up nuking to the casters and full on meleers.” Of course there were other things, but like … I dunno, nothing in WoW ever really felt “epic” in scale comparatively. I’ll give you an example:
Xegony in the Plane of Air is a monstrous fight. You have certain elements that happen during the fight that take up an entire island. The fight isn’t located in just a room with the boss stuck in a corner or something. You must tank Xegony while killing minions on certain parts of the island in a certain order while being careful not to get too close to Xegony while you criss-cross with other groups.
The Rathe Council consisted of 8 bosses all of which needed to be killed within like 1 minute of each other or something like that and that took up an entire temple for that encounter.
Yes EQ had its share of “tank in the corner” bosses. Hell even some of the gods like Fennin Ro, but even he was awesome to look at
You could be right, it could just be that EQ was my first and I’ll always treasure it, but the fact that no other game has really “Wowed” me when it comes to encounters is pretty lame if you ask me. There is a singular fight that I found entertaining in WoW, which was the four horsemen fight in the original Naxxramas. The Vaelastraz fight was interesting, mechanic wise when it was released, but other than that I’ve never felt like I was in an epic battle in any game other than EQ.
I think it MAY be because of how tough it was to progress through EQ’s world. The fact that you started out SO underwhelming and pulled yourself up to match wits and steel with gods and eventually BEST them, made it feel special. In WoW you never get that feeling, nor even in EQ2. You KNOW you’re the hero and you’re invincible from the very start.
Aye, I was wondering if scale and difficulty played a significant part. The open air large team tactics sound interesting, too.
Kind of kibitzing here, talking on the edges of the conversation, but one of the nice things that something like L4D’s AI Director gives you is that when a group member’s dog pukes on the baby and he has to suddenly leave, the group wouldn’t have to implode… the AI Directory could scale the rest of the encounter to account for that person no longer being there.
Aye, Pete, and agreeing with Scott, I’d rather some sort of Director be able to handle things on the fly. An iterative layer to the thing, as Hirvox describes, could be useful to a degree, but to really be helpful in an MMO with as many variables as they have when it comes to players, I really think that you’d need something with more immediacy.
No worries about talking on the edges. This post (as are many of mine) was about kicking off a discussion, rather than trying to present a final word on one. Tangents are good reading a lot of the time.
Pete brought up a good point with L4D that I didn’t consider — taking control of AFK players. Given what we’ve seen of current AI tech, I could probably state without a shadow of a doubt that this would be highly problematic with the myriad MMORPGs with umpteen thousand skills, consumables and “clickies” strewn over umpteen hotbars. It works with Guild Wars’ Heroes because, just like players, those AI Heroes can only have a maximum of 8 skills loaded. DDO’s Hirelings have even fewer. I can only imagine the chaos and stupidity that would commence if the server took over my actual DDO character while I was AFK…
Set up AFK Autopilot Gambits, like FFXII?
Isn’t all MMO content essentially repetitive in nature and thus a treadmill? How is soloing different once all of the content is explored? It seems to me once a player reaches the level cap they are in a worse predicament then the raider who can keep raiding to self-actualize their characters. The soloer is pretty much done at this point.
I’ve got a solo level 80 hunter right now myself in WoW. I’ve seen pretty much every zone, done every quest, acquired and/or crafted every possible epic item for my hunter. I’ve grinded out my repuation with various factions for epic items too.
So what do I have to look forward to? Doing the same daily quests each day that pay my gold in lieu of experience. Gold that I can not use as I have everything I can personally purchase in WoW. I play maybe 30 minutes a day if that and I’m completely maxed out.
Daily quests that are done each day are terribly tedious and are a very poor “solution” for a lack of content.
Solo content is not as limiting as group and raid content. With soloing you reach the lifespan of your character much sooner.
Regarding raiding and DIKU model. I’m not absolutely certain about this but it’s my understanding that previous to EverQuest raids didn’t exist in MUDS. I stand to be corrected though.
[...] recently made a comment over at Tesh’s blog alluding that those situations while in a group where things go downhill [...]
[...] Tesh wonders about the appeal of raiding. Running the same instance every week just doesn’t sound fun. [...]