The original poster, Fappa, level 13 posting alt of the Argent Dawn realm, wrote:

WoW is the first MMO that I’ve ever really played extensively and gotten into, and it’s clear to me after playing the game since 2005 that raiding is and will always be the endgame to WoW. Yes, there’s arena (which occupies like one hour a week), and there’s daily quests, heroics, professions, etc. to do at 70, but really, if you want the best gear and the hardest challenges this game has to offer you have to raid.

Since I haven’t played any other MMOs extensively, I don’t know what their endgames are like. Is the endgame to MMO always raiding (10+ highly coordinated players)?

Reply #8 described DAoC’s endgame:

The endgame of DAOC was entirely PvP based, and still is if you want to play it… Game goes like this:

-3 factions
-Level to 50
-Do some raids and get some gear crafted
-Enter the frontier, an area as big as the leveling areas for the 3 factions, had like 24 captureable keeps, siege weapons, like ballista, catapults, and boiling oil you could dump on people trying to break into a keep you were defending… each faction had a relic that if captured, gave your entire faction a boost to damage, as much as a 20% bonus if you held both relics. Also, there was a whole system of PvP experience points that opened up a whole new progression of abilities that you could get only by PvPing.

I really wish WoW would steal this concept.

Reply #17 recounted old skool Star Wars Galaxies (pre-that mess where they turned everything upside down):

Sadly with the success of world of warcraft, many companies will keep thinking this is the way to go. Before SWG got forked up “endgame” was what you made of it, some of us were content with running our businesses, trying to create items that were better than our competition. Or organizing player cities and keeping them running, things that didn’t always involve scurrying in the same dungeons week after week. However I can’t speak for what everyone else considers fun, just more or less it would be nice if a game offered more options for gameplay than simply tossing instances at us that not everyone wants to do.

Reply #20 Lord of the Rings Online:

you obviously didnt play lotro. The max raid size is 24 people for one and the best gear and crafting items absoltely come from the high end raids. People were hitting max level crafting in open beta and it was nowhere near the epics from the 50 dungeons.. Very very few people have done the raids in LOTRO so im gonna assume you’re talking completely out your butt. Also, from the monster side you can start raiding fellowship leaders as early as level 10, as well as fighting raids of fellowship players.

I think maybe what you’re calling a raid are the “elite” quests you do at low levels. This is like killing Hogger than claiming you know what its like to raid Gruuls.

Reply #27, Beware, level 67 cow of the Sargeras realm, summarized his experiences in MMO endgames:

There are 3-types of “endgame” I have encountered in MMOs so far. Raiding, PvP and Leveling.

By design, the lure of MMOs is that they take a lot of time to play, and to do this they need to give players a reason to keep playing. The best way to do this is to have players create their own experiences, usually with other players. A developer can only create so much content before players go through it all and get bored, so they create repeatable content.

Raiding is somewhat repeatable content, simply because you need to grab a large collection of other players, and you need to repeat it to obtain loots to progress to the next encounter. The large amount of time it takes for groups to learn, beat and gear up encounters is why developers like raids.

PvP is great repeatable content, since people all play differently and this makes for a highly unique and different experience each time you fight another player. This is why designers love to put PvP into MMOs. Usually requires very little development time for huge returns of replayability.

Lastly, older MMOs, which usually had smaller budgets or were just older used the leveling repeatable content. They basically made leveling take literally years to keep you playing. The repeatable content was the constant leveling and seeing your xp bar go up. This is, in a sense what rep-grinding is, and as you know for some people this can get boring very quickly. Even though it is, it’ll give people playing, because people love getting levels, it gives them a sense of accomplishment.

Notice the Blizzard uses all three of these types of repeatable content in WoW; except they’ve placed the biggest emphasis on raiding, simply because it takes the most time to do (gearing up 25 people + once a week) and the fact that they just have to make one new dungeon every few months to keep people happy for the next dungeon. While if they did other types of content, people can blow through it in a few weeks.

Reply #51 City of Heroes:

I know, I keep up with City of Heroes and it’s updates. I logged in for the first time in two months today, and it’s still pretty boring.

Tasks Forces are a poor excuse for endgame as well. It’s a chain of missions that, for a level 50, is only good for a badge and a good story. After that, it’s just the same damn thing. Why do it again? Not only that, but the few true end game Task Forces are just that, rare. There is one exclusive to Villains, one exclusive for Heroes, and one for both. After that, you just have the lower level Task Forces.

