f13.net

I've been reading the WOTLK forum on Blizzard's site and seeing a lot of stuff like this (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=6417313330&sid=1).  God, it fills me with joy to see the last of the Catass Elitist Brigade scream in horror at the realization that it doesn't really matter anymore.

Wow. Just wow. Talk about coming late to the party. I'm glad I stopped hardcore raiding when we killed Kel'Thuzad (was world 2nd or 3rd), the second he fell, I unsubscribed my mage account and handed it to a friend with best gear available and just PvP'ed on my warrior alt (with full Naxx/AQ gear). In TBC I killed Lady Vashj / Kael'Thas at best, but it was mostly for fun and some gearing with my old guild and I've nearly solely PvP'ed on all my characters and those bosses were on farm on the raids I joined. For me the reason for hardcore raiding and gearing up was guild progression and being on the top, but the bonus was partially to melt faces in PvP, so thanks to Blizzard for relieving me of the pain of no-life and 24/7 playing. Sorta.

In one way I'm glad they are taking 10 man instances more serious though, for some 40/25 man raids are just too much and too tedious and some people want top gear, but don't have the time or motivation to be a part of pissing contest. I on the other hand have never been a casual gamer, so it means squat to me and I'm not too fond of "welfare epics", but hey it gears up my alts and I'm a PvPer. Personally I enjoy some of the hardcore aspects of raiding, especially high difficulty encounters which require great cooperation and structuring, tank and spank encounters should have been buried and stayed in Molten Core. Even if its 10 man encounters they should be tricky and require a great deal of cooperation, cause thats what "PvE" is all about, teamplay.

Heh.. that's hilarious.

And if you dislike "welfare" epics, you're going to hate WoTLK even more.   They've stated a few times that the time investment for  PvE vs PvP was imbalanced, and they're going to make it easier to get PvE gear in LK.

I, on the other hand, think it's great.  You shouldn't have to play a game 40 hours for a single upgrade.

Nah its okay, I don't mean dislike in the way that you can invest little time to get good gear, thats great, but it should require some skill and not just little-to-no effort. Now this breaks the entire WoW formula of welfare epics. I'm solely PvPing now and will do so in WoTLK if I'm not playing something else.

It's really weird to me to hear it said that it should require "skill" to get gear. The principle of one flies in the face of the other.

And if you're saying that devoting oneself to playing raids is skill, then I don't know what to say. Other than the typical cliché response, I guess: There's nothing skillful about raids. Compared to almost every game known to humankind, they're incredibly facile. And even moreso once you've beat them once -- at that point, it's just drudgery. By definition, drudgery is painful and hard to do, I'll grant that. But requiring skill? No. Not to mention that you're losing substantial parts of your life doing all of this. I would call that courageous at best -- to forfeit all of the other good things you could do with one's time is truly brave. But I wouldn't call it skillful.

Besides, if you really wanted to skill to shine through in that game, then allow easier access to that gear (or hell, no gear at all! Yay.). That way you can really sift out the wheat from the chaff. That way people can stand or fall on skill alone.

Now there are some aspects where I do agree with you, and I never said any raids until now have required a massive amount of skill. It requires XX people who are geared, dedicated, motivated and have common goals and are willing to listen to their raidleader and follow instructions. From there you learn phase by phase and down bosses and progress forward. Now this can sound very simple in theory, in practice it really isn't "just like that". It does require skill, but Ill come back to that later. Anyhow now doing the same boss after you have killed him gets easier each time you do it, but such is everything in life as you probably already know. There isn't one task an average human being in its field can undertake and do repetitively for 5-10++ years and not become expert in it. With the exception of situations where you are directly competing with other human beings, which is exactly what you do in PvP.

Now this does take skill. Micromanagement, twitching, reflexes, knowledge, wisdom gear yet again and lots and lots of practice versus different opponents, setups, builds, classes etcetra. I'd love to see a skillless person get 2100+ rating in arena in WoW, it simply won't happen without a time investment and constant playing. Now facing every setup and class and build in the game knowing how to play versus them makes it much easier for you, it still doesn't mean its easy. It does require skill and that is exactly what skill means. This is the same as raids, doing the same things, learning new bosses, new phases etcetra and facing new opponents and figuring out how to kill them. It does take skill, just not the same amount as PvP for the sole reason of human>repetitive and predictable AI actions.


Also this progression gets thrown into the four stages of competence. Which means :

   1.  Unconscious incompetence
          The individual neither understands or knows how to do something, nor recognizes the deficit or has a desire to address it.

   2. Conscious incompetence
          Though the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit, without yet addressing it.

   3. Conscious competence
          The individual understands or knows how to do something. However, demonstrating the skill or knowledge requires a great deal of consciousness or concentration.

   4.  Unconscious competence
          The individual has had so much practice with a skill that it becomes "second nature" and can be performed easily (often without concentrating too deeply). He or she can also teach it to others.

I would really take anything concerning how "casual friendly" WotLK will be on release with a grain of salt, considering how well tuned the entry level raids in TBC (Gruul, Magtheridon) were. And to say hardcore doesn't matter may also be presumptive since we are talking about Pardo and Kaplan, former grand poobaas of catass in EQ1, the later also being the one who coined or at least popularized the term welfare epics.

I think my main gripe is the repetitiveness. Not only because it requires one to lose a bit of their life inside a game, but generally speaking, the whole idea is so ass backwards compared to how other games are done. The way a typical game's boss would work is that you repeat the puzzle until you beat it. Not after. That fact that you finally beat a boss means that you have nothing else left to learn about him. The learning process is in the failing, not the repeating. Imagine not being able to progress through Contra without having to beat this dude up over and over again:

(http://contra.classicgaming.gamespy.com/villains/contra/cBoss6.gif)

Contra would turn into boring work too if that was the case.

[Time to rant for a sec]

Hell, I would say this about all mmo gameplay in general. Not just raids. I am literally learning nothing new after killing the first one or two mobs of a certain type, and am learning nothing new after using this or that new class skill a few times.

Basic example: I swing my sword, auto-attack, mob dies. There is no reason that I should keep doing that over and over again. I learned that part of game right away, y'see.  :oh_i_see:

Next example: Ooh, a new fancy mob that heals himself. And looky here -- I have an interrupt skill. I'll interrupt him the next time he tries to heal. Voila. So that worked. No reason I should have to keep doing that much again!  :awesome_for_real:

Example: How to walk from point A to B. Yay. I did it. Mom would be so proud. But why do they keep trying to teach me how to do this? Just how many FedEx quests do they think it takes before someone understands the concept?

Example: Wow, my first group. Apparently I picked a tank class. I'm supposed to taunt and keep these guys on me, while the priest heals. Simple enough.

And so on and so forth. All the way up to raiding tasks. It's all just the same old shit after awhile -- and only a truly mentally deficient person couldn't get the hang of the game immediately. But I, and many others here (and many elsewhere for that matter), are not mentally deficient. We are normal folks who understand a pattern when we see one -- and act accordingly. Either do your best to give us new patterns, or give us a fucking hyper-condensed 1 day of leveling crash course fasttrack into the game, so we can move on to just pvp'ing -- where the encounters are a little more dynamic and unpredictable. The rest is bullshit.

/rantoff

Great example Stray.

Also, point and laught at the catass.

Definitely valid points, but this just goes back to the basics and MMO structures in general. You do have a point though. I have many ideas (doesn't everybody) on how to break the standards and move MMOs forward, but I do somehow unfortunately believe that MMO's need to be like they are, at least for now, repetitive, in order to function for most people. You have to attract people with something familiar and something they already enjoy, but want more of, just different. MMO designers have a bigger marked and more potential subscribers this way, making complex MMO's with mechanics that require re-learning everything is a high-risk organization that most are not willing to undertake. Just take a look at the FPS genre.

