Today MMORPG.com brought up an interesting question in their Community Spotlight asking a question that a user posted in the forums, “Why is raiding so unpopular to the MMO community?” The topic came up when discussing the fact the ArenaNet announced no raid dungeons in their upcoming Guild Wars 2 MMORPG.
A few reasons were highlighted stating they take too much time to organize and complete, they’re repetitive or boring because you have one guy tanking then everyone else attacking for 30 mins. Other reasons include raid parties falling apart and the fact that most raid gear is only usable for progressing to other raids.
All valid points and part of the reason why I never got into raiding, but for me they are not the main reason. I don’t raid because in most games raids are grindfests that you need to complete a dozen times or more just to get the item you want. Their’s almost no point to complete a raid once as you have a 90+% chance of not getting the reward you came in for, so if you start to raid, it’s going to be raiding for the long term.
I have absolutely no problem with raids being difficult, long or hard to organize. These are epic quests, they’re supposed to be difficult and long. My problem is with the reward system. Every player involved should receive the item they went into the raid to get. I understand the concept there are supposed to be epic items that are hard to acquire, but then make the raid harder. It’s a cheap dev mechanism to tell players you have a 10% chance of getting the item drop you want, so get ready to spend the next 50 hrs running the same raid over and over.
Even if the item does drop, there’s probably a handful of players that all want it, so your chances drop even lower.
What makes raids attractive is the difficulty in completing them and the sense of accomplishment you get when you do. But in the same moment players are celebrating their victory, they’re smacked in the face with the fact they received no reward for their accomplishment and the only thing they have to look forward to is re-running the same raid again.
I don’t agree with Guild Wars 2 not including any raids, they’re apart of MMORPGs and can be fun if done right. Raids should not be used a mechanics to keep player grinding away at items, but instead should provide players with a sense of real achievement.
Agree in every way. I got started in raiding 2 times in WoW. Molten Core and Ulduar. Both times I was in a group of fun and decently good players. The Ulduar guild was fighting for server firsts, but never really got there because nobody wanted to obsess that much, including myself. We were always a bit undergeared, but having descent playerrs made up for it. Both times, the guild and I learned the entire zone, all boss fights, etc and I stopped playing once we got to the final boss. I was sick of NEVER getting a single item.
In my MC guild, we rolled for gear since we the group was actually an alliance of 2-3 small guilds working together to make 40-mans possible. Only item I ever got was my Pally bracers, a BOE… from the auction house.
In Ulduar we used DKP. I still managed to never get a single item because I was stationed in Japan, and so I could only make it to every other raid. Meaning there was ALWAYS somebody with more DKP. Sure, if I stayed there longer than 2 months, I might have got something…
In my mind though, after 8 times in the Ulduar raid (2x a month x2 raids – 10man/25man) I should be getting SOMETHING from the effort.Once I realized that it was going to take longer than a year at that rate, I stopped raiding. Once Blizzard finally put the nail in the coffin of PvP with Cata, I quit WoW altogether.
I also wish GW2 would have raids. Their financial model of NOT having a monthly subscription has been fixing almost every problem I have with WoW and it’s clones. Arena-net does not want you to grind. From a monetary point of view they would prefer you buy the game, and never even log in, they already got your money.
The only time I really raided was in Lotro and I remember completing a few raids a handful of times each, but always losing the rolls when it came to the reward items. Since PvP was boring and raiding was becoming a chore, I quit.
All they really needed to do for me to keep playing was make raids meaningful and I would have stuck around trying to complete all of them. Instead it was a grind and I quit.
“What makes raids attractive is the difficulty in completing them and the sense of accomplishment you get when you do.”
According to that definition, then, GW2 does indeed have raids, in the form of explorable dungeons. These will NOT be the kind of place a PUG can clear, and will require tight strategizing to complete.
It just doesn’t have group sizes larger than 5 or progression gear attached (rewards will be elite appearance armor sets, which will carry the prestige to the remainder of the player base due to the fact that everyone will know where and how you got it).
Although raiding can be fun due to the challange and teanwork required, the whole concept of ‘grind for better gear so you can grind for better gear’ is reason #1 why raiding, in general, sucks.
To raid you need to grind, to meet standards that are set by the raiding community if not by the game. They are popular with those who do it because they identify with the raiding community and basically grind to brag. That is all and its a mind dulling decline devolving MMO gaming all for the fantasy of a camaraderie that typically is only real for a minority who would be friends anyway for other reasons and just happen to raid together sometimes.
The best expression can be found in zero punctuation’s review of the WoW Cataclysm Xpac where he points out that we simply have been trained to chase numbers. All MMOs start you out with the right stuff, your immersed , it feels larger than the box your looking at and it draws you in. Maybe the newbie zone , maybe a bit longer and then gradually, you grind, and then grind the next level thing , and the next … and the next …
Everybody says the Emperor’s new cloths are fantastic and if you cant see them that your dull witted. With that in mind a game’s forums tell you how much they love the very things that drives them to spend more time on the forums than in game.
