f13.net

Seeing as how I've never been on a real 'raid' in DAoC, EQ, EQ2, WoW, or the like, only in games with, some might say, less complex raiding behaviors, I was wondering - what are the dynamics at work in a raid?

Is it basically just that you're up against a mob who hits a lot harder and takes a lot more punishment than usual?  But that beyond that, it's the same deal as usual of healing, aggro on tank, damage-dealers, etcetera?

I know that some games have specific gear prerequisites for certain raids where without them you'll get owned.

What are the more interesting raid dynamics out there used in the various games?  Unique or interesting special attacks that require special strategy to combat?

EQ has some highly scripted raids that are very very difficult to complete without a pretty coordinated large group of people. As an example, in killing Terris Thule, the demi goddess of nightmares, she goes through 3 or 4 'stages' of death, as determined by her health bar, where various things happen, including sudden spawns of very tough mobs directly in the middle of the fight, to AoE attacks that are utterly lethal to casters, and any number of things.

Equipment wise, it is of course easier to kill boss mobs in EQ with higher end equipement, but my old EQ guild managed to kill Rallos Zek without having gone to Ssra temple, which uberguilds often stated was a requisite to killing RZ simply because the equipment drops in Ssra Temple were the next best thing. Of course, to get to Ssra Temple you needed to collect these super rare 'shards' to get a key for ever single raid member, and this takes months to do, so its no surprise that the uber guilds stated it as a prerequisite. My guild proved them wrong, but only after 5 tries. He was very tough to kill. Time-wise, RZ is an easy mob, compared to the 'fake' god Mithaniel Marr and his temple, which can take hours and hours of coordination.

Personally, I'm glad the MMO world seems to be past that type of time sink.

This is really interesting.  So how much health he's got left determines his behavior?

The high-damage AOEs - is that countered based on where people are supposed to stand, or skills/spells that must be used right when he's about to hit that 'phase' to mitigate the damage, or making sure some guy off away from the group has aggro?

Please do tell me more - or if possible, point me to somewhere that describes this behavior in detail (I've never been able to find that, mainly because I don't know the fansites / search keywords for most of these games)

Uhm...

http://eqbeastiary.allakhazam.com/search.shtml?id=10334

The stages are listed in a post further down the page.

Hmm, interesting.  So basically, the effects that can happen are spellcasting, mob spawns, i assume maybe attack type changes?, things like that.

What about the big WoW raids I hear about, like Molten Core?  Similar style?

WoW raids tend to have multiple boss mobs separated by trash mobs and in the case of Onyxia, it's just a single mob encounter (4 easy killed trash mobs before her, kinda like a warmup).

Now, I'm not sure if you know the lingo for this stuff, so I'll go over it briefly.

Trash mob: a mob that's before the intended boss mob.  Usually has a low percentage of dropping some gear, but its main utility is to put some time betwen you and the boss mob. Usually nothing special.  Trash mobs in the newest raid instance, AQ40, can be brutal.  The stuff you fight between Princess Huhuran (a giant wasp) and the Twin Emperors can give my guild more trouble than Ragnaros (the main boss of MC) or Nefarian (the main boss of Blackwing Lair).

Boss: the main target of the raid.  Usually something scripted. Likely to have unique abilities or abilities that function on a wider scale. Garaunteed loot drops.  Lots of hit points and has damage abilities sufficient that only one person should be attempting to take the brunt of the damage and that person will require dedicated healing.  Some bosses can be more aptly classified as encounters as they won't consist of just fighting the boss.

Molten Core was Blizzard's first real attempt at a raid zone, so they did what they'd done with all of their other level 60 instances: tons of trash mobs far between the boss fights.   

Molten Core is a big underground cavern with lot of magma (wooopidy doo).  You fight lots of uninteresting trash mobs that basically require the most basic strategies.  The only trash that's remotely interesting are the core hound packs, which require you to have 5 separate mobs all die at the same time or they'll resurrect themselves. Not very interesting thought after the billionth core hound pack you've killed.  The trash is  usually one trash mob at a time and the strategy is: tank it, heal, DSP, next.

You fight the bosses. See more detail on all of these as the link I provide at the bottom. Pattern is basically trash for 10-30 minutes, and then a boss fight.

Some bosses have trash mobs tied to their existence.  You beat Magdamar and ancient core hounds stop spawning. You beat Garr and lava surgers stop spawning.

And after each boss you put out a rune with a quest/reward water. Once all runes are down it summons Majordomo Exetus.  If you get Majordomo to yield (you kill all of his guards and leave him alive), he'll summon Ragnaros, the ruler of the Molten Core.

Ragnaros is a giant elemental looking guy.  He'll attack whomever is right next to him and has melee aggro on him.  If you don't stick someone in front of him, he starts offing people at random.  He does ground based AE attacks with a knockback component.  All around him are lava pits so getting knocked back can be troublesome.  You've really gotta hit him with all you've got. Three minutes in, he'll submerge into the lava and spawn "Sons of Ragnaros".  It's around 7-10 fire elementals that also drain mana as well as do fire damage to people.  You group them up and kill them, hopefully not killing off too much of your mana.  He'll pop back and up and try to burn him down.   If he does his sons thing again, you're going to lose. 

He takes a lot of DPS and fire resist to take down. He takes good execution and coordination. He drops the best loot.  Once you've kill him, Molten Core is done. Enjoy killing him every week from now on.

More info for Molten Core at: http://www.wowwiki.com/Molten_Core  Has some details on the boss fights.  I honestly still don't know the detailed mechanics of most of the fights since my job is often pretty simple: keep people alive.

Hope this was illuminating.  If it doesn't sound very interesting, well.. it isn't Blizzard's best effort.  Molten Core is built on the bones of bad ideas.

Thanks for the writeup.  I'd heard between 1/2 to 1/3rd of that from screenshots, board posts and the like, but now I can understand it on a much more systemic level.