I do hope at a future point we will see a solid evolution or turning point in MMOs where it doesn't have to be like todays. I at least am tugging towards that sector while working in game design, but eventually it will all be about timing. Releasing something so awesome and groundbreaking to the people that is so good they don't see it at the time for what it is(I can name quite a few games which has done this "error", released too early) is bad business.

Raiding requires skill, just not any the game measures. It's all about doing the same thing again, but better, and along the way amassing the gear and group you need to progress to the next tier of raids.

Which is fine, for folks that like that. While that group isn't probably all that statistically large, they're as important to an MMORPG as any other group, a very relevant part of the Player Pyramid.

If WotLK launches by lowering the barrier for more people to get into the raid cycle, who's going to complain about that? Seriously, lower the barrier even more, get people to repeat the same exact content over and over. It's already been proven people want to do that. And it's already been proven to be good business (less content creation). What's not to like?

And for those who don't like it, there's PvP, or other games in the genre.

Nothing wrong with that Blizzard is doing here.

The thread ended quickly on the WoW board.

It was in one of the recent interviews that they said the opening TBC raids were a giant mistake. Something about opening the expansion with a brick wall to climb over or something  :oh_i_see:

Actually you got that backwards (edit: If I'm interpreting you right)

He said something more along the lines of "The entry level raids were way too fucking hard. Mags was way way above the level of gear/content he was supposed to be at, and only having ONE 10-man be an entry level raid was really stupid. In BC we basically said, 'here's a brick wall, climb over it'."

Basically the entry level raids are going to be way more accessible and there'll be more of them before the cockblocky silliness the uberguilds all enjoy.

Even now years later, it rarely ceases to amaze me how articulate and just plain clued-in the WoW devteam is. There's a reason why WoW is #1, folks.

I don't for a second believe it took them a full year to realize the brick wall that BC raiding was. They either knew it going in, or realized it was a good way to talk about how to sell the next expansion.

Never underestimate the power of linking "for the gamers!!/1" with a point of sale.

Good to see I am not the only one. I joined a competitive guild before TBC, took my first step into Karazahn with my priest and then quit.

But I distinctly remember an April fools page made by the wow team. It showed an exaggerated map of what you had to do to get to the black temple. It was a very, very long scroll fest of instances, and then their heroic counterparts. So to back up Darniaq, I have to say that they knew this was a problem a long time ago.

That's silly. Truth is that every diku to date has had that very same brick wall, where you hit max level and then gosh, now what do you do? Traditionally it's followed by a couple of months of farming dungeons for the best single group items followed by endless raid progression until the next expansion. It's a testiment to blizzard's designers that they not only recognized that this was a disservice to the majority of their customers but were willing to break the mold to an unprecedented degree through multiple progression paths before the next expansion pack's release.

It's easy to say these things in hindsight. Obviously forcing all your players to raid to advance their characters doesn't service the majority's needs. I agree. Everybody complained about it. So why hasn't anyone else addressed the problem?

Of course.

All I'm doing is disbelieving the notion that Blizzard is handling things any differently. WoW is a standard diku. The only real difference* is that they paced the game so that more people can get drawn into the looping content.

* Aside from, like, working.

Oh I don't think the basic advancement mechanics are changing, certainly. But they're making all that content much more accessible and providing multiple progression paths. It's not revolutionary, but it is innovative, and I think it'll continue to be successful.

Given the potential for one person to fuck shit up, and the odds of someone having an off night when there are 25 or 40 people involved, how hard can it be?  I mean yeah, jump three times when the boss farts lava, duck behind the pillar when he casts Frost Snort, whatever.  Those are just instructions to be memorized.

I mean, if I create gameplay simple enough that the average slob has a 90% chance of doing it right, all I need is to require 25 people to all do it right at the same time, and suddenly I have "challenging content" where the odds dictate that 3/4 of all attempts end in failure.  Throw the agony of logistics and interpersonal drama on top of that, and suddenly we have a small percentage of the playerbase that is "elite" for slogging through.

DIKUs suck. I'm probably not going to pay for another.

You've levelled up one paladin into greens and never raided. Why are you trying to discuss raiding?

Raiding is not the simple sequence of scripted events you described. Skilled reactions matter.

A skilled player with a crowd control ability sees a healer rezzing someone, and a mob pathing towards the healer, and buys time for the rez. Without that, the healer's corpse joins the other.

A skilled player with low mana picks exactly the right spell to cast with remaining mana - maybe it's a heal on tank #2 instead of tank #1, and it's the only reason tank #2 survives for the next heal. Or maybe it's a DoT on the mob instead of a rebuff, the last tick of which wins the fight.

I remember a situation where I wasn't supposed to be tanking, but something went wrong with a healer and I saw a tank drop. The mob was loose to mow down healers, so I tried to buy time by taunting it and sacrificing myself. But the healer leader saw what I was doing and called a heal chain on me, the healers responded fast enough, and we succeeded where another raid might have failed.

Raiding skill is the combined ability to make good split-second decisions. When it's "whelps, many whelps" and the guild just handles it.

This is what Microsoft does aswell. It's a valid sales argument when you're the biggest fish in the pond. "Yeah, we know we're a giant on clay feet, but look, next iteration will be much better." MS is barfing the exact the same thing about Internet Explorer 8 as they did for version 7 - "We know the last one was a wreck, this is much better! Please developers, keep wasting your precious development hours on our products, it isn't all in vain!"

Seriously guys, it's part of the Grand Scheme. They could remove all the cockblocks overnight if they wished to and lose a minimal amount of subscriptions. It's just that every dish needs to come with a side-order of turd, just to get the opportunity of listing "Turd removal - Price: Your soul". Buy this expansion pack of cockblocks so you can enjoy the cockblock-removing one. Marketing, DIKU-style. :)

Um, no.  WUA is right; scripted is as scripted does.

The only time skill comes into play is when someone bangs the pooch.  Raid encounters are controlled, scripted events; the same shit happens the same way, every time.  Unless some monkey fucks up, it's 'do your job, collect loot, on to next'.

I sure as hell your definition of 'fun' doesn't primarily consist of cleaning up after other folk's :uhrr: .

Last week was my last week of raiding in WoW (only staying subscribed to do some 2v2 with brother, seeing as how it's the only thing we do together anymore, really).  And looking back, the raiding was a waste of time; the time/reward ratio is so fucked up that it beggars belief that sentient beings could pay to spend so much real time for such little reward, or that the devs would value their customer's time/money so little.

And since you seem to care, this is coming from someone that has done 'progression' raiding for every boss in BC (well, not the Sunwell shit, but up to and including Illidan). 

Pre-edit edit: I suppose, to the credit of WoW's devs, that after just four+ short years, they now realize that PvE needs to offer more reward for the effort/time spent.  Well, thank the Light for small, extremely tardy favors.

WTF does looking at a hotkey bar and seeing that one doesn't have enough mana for Rank 7 Heal, but has enough for Rank 6 have to do "skill"?? At best, that's vigilance. Hell, it's not even that. It's just about being able to read.

Now if it's a long sequence of split second decisions, then I'll grant you that that has a lot to do with skill. A good fight against other players comes down to a some of that (a good fight, that is...) -- but a raid encounter? No. It's a bit more forgiving with your lack-of-attention and mistakes. Especially if you've already played it.

Yeah, because no one could speak upon the complex and elite world of raiding unless they've partaken, right?  Face it chuckles, it's just a video game, and it's one that looks pretty fucking weak.  The reason I've fucked off at 70 instead of trying to raid is the same reason I haven't gone out and bought any number of shitty-looking games, namely because they look shitty.