The loot system they added is only useful if you are diehard enough to work to get full Invention Origin enhancements and all the costume pieces. However, the drops on the rare items are so rare, the prices get jacked up on the Auction House and it becomes a chore and a waste of money on something purely asthetic or only partially useful.

Oh yeah, and they added a new Raid. A level 54 Giant Monster in the Rikti Crash Zone. Big whoop, it doesn’t give special loot, it doesn’t give particularly good xp, and it isn’t up enough for a casual to fight it.

But yeah, you are right about one thing. The travel powers kick ass.

Reply #64, a shout out to Ultima Online:

Everquest is such a terrible example. I like SOME raid content, but it should never, ever , be the only option you have or take up 90% of your time in-game. A lot of people like to hate the recent expansion but I was ready to call it quits right before it came out. I hated molten bore and bwl, but I loved AQ20 and ZG. Unfortunately my ZG blues didn’t touch someone who spent 30+ hours a week in AQ40, BWL, and Naxx. I accept being at a disadvantage in PvP because I don’t have the time or desire to raid day in and day out, talk about boring. TBC really helped even out the gap. Do people have better gear than me? You bet. Can I kill them? Absolutely.

People like flexibility. Sure UO had plenty of problems, but there was tons of things for you to do and none of them were raiding. Go pvp, hunt some monsters for monies, decorate your house for the holidays, or setup a makeshift bar outside the bank. The world was just so much more moldable, and you could do a lot of quirky and fun things with it. It has nothing to do with “solo content” or not wanting to work with others, just that if they don’t want to raid, they would like other options available to them.

Whether those options are smaller groups (heroic was a great start but the gear is really meh), more robust crafting systems so that players can be more like merchants or trade their way up to better gear, or a housing system.

Everquest was a static world and an awful, mind-numbing grind.

Reply #88, Kastchei of the Argent Dawn realm, summarized WoW raiding (and spot on):

I (and some others) do not doubt that for you raiding has been the most fun you’ve ever had. However – and I have no sound statistics other than the ones others have posted – I think your experience is somewhat unique. Certainly, I personally know folks who have your experience. However, I know a lot of others who used to raid who no longer do.

The reason I do not think raiding is as great for a lot of people, yourself excepted, is because they do not have the guild/time/dedication/resources that you have. What guild (or who you raid with) makes a huge difference between a fun, exciting night of raiding and a long, frustrating, unpleasant one. You are very lucky to have found a guild that gets along smoothly, or at least smoothly enough to down the raid content you have. But what of those who do not have a good guild/raid? Sure they can find another, but for every good, well-oiled raid group out there, there are dozens that aren’t. You could hop once a month and not find a group before next expansion that makes raiding fun, and as we all know, you can’t hop that often for long before guilds turn you down.

Raiding is very difficult, but largely for a lot of extra-game reasons. I said a lot, but certainly not all: certainly strategy and execution play a role. Difficulties in raiding, which match and in some cases supercede the actual strategy/skill needed include (but is not limited to):

organizing a time when the appropriate classes can raid
organizing a system for keeping those players happy (DKP, fairness, rules, etc.)
maintaining people who can concentrate on a game for hours at a time
maintaining people who will not be distracted (pets, children, food, bathroom, etc)
finding individuals willing to give up free time to run the group (designing a website, monitoring the website, keeping track of DKP, farm for materials)
maintaining people who are willing to make raiding a priority in their life
maintaining people who get along with each other or at the least do not cause strife, etc…

As you can see, there are a lot of people problems to overcome with raiding, much more than simply showing up to play the game. My guess is that your guild has managed to solve all of these, but more importantly, your guild members do not mind putting in the time/effort to solve these. There are many people who do, and to be sure, there are many who used to put up with it solely to get better loot. If all raiding took was showing up, devising strategy, and implementing it, I think raiding would be a ton more fun for more people.

I’ve been in good raiding guilds and bad ones (note, I haven’t raided since BC) and the difference is night and day. One case I wanted to tear my hair out and kill my guildmates [sarcasm], the other I thoroughly enjoyed and often times wanted the night to go on longer. For me, doing or putting up with all the extra stuff I mentioned above is generally not worth the reward (either in loot or fun form). You and your guild do find it worthwhile from a fun-only perspective. However, judging from my experiences, trends on my server, stories from friends, and the statistics that people bat around here from time to time (including a few in this thread), I would say you are in a very small (and perhaps lucky) minority. Moreover, I think there is a sizable number of folks who used to raid and now no longer do, because they can stay competitive and advance without needing to raid.