One question:  You mentioned mana consumption as a concern.  Does that mean that player mana is significantly finite?  I mean, in games like AC1, you'd use two spells like Revitalize Self (gain X stamina) and then Stamina to Mana Self (Turn X stamina into Y mana) in rapid succession, with the sum mana gained being significantly more than the mana required to cast.  So, with the exception of the casting time required (more casting time required if your mana gets really low), you essentially have infinite mana.

Does mana in WoW function something more akin to DDO, where in the midst of a battle your group's overall mana resources are rather finite, and so you can actually be winning the battle, though not decisively enough, but lose eventually due to running out of mana?

At least in older MMOs I've played, the 'race', the essential determining factor in whether you'd win a battle or not, was not mana nor health itself, but the enemy's rate of health regeneration versus your group's DPS - for the most part, if your DPS was greater than the enemy's health regen, you could whittle away for however long was necessary and eventually win.

I take it that's different in WoW raids?

I was in a couple of raids in DAoC... I just stuck my char to another and fell asleep while we were 2 hours into it and pounding for longer for 30 minutes on Huge Foozle #347. No problem, It didn't matter much if I casted or hit the monster or not, when I woke up 3 hours later with keyboard marks in my face and a terrible neck ache, I even got awarded some Glaciar Whatever Jerkin that was supposed to be very phat lewt.
That was the good one... with my mature and reasonable guildies and trustable allies.
I attended another one, server wide, and it readjusted my concept of idiocy.

Mana is finite but there are a number of ways to regen mana. Class specific abilities, talents, potions, armor stats (there's a + mana regen), trinkets, totems, paladin judements, etc. There's even soup you can eat before a battle that will help mana regen.  In a fight like Nefarian I run through my mana bar many times over.  Some classes given the right fight can nearly heal indefinately.

Boss mobs don't really come down to you just getting exhausted.  If everyone's out of mana, you're likely doing something wrong or you're already in an unwinnable situation.


Boss mob regen really doesn't come into play. There's a boss fight in Blackwing Lair where the boss will throw a debuff on someone where any melee hits landed on that player will heal the boss. But you can prevent the boss from hitting them.  Certain bosses can heal, but it's not just straight regen and in all cases there is a counter.

There are some fights where it is just a DPS race though. You either need to kill the boss in a set amount of time or you're all going to die.

It varies a lot, but in general the key mechanic that trumps all mechanics is getting 20-200 people to do what they are fricking told.

Managing aggro and pulling at the correct time is usually the most critical thing. This normally means having one single tank buffed to god like levels do nothing but keep the attention of the mob while a dozen priests heal him and a dozen dps classes kill him.

Beyond that it's all about convincing people to follow simple instructions to circumvent whatever weirdness that each mob has scripted into him/her.

Things that usually kill raids in all mmogs because someone wasn't listening...

 - "DO NOT CROSS THAT FRICKING LINE BEFORE I SAY SO"
 - "ONLY THIS GUY PULL, NOBODY ELSE PULLS. IF YOU ARE NOT THIS GUY, YOU DO NOT PULL, DOES ANYONE NOT UNDERSTAND OR NEED HELP DECIDING IF YOU ARE THIS GUY?"
 - "FIGHT FROM HERE, DO NOT STAND DOWN THERE, AND NO, I DON@T GIVE A RATS ASS IF THAT MEANS ONE PERSON OUT OF FORTY CAN'T USE HIS FAVOURITE SKILL"
 - "STOP HITTING IT WITH BLUNT WEAPONS YOU IDIOT, I ALREADY TOLD YOU BLUNT WEAPONS HEAL THIS GUY"
 - "WHEN THE DRAGON GLARES AT YOU RUN AWAY *BEFORE* YOU GET HIT WITH THE 4000HP AOE NUKE THAT KILLS YOU AND EVERYONE AROUND YOU KTHX"
 - "OI, MORON, YOUR PISSY LVL 3 STEALTH WON'T FOOL LEVEL 600 ASS-DEMONs, THE NO-ROAMING RULE APPLIES TO YOU TOO"
 - "GOING /AFK AND /FOLLOW FOR TWO HOURS DOES NOT CONSTITUTE A CONTRIBUTION TO THIS RAID"
 - "I TALK TO THIS CRITICAL RAID NPC, NOBODY ELSE TALKS TO HIM. I HAVE THE CORRECT ANSWERS TO HIS QUESTIONS WHERAS YOU ARE AN IMBECILE. IF ANYONE WHO IS NOT ME TALKS TO THIS NPC WE WILL ALL DIE."
 - "MOB IS AT 31%, AT 30% HE PBAOE'S AND WILL KILL YOU IF YOU ARE NOT MAIN TANK, RUN AWAY NOW. THIS IS NOT A DRILL."
 - "WHEN I SAY GO, YOU RUN ACROSS THE BRIDGE, YOU WILL HAVE 10 SECONDS TO COMPLY. DO NOT RUN ACROSS THE BRIDGE BEFORE I SAY GO, DO NOT WAIT AFTER I SAY GO. DO NOT LISTEN TO ANYONE WHO IS NOT ME. IF YOU DO NOT FOLLOW THIS SIMPLE INSTRUCTION YOU WILL DIE AND NOONE WILL BE ABLE TO REZ YOU."
 - "A NON-CLERIC JUST HIT THIS GUY, CAUSING HIM TO FULL HEAL, IF YOU ARE NOT A CLERIC STOP DOING THAT PLZ"
 - "THIS MOB IS MELEE ONLY, CASTERS, HIT IT WITH YOUR STICK THING. IF I SEE ANY FINGER WAGGLING IN THE NEXT 3 MINUTES, I'M KICKING YOUR DRESS-WEARING ASS FROM THIS RAID."


But perhaps the most common fatally ignored instruction...

 - "/ASSIST ME"

- "EVERYONE FOSUC!" 

Maybe that was just us.

One thing though about these scripted events is, to me at least; the real fun is in learning the event.  Yea, dying repeatedly.  You really need to be forefront though for that to happen, as most of the scripts become well known rather quickly.  Even if you know the script though that doesn't mean you will be successful.  In EQ at least you really need to keep 50 or so people awake at the computer long enough through some really boring prep work (that's you Rathe Council) to be successful.