Given the appropriate strategy and level of gear, is there any reason why 25 players who are completely mediocre but who don't make any critical fuckups couldn't win any raid in the game?  Hell, is there any reason a guy with 25 accounts, 25 computers, and the urge to write a lot of detailed scripts couldn't theoretically just bot his way through one?

The hard, stressful parts of raiding seem to be:

A.  Teaching people gameplay basics that they should have learned after their first hour playing their first Mario game (getting hit by fire = bad... and for fuck's sake, don't keep standing in it).

B.  Please don't get completely smashed until AFTER Archimonde's dead.

But seriously, raiding is teaching 20+ people what to do for EACH AND EVERY BOSS, and keeping said cats herded for 20+ hours or so a week (well, that and finding 25 people with that much spare time; seriously, there should be a special child abuse hotline to call just to tattle on parents that play these games).

Actual game skill has very little to do with it.

The hard part of raiding is doing the instance more than once. Which, by the way, is certainly a requirement of raiding.

Nope.
If raiding was so easy, why did only a low % of raiding guilds complete the access quest for Black Temple/Hyjal? I'l concede that learning the script to a fight isn't the challenge of raiding, its more having a fair share of meta game knowledge and the ability to think on your feet as mentioned. I'll also point out that some of the later TBC raids were some of the best designed encounters I've ever experienced, scripts aside there is a lot of random natured stuff they include in the design of the encounters that would prevent your theoretical 25 man bot squad from making a dent in them.

I eagerly await the backlash after wrath launches when all the accessible "casual" content that players wanted is over tuned causing your avg joe schmoo in greens to hit a brick wall until some artificial time period is reached and it gets nerfed down coincidentally in the same patch or content release that the next hard core raid come out in. 

With enough people involved, Murphy's Law would make "Push the big green Kill Arthas button, not the red Kill Us button!" a dicey proposition.

FIFY.

Christ, I can barely tolerate most groups of 5. 25?  Fuck no.

The Brick Wall in earth TBC was a different kind of beast. Basically the raid content right out of the gate was some of the most difficult content in TBC to date before they nerfed. There was supposed to be a gentle difficulty curve like pre-TBC where you started out with beginner raids and worked your way up to the hard ones. Having completed all that content before it was nerfed, it was in fact a literal brick wall for anyone outside the best guilds.

On a side note, this goes back to the "raiding takes no skill" argument and lays it flat. If raiding took no skill then everyone would be able to beat all the content easily which is certainly not true. Playing perfectly for the duration of a boss fight can be difficult to do even for the best players, and the cutting edge content often requires near perfection to beat.

As you said, people worked their way up through earlier dungeons (and by doing so, slowly geared up for each successive raid encounter). It's an itemization issue. Not a "difficulty" curve.

As for the bosses... Boss fights go hand in hand with knowing how to play games in general. Figuring out puzzles, being aware of one's surroundings and abilities, making split second decisions -- those are all things that a gamer already does -- and has been doing since he or she was old enough to pick up a gamepad. There are a ton of puzzles and boss fights from games in the past 30 years that are even more complex and less apparent to figure out than anything in an mmo so far. Yet, many people have been beating them since they were kids. So...if the typical raid boss is difficult to many players in mmos, then all that tells me is that they aren't even gamers. They're just people who fuck around and think they are. For what reason, I don't know... But if all of that shit is difficult to them, then I have to wonder what they've been doing all of these years.

That being said, there is the added element of cooperative play which adds to difficulty -- you could have 24 gamers doing their thing, and one housewife (or househusband  :-P) who could fuck things up for everybody. I understand that. It shouldn't take much to teach them though -- or better yet, kick them out.

There seems to be two sides here: 1) people who never raided but understand the concept of scripted repeatable encounters; and, 2) people who've raided so often it's second nature.

The "skill" is in between. You can read all of the cheat sites you want, but that's just going to give you the knowledge. It's not going to help you actually hit the right keys at the right time while 23 or 39 (or in EQ1's case, 74) others do so as well.

Your personal skill is not going to necessarily guarantee success. This is sometimes misconstrued as luck when it's just that someone else screwed up. Whether they're having a bad night, got called AFK'd, or are high/drunk/tired doesn't matter. They didn't do what they needed to do when they needed to do it (CCing, healing, snaring, whatever). These are predictable events to a point. To think otherwise ignores the years of drama we've all sat through in these games.

And that's skill with a lowercase "s", because the term is descriptive and on a sliding scale. What to do is just flat out knowledge. Actually doing it is the skill. Yes, an FPS game requires more player skill than your average heal rotation/buff bot in an MMO. But that doesn't mean MMOs are a bunch of people with their thumbs up their noses waiting for the proverbial manna from heaven.

What was required to beat that content? Did every single person have to farm items that gave off a certain amount of resist? Did they have to learn to 2 step and do the Kingston Trot? What kind of skill was required to break through this brick wall?

(I honestly don't know, I was done with wow within the first 6 months (2 months actually spent playing) and haven't looked back.)

WoW raiding takes the following:
- 25* people learning the fights. What to do, and when to do it. 5 people have to click on the cubes in a 5 second window, or the raid blows up.
- 25 people paying attention for the whole span of the fight. This is the most unpredictable part. Disconnects, spouse aggro, child aggro, baby aggro, pet aggro, phone, bio, etc.
- 25 people being well-geared enough to take on the opponents. Whether "well-geared" means you have the required base health, base dps, base healing, or some other minimum set of stats. This means you need gear. Which means you needed to sit through the previous "tier" of raid dungeons and/or battlegrounds.
- To get to the next "tier", you need gear from the current "tier". This means you have to repeat the content until your gear drops. You can collect badges and purchase gear with them, as a form of a shortcut, but you still have to grind dungeons to get those badges.

* I use the number 25, but you can sub in 10 or 40 to fit whichever instance you want to visit.

The ability to free up enough time to accomplish the above isn't really a skill; it's a matter of sacrificing something else  you could be doing in RL.

The ability to sit still for 2+ hours, and pay attention during that time, is closer to being a skill. A lot of people just can't do this. Getting 25 of them to do it at the same time is a challenge. That's why not everyone gets to see raid content.

I'm not sure how to quantify it, its easy to say raiding is all farming consumables and learning a pattern but until you've tried it, its just talk. I'll just say on the example pre-nerf gruul, you either had "it" or you didn't. "It" being ability to maintain a high level of effectiveness (tanking/dps/healing/agro-management) while dealing with split second choices about position (shatter).

Most of what delights me about this move on Blizzard's part is that it makes large-scale raiding strictly an activity for people who like large-scale raiding.  Imagine that.  The gear quit being a requisite for top-end PVP with TBC, and it'll quit being the only way to see the later content with WOTLK.  So it's just... something to do.  If you like it.

The raiders I know who just like raiding haven't made a peep about this.  But retards on the forums who are used to RAIDER = KING OF THE GAME are just crushed.

All of these arguments (Particularly they "you could have been doing something useful with your life") can be applied to any game.  None of them require any real skill. NONE.  Just the patience to sit there and plug away until you find the right pattern.  The only place I'll even begin to listen to a skill argument is in pvp.  That's it.  And only in FPS pvp.

The way MMO pvp is designed these days, it's still 90% sitting on your ass doing something useless for large chunks of time, until you find the right build/ combo/ assemblage of team members or bits from a kit of parts to pwn face.   Just. Like. PvE. AND Just. Like. Consoles.

