Apparently raiding is fun. But only some players can do it, despite efforts to open the raid gates to the unwashed masses. Even though “accessibility” is a swear word for some, and the true Achilles Heel of World of Warcraft, if hyperbole is to be believed. (Never mind the newbie hose, newbies don’t want to raid. They would probably do it wrong, too, or maybe they just don’t care about the endgame that they either haven’t heard about or have no hope of ever seeing.)
My solution is simple:
Make raids soloable
Yup, soloable. If Blizzard is so concerned with getting players to see their content, let them see it already. (Tangentially, they really aren’t selling content, they are selling access. If content is important, they should sell content like Guild Wars does and drop the subscriptions, but I digress.) DDO lets players solo almost every dungeon, and GW does something similar by letting players have computer-controlled associates. (Notably, both of those games sell content, but I digress again.)
Maybe this means “Battle for the Undercity” buffs. Maybe it means NPCs shepherding players. Maybe it means no experience gain or loot drops from these soloable raids, so they are truly just content tourism. (Speaking as a soloist interested in content, I wouldn’t mind losing the XP potential or loot, since that’s not why I play.)
Of course, I’d also make raids at all levels, not just five man dungeons.
If raids are so important that the game is designed around driving players into them, let’s put players in raids already and stop making it an elite activity that you have to play for months and find a bunch of other players to get into.
I’m not sure I see what the difference is between a soloable raid and other soloable content? What makes it raidlike?
If they did that, I’d have a hard time to justify paying fees for the game being ‘multiplayer’.
And there’s not much content behind the raid barrier anyway.
WoW’s leveling is already a complete single player game (the multiplayer features that you can teleport to make you outlevel the content). I don’t want this trened to continue even more.
On the other end, it’s just WoW. It’s beyond hope anyway ;(
Grossly generalizing, seeing content was never what players actually wanted. Want to see content? Wait an expansion, or watch a video.
No, what they want is the psychic reward, the ego boost, of having cleared the content when it “mattered”. “Seeing content” was just a code phrase.
And developers don’t want players to see content, they want players to spend time in content and not blow it off. Do you think developers would like people to see the raids by waiting until the next expansion and just touring through them at higher level in dungeon blues, then unsubbing? I highly doubt it.
Here comes the broken record….
One of the things I liked about EverQuest, originally (not the later stuff where they tried to copy everything WoW was doing), were the lack of restrictions to raiding. You could take as many or as few people as you wanted. I know not all servers had this, but on E’ci we had a public raid community. If it was a Hate raid day, you could have signed up on the forums or just show up at the wizard temple in Nektulos, get put in a group and whisked away to adventure.
As games have progressed, not only has raiding changed, but it has modeled itself less on public raiding and more on the elite raiding of closed membership guilds. The community of WoW and other newer games is far less open than that of EQ and other earlier games in their day.
I don’t want raiding to be soloable, but something needs to be done to make it more open.
what she ^ said. A soloable raid is, by definition, no longer a raid. Raiding is about teamwork more than anything and novel challenges to said team. A solo experience can’t ever replicate that.
Sure, you can get the walking man’s tour of the instance and “defeat” Kmarthas (TM Octale & Hordak) at the end, but that is not raiding. Give solo access to raid dungeons (with the appropriate zero loot) and you’ll make the handful of explorers happy that really just wanted to see how that instance looks like. Everyone else will still have to join actual raids and complain about it.
I respect what you’re saying here. WoW has a sizable backlog of raids that are no longer experienced at level. Raids, beautiful pieces of architecture, models, and mechanics, are content best enjoyed at level. Some mechanic should exist that allows current day players to enjoy olden day raids at level. Giving players a mechanic to experience this content when they’d want serves both Blizzard’s purposes and its philosophy.
Spinks and scrusi are right: this is not raiding in the strict sense, defined as a high-difficulty social challenge. But is AQ20 or Gruul currently being used for proper raiding, excluding a few heritage raiding guilds? And secondly, wouldn’t this provide at least a foretaste of what raiding is, whereas players currently only have 5-mans to give them that taste up until 85?
I just wonder that there is a multiplayer activity tacked on the end of a solo progression path that often really discourages grouping.
I am not only talking about WoW, LOTRO is following in its footsteps. And I am not only talking about LOTRO either, I am talking about almost every “mainstream” MMO out there these days.
I see two solutions to this!