Also, boss mobs tend to have a bunch of quirky abilities that nothing else in the game has. In EQ for instance, many mobs had an ability called (I think) Ravage. It would be a big melee hit, but hit the first 3 or so people on the agro list. So, you would have off-tanks in addition to your main tank, to soak up these other hits.

Also, in addition to EQ, boss mobs may have some VERY nasty spells, like AE diseases which kill you in 3 ticks, or something.

Heh, I remember a certain EQ raid where, if ANYONE died while in the vicinity of a certain boss mob, 4 high-level skeletons would spawn from the corpse. This basically means that if anyone dies, the raid will completely wipe, as one death will turn into 2, and at that point, you have 8 powerful mobs running around with no one tanking them.

My raid group was fighting this boss, and just as we killed him, someone died, which spawned 4 skeletons. This quickly turned into 2, 3, 5....a lot of players being killed.

In the end, my rogue was the only person left alive, standing stealthed among about 100 skeletons, waiting for them to despawn.

The following chat was pretty funny, as people were telling me to get the hell out of there, not realizing that I had totally dropped agro and went into perfect stealth, and that I was not actually in any danager....actually, this happened somewhat frequently. Good thing I was one of those freaks who actually LIKED corpse runs. It made me feel useful.

My monday night was spent raiding the Lab of Lord Vyemm in EQ2. EQ2 raids consist of 24 people max. This was only the second time our guild has raided the lab and seeing as only one guild on our server and probably less than 10 game wide have finished the zone there aren't a whole lot of written strats for this zone yet.

The first challenge is proper group setup. The 24 man raid is made up of 4 groups of 6. In eq2 all buffs are group only so you have to have the proper class mix and group setup for 2 tank groups with proper buffs and then 2 dps groups. For the first time ever we actually got a raid group together that had one of each type of healer. That made the group setup pretty easy as the two tank groups had 3 healers, 2 tanks, and one class that could shift aggro to the main tank in each group. The left over dps go into the other groups w/ one healer per group.

The lab is a fairly long zone with 8 or so named mobs in it. In between each name is probably 6 or 7 trash encounters. Luckily even the trash encounters have a chance at dropping some good loot though so they aren't just a complete time-sink.

We rolled through most of the zone without a problem. The challenge in the beginning was just figuring out what resists you need (heat, cold, poison, mental, etc...).  We supply everyone in guild with various resist jewelry so there's no excuse for not carrying it with you. Since we didn't have a mezzer with us this time we ended up off tanking most things. The group setup I talked about earlier really helped with this since we had two tanks with full buffs.

The toughest mobs at this point were those with the AE fear. Once we figured out which ones were doing that though it was easier at everyone would just switch from run to walk for those fights so fear couldn't send you as far and wouldn't send you in to aggro other mobs. And with the proper resist gear the fear only lasted a few seconds.

Everything was going VERY well up until the last mob, Lord Vyemm. Vyemm is a level 74^^^ epic x4. Max level for players is level 70 to give some perspective. Vyemm posed the following challenges:

Frontal cone AE - Mental damage
Tail Whip is a rear melee AE
A 35 second long range AE that was heat damage and also a gravity flux.

Gravity flux is a spell that tosses you WAY up in the air and classes without safe fall would then take falling damage. The other problem with Grav Flux is that the main tank would lose aggro while flying. Whoever would land first and took action vs Vyemm would draw aggro and Vyemm can one-shot any non-tank class.

We still haven't figured out how to beat him after 9 attempts (each death takes 10% off your armor and at 0% it's useless). After that we were mostly out of armor.

After talking with the guild that did manage to beat him it appears they didn't have to deal with the mem-wipe during gravity flux so not sure if anyone has manage to beat the newly buffed Lord Vyemm.

We couldn't find a way to keep him facing the main tank and away from the rest of us during the grav flux. Once he turned toward the main raid and did his frontal AE it was pretty much all over. The other AE's also caused a problem with jousting (running in and out of AE range) as you would invariably get hit with one of the 3 AEs. I think the best we did was about 2 minutes in and got him down to around 70%. During that fight we found a spot where the tank wouldn't get thrown too far so would only lose aggro for 1-2 seconds. Everyone else gathered under the dragons belly to avoid all but the grav flux AE and made sure to turn off and interupt all attacks/heals as soon as the AE went off. Getting 24 people to react instantly to an AE is a bit of a challenge to say the least. We lasted a while but someone else eventually grabbed aggro, he turned and frontal AE'd the raid to death.

He does seem killable but it's going to take perfect timing and coordination from everyone in the raid.

Eventually this zone will be a 2-3 hour raid. I think we finished everything up to the final fight in about 2 hours. We then spent another 2 or so hours strategizing and attempting Vyemm. Turned it into a fairly long night.

Do main tanks have access to any long, slow DoT's in EQ2?  Where the main tank keeping some sort of wimpy DoT on him prior to the gravity flux would ensure he turns back to the main tank after the mem wipe?

This thread has made me nostalgic for the 'bad old days' of EQ. Its funny; although if presented with the same options I would never go back to the 80 person raid format, I do have fond memories of some raids that seem to outshine the more honestly recalled hours and hours of tedium and frustration.

Strazos, that encounter was the scariest, most tense thing evah. It wasn't simply dying that made the 4 skeletons pop (any one of which could kill any player within 8 seconds), but simply getting off the aggro list caused them to spawn. Stealthing, FD, even zoning caused 4 to spawn if that player was on this boss mob's aggro list.

The worst for me was the Bertoxxulous raids, the god of disease. 3-4 hours of mini bosses, constant tension, and absolutely necessary for progression at the time. And with a 200+ member guild, you had to do the raid over and over and over again to get everybody 'flagged' to keep advancing. I left EQ before my guild went much past this, but I hear that Council of Rathe was far far worse, 8 hours being standard for a raid. And not just 8 hours and you're done for your guild. Chances were you would have to do that particular 8 hour stint at least 3 times to get everyone flagged. That's 3 successful runs. Most guilds failed at any one of these events an average of 3 times before succeeding in killing the boss mob once.