The biggest barrier to raiding is the time it takes.  Yes, that's stupid design.  No, I don't want to hear about how leet you are that you can beat Metroid in less time... because you still took more time gaining that skill than the MMOs you bitch about.

This argument gets more retarded every time it cycles around.


Exactly.

Oh c'mon now. Skill only required for FPS? Try beating me at Horse in skate beyotch.  :-P

That raiding mostly involves just mashing your buttons is what makes the ability of people to FAIL so completely particularly aggravating.  I've started asking my guildmates to log their pugs so I can add people to my blacklist without having to group with them myself.  For example, as a result of >this< (http://wowwebstats.com/msokbe3oi1nny?s=6989-7578) WWS, I decided to just add an entire guild to my blacklist.  My favorite one is the raid leader, Zildard.  He's in full tier 4+ and yet he does less DPS than what a non-retarded frost mage in greens and blues would do.

That's pretty much what I'm hoping for really. I enjoyed seeing all of Kara, I'm enjoying seeing Zul'Aman. Some of you people are just really fucking miserable. Shit, all but maybe 2-3 people in my small guild like eachother and enjoy playing the game in a non-serious manner. Yeah, if you're raiding with 24 loot sponges you hate because you wanna raid you're gonna not like it, you'll just do it to appease that reptilian part of your brain that gives you a small bit of pleasure from seeing numbers increase.

Not like pattern memorization and reflexes aren't 90% of uh...nearly every fucking video game of every genre ever made ever.

Loot whoring turns about 70-80% of normal people into that sort of despicable shitheel regardless of how good or casual the game is.

As an experienced raider, I took one look at Burning Crusade's progression and thought "that's just crap" and stopped playing WoW.

So I wouldn't know about your BC raids that apparently took no skill.

It's a fairly reliable rule in life that someone who has a lot of experience doing something probably knows more about it than someone who has never done it. So yes, what you said.

My guild exists because of people like you. The ones who post all over message boards about their latest noob adventures in a diku, telling us their wild ideas for looting rules and tactics. So we left and started a guild without them.

There's an apparent assumption in the thread that I must be caught up in some kind of raiding progression and trying to justify it. Actually it's a couple of years since I've been in any raiding game.

The reason I know it took skill is that there were individuals I came to admire. No, WUA, not because they had shinies round their necks. I admired them because they were better at the game than me. If they were online, I knew we were more likely to win encounters, because they regularly made the right decisions at the right time. Call it skill, call it talent, whatever - those people had it and others lacked it.


You are trying to tell me that because a million monkeys with a million typewriters would eventually write the works of Shakespeare, that writing takes no skill. It does, actually. Raiding is not Shakespeare, it's just gameplay. But if you have some ability at it, you'll do it better and get there faster, maybe even be able to discuss it afterwards with some insight.

Edit - Also, my experience is in a guild in a low-population time zone. Often we wouldn't have the 25 or whatever people we needed to do a raid, and we'd end up doing it with 19 and still win (just). We could still wipe if we had a full 25, it just depended who was there. If we had the right 19 people, even if the class balance was all wrong, we could win if we played well.

This came more into play in EverQuest, where there was no cap on the number of people in a raid. Encounters were designed simply to be near-impossible for any number of people. So you had to either approach it with some vast zerg force (frowned on) or with a smaller raid of quality players. Every raid could still wipe, but if you could make good progress with a bunch of good players, that was more admired. And that's what we had to do as a low-pop Aussie guild, and that's how I came to see the skill in those players. In a guild that has no trouble with numbers and just keeps throwing bodies at something till it works, I guess you never see that.

This is the major disconnect between how you are playing these games, and how many other people ("noobs", "casuals") are playing these games.  You are looking for some sort of admiration for playing a game.  For a time it was there, you had the loot the prove it.  But then the developers had to go and ruin it by making so that just anyone could get loot, and they didn't even need to do corpse runs!  They turned their backs on the chosen, the hardcore.  It's a fucking tragedy.  I hope the money hats they are wearing because of it aren't as comfortable as they look.

On a less sarcastic note:  I'd agree, an aptitude for situational awareness, fast reflexes and an ability to stay calm under pressure is a skill (skills, actually).  I'd even agree that these skills tend to come in handy when learning a new zone, undergeared or undermanned.  These are not the skills that are needed for the period of time where you are grinding a known zone for the gear.  I'd say, "neurotic need to have a badge that says 'I'm teh bestest evah!'" is the skill that is needed to get through those periods of time.  I can't really say I admire anyone for wanting to get a sense of selfworth from a video game.

Also, when developers make games for those people, I tend to hate those games.  So for purely selfish reasons your style of gaming must die.

aye it's my only sore point with this raiding system. Its quite hard to accomplish with 4 other strangers but to do that and still end up with no loot? ouch!

Patience, an ability to put up with repetitive tasks, to forgive others mistakes, and to tolerate fools are all, in a certain respect, skills. They are also needed to get through those periods of time. I personaly don't have them and I tend to quit MMOGs when the need for those skills outweighs the need for the former, but I'm not going to go out of my way and slag off a whole group of people. I've played with many people like that and enjoyed their company and admire a few of their 'skills'.

I disliked most of them, really disliked quite a few, but that doesn't change much. Most of the people in life are fuckwits anywhere you go.

And I can assure you, as someone who has played WoW recently with people like that, that no one hates repetitive shit more than the people who are determined to do it over and over again just for the payoff of the next new encounter/new loot. These people play for the challenge of doing something before other people, not doing it more times than other people.

Actually 25 man raiding is going to have the best gear, and probably the best challenges too.

So people who like things that are really hard but prefer doing them with 4 and 9 friends instead of 24 semi-strangers will still have to suck it up and deal with it in order to find challenges.

And the people who don't PvP and don't raid but want lots of shiny shit will still complain too.

But it is a step in the right direction.

They are.  The first is a business skill in modern life.  The latter two are social skills.

This. 

I remember when my wife (girlfriend at the time) and I first started playing WoW, it was our "first" raiding experience in an MMORPG, our guild was on a relatively high pop server and we were the second progressed guild horde-side.  I raided all content up through the first half of AQ.

My opion:  Raiding is completely mindless skilless timesink, generally populated with 2 types of personalities:

1.  Lametards whose entire self-worth is invested in proving they are teh best video game player evah!
2.  Everyone else who likes to have good gear for someother activity they enjoy more (PvP, farming, sitting at the Auction house, whatever...)

We raided pre-nerfed MC, and all of BWL and let me tell you, it was a boring pointless timesink where the only skill involved was convincing folks to pressbutton at the right time.  Most of the mouth-breathers in this guild were utter wastes IRL who were either socially retarded misfits or ADD addled 14 year olds.  If this group of losers could progress through content any group of sufficiently committed idiots could do it.

What finally ended it for me and my wife (beyond the fact that playing a video game had become a f-ing job) was when one of our guildmates had a long-winded diatribe in Vent about how casuals "didn't deserve" good gear because they didn't have the "will to power."  I swear to god I wish I had taped this speech because it was comedy gold that centered on the philosophy of Nietzche and Ayn Rand and how raiding weeds out those who "stive for excellence."

At the end of the conversation I simply said: "Yeah, I'm sure Ayn Rand would view some guy sitting in his basement playing a video game 50 hours a week as a model of human achievement."  We both quit within a week and never looked back.

The only activity that took a modicum of "skill" in the game was PvP, and at least the really good PvPers (not the Rank 14 no-life poop-sockers, but folks who actually were good in spite of gear) were actually friendly and had some perspective.