And there’s lots of other thoughtful, heartfelt posts about raiding and guilds in that thread.

Contrary to what I’ve read around the intarwebs, there are a lot of players with good ideas who’ve spent considerable time thinking about the games they play and why they love or hate raiding, PVE, PVP, guilds and the endgame. Imagine that.

In the meantime … I’ve done some work on back info you might find amusing. As you’ve probably noticed, I revamped the look around AFK Gamer. (And if you’re reading blogs via feed reader only, you’re wrong.) More importantly, I fixed some of the static pages and expanded the historical record. If you’re the type who enjoys second-guessing others’ poor decisions (e.g. mine) — and we’re talking YEARS OLD decisions here — you might enjoy this.

Within the limits of blurred memories, I documented my game characters and guilds over the past ten years. Here’s an example of why this is mildly amusing: EQ – Original Main: Druid (soloing juggernaut), Next Main: Bard (post-Luclin soloing juggernaut), Constant Alt: Cleric (equip my Mains, kthxbye).

Takes me a while to figure out the system, but once I do, immersion and community be damed, I’m working it.

While it took me weeks to remember all that and piece together the dates, I realized that most of the memories had become fond ones. That’s one of the advantages of losing your mind.

Long ago, in a galaxy far far..err wrong content. Back when DAoC (Dark Age of Camelot) was new, I hailed it as my final escape from Everquest (how wrong I was). The game itself wasn’t that bad, and it followed the general EQ way of things (which in the end was its Achille’s Heel, imo). PvP was very well done, however, I didn’t maintain interest in the overall game long enough to fully explore it.

The best part of DAoC were the zone-wide death messages. When anyone died in the same area you were in, you were greeted with “Soandso was slain by …..!”. I found it particularly amusing when the same boss killed the same group over and over and over again. Or when Noob_152 was killed by the same level 3 wolf and you wondered how they would ever survive and make it in the game (They’d just remake as a healer, since almost everything is forgiven when you’re the least-played, most-needed class). Whenever I noticed some douche I hated being repeatedly killed, I’d be compelled to just watch for more death spam. Often times my group would notice I stopped paying attention for prolonged periods of time. They would then decide to train me for making their lives difficult, and, my death spam was then broadcast much to the joy of others. Bastards.

Everquest had a similar feature, (it was later removed) zone-wide summon messages. Select higher level mobs had the ability to summon anyone on their hate list who was out of melee range. The shrooms in Sebilis (King especially) were some of the best bringers of hilarity. Once the spam ended, (You could easily get over 30 messages before a wipe) /yells of King camp now open! or /yell Good luck getting your corpses back without gear, douche bags! would follow. It was like Warcraft’s Barrens chat, but, instead of wanting to spoon your eyes out with a fork, you’d laugh your ass off.

Blizzard, you’ve followed the Everquest mold so closely in many regards. Why not take another step forward and add in the zone wide death messages? Think of all the fun times!

Apparently that explains these two pages of notes I made about our (at the time) rioutous guildchat a week ago. Maybe two weeks ago — the days blend together when you’re subject to frequent blackouts. (I exaggerate!)

Like this note: “Ship comes in.” WTF. I didn’t even finish the thought and I doubt it was even funny at the time. Or this one: “women that –> men that don’t = happier” ??? Women that what? Why the arrow? Crimony.

Anyways, I have a vague recollection that my point was going to be: guilds with lively, pointless guildchat are the best guilds. And I’ve been in several where the guildchat bounced from here to there and back again, covering the entire gambit of human conversation.

I’ve also been in guilds where a large portion of the population is completely devoid of personality. I mean ZERO personality is in evidence. The most I ever knew about those people was the “incoming” and “/assist on me” macros. Well, that and they were DEAD serious about winning the uber. Time spent with the zero-personality crowd really should be counted against any prison time you might be assigned during your lifetime … maybe it should count for double.

Other jottings I can actually decipher: This Sony “ebay” story. I’m getting a big kick out of some of the message board posts around the world that are rabidly against this experiment. Some of the players act as if learning to play a particular character in a game takes longer than all of about five minutes. Ok, maybe a half hour if you’re a raw noob to a game and need to customize your UI a little and figure out where the attack key is.