Never again. Corinthians 13:11 comes to mind,"When I was a lifeless nerd, I did nerdy things, I raided like a nerd, I fought like a nerd, but when I became a nerd with a girlfriend, I put away EQ-like things."

I dunno... a lot of the fun for MMOs from me comes from having room for error - where you can play with an imperfect template, or an imperfect group setup, or having clanmates along who are fucking around half the time and can't be arsed to follow actual directions, and still winning.  I guess I don't just see the "challenge" in cat-herding; I mean, sure, it's difficult, but it doesn't seem so much intellectually (i.e. Flash games like The Dark Room) or physically (i.e. CS twitch skills) taxing as it does like a test of endurance.

I'm not seeing what having to worry about dying if things don't go right adds to PvE.

The issue isn't the main tank regaining aggro once he lands. I don't think it's an actual mem-wipe so much as an aggro interupt only while the tank is in the air. I could be wrong here as we didn't have a ton of attempts to fully test it out. But the couple occasions where our tank got blasted across the room he would turn kill a bunch of people then the tank would land and he would go charging after him again.

The problem is the instant he goes into the air if someone else on the hate list is still on the ground they will instantly get aggro. Or if someone didn't turn off their auto-attack and lands they will grab it before the tank. Once he turns toward the main raid force it's very hard to recover.

The other strat we didn't have a chance to attempt is to only go after him with the 2 tank groups. Both of these groups have enough healing to eat the non-frontal AE's and the healers would never do anything other than heal. This means a tank would always be the one to grab aggro after the aggro interrupt. Putting all the tanks to the front would mean hopefully he would never turn toward the healers. It would make for a long slow fight but it might be doable.

My problem with raids are that they are only moderately interesting for the first few people that figure out how to defeat them.  Once the word gets out, they become yet another Foozle_6879 for people to extract loot from.  If there was a way to make these encounters more dynamic, they may be able to preserve the fun a little longer.

I think that this is the fundamental reason that I prefer PvP games to PvE games.  Playing another human has the potential to produce a widely varied encounter every time. 

I would aggree with your assessment but only when something is figured out and is in farm-mode. If the correct strategy to beat a mob you've killed 100 times still requires perfection then that is just boring.

But when you are first figuring out a zone or a mob it's a lot more satisfying (for me at least) to be pushed to the limit of your combined abilities.

Raids are so much fun. I remember the first time my guild did Hate in EQ waaay back and I was able to do a 45 minute beer run and not be missed at all. My buddy the eqholic was at my pad, so he could have taken over if something bad had occured...but nothing did.

Riveting gameplay.

Gear really isn't so important as the ability to play properly, in my experience.  Skilled and dedicated players will often be taken over idiots with superior gear.

The time commitment for raids depends on the game.  In WoW, good, organized guilds can clear the high-end instances in two or three hours.  Many encounters are fairly conventional (based around tanks and keeping them up), but Blizzard has shown some originality in designing encounters after MC.  For instance, the first fight in Blackwing Lair has several phases, the first of which involves 20 or 30 mobs being thrown at the raid at once.  They're too powerful to be killed straight out- some can be mezzed, some kited, some are more vulnerable than others.  There are multiple ways to get through this phase.

AQ, the new instance, has some very original fights.  One encounter, Battleguard Sartura, is a fight with a boss and four minions that cannot be directly tanked; they de-aggro every few seconds.  Players who aren't in plate get shredded in short order if they're within several yards.  Controlling these mobs is an exercise of trying to stun them at proper times, and getting everyone to know where to position themselves and when to run.

Fights like these are difficult to master, as they involve a good amount of random chance.  This is part of Blizzard's stated design vision for raids, I believe.

Warcraft movies (http://www.warcraftmovies.com/) is a good place to check out some encounters. 

My favorite raids are ZG bosses, by far.  Even though we're doing MC (hey our group made it to Rag last week, only 4th time in there, whee.) I still like ZG a lot better.   The coordination required of the people is a lot more intense and the things the bosses do are a lot more interesting than the MC bosses. Not to mention the zone itself is a lot more aesthicly pleasing.

Mandokir is one of my favorites, just because he "levels up" when someone in the raid dies.  In some cases he'll shout "DING" and one of the other bosses shouts "GRATS!" back at him. Still funny after the 20th time you see it.

I really dig the new bosses in AQ20. (WOW)

There's an encounter that's basically a battle scene between NPC soldiers (lead by a Lt General) and waves of baddies. The key in the fight is keeping the soldiers alive (they do lots of damage and hold aggro well) and killing / crowd controlling the baddies quickly one by one; there are 5-6 waves with unique types of bosses showing up in each (some have AOEs, some reflect spells, some heal, etc). Then in the end assisting the Lt General in his showdown against the boss... it IS possible to kill the boss the traditional way, but he hits waaay too hard for non-epiced groups to pull it off.
Another encounter is basically a game of 'hot potato'. The boss will target a person randomly, and that person will have to kite him around (some classes are better at this than others, but the other people can assist) and lead the boss to an egg, which the rest of the group burns down and makes it explode just when the boss passes over it. Then the boss takes X damage depending on how close to it the egg burst, chooses a new target and the process is repeated until it reaches 20%, at which point it becomes vulnerable to normal damage and is tanked/killed as usual.
Yet another boss starts from 0 mana, constantly drains mana from the raid, and when his own mana bar reaches 100%, he kills everyone (and uses random damage spells before that). So you actually need your druids in feral form (he can't drain their mana that way) and have everyone use all mana draining abilities they have.

The Defender mobs (while not really 'bosses') are very non-standard too.. they have three abilities randomly chosen from three sets of two ('primary attack', 'secondary attack', 'defense') and the raid has to discover which ability set they have and adapt mid-fight. For example, the primary attack can either be a meteor centered on someone not actively tanking the mob (that hits for a fixed amount of damage distributed amongst everyone in the area of effect) or a plague on a random person (cannot be dispelled, does moderate-heavy damage to the afflicted person and everyone in close proximity for 30 seconds). Obviously if it has meteor, everyone needs to cluster up to avoid getting one-shotted (20 people taking 500 damage each > 1 person taking 10000 damage) and if it has plague, people need to spread out and whoever gets infected has to run away from the raid for a bit. Etc... I honestly don't really know how people handle these mobs without voice comms.