Conclusion:  Group PvE activities of more than 10 people are generally miserable experiences that appeal only to a very niche audience that Blizzard is absolutely correct in marginalizing.   :grin:

Well sure, if the 25 man raids didn't have the best gear, then they would have relatively little reason to exist.  But as I hear it, the gear from a 10 is only going to be one tier lower than that from the equivalent 25, so it sounds like only the 25 man version of the highest raid will have anything you can't get anywhere else.  It's a prize that the hardest of the hardcore PVE types will lust after, but I suspect the overwhelming majority of the WoW playerbase just won't give enough of a crap to care.  Especially given that someone who's equally hardcore can eschew joining a large guild, and just PVP his way to top-end arena gear that will melt said raider's face anyway.


No.  It's carefully scripted MMO PVE.  It's not some secret elite incomprehensible gameplay that no one can grok unless they sink a chunk of their life into it.  It's carefully scripted MMO PVE.  It requires far less individual skill than... say... beating Street Fighter 2 on your SNES with the AI set all the way to Hard.  I mean at least nobody can say "Okay, Ryu will do a Shoryuken every 40 seconds, followed by three Hadokens, so be ready to counter with Yoga Flame!"

The only way this carefully devised mathematical formula can require anything resembling improvisation is if someone else is doing something wrong.  And if covering for the fuckups of others were fun, well, I'd pug a lot more.

Actually, when I played WoW, I found that pugging with idiots was quite fun. Especially Paladins. It brought some life into the game. :grin:

Wouldn't want that on a large scale though.

I thought the best gear these days was arena/pvp gear?

I think that depends on your spec...

Eh, fuck if I know.  :awesome_for_real:

I've never done any 25man raids since my guild is casual... I have done some 40-mans [up to bwl] before BC when some other guild asked me to tag along. Honestly, I don't think either the pve or the pvp [arena, bg] aspect of WOW takes 'much skill'. But at least it's fun. Or something. :P 5-man dungeons and small group pvp are the best part of WOW, imo.

Re gear: arena/pvp stuff is best for pvp (notable exceptions are classes that can get away with using pve gear, ie paladins). It's mediocre-to-good for pve, depending on class (it sucks for priests or rogues, but it's pretty nice for enhancement shaman or dps warriors... etc). And even the 'best' pvp pieces are worse than their tier6 equivalent from raids / badges.

Edit: actually, most of the 'high end' pvp stuff is worse than equivalent tier5 pieces for pve; SSC and TK (tier5 raid instances) are pugged on some servers already, so there ya go.


-- Z.

There's a fairly large sense of accomplishment for a guild to get through a raid together and be able to do it repeatedly quicker while outfitting their guild in ways that others can't. It's also a pretty big social event. While you can't chatter all the time, a lot of chatter does happen. It's also a joint achievement, which leads to further discussion points, jointly felt feelings of accomplishment, etc. While the argument of skill can go back and forth, it's patience and perseverance that can't be denied. You need both to be successful and there are those that thrive on them. While there's definitely some that take it too far, I think that raiders deserve at least some respect for accomplishing their goals by dealing with a lot of setbacks, annoyances, people, and whatnot. Especially those that pave the way into a new raid dungeon and figure out the patterns and gotchas.

Personally, I'm more of the small, tight knighted social group type. I like the achievements of the 5 and 10 man dungeon runs far more than the large, over the weekend raid stuff. Still, I don't despise the raider types in general and I do think they should be rewarded for how much time and patience they put into a game.

I'm still chuckling at Tale's stupid-ass "admiration" post and how his guild formed to get away from dumb newbs like me who don't treat the numbers on their imaginary armor as super important business.  Like I'm supposed to feel inferior or something.  It's the same sort of "I take this shit way too seriously" vibe I used to get when some of the usual suspects would expound upon the incredibly deep and meaningful bonds of honor and friendship that only old-school UO ganking could forge.

Eat my ass, Tale.  I'm a big lame newb scrub who treats an MMO as a hobby to goof off in, and I don't give a fuck.  Frankly, the idea of a few baseball teams worth of people all sitting in rapt attention for hours per night, however many nights per month, killing the same bosses over and over and over so that they can all get better pretend helmets kinda creeps me out.

I won't go so far as to say that there is no skill needed in MMOGs. But I will go so far to say that 99% of the players have enough skill to enjoy the game up to the level they want.  Reading a mob strategy before your raid so you can be ready for it is not skill.  Fighting a mob. Dying. Trying something new. Dying. Refining that something new and winning. That is about all the skill one needs (and one could argue that isn't skill at all.)  Face it. Gamers tend to be geeks/dorks/nerds at some level and that cadre usually has a right-skewed IQ distribution compared to the population at large. 

But there are exceptions. One very nice guy I have played MMOGs with since 1999 will just never be "good" at them. He gets lost easily. He dies trying to get to his destination when no one else even gets aggro. He is the last person to notice an add and is the last person to react in game to a command/suggestion in vent. He just is what he is and we drag him along because it is just a game.

Thats how your last post comes across. It is kinda funny, your just as fanatical about being casual as some of the hardcore raiders you enjoy vilifying are about raiding.

WUPs attitude is not even on the same planet as some of the D-baggery that comes out of Raiders mouths.

Case in point:
http://vnboards.ign.com/world_of_warcraft_general_board/b19789/107355333/p1

My favorite part:

"What happens now? Well, that's not up to us, it's up to you. Those of us that have been here will always be members of DnT, our characters will disappear, but our memories will not. We didn't create our legend, we were just a group of friends who loved killing raid bosses. All the people who came to our website, and followed our progress, and cheered for our accomplishments, you created the legend, and ultimately you will have the last chapter in this story."

Yeah, thats someone with the proper perspective right there.

Really?  Seemed like amusing mocking to me..

That one made my day.  I'm still giggling. 

MMO Gamers... priceless.

That depends on the day.  A year ago (or whenever they patched in BT) when only a few guilds were in T6 content there was a massive boost to PvP gear in order to keep those few guilds with T6 access from utterly dominating the arena sport PvP scene.  Since PvP gear was largely a fixed time for fixed reward proposition, and the quality of performance over that time largely immaterial, there was an imbalance in risk vs. reward for PvP vs. PvE.  Season 3, and moreso in season 4, gear start to place limits and requirements on the desireable loot that when coupled with easier access to the PvE endgame means for many the risk vs reward balance between PvP and PvE is at a better balance point.  PvE really hasn't had much of a ceiling increase since TBC, Arenas have had to keep their progression and ladder relevant, which means you are doing the same thing in PvP for a better reward than the PvE side repeating the PvE content can get.  It isn't always easier to upgrade through PvP anymore, so now it comes to how one wants to spend their time in game.  Of course, if your guild is stuck in Karazahn... PvP is still the easiest and best upgrade path (roughly 70% of all players, e.g. the missing 7M + not listed on wowjutsu and or stuck on Kara). 

Most of my SPriest's gear is PvE/crafted with the exception of the PvP necklace.
My Rogue's gear is split between PvE and PvP - limited only by time and inclination to play melee dps.
My Resto Shaman will gear out through crafted and PvE gear much like my SPriest (stuck at lvl 66 for 3 months though).

DPS warriors have a lot of 'easy' upgrades from PvP loot.  It used to be that everyone had the upgrade path of least resistance running through the Arenas and Battlegrounds.

This is pretty much how I feel. I ran Molten Core a total of 3 times shortly after launch before I realized raiding was completely worthless as something I find enjoyable. What I found enjoyable was ganking the hell out of noobs in Westfall, Redridge, Hillsbrad and STV. I reactivated 2 days ago after 18 months away from the game. Raiding still sucks, but noob ganking is timeless. The bonus is I don't have to shit in a sock.