I’ll agree that it would be nice if we lived in that ideal world where the gaming had integrity and everyone played nice and shared, if we were all happy elves and helped our fellow players whenever we could without any expectation of reciprocity, and no one ever stabbed their guildmates or groupmates in the back by laying claim to some uber just to IGE the shit. But c’mon, wake up. We haven’t lived in that world for over five years.

My opinion only, of course. Although I have never bought or sold game shit for real cash, I’m a game whore nonetheless and I have no delusions about that. I used to be a happy elf, and now I’m not.

Player types I hate. I already have many (many!) posts about player types I hate, but I have one more to add to the pile: Players that have “lady” or “sir” somewhere in their character name. I’m not entirely certain why I hate this sort … maybe it’s the almost-roleplayish nature of their name. I also hate when they refer to themselves as Druidess or Priestess — what’s next, Paladiness? FFS.

Is it wrong to laugh (irl!!) when players die at your feet? Y’know, they’re running from a pack of mobs they had no business aggro’ing in the first place, I target them, I see that death is imminent, and hell, what can I do anyways as they’re too far gone, then SPLAT! they hit the dirt and skid right at my feet. I don’t think it’s wrong to laugh. I’ve done my share of splatting, even in situations where I just know the witness is having himself a good laugh beyond the interface. That kind of player-created content is the best.

One of the greatest things about Dark Age of Camelot was there would be a zone-wide announcement when a player would die to a mob (and I don’t know if this has changed since the early days post-release). I’m laughing even now remembering it — that was my favorite feature. It was a rare treat to see in the zone chat an entire group get downed by one of those wind vortices (wind mephit?) … good times.

The only real life women players with helm graphics turned “on” are dykes. This was proposed by our token chick guildmate when this night elf fem warrior with a wolf-ugly helm walked past us. She said, “Now that is either a male driver or a dyke. Hideous.” I’m not saying she’s right, I’m not saying that’s gospel, I’m just saying no humanoid should have to wear something so ugly.

Lastly, looking forward to Guild Wars’ upcoming release on April 28. I could really use a World of Warcraft vacation.

Ain’t called a grind for nothing.

Q: Where is QuestMob_04?
A: In your questlog, FOR THE LAST GODDAMN TIME, CHECK YOUR LOG FIRST!

Q: When did you log on, SoandSo, hi!
A: Hi to you, SomeOtherSoandSo! About 10 minutes ago, I just got home from … (zzzzzzzzz, isn’t there private chatting available? Yes, yes there is.)

Q: Is WoW the best game ever? I sure think it is! *insert paragraphs of reasons why this is the best game ever in the last year*
A: Yes! Yes, it is!

One particular conversation sent me back a few years ago, however. The spammer was bitching about how horrible and GAME-BREAKING the WoW Beta was, and others piled on with their own prior beta experiences.

I, myself, have played in a few betas. Pitifully few — I’m not much of a sign-up guy, and the few times I have signed up, I’ve been chosen to participate, maybe, three times. (assholes)

But I do remember one beta that was smoother than 12 year old Scotch. By way of comparison, I’d classify WoW so far as very similar to homemade bourbon, but I’ll see how the live goes. I can be very tolerant when something is free. (If you know what I mean, and I think you do.)

Back to the Scotch … a group of my old-timer e-friends were playing EQ, discussing The Next Big Thing on the horizon: Dark Age of Camelot. Since we all had played one of Mythic’s previous titles, Rolemaster: Magestorm, (and what a juggernaut that was … for mid ’90s, IT WAS JUGGERNAUT!), one of the e-friends said he would talk to his Mythic contact (wtf, he had a Mythic contact?) and see if we could get into the Camelot beta.

True to his word, he talked to his contact (wtf, he had a Mythic contact?), and we all got spots in the Camelot beta. As an aside, this guy and several of my old MS guildmates still play Camelot to this day. When they said they were shaking the Norrathian dust off of their boots, they weren’t kidding.

Time has dulled my memory and maybe DAoC didn’t do a stress test per se and there certainly weren’t as many MMOGers back then as there are today, but that beta never denied me access due to server slog. I never sat in a queue waiting to logon. I didn’t hear any rumors about Mythic stepping down server performance to test the limits of their databases.

I’m not saying Blizzard isn’t doing it right. I’m just saying DA0C, as a beta, didn’t slog.

Ok, I’m also saying I smell bullshit right now. But we will see! O yes, we most definitely will see!