Not really a raid encounter, but there's a fun new fight in WOW... you fight a 5-man NPC group composed of random classes, only they actually behave like people -- they try to concentrate on your healer, crowd control and stun-lock your groupmates, use potions and items, etc. Definitely different from your average encounter, almost feels like pvp. :P


-- Z.

MY first thought was have a OT stand out of range of the Grav Flux thing, so that when the MT is up in the air, the boss turns to the OT.

I have to say that I really love raiding BWL in WoW. The encounters are much more challanging than Main Tank on mob, heal + dps. Each fight requires a good deal of team work and brains. The only problem I have is that a lot of the fights are very Tankcentric, in that you live or die by the ability and quick thinking of the tanks. (main tank, and 2-4 offtanks). I should probably have rolled a tank, cause I really enjoy leading raids, but instead I rolled a rogue, so the majority of my raid time is spent inbetween DPS ON - DPS OFF. But since I do quite a bit of actually leading the raids, I have to know what every one else is doing, and make sure they are doing the right thing. MC can suck my ass though. Such a crappy raid dungeon. BWL and AQ are great.

Not sure that will work due to positioning. It would take the OT too long to get into range and while doing so Vyemm would end up out of position. Any movement on the part of Vyemm results in someone taking an extra frontal or rear AE. It's worth a shot though and I'll suggest it next time we can raid the Lab.

Aggro seems to be the common denominator in raid situations - where by definition the maintenance and management of aggro makes the difference between success and failure.

I think, now, I'm starting to see where the differentiation comes in between very different MMOs - if a game doesn't have aggro management (i.e. mobs basically go for whomever), you by definition can't have radically different defense abilities between classes (i.e. if mobs are going to randomly go for every member of the party, you can't let anyone get wtfpwned too easy).

It seems that if one were going to take apart the 'diku' paradigm for future, 'different' MMOs, aggro is the linchpin that has to be discarded - it by definition requires a certain selection of classes and from there a certain sort of group gameplay.  You have to let all the party members get knocked around similarly.

Essentially, all the strategy that is injected into these raids seems to arise at the base from aggro management.  If strategy is going to be injected outside of the 'classical raid' sense, it would require a move away from that.

I imagine, in such a MMO, the difference between classes would be something akin to the difference between using a shotgun, a SMG, and an AWP in CS (not getting into the twitch, it's just the first example that pops into my head).

Question:  I haven't played a whole lot of pen and paper D&D, nor did I ever get into the really high levels of MUDs.  Was aggro management big in those venues as well?

That was entirely up to the DM. There weren't any real mechanics for it that I remember.

Gotcha w/r/t D&D.  Did they have the equivalent of difficult raids in the MUDs?  If so, how did they run them w/o aggro management being a key?

Depended on the MUD.

Circle muds and ROMs that I played, mobs attacked the first person in the room list.  Lots of Circles and ROMs added in "Rescue" and "Heroic Rescue" skills that you could get as warrior classes.  These would grab whoever you named and "pull" them behind you, so you were the one getting beat-on instead.  This only worked one mob at a time, though, so you'd have to rescue multiple times if there was more than one aggressive mob in the room, or if one wandered in while you were fighting.

A lot of MUD admins would add-in tougher mobiles with specials or uber equipment or jacked-up stats for players to have a challenge.  However, most MUDs were so unsophisticated that it was just a question of attrition.  Would your HP or the MOBs go down quicker. Party members were only there to increase damage-done or keep your Tank's health higher.

 Tanking came from MUDs, because of the lack of aggro management and 3d movement space. It was just one guy standing there acting like a wall until the HP tickers resolved a winner.  I played MUDs for a good 5 years... so I suppose that explains my tolerance for "crappy" (as deemed by others) combat systems like WoW's.  They've come a long way since 1995, and I appreciate the chance to do more than stand there.

Bertoxx was a pushover... try coordinating a 72 ppl Rathe run with 40 other in vent screaming about how they wanna get keyed too...as of today ive never even come close to the thrill i felt when we killed him the first time, or faced anything that was so downright hard in the gaming world...


most of the raids in EQ was ZZZfests tho....i never ever ever EVER wanna see something like Vex Thal in a game again.

Yeah, the DM, aka the "missing ingredient" from MMORPG.  Having a human control the opponent could lead to much more variance in any given Raid or epic encounter.  Boss mobs wouldnt have to have ridiculous amounts of stats if you could allow significant variance between encounters, everything from variable spawn location to rearranging the geography of the zone itself each time.  In truth the instancing of raid zones by WoW really don't take advantage of the options instancing could provide.

But of course that's too expensive so once again static reusable content ftw!

Xilren
PS The irony about raiding in these games is they are actually the closest thing we have to "doing" a dungeon in a traditional D&D sense where there's a logical starting place, a set of objective, and an end state with victory and failure conditions.  It's the neccessary repeatablility which sucks.

Well, uh. I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the Hydra trial from CoH.

To activate it you go on a stomping spree in the abandoned sewers and wipe out big globs of Rikti, but that's just a standard hunt to open the contact up. You get an access card that'll unlock a certain maintenance door in the sewers for an hour and a half - the time starts ticking when you interact with a world object at the heart of the abandoned sewers.

The sewers aren't exactly easy to get around in - tight corners, narrow passageways, and enemy groups sized for 6-8 heroes. But assuming you get everybody there alright, you enter the lair of the Hydra. It starts off like a normal sewer but opens into a huge chasm with catwalks running every which way and Rikti sprinkled throughout. At the bottom is the head of the Hydra, an alien beast the Rikti brought in to serve as a heavy siege engine.

Getting down the catwalks is the "easy" part - though of course if somebody falls you need recall friend to pull them out of the mess they no doubt landed in. Scattered on the way down are weapon crates, one for every member of the team. Half are thermite flamethrowers, half are particle guns. Temporary powers. You need to get as many of them as possible.