Anything that is filling hardcore catasses with this much nerdrage is good for 99.5% of the players.

I raided during my time in WoW, and in all honesty I liked it less than running 5-man instances.  The presentation of raid instances just never felt as complete as the smaller ones.  I mean, when wandering down a hall in Scholomance and the party gets jumped by some undead, there's activity and interest for everyone in the party.  When going through a raid and some giant trash monster shows up, you spend thirty seconds staring at a foot while forty people pinprick the thing to death.  The bosses are the only worthwhile features of raids; the other monsters and surroundings are just filler, and it shows.

If I'm gonna blow an hour or two running around in an instance, I'd prefer to do so in an instance that looks like every inch was designed to entertain, not just the boss fights.  The instance fights I undertook while working for my 1.5 gear were all more interesting and challenging than the raids I attended, because each one hinged significantly on me.  When you're in a five-man group and you have to make it through Stratholme in fifteen minutes, or survive a special arena fight in BRD, your performance directly determines whether the party succeeds.  In a group with twenty or more people, though, it's nearly impossible to excel.  You're a statistic, a mote of hit points and DPS, and unless you manage to totally fuck up somehow, odds are good that you won't impact the success or failure of the raid.

That being said, I don't really care about raiders one way or the other.  Nightly commitments of running raids to build DKP for one item is not for me, but I don't begrudge anyone else who chooses to do so.

 :-o I didn't read it all the way through,  some guy actually brought up Ayn Rand.  Priceless.   What is it with these dudes and Ayn Rand?

Oh man, Scrub versus Poopsock could be the new Trammel versus Felucca.  We just need Grunk to come in here and be the new Sinij, and we'll be on our way to thirty pages of awesome.

 :awesome_for_real:

(http://vanguard.tentonhammer.com/files/gallery/albums/article-illustrations/titan_grunk.jpg)

No real skill required; just basic MMO gameplay familiarity and shitloads of time (and in pre-nerf Gruul's case, especially, a lot of luck).

I don't know what possessed you to tar me with all this "you people" bullshit, or assume that I refer to people as "noobs" and "casuals". I've made it pretty clear that I seek NO PERSONAL GLORY WHATSOEVER from raiding games, but you're still banging on as if I've been raiding for attention.

Among a circle of people who engage in some kind of activity, there will be a subset who earn the admiration of some of the others. Whether it's raiding or cross-stitching. And it will vary over time with successes and failures. There's nothing wrong or unusual in that. People who don't care for cross-stitching are irrelevant - it's just something that matters to the cross-stitchers at the time.


OH, JUST LIKE ME! I SEE. Why do you feel the need to apply an undeserved label and insult me for it?

Damn right I get a sense of self-worth from completing a common goal with people whose company I enjoy. That's all raiding in a MMOG has ever been for me. But you're trying to portray it as a crutch, as if it was my only source of self-worth, when it's only a hobby activity.


Again you've got something in mind that I'm not, applying foolish assumptions like "your style of gaming" to me, with a kind of Fires of Heaven uberguild in mind. I've never been in any guild of that type. You know nothing at all about my style of gaming.

"This is what raiding is like because I JUST KNOW, even though I've never, ever been on a raid in any game."

Guys, WUA is just rewording your opinions on raiding and posting them back at you, so you say "yeah, WUA, you're so right!". Please stop helping him masturbate.

I could have sworn I started this thread.  And that MMO PVE is an activity essentially devoid of the need for skill in general.

In other news, I now have to fight the urge to use the Comic Strip Generator (http://stripgenerator.com/create/) in every post.

(http://static.stripgenerator.com/generated/anonymous/strip/2008/05/22/a-tale-of-woe.png)

Yes, you started the thread. And you apparently hovered over your thread while I was busy offline. You camped the thread, hoping for some action. Nothing happened in six hours, so you couldn't resist responding again to my old post. Maybe if you mentioned me by name and said something strong enough, I would respawn and drop a nice phat reply.

A day and a half later I get back here, reply, and look what happens - I get an instant response.

If anyone here is in poopsock territory, it's you.

The sad truth is we are ALL poopsockers!  :ye_gods:

If only it took 24 other people to post a message.  Then you'd admire me for it.

Unfortunately for you, what he's saying is essentially true.  Raiding IS about learning the scripted encounters and then performing them over and over again.

WUA's just bored and gone back to trolling.  He can't do Trammel vs Felucia anymore, so this is his new bag.  He as much as admitted it a few pages back.  I'd realized it on Monday but figured it was more amusing for me to wach people beat their heads against the wall or pump his e-peen than to mention it.   Now you've gone and spoiled that fun for me, damn you Tale.


Yeah, if only we could have innovative video games where you didn't repeat the same action over and over and over until completion.  Like Starcraft, or Conan, or Mario, or Pong, or Pac Man...

Oh wait.

Anything learned via pattern recognition and repetition is not a skill?

Yeah, but I don't see Pac-Man players writing angry letters on the Nintendo forum demanding that the ghost timers remain the same to prevent casual noobs from receiving the bananas that they did not rightfully earn.

Damn you if I just haven't found another way to waste hours of my life.

Didn't say that, although the fact that each particular raid encounter doesn't vary it's not as impressive as the raiders often make it out to be. 

Suppose after many tries you figure out the right path to take in a Choose-your-own-adventure novel.  You then re-read that novel repeatedly, and having memorized which decisions to make you win every time.  Is THAT a skill?

Not sure what your point is here.  Is it because other games have repetition and scripted encounters in them, that it makes this particular scripted encounter set somehow better?  Pac Man is actually an EXCELLENT example of what raiding is.  At least, the original one is.  If you spent enough time memorizing the set paths you needed to take, it was possible to continually play it.  There was no reacting to something unexpected in it, because once you knew those patterns it was simply a matter of repeating them, verbatim, in that set order.

Now imagine you have a Pac Man machine that had a pattern that was so simple that you could explain it in 10 minutes to a group of 40 people.  Now have all of those people play the game and if enough of them succeed you get to play a new maze where you have to figure out the pattern all over again.

It's ok to laugh at those people. What irritates the shit out of me is the whole premise formed in this thread that if you've ever raided, or raid now you are a catass no lifer who does exactly that.   "Generalizations suck" is usually pointed out quickly, except when touching on endgame MMO stuff for some stupid reason.   Worse still when assumptions are made based completly on lack of experience and are seconded by the peanut gallery.. which AGAIN doesn't pass muster anywhere but on this topic.

The retard blinders are on the forum as a whole about this, and it always irritates me.


That IS the point.  It differs little from Mario, Pac Man or raiding.  It's a simple memorization of patterns that you repeat.  Yes, you have to learn a new pattern for each board, boss, or 'world' but it's still the same thing.   Yet raiding gets lambasted for it.

Want to bitch about the loot/ reward structure? Fine, fair game, I do it too.  Rarity and forced repetition is lame and stupid.  Locking people out because they don't want to repeat the same fight 10-20 weeks is stupid.  I agree.   Bitching that raiding is stupid because it follows the same principles as every video game, EVER?  Just as retarded.

Saying that only "elite" players deserve rewards because they're somehow better?  Equally stupid shit, don't disagree.  Laugh at Joe Mc Wowismylife all you want, I'll be doing it too.  It doesn't mean his opionion is that of all raiders.  It means he's got emotional/ social problems and is trying to build himself up in a video game.  Really, I tend to pity them more than hate them.

Well there is ONE rather big difference.  In every other video game, once you've beaten that level/boss, whatever, you're off to new content.  In raids, once you've beaten that boss, then you've just STARTED.  You can't go on to the next content until you've defeated that boss enough times to gear up your raid for the new boss.

