Post by Morreion on Dec 3, 2014 17:26:37 GMT -5
The Soapbox: Six reasons MMOs should abandon raiding, part 1 (Massively)
It's designed for a tiny portion of the people playing the games
Why did Turbine stop designing raids for Lord of the Rings Online? Because no one played them. And that isn't a recent development, either. Sure, maybe Lord of the Rings Online is unique in that regard, but it sure doesn't seem like it.
There are plenty of data to be unpacked in this post when it comes to raiding in World of Warcraft, some of it outdated, but at the height of the game's popularity (Wrath of the Lich King), it still makes a pretty clear argument that raiders made up about 10% of the population: About 1.1 million players were killing the first boss of the highest tier of raids available while the game's overall populace was upwards of 11 million. Looking at WildStar's worldwide progress on Genetic Archives suggests that around 6500 players have cleared at least one boss; if you assume that all of these guilds had twice as many people going into raids and working on progression, an unlikely prospect, you still wind up with a figure that doesn't make up more than 10% of the game's population.
...Numbers don't tell the whole story, but they paint a picture. About 10% of the game's population, give or take, has an interest in actual progression via raiding. Those of us discussing it online have different perspectives solely because no one's going to take part in this discussion unless he's already passionate about the game or the genre, which skews the discussion more heavily toward people knee-deep in raiding. But the actual metrics paint a different story.
What you're left with, under this model, is a system under which 90% of the playerbase doesn't get to experience content that took significant time, effort, and resources to develop -- enough time, effort, and resources that other features had to be cut down. If you don't raid for whatever reason, you are expected to subsidize the players who do.
The Soapbox: Six reasons MMOs should abandon raiding, part 2 (Massively)
I have absolutely no doubt that there are people who get into raiding because they want a challenge. Those are the people who race for world firsts, server firsts, and so forth. They want to take on the biggest challenge a game has to offer, and that's great for them. But I also know that those people are a fraction of the fraction of people who are there based on the fact that it offers the best kit in the game.
Some of it's even just about straight-up looking cool. People who had no interest in raiding as a fixture in World of Warcraft happily participated in LFR runs because the raid finder still offered up those all-important tier pieces. The stated problem of people feeling as if they had to run multiple modes even implicitly comports with this fact. People were running the raid as many times as possible not for fun but to collect the carrots. There were bonuses at the end, and if you wanted to stay competitive, that was where you needed to be.
The Soapbox: Six reasons MMOs should abandon raiding, part 3 (Massively)
The assumption, for years, has been that raids are a necessity because World of Warcraft had them. That all games have to have them. Except there are games that don't have them that do fine for themselves. Guild Wars 2 has its endgame issues, but its lack of raids hasn't hurt it in the market. Star Trek Online has some big group queues, but nothing requiring the exacting progress standard of high-end group content seen in other titles. Final Fantasy XIV designs its progression content with eight people in mind, and it's not the whole and breadth of the endgame so much as one option among many (and those other options get constant attention and expansion).
I hate holding this up as an example of how to design a game right, but it keeps standing up to the examination with only minor missteps, so... here we are again.
When you realize that they're not, in fact, necessary, and when you start realizing all that raiding takes away from MMOs, you have to start wondering why they're there at all. Raids as a staple in MMOs are, ultimately, just like open PvP: They were something that seemed necessary for a while, something some people liked and a lot of others disliked... and they ultimately are holding the genre back. They are a model being shoehorned in where it doesn't fit. They're resource hogs. They're archaic.
I agree with 2 or 3 of these 6 reasons. I'm not a raider, though I did all of the Master Levels in DAoC ToA which after release took a LOT of work. I feel like I accomplished something when I finished them, but I about gave them up twice due to all of the hoops I had to jump through. I only did a couple of raids in WoW. That doesn't mean I think people shouldn't raid because it's not my thing, but it does seem only about 10% of the player base does raids and it takes TONS of content for endgame raiding, leaving little or nothing for the other 90%. I agree with the author of these articles that it seems that raiding is a leftover of WoW's system and everyone just copies it. That doesn't mean that there should never be raids, but they are overdone. I'd rather see a variety of things to do at endgame which would involve a lot more of the player base.