When you finally hit bottom, the Hydra head is in the center of a chamber with four alcoves, surrounded by its own tentacles, surrounded by hatched Kraken, and groups of Rikti are in the alcoves protecting generators. Hatched Kraken are monster-class adversaries with a punishing AoE stomp (and they nerfed XP for them but boosted the mission complete, because people would kill the simple giant monsters for lots of XP and not actually try the Hydra). Tentacles come in the three major minion strengths - boss, lieutenant, and minion - and spit toxic sludge which can punch through a lot of defenses. Fortunately, the thermite guns can do some decent damage when used to hose down a tentacle.

The ultimate goal is to wipe out the Hydra head, but it's protected by an impenetrable force field - you need to wipe out all four generators before it'll shut off, and when a generator fails you only have a few minutes before the Rikti teleport in to repair it. To make things a little more complicated, only the particle guns can actually damage the Hydra head once it's been exposed.

To make things a lot more complicated, the Hydra head can shoot you with nasty psionics even through the force field, and they're pretty much unresistable damage, even for the 'tanker' classes.

To make things even _more_ complicated, when the head gets down to 50% and 25% health, a bunch of Rikti reinforcements gate in to protect it.

Of course, in CoH tankers get taunt and taunt effects, which rocket them to the top of the aggro list and leave them there, and they get a small one every time they hit something and can fire off a larger AoE one every 10 seconds or so. But psionics still punches through tanks, and when the Rikti show up to reinforce the Hydra, they're way too spread out to get taunted all at once.

The trick is timing - bringing down the generators with simultaneous attacks and then rushing in to do as much damage to the Hydra as possible - and maintaining the pressure in the face of the Hydra's pisonic assault.

--GF

Question for you.

How do you talk so much shit about all these games when you don't have any idea how any of them actually work?

I hate to bring UO into this, but on the aggro issue, how did it work? I don't remember anything complicated and there certainly were no taunt skills. Was it just proximity? I remember charging into many orcs while my brother's mage nuked and healed me. Occasionally an orc would peel away from the pack and chase him. I never actually fought the big mobs like dragons head to head since there was always a bard in the party provoking.

A game that gets rids of aggro can get rid of chain healing which means no healer classes which means everyone can have fun in a fight.

GW has no aggro crontrol, but healing is still inportant. Some of us like healing.  I don't see how making bars up is less fun them go down.

His title is there for a reason.

Personally it's always irritated me how aggro works in most mmorpgs.  Having played loads of single player rpg's when I was a kid and having played PnP DnD plenty the concept of "pulling" mobs always struck me as kind of dumb.  And the larger the group the more retarded I find it to be.  In DnD I would say the general rule was that once you entered a room or an encounter you then had to deal with all the adversaries who were in that immediate environment.  The only way you would normally draw more is if you set off an alarm, made to much noise etc...  I think in DnD you wouldn't normally get killed from drawing to much "aggro" but more often from wandering into or picking a bad fight.  Now since this was DnD every DM played it differently and some were pretty brutal and others focused on allowing the group good chances to succeed while keeping things challenging.  Obviously no online game can easily accomplish that. 

Really I think aggro control comes down to how many mobs you are able to take on yourself.  In games were the number is one, maybe two, aggro usually consists of pulling one mob, but in games like Diablo II (not an MMORPG I realize, but an online RPG none the less) you would have packs of monsters on just one person, so aggro control wasn't so much an issue. 

I don't seem to remember Guild War's PvE feeling to wrong when it came to aggro either, though I've not PvE'd since that game came out.

And in a large group environment I don't mind playing the healer but I think most people either get burned out on it or end up just not having so much fun because when your healing you tend to not notice what's going on so much visually and pretty much have your eyes glued to the health bars on your screen.  Which is another thing I like in CoV because my Fire/Dark corruptor can heal (and has to be mindful of positioning to do so) while engaged in the action.

I can't really offer any comments on raiding though as I'm not a raider and have only ever been on a couple.  I do think that raiding seems to me to really be a distilled form/exacerbation of a games general group mechanics, which is why I think the roles tend to be so defined in that context.

Ours was a heavily modified DIKU with a similar system for aggro.

Anyone in the room could be a valid initial target, unless stealth kept them from being seen.  Once engaged that person remained the tank unless they fled or someone rescued them.  Later on our Shadowmages got a doppelganger spell that created a low-hp dupilicate that would take their place.  Some specials would let casters pick a random target.  I added one or two others that let them switch targets during combat, such as a counter-move that would possibly throw a stunner out of the room (usually the tank since they wanted to stun-lock the mob).

For the most part though, once someone had aggro they kept it until dead.

Update:

We managed to beat Vyemm on Monday. Took about 8 or 9 more tries and we were on our last attempt before everyone's armor finally gave out but we got the bastard.

It turned out to be a matter of positioning and timing. We ended up going healer heavy and using multiple tanks to control the aggro and mem-wipe issues. It took a bit of luck and a lot of teamwork but he eventually died.

We now have one more zone to beat (Deathtoll) which we don't even have access to yet. It's been hard to motivate people for the 20+ some hours we're going to need to raid-farm to get access. The farm zone (Ascent of the Awakened) is the most boring god-awful piece of shit zone I've ever seen. No names to kill, no worthwhile loot drops, mobs with millions of HP's (takes about 5 minutes per encounter with a full raid force with no risk of dying), etc... I would like to kick the zone designer squarely in the nuts. I'm not even sure 20 hours will do it as we've only gotten one (out of four) eyes so far after about 6 hours of farming, not to mention you have the risk of failing the eye-spawned encounter which means you get to do it over again after farming another fucking eye.

When you describe it like that... it all sounds like fun!

For all of this time invested you get what... a 5% better piece of gear?  I really hate raid endgames. 

This was a long raid given that we are still in learning mode and make a lot of mistakes. Total time was about 3.5 hours. Once we have it down we should be able to roll through in about 2 hours.

