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.

1. Sony’s Station Exchange. I’m still laughing, maniacally, months after the launch of Sony’s Station Exchange — the sanctioned, sponsored and approved game items store for EQII. Virtual items and currency have been sold for real life cash for years, as we all know, this is just the next step in what will become the norm.

Gaming purity be damned, there is little that can been done to stem real money trading (RMT) when it’s what many, many players want.

Mostly I enjoyed this story because it was a 180-degree reversal of Sony’s previous mandates and because it was a textbook example of that ancient axiom: Money talks and bullshit walks.

2. Blizzard’s Big Warden. In a teeny, tiny paragraph in the ginormous documents you digitally sign when logging into the World of Warcraft for the first time and after each patch, is a teeny, tiny explanation that Blizzard’s Big Warden can and will crawl up your computer’s ass — as we learned later in more detail, said ass crawling was a scan of every open window and program while playing World of Warcraft.

Well, you did want to play WoW, didn’t you? You’re not a cheating hacker, are you? Then what’s your problem?

What I enjoyed about this story was how the times had changed. Few years back, when Sony wanted to do a much gentler ass job on the EQ players, we screamed like stuck pigs. (How dare! The nerve! Privacy rights! I pay for the equipment, keep yer mitts off it.) However, to Sony’s credit, they pulled the scan plan and all was well again in Norrath.

This year, Blizzard, Lord over all We Survey, implements a far more intrusive program without fully disclosing how thorough these scans are, and the playing public shrugs. For some reason that is not clear to me, we can trust Blizzard not to abuse the private information they could (and do?) collect, but not Sony. Wild, freaky stuff.

Not long after the larger details of Big Warden were revealed by smarter people than me, Sony’s BMG rootkit scandal hit the net: selected Sony Music CDs were shipping with aggressive self-executing anti-piracy software unbeknownst to the hapless consumer.

File this under Karma is a Bitch: WoW hackers used the Sony rootkit to hide their nefarious operations. Heee.

3. Hot Coffee with Cream. The 2005 story that launched a million blog posts, Grand Theft: San Andreas is found to contain code for a hidden, explicit sex minigame. Unlockable with the Hot Coffee mod, the minigame belies its ESRB rating of M-Mature audiences, for ages 17 and over.

The mod’s creators claim, “the Hot Coffee mod merely unlocks hidden, preexisting code inside San Andreas.” GTA: SA’s publisher, Rockstar Games, claims, “So far we have learned that the ‘Hot Coffee’ modification is the work of a determined group of hackers who have gone to significant trouble to alter scenes in the official version of the game” and “In violation of the software user agreement, hackers created the ‘Hot Coffee’ modification by disassembling and then combining, recompiling and altering the game’s source code.”

Damn, dirty hackers!

GameSpot, not satisfied with the pat “damn, dirty hackers” response, tested the Hot Coffee mod code on a “a sealed, first-edition copy of San Andreas” for the PS2 and the rest is history + a million blog posts.

Damn, dirty publisher!

4. Guild Wars arrives in a Warcraft-weary World. While there were a few (more than a few) things about Guild Wars that I did not like, it was a breath of fresh air in a land lousy with EQ clones. (refresh your memory of my struggles in the land of not-EQ)

No one, not even noobs, would mistake Guild Wars for a deep and rich virtual world, but there were two new-to-me concepts for which I will remain forever grateful: instant travel and no monthly subscription fees. I was willing to forgive Guild Wars many sins because they granted those two wishes.

There’s probably a marketing lesson in there somewhere.

5. Happy Holidays, Azeroth! I had enjoyed Christmas, err … the 2004 Winter Holidays in World of Warcraft (a few holiday quests and a mountain of holiday decor) but the Blizzard 2005 Azeroth holidays of Halloween and Christmas wtfpwned with improved quests and easily acquired tricks and treats for all.

I tire of Blizzard’s incompetence with infrastructure. I am disappointed with many of the endgame design decisions as this game moves steadily towards becoming EQ — I mean, let’s just put in dark elves, open up Neriak and be done with it.

It is Warcraft’s sly humor and abundance of goofy treats, especially around the holidays, that set it apart: the journey to level 60 far exceeds the destination, which could explain the chronic alt-itis ’round those parts.

Looking forward to 2006, may it be full of amusing drama and many new worlds to explore and conquer.

1. February 2005 — The warrior protest on the Warcraft Argent Dawn server … hundreds of naked and partially-dressed gnomes marching on Ironforge. The horror. The horror. (full post)

2. March 2005 — World of Warcraft’s impending launch in China is eagerly anticipated … by Blizzard alone. (full post)

3. April 2005 — The drunk cat toucher in Warcraft’s Darkshore zone was my favorite public chatter of the year. His cat liked it! (full post)

4. June 2005 — My psychotic, cursing group member from Guild Wars. So young. So angry. Damn that rap music! (full post)

5. August 2005 — The Warcraft noob who was unsure if Humans could pick up the face-melting talents (aka Shadow spec) or if those talents were limited to Undead priests. He wasn’t joking. (full post)

Looking back through all of my 2005 screenshots, I’m reminded that it’s the people that make multiplayer online gaming so special. And when I say special, I mean “frequently a pain in the ass”.