It's like space invaders, but worse, because at least every level in space invaders was harder than the last because the speed changed.  In a raid, beat the encounter once and it'll be the same the next time you do it.

The "peanut gallery" is acknowledging that you CAN get 30 mouth breathing idiots together with 10 clued in players and successfully raid.  So far as I can tell from my experiences raiding, that's spot on.

Like I said, I don't have a problem bitching about the loot structure/ rewards.  It's almost like Diablo farming but even more stupid becuse trash can't drop "phat" loot, EVER.   So it's like ONLY boss farming in Diablo.


Not the case anymore. Not just because there are no such thing as "40-mans" so the smaller raid size requires a greater percentege of people to be spot on, but the fights are more complex.   If you have 5 competent people but 20 idiots, you're going to fail over and over again.  Hell, one idiot is enough to wipe everyone else in several encounters. 

I don't think that is the premise of this thread.  I think the premise of this thrad is that Raider whining about the trivilizaiton of content is hilarious because, the whine itself is proof that the whiner takes raiding far too seriously.

I have raided and I am certainly not a no-lifer, but to say I haven't encountered that type?  Well, I have, and they tend to be the ones whose salty tears streak accross the computer monitor when raiding ceases to be the end-all be-all endeavour of a game.  Folks like that are poisonous to a gaming community (whining raiders, not "people who raid") and need to be excised like an infected boil.

This is what I love about all of the less-intelligent objectivists out there; their ability to speak as if they're singing the gospel of the universe while being the ones most ignorant of the way the world works.  This poster clearly believes that his excellence and hard work entitle him to his achievements.  This in theory is all fine and dandy, but the reality is that both the excellent and the mediocre are nothing but teensy motes on Blizzard's stock reports.  Being the best WoW player of all time will not get your name known in Blizzard's offices; you will carry no weight with their stockholders.  Excellence and hard work in a video game is less useful than excellence in pissing.

The excellent in WoW may number a hundred thousand; the mediocre number in the millions.  Until the excellent manage to give Blizzard more money each month than the mediocre, the excellent will continue to get the short end of the stick.  They'd best learn to enjoy it.

But hey, all they have to do is cough up a $50/month Legends server with earlier access to content for all of the excellent to move into and everyone'll be happy.

Well this is similar to most console platformers and smups, where you learn the exact pattern and terrain to beat a level.
It's not like an RTS or 4E where there are usually more variables in play, and you learn to adapt to situations on the fly.

After you learn the basics (jumping, shooting, cooldowns and Not Standing In Fire), it then becomes like learning your multiplication tables. Rote memorization and recitation.

Except, the difference is, as I pointed out in my first post, you get rewarded in those games immediately after you figure out the pattern. On to the next level, next cool twist in the story, next wave of interesting baddies with brand new tricks up their sleeves, and next new boss full of completely different patterns.

In an mmo, you figure out the pattern (much more easily, mind you), and then... You get rewarded with playing it over and over again, and over and over again... until everyone and their mom gets their 5 piece and other assorted shit. Then if that succeeds, and people aren't utterly burned out or pissed at each other, you get to move on to the next shitty episode of that.

I just really enjoy the idea that I'm rephrasing and parroting the opinions of others to gain approval, when I was the one to broach the subject and some people just happened to come in and say that they agree with me.

Sure, when you fight a boss you've fought before, you know what to expect, but it doesn't flow the same every time. Every guild has times where it messes up a raid it shouldn't, the target does its area-effect ability at an unexpected time, or some other server-side glitch happens. Factors on both sides of a fight can give you something unexpected to solve.

The attitude in this thread has been "that only happens if somebody wasn't paying attention", again reducing it wrongly to a simple equation of win or lose. Skill is about how you recover.

You're forgetting that the rest of the guild performs a goalkeeper function against these errors. Someone puts a foot wrong, but someone makes a nice save and the raid doesn't wipe. That's NOT simple learning and repetition, that's skilful, intelligent, co-operative, variable gameplay.

Try crippling your raid - can you win an encounter with reduced numbers or a really bad combination of classes? That changes the fight and requires you to think outside the square. You force your collective skill into play.

Plus you've glossed over the learning process. Breaking a new zone, learning new bosses. Sometimes it can take forever to get the fight right, sometimes it happens right away, and it comes down to the ability of your members to overcome a challenge.

You're also assuming spoilers are known and there's a strategy to follow. Haven't you ever been in a situation where it's unclear how to win, and you have to figure it out? (e.g. first raids of new expansion, first raids after an encounter is tweaked).

There's far too much focus in this thread on WoW's Burning Crusade. You seem to define "raiding" by how WoW currently defines it. Your shared disdain for raiders all seems to stem from recent threads where Burning Crusade guilds spit the dummy, which I've already said I know nothing about, because I didn't like Burning Crusade's version of raiding so I quit after doing 60-70.

Please take a broader view than just WoW and Burning Crusade. It's ignorant to say raiding in general requires no skill.

Oops, did I just push your buttons again? Are you going to make this automatic assumption that I'm some kind of hardcore uberguild member who thinks raiding makes you internet famous? Because all I'm saying is, it's a simple fact that raiding uses skill, which you guys seem to think implies "ph34r mY 3p1cx l3wtz". I d0n't h43v 4ny.

I'll say that raiding requires a certain skillset. My beef (and it's a small one at that) is that that skillset is not one that I find challenging or "fun".

That's not an absolute statement. I have raided and had fun doing it. But the whole endgame raid paradigm can get rather tiresome and frustrating at times. And it's hardly the last word in "fun" activities in MMOGs.

You only raid these forums to try and make people admire you Tale.

At least WUA raids them to derive personal pleasure, even it come from being a dickhead.

So can Pac-man. Where is the hilarious "omg Pac man sucks only the fucking hardcore losers get the high scores" thread? Or the "lol they wiped the high-scores when they moved the Pac-man machine I love seeing you hardcores cry" thread? Or the "lol get a life losers I just play Pac-man every now and then, how it should be played!" thread?

Just stop playing when it's not fun anymore, or make constructive suggestions as to how it can be made more fun. Having a whinge because other people still find it fun when you're over it? Pretty mature.

I'm not sure what's so unfortunate about it, really. Repeated performance of essentially 'scripted encounters' happens often enough in RL in various forms (group dances, group music, synchronized swimming or whatever) and no one really scoffs how these take no skill compared to single person doing similar stuff on their own. Heck, for closer analogy from gaming field you have the Rock Band kind of games where players work literally with the script that tells them what to press and when, and the whole thing hinges on ability of them all to pull that off without screwing up.

Sure, raiding isn't exactly on level of "Black Temple, the Musical" but i don't think the basic raid mechanics deserve derision for what they are. The "skill" in these encounters is the actual ability of whole group to perform with enough synchronization and without errors, that they make it all look easy to the point where casual observer may say "oh they're *just* following the script"

Raiding is not as difficult as some of you make it out to be. And if you do a fight the 100th time I don't think too many people have still fun with it. They endure it so their guildmates can have the shiney as well. If an encounter is relegated to the fabled "farm status", thats when the fun stops.

Up to then your analysis is right if you are into that sort of thing.

Anything can be difficult. Depends what your goals and rescources are.

Walking? Not so hard. Yet it's an Olympic sport that people train very hard for (read: do over and over and over).


By your logic going out drinking with your friends is unfun the 100th time you do it also. Or having sex the 100th time in your life? Or ... get the point?

Why don't you just stop trying to tell other people what they do and don't, or should and shouldn't, find fun.

Because you fucking catasses ruined the genre from 1999 - present, and it's only been Blizzard, and only lately, that has finally begun taking steps to shrug off the legacy of EverQuest and quit turning the keys to the game over to a bunch of unemployed sock-shitting degenerates.