To get an idea of value of the raid you have to know the DKP system. We earn 1 DKP point per hour of raid. You can then bid DKP on drops for your main only and only if you are at that raid. Minimum bid on a fabled (highest tier) item is 5 dkp. If no one bids on an item it goes into the guild bank and other guild members not on the raid can then bid on the item again with a 5dkp min. If no one bids it out of the guild bank it is then sold within guild for guild bank cash (for non-raiding members), then finally sold outside of guild for cash.

During this raid we got about 4 or 5 crap loot drops that went to the guild bank. Another 6 or 7 nice drops that went for around the minimum (5) DKP including a few that were VERY nice that went at the minimum because they were class specific and only one class was on the raid. About 5 that went for a decent few DKP (12-20 range). And finally 2 items that went for 20+ including the boss mob drop that went for 45.

To determine if a raid was worthwhile you compare the DKP earned to DKP spent. 24 people x 4 dkp (round up since it was slighly over 3 hours) = 96 dkp earned. Somewhere around 130 DKP were spent on the items.

So from a loot only perspective it was definately worthwhile. From a guild perspective it was also worthwhile as I believe we were the first on the server to beat the recently buffed boss mob which results in guild pride. We also advanced a heritage quest for a number of people who had made it to the step where you need to kill Vyemm.

From a personal perspective I won a Swashbuckler only hat for the minimum DKP that was a server discovery and the nicest chain cap I have seen out of KOS yet. It was around a 25% improvement over my existing "signature quest" hat. I also earned 1 full AA point off of the last kill (so did everyone else).

Unfortunately, I am all too aware of the dkp system.  It makes me cry.  The whole raid endgame makes me cry. 

The idea that I get to work 12h just to come home and try and organize a bunch of idiots people to whack a large foozle so I can get a +1 sword after 4h of mind-numbing tedium just doesn't seem like fun.  The thought that people are willing to pay real money for the opportunity to stand in line to do this makes even less sense to me.  I have to blame my my 2 years in EverQuest.  It has forever purged the desire to endure this type of "fun". 

Could be a difference in guild dynamics. Everyone in our guild knows at least a few other people from real life. Our guild leader for example is a buddy of mine from highschool. A bunch of his friends from college that I met a couple times play. Then friends of theirs, so forth and so on. We also have at least 4 families that play. 2 husband and wife teams, my father was in the guild for a long time until he decided to move to PvP, the parents of a couple other guildies play, etc...

An example, I went to one of my close friend's, brother's bachelor party. I've met his brother a bunch of times before that but never met any of his brother's friends. Turned out 2 of the other guys there were actually in the same guild as me and were college friends of our GL.

We've recently taken on a few people from one of the other top raiding guilds on the server due to attrition within our guild. Could be a change in dynamic now but only time will tell.

Question:  Why doesn't the dragon just drop 40 scales, or what have you, and each person gets one scale that they can turn in for the loot item of their choice?

Other games figured out how to that... 4, 5 years ago?

At that rate, raid content would not be generated quickly enough to keep people interested.

This answer was fairly obvious 4 or 5 years ago.

Sounds kind of boring. Every class would have the same gear then. The gear would also not be able to be as good without ruining the game balance. A mob dropping 1 or 2 pieces of incredibly good gear doesn't imbalance the game as it would take a long time to collect however many slots x 24 characters given this particular zone has a 1 week lockout (but that's another rant).

I didn't mean to be too harsh.  I totally understand this.  Sometimes you can forgive a lot in a game's design if you're playing it with a group of fun people. My criticism was more directed at the mechanics of the game not toward your enjoyment of it.  If you're able to play online with a bunch of good people, that can make the whole experience worthwhile.

I guess I don't see how the mechanics are an issue. Seems to be purely a people issue to me, then again maybe I'm blinded to the mechanics because like you said I enjoy the company....

My opinion is that if a game needs a dkp system, something is wrong.  Perhaps I could be blinded by the fact that I couldn't play a game with people that actually use a dkp system.  If someone I play with wants something on a raid, I was pretty happy to let them have it.  Seeing someone else get all excited about getting the Sword_of_pwn has always brought me more happiness than a 10% improvement in my pixelated toon's ability.

DKP serves the greater good in my opinion. It tends to balance the entire guilds improvement over time. Sure, you may enjoy seeing someone else get an item at a cost of giving up 10% potential. But do that 10 times and you're now half as capable as the next member of your guild who is ready to move up to more challenging content but now has to take you through the content to gear up or leave you behind. That person now has to give up loot 10 times because they don't need it in order to catch you up.

Using a DKP system you would both be earning and bidding on items and improving at the same pace so neither of you would be bored raiding a zone you no longer need anything from.

Does that make sense or did I do a horrible job of explaining it?

It's an issue because (in this case) 22 out of 24 people probably got fuckall for the trouble of the raid. Which means 24 people now have to do the raid again, only now its easier so that only 20 out of 24 people need to do it again but its even easier and then only 18 people out of 24 now have to do the raid again...

Raids are totally fucked because they never reward everyone, and those who are rewarded are rewarded so much more than those who aren't that its inevitable the green bitch of jealousy comes out.

Of course, knowing many of the people in real life helps a great deal. But I'm with Nebu. That kind of content makes me want to stab people with my turgid cock.

Hippie. 

I hope this doesn't end up rehashing why DKP is needed is current game systems, how it's helpful, or that the need for the system isn't any indication of a game's merits.   We've had this discussion I think rather extensively in the WoW subforum.

Cliff notes version:
DKP advocates: People have different motivations.
DKP detractors: Raiding is stupid.
DKP advocates: K. People still have different motivations. Raiding still exists. 
Free-roll advocate: Hah, I raid  and we just roll on all gear.  Shit, my alt druid won a Rag hammer.  Suck on it, poopsockers. 
NBG hippie commune member: We talk it over and just decide who would benefit most from it. Our leaders are fair and wise. 
DKP advocate: That's fine. That'll work in some situations, DKP will work in most others where guild members aren't on a first name basis and raiding in something other than a utopian society.  THIS ISN'T NAM, THIS IS WOW. THERE ARE RULES.

Repeat the above for 1 to 4 pages.