My 2 cents on why raids are unpopular: they are unpopular because they offer nothing more than the 5-6 player dungeons in terms of tactics and difficulty but you have to get 20-25 people to be organized for 30 minute fights and because of the large number of people and the extensive time period there will be at least one person that screws up and die and everyone else goes down with him. Combine that with the poor rewards, the ridiculousness of 6 people being there for the same item and the sheer torture of spending 4 hours in the same bland environment to finish a perfect run without any wipes and you have the reason why people absolutely hate raids.
I understand your point about the gear dropping hard, but at the same time we can’t ignore the fact that no production cycle in the world could launch 1 good raid every month. With players getting the gear they want in the first 2,3 runs, that would have to be the case for them to not get bored.
So there has to be some kind of grind. Just enough to give the devs a chance to come up with new content without losing all their customers because they finished the game 2,3 months ago.
Why does there need to be a reward for raiding? The reward comes in a number forms such as extra currencies, potential vanity items, reputation gains etc. But shouldn’t you be doing it for fun first and foremost? Ok so it’s not fun to lose out on your item every week, that’s true, but so what? Think about the development time that goes into designing a raid dungeon – of course they want you in there every week. If everyone got their drops the first time they went in, they would have a character with the best gear and no reason to do the raid again. Then what are you meant to do? Complain to the developer that there’s nothing to do :P and for the record no boss fight at least in wow ever took 30 mins and I doubt anywhere else either. That would be absurd.
i for one am glad to do away with the raid. i much prefer tight smaller group content. i don’t think just upping the stats on your standard boss and having him do an uber-mario brothers on 20 bickering strangers is exactly more challenging than upping the stats and doing an uber-mario brothers on 5 friends. about the only real challenge to the raid formula is the bickering.
that said, i kind of wish for scaleable dungeons so you can do it with your closest mates regardless of how many of you there are. doesn’t make the content easier. just makes it more intimate and friendly. my best moments in wow were in the early days when you found maybe four or five regular friends and you made a small guild and just hung out and murdered some pixels together. you could do your dungeons with a pizza in one hand and a coke in the other while wheeling forward using your nose on the mouse and no one would complain. then everything seemed to get so cut throat. and everyone began to rage and hate more. now it’s all rage all hate 24/7 and what used to be fun is a chore. i don’t necessarily blame the game. a 20+ man fight is awesome in CONCEPT. but in reality, it’s a pain.
i’m with ent on the fun factor. i really feel rewards should be less loot-oriented and more amusement value. less predictable loot, too. let’s face it, the worst thing about wow is KNOWING what loot you’re gonna have to fight over. that and being able to KNOW a fight. i’d really prefer some randomness to my dungeons. first step to making the dungeons/raids difficult in my opinion is: take out the element of predictablity. give you the unknown back so you just don’t know what’s behind the door. each journey into the dungeon becomes thrilling, then. i can’t stand a game you can play with your eyes closed. what’s the fun in that?
fingers crossed gw2 can go halfway toward doing just that.
Along with a lot of the stuff I read above, another problem with raids for me is how the devs seem to make it the most important thing in the game.
Back when I started out playing WoW, up to patch 2.2, it took me no less than 6 months to get one character up to level 40, and a whole bunch of alts up to 10-28.
When 2.3 hit, I happened to move to another realm to start over, because I discovered some old real life friends of mine were playing there. I got my new characters up to the same levels in 2 months. I also moved from horde to alliance and did NOT know any quests or my way around the cities!
Since then, they have been speeding up leveling to max level more and more, while I was perfectly happy with how slow it went in the first place! At least back then it felt like there was SO MUCH to do! In a way it could resemble grinding, but I just loved doing quests in several areas, and getting to see the whole game. It makes it different from how you just race through an area because you need XP and get to the next expansion fast. I completely lost that feeling of vastness of the game world now, and all that one can do now is just level an alt and hope for a different game experience with a different play style, and raid with the high level characters.
I keep getting bored, and quit for a few months several times now. One time even for a whole year. Then I buy another time card to catch up with in game friends, and ask them if they have seen stuff about GW2, and whether they would like to join me in a guild in that game when it gets released. I think I managed to convince a bunch of people so far!
I really hope Arenanet will make just playing the game fun again, and make achievements feel like real feats of strength rather than a chore. I have faith in them :)
I think WoW vanilla did raiding right (for hardcore players). You had short mildly challenging, but goof off destroying sprints to epic strategy and play book demanding boss fights with numerous item drops (though you might argue that since they involved 40 players for the 4-6 drops). You killed 3-4 bosses and often had to come back another day to finish.
That is not to say that would attract the majority of today’s gamers. It was a different time, but I am saying they got it right within that moment.
NooBs Raiding is fun Retards have you been sleeping the last 5 years or what Roflmfao
My first experience in proper raiding was in Ulduar in WoW. We did hardmodes with this awesome group of 10. It was a great group of cool people and we had tons of fun with eachother. And it would have been far more awesome if every time we managed to kill a boss, we all got something out of it.
I agree that raids can be awesome if done right. The huge bosses as dynamic events in GW2 really is the right direction. Perhaps “hardmode” versions of the same ones in an instanced raid for guilds?