1.) Change of game design and player mentality. The current solo+raid at the end mix strikes me as a dead end of evolution. Either encourage people to teamwork from day one and ideally allow soloing at the same time or simply go as you suggested and do the “solo raid”. Though the solo raid idea makes people frown for good reason, it shatters the last little bit of “MMO” illusion that is left in SOLO PLAYER ONLINE RPGs these days. :>
2.) Scaling content. LOTRO’s skirmishes scale and change the encounters according to the number of players present and give them a “soldier” pet as helper. Guild Wars gives players henchmen to replace missing human players or if you want to play just with your buddy.
You would make the “progression/puzzle” raid crowd unhappy, but as the design goal of WOTLK was raiding for everyone they feel understimulated for a long time already.
I am totally out of the whole “raiding” debate ,since I do not play MMOs now and last raid I ever done was original stratholme in vanilla (rift BS does not count)
I think a lot of raiding content itself is beautiful and worth seeing. But not sure that making it available to anyone would solve anything . I mean I can fire up WoW emu instance and see every location in game. I can go and watch HD videos of raids -this is all already there
Epic dungeons (aka “raids”) were supposed to be epic destinations, the journey you travel to get to them matters as much as the end ( remember original onyxia line of quests – it was not a “lfd queue in ” nonsense). At least I thought they were originally.
Now for me personally whole PvE side of things was always ruined by the fact that it was repeatable instanced content ran for loot. The whole story line goes straight out of the window when you “farm it for purplz”. Its just never worked immersion wise.
From the point of view of “puzzles” to solve for end game play it imho makes sense to make it challenging and not accessible. From the point of view of “selling content” – not so much
Solo raids, if they are filled with NPCs to compensate for lack of players, would perhaps allow more people to see the content – which is fine.
But I think the primary problem with the raiding is not the number of people required, but that it is an activity tacked to the end of the initial progression path. Make it available and accessible at all levels (if the game uses levels). And if there is any kind of of “end game” progression, do not tie that to a specific activity (e.g. raids), but to many different activities.
Variety is good.
Cynical nugget says: Soloable raids without gear etc… will become just another requirement that you have to do before joining a raid proper.
At least, from a WoW perspective.
Along with everything a decent WoW raider does (research, videos, own testing, farming for buff stuffs, etc etc), there will also be, plz link solo achievement to show you’ve at least gone through the instance by yourself once and know where things are…
…just saying!
[...] Tesh says “only some can do it” in regards to raiding and Keen claims that World of Warcraft [...]
For people saying ‘It’s not a raiiiid!’, the word ‘raid’ isn’t the point. It’s about seeing that big boss, then seeing him die.
I just agree with tesh – why make raiding easier (to the point where someone having a coniption face first on the keyboard will probably do pretty well at healing AND DPS) if it’s about people spending more on subs to see stuff. And anyway, are you really playing with someone when their only presence is hitting 1,2,3,4,2,4,1,2,3,4…?
Thinking about it, I might have kept my sub on for a few months more if I could have ‘kicked the ass’ of a few ‘raid’ bosses by sticking around longer. Don’t want the gear – you raiders are the leet guys with the gear. Just wanna see the boss and pop him.
Does the verb “to raid” even exist without assuming a plural?
If your bad ass enough, yes.
Unless you count ‘Say hello to my little friend!’ as a plural group?
Oh, it embeded the video – I just posted a link – I didn’t know it would do that…
So what is the essence of raiding? Is that the big boss has a number of different stages and mechanics in which one has to switch tactics or adapt to? In which case, a soloable raid would be perfectly fine – especially if one has better or pre-programmable AI on NPC allies, or can control a few characters at once. Sort of bring in the strategy involved with multiboxing, build-swapping a la Guild Wars, and careful solo tactics.
Or is raiding primarily an activity to be done with many players. In which case, public raids, open raids, raid rifts, with less rigid a player number cap etc. might be the way to go.
Or maybe raiding has to be both many players, doing the strategically right thing at important times, as designed/figured out by a subset of raid leaders who pride themselves on the accomplishment of trailblazing the way. (In which case, you can count me, and probably others, out of the resultant closed club that forms.)
Thanks for the comments, all. I’ll admit, this was more about prompting thought, less about telling Blizzard the One True Solution to their problems. …as if they would listen to me anyway, that is.
I think Jeromai really gets to the heart of it, and Callan and Longasc echo my thoughts as well. What exactly do we want raiding to be?
Also, what role, content? What is Blizzard really selling, and to whom? There’s too much fuzziness there and unspoken assumptions to quantify value or effectiveness.
…oh, and Callan, that’s a weird new WordPress thing. No worries, you didn’t do anything wrong.
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