Actually in this particular instance everyone did get something. That was 1 full AA level and 4 DKPs. As far as loot only about 10 out of 24 got upgrades this time but the other 14 still earned DKP to spend on future upgrades. Each and every raid will reward DKP which means you are always getting something out of raiding.

Did I really get anything for working today? No, but I will get something in 2 weeks when I get my paycheck. The fact that a co-worker might be on a different pay schedule and got paid today doesn't mean anything to me.

Ugh.... now you made me compare raiding to a job. You bastard!


Then again if I could drink and bullshit with a bunch of my friends while on the job I might like it a whole hell of a lot more.

/selfowned

That made my day... well that and being called a Hippie.

Why shouldn't classes use similar gear?  Diku style class differentiation seems to be a major problem, not a benefit.

The two most interesting 'class' systems I've seen,  WarCraft 3 mod for CounterStrike and AC1, generally allowed players of different classes to use similar and overlapping equipment.

That said, why would it follow that every class would have the same gear from everyone getting a 'token' from the raid exchangeable for loot?  They could turn in the token for different items depending on their preference.

Also, since when is game balance predicated on keeping some items rare?  The best MMOs I've played all explicitly don't keep the uber items rare and out-of-reach of the average player.  I always just kinda figured that was a good thing.

What, so someone who plays 10 times as much as me should have more gear and more power?  How is that fun for me?  Fuck that shit.

===

Re: DKP - it sounds necessary, given the system you're operating under, just as money has replaced barter for most impersonal interactions.  Intimate interactions will be governed by context instead, just as in the real world - you don't pay your wife to sleep with you, for instance.  I would imagine about 90% of raid guilds would work best on DKP, and the other guilds that don't won't use it - I see how you'd want to debate using DKP or not within your guild, but debating it overall just seems like a really pointless argument.

===


Maybe the solution to that is that people should play the game far less (say, 5 hours a week?), or that they should play games with content-generation tools such that content gets added quicker than in, say, today's EQ2 or WoW, even accounting for everyone only needing to do a certain raid once?

It seems like the player has three options:  Playing because they want to, not playing because they don't want to, and playing because the game will 'pay' them.

The problem is, what you're talking about involves switching options 2 and 3 - doesn't that create an incentive for game designers to create content that you'll play well beyond where it interests you, just to have "something to do"?

Heh, at least they couldn't see through perfect rogue stealth. Sure, I guess I made 4 more skeletons by hitting Escape, but hey - someone has to be there to do the corpse run or say when the mobs despawn.

What's a mob 'despawn'?

Usually a timed encounter. If you don't finish it or fuck it up then the mob goes 'poof' and you blow your chance. Try again later.

There's the rub between raiders and non-raiders. It always comes down to the sense of entitlement non-raiders feel and the contempt of the raiders that the non-raiders want to trivialize the time they've spent.

Anyway....

I actually play less now that I'm raiding than I did when I was leveling. I raid 3 times a week and each raid averages around 3 - 3.5 hours. So, I probably play about 10-12 hours per week. I played closer to 20 hours/week as I was leveling. We also don't require raid attendance other than if you start the raid you need to finish it. So, as long as you have one night a week you could put in 3 hours you could be a raider.

Thats what im finding now also. Now that I have devoted myself to raiding, I actually seem to spend less time in the game than I did before. Its actually nice. I have fun raiding, and I get to spend more time with my friends/girlfriend.

Some other issues with no DKP system:

1. Self-interest. People only attend raids with loot they want. Some people are just not charitable enough spend a long play session with no chance of direct reward. It's amazing how many people suddenly don't log on on certain nights. This can leave the guild without classes necessary to even do the raid.

2. Lucky short-timer syndrome:  DKP systems put the powerful items in the hands of those who play the most and contribute the most. This helps the guild go and get more shineys for everybody. How much good does it do the guild is Mr. Casual logs on one time in a month, hits a lucky roll, and wins the best weapon in the guild? Note that Mr. Casual could save up his points over a longer time and eventually get a sweet item.

3. Random luck is a pretty poor way to distribute wealth. And, loot in computer games is analagous to wealth. DKP is a step toward fairness that can keep people more satisfied. A guild can topple like a house of cards with a slight puff of drama, so fairness is a good thing.

I still don't think people understand.  DKP exists because raiding is a broken game mechanic and involves large numbers of equally broken people. 

My issues aren't with the dkp system.  My issues are with the fact that raiding endgames are so messed up that they required players to create things like the dkp system to un-fuck them.

I think it's because people are broken. The greedy, broken nature of people in just about any setting usually causes the evolution of systems of control.

People can't be expected to help others in a game. They can't be expected to put aside their own needs for someone needier. Finally, /random does not always reward the saints and the most deserving out there.

Look, everyone wants to be unique. People aren't the broken part. A lot of MMOG players have obsessive personalities, or else they wouldn't take part in shit like this.

The system itself is broken. If I waste time going on a raid after I max out my level, I sure as fuck better get something for it. And most of the the time most of the players don't get anything for it. There's an easy fix for that. Diversify the loot tables and give loot to everyone for shit like this. It's not fucking rocket science. McQuaid and Co. set a bad fucking precedent and we're just screwed. Even the history of the mechanic is depressing.

HOWEVER, it dates back a little further. Back in Major Mud when the first expansion came out, they added a weapon to the game that only one level 10 player could get. It took about two people to really survive the machine. Myself and one of my arch-nemeses were the only two thieves in the game. We both wanted that Crystal Shortsword like a motherfucker. So the moment the servers went up with the first expansion, we both hammered to get online. When we finally got in, I got to the room it was in about 15 seconds before him. When I left, I killed him.

Games don't do that sort of shit anymore. But one item for one person for one realm. That's almost as bad as a the current drops for raids. HOWEVER, the realm only had 50 people playing. So, uh, yea, fuck raids.

FWIW, life itself makes it clear that the time all of us spend on MMOs is trivial, no matter what we're doing.  Some We-Deserve-Better-Because-We-Spend-Time raiders might try and kid themselves on that, but a conversation or two about their raiding with someone who doesn