It's designed for a tiny portion of the people playing the games
Why did Turbine stop designing raids for Lord of the Rings Online? Because no one played them. And that isn't a recent development, either. Sure, maybe Lord of the Rings Online is unique in that regard, but it sure doesn't seem like it.
There are plenty of data to be unpacked in this post when it comes to raiding in World of Warcraft, some of it outdated, but at the height of the game's popularity (Wrath of the Lich King), it still makes a pretty clear argument that raiders made up about 10% of the population: About 1.1 million players were killing the first boss of the highest tier of raids available while the game's overall populace was upwards of 11 million. Looking at WildStar's worldwide progress on Genetic Archives suggests that around 6500 players have cleared at least one boss; if you assume that all of these guilds had twice as many people going into raids and working on progression, an unlikely prospect, you still wind up with a figure that doesn't make up more than 10% of the game's population.
...Numbers don't tell the whole story, but they paint a picture. About 10% of the game's population, give or take, has an interest in actual progression via raiding. Those of us discussing it online have different perspectives solely because no one's going to take part in this discussion unless he's already passionate about the game or the genre, which skews the discussion more heavily toward people knee-deep in raiding. But the actual metrics paint a different story.
What you're left with, under this model, is a system under which 90% of the playerbase doesn't get to experience content that took significant time, effort, and resources to develop -- enough time, effort, and resources that other features had to be cut down. If you don't raid for whatever reason, you are expected to subsidize the players who do.
The Soapbox: Six reasons MMOs should abandon raiding, part 2 (Massively)
I have absolutely no doubt that there are people who get into raiding because they want a challenge. Those are the people who race for world firsts, server firsts, and so forth. They want to take on the biggest challenge a game has to offer, and that's great for them. But I also know that those people are a fraction of the fraction of people who are there based on the fact that it offers the best kit in the game.
Some of it's even just about straight-up looking cool. People who had no interest in raiding as a fixture in World of Warcraft happily participated in LFR runs because the raid finder still offered up those all-important tier pieces. The stated problem of people feeling as if they had to run multiple modes even implicitly comports with this fact. People were running the raid as many times as possible not for fun but to collect the carrots. There were bonuses at the end, and if you wanted to stay competitive, that was where you needed to be.
The Soapbox: Six reasons MMOs should abandon raiding, part 3 (Massively)
The assumption, for years, has been that raids are a necessity because World of Warcraft had them. That all games have to have them. Except there are games that don't have them that do fine for themselves. Guild Wars 2 has its endgame issues, but its lack of raids hasn't hurt it in the market. Star Trek Online has some big group queues, but nothing requiring the exacting progress standard of high-end group content seen in other titles. Final Fantasy XIV designs its progression content with eight people in mind, and it's not the whole and breadth of the endgame so much as one option among many (and those other options get constant attention and expansion).
I hate holding this up as an example of how to design a game right, but it keeps standing up to the examination with only minor missteps, so... here we are again.
When you realize that they're not, in fact, necessary, and when you start realizing all that raiding takes away from MMOs, you have to start wondering why they're there at all. Raids as a staple in MMOs are, ultimately, just like open PvP: They were something that seemed necessary for a while, something some people liked and a lot of others disliked... and they ultimately are holding the genre back. They are a model being shoehorned in where it doesn't fit. They're resource hogs. They're archaic.
I agree with 2 or 3 of these 6 reasons. I'm not a raider, though I did all of the Master Levels in DAoC ToA which after release took a LOT of work. I feel like I accomplished something when I finished them, but I about gave them up twice due to all of the hoops I had to jump through. I only did a couple of raids in WoW. That doesn't mean I think people shouldn't raid because it's not my thing, but it does seem only about 10% of the player base does raids and it takes TONS of content for endgame raiding, leaving little or nothing for the other 90%. I agree with the author of these articles that it seems that raiding is a leftover of WoW's system and everyone just copies it. That doesn't mean that there should never be raids, but they are overdone. I'd rather see a variety of things to do at endgame which would involve a lot more of the player base.