Pink is the new color for WUA taking the piss.  It's not sincere enough to be white, but not opposite enough my viewpoint to be green.  Because, as it says, I like pink.

Nice comparison between a low-stimulation activity and one of our primal instincts. They're really in the same league.

Sure, I will stop, as soon as I believe raiders, in general, do have inherently fun when they raid. The dramafests on official boards point to something else entirely. It's prestige, loot, e-peen, what ever, nobody has ever complained about "raiding isn't fun enough". At a second glance, I do suppose that's what they're all saying, seeing raiding for the sake of it is in no way satisfying enough.

Are you a fucking imbecile or a crafty Troll? I'm talking about the raid clique that drive the guild forward. I'm talking about people who like raiding. I'm talking about what they say to each other. Its "I'd rather grind my teeth on something new and challenging, but we need more Tier X-1 Pants for the other members of the guild". Its equipping up to meet the new challenges. When the encounter is trivial but you still need loot for your people. When every fight is not fun, but another pull on the loot lever to hope the right thing drops. Because without that gear you would either get slaughtered in that Tier. Or the other people in that raid want their share of the loot as well, and that being a social experience you have to provide to the others the same opportunities you had. And yes, that means giving them a chance at the same loot. At least for a while.

If you think that doesn't happen you never were in any leading position in any raid guild. Do you even know what "farm status" means?

You have to do it more often than you like because you need the equipment for the whole guild. And if you work with loot rarity system and not with tokens you can trade in for (like WoW now does with new content) you can be there an awful lot of time if you are unlucky with the drops. You try to tell me with a straight face you never had to disenchant Druid gear while other more common classes grumbled about it?

There seems to be a huge 'train of thought' gap with the raiders crying up a storm.


The new 10 man raid dungeons, are not, for them.


They can't wrap their heads around the idea that they won't get everything anymore. Some random poster from that WoW-forums thread:



Oh no, you'll have to run the same dungeon twice? Welp we better put things back the way they were then, split all the dev resources and lock out the majority of the player base so you can have unique content! This idea of asking for empathy/sympathy to their 'plight' when their desired outcome itself has no sympathy for anyone else BUT themselves?

 :awesome_for_real:

I was in the most progressed Australian guild for a time. (TBC to just before the big BT patch)

My point is that not all raiders and raiding guilds are the cliches you spout/see on forums. They are not always having drama troubles, or not having fun. Yes there are dramas and there are people not having fun. Yes there are people who seem to be masochists. But they are not allways like that, nor are they all like that.

There are dramas in social casual guilds, and people not having fun when they solo. You seem to pain all raiders and raiding guilds with the same brush and it's a stupid thing to do.

And I thought this was the "imbicile trolling thread"... after all, WUA started it.

Your point comes across more like "Because we didn't have the problem no real raiders do".

A tightly knit raid guild with almost no fluctuations and "dead weight" (as top raid guilds are more often than not, after all where do you jump to from the top guild in your timezone) can evade much of that "Lets make a few more loot runs to equip the back benchers/new arrivals as well" pressure.

That doesn't mean it isn't a problem in the "random loot dispersion" system that forces you to participate in content longer than you have fun with it. It just means some guilds are less affected by it.

I have friends who've raided, but I've never even heard of a raiding guild that wasn't a bunch of people where the hate for each other (or hate between cliques) was outweighed by the desire for loot, intermixed with episodes of the inverse that exploded into drama.  You schmucks (raiders in general) certainly never SOUND like you're having fun.  Just stroking your e-peens or screaming at each other over who should have gotten the last pair of uber pants.

I have to disagree. While I know most are that way, some are indeed Dramafree. Mostly because they are basically just one tight clique.

Then huzzah for ten-mans of everything.  Now the cliques can go be separate guilds.  Yeah?

EDIT:  Seriously, it always seems to be either...

"Legion of Aramithariaryhtia has once again enhanced its status, its myth, its legend in the eyes of its worldwide fans by being the 47th Horde guild in Wisconsin to down Bloothagria!"

Or else it's...

"YOU STOLD MY FUCKIN CLOUDSONG!  RAAAAGR!  RAGE!"

Are you asking me? Because personally, yes. The less people, the less chance for one of them being an asshole, the less drama.

Oh I'll be playing 10mans in the exp, not 25 unless there's not of different stuff there.

I stopped plying because I got bored of the repetition, too. But some people get less frustration from the repitition than me, and more fun from killing new stuff, so they still have fun overall.

So this is the thread where people not playing AoC are hanging out then?

Or just people stuck at work. Crushing my enemies is more of a hobby.

They're waiting for the websites and threads where Pac-Man players with high scores talk about how "uber" they are and how the noobs don't deserve to play the newest pac-man machine because they haven't put enough time into the last one.

But don't worry, I'm just as baffled by those rare individuals that did devote the time to memorize the perfect pac-man patterns, too.

Two thoughts. First, especially given how fucking slow Blizzard is at generating content, they would be better served by picking a group size, picking a raid size and sticking to it.  They can't make enough x-mans OR z-mans as it is.  Adding w-mans to the mix is the fail. And no, you can't just cut 20-man hit points in half and have a good 10-man. They should just have 5s and 10s, or 5s and 25s, or 5s and 15s, or 5s and wtfevers (or, hell, just 5s) so people can design their guilds and be done with it.

Second, raiding obviously takes quite a bit of skill, much of which is coordination. Think of 24 having 24 people playing Guitar Hero, only there are several different songs being played at once by different players, and they have to toss their controllers back and forth and switch to one of the different songs on the fly without missing a beat or you wipe.   Is it fun? For some people.  It's not really my bag.  But it's certainly a skilled activity. So was getting all those Korean prisoners to do the dance from Thriller.

I mean, think about it. There are hundreds of uber-catass, farm-whatever-it-takes guilds in WoW. But the same handful of guilds get almost all the serverwide firsts. But they don't play more than others, and in some cases I bet they play less.

The "only time matters" argument held a lot more water during EQs heyday, when raids were (a) all just tank-and-spank gearchecks and most importantly (b) not instanced (getting a chance to kill the target was often much harder than killing it because Euros, students and the reserve army of the unemployed would have everything worth killing dead before Joe Sixpack got home from work).  Even in EQ though, among the no-lifer guilds on the top of each server, there were a handful that usually got all the serverwide firsts.

This really is the new tram-v-fel debate.

Well, having sex with the same person and in exactly the same way for the 100th time _does_ get boring for people...  :oh_i_see:

Uh, no.  Most encounters you sat in one spot hitting the same 3 buttons repeatedly.  Occasionally some foozle would happen and the RAId leader would yell over vent: move here.  If the actual mechanics were anything close to do the difficulty of Guitar hero 99.9% of the "hardcore raiders" would never have gotten past the first boss in the first raid instance.

The vast majority of the "skill" involved in Raiding is organizaitonal.  Arranging 40 folks to meet in the same 4 hour timeblock of the appropraite classes was the challenge.  Everything else was just learning the encounters, which was the easy part.

El Gallo, did you stop posting for a while or something?  I don't remember seeing much of you lately.

I've just been very busy IRL during my normal reading/posting times (i.e. at work) the last few months. I'm touched that you noticed  :cry:

I wonder what it'll be if this thread is still going like 5-6 months from now and no one is playing AoC.

I'm not commenting.  I never imagined people would want to play WoW longer than 6 months....

You can level to 40 in 40 hours /played. AoC is fun but how sticky can it be at that rate?  I hope the devs decide to find out and don't nerf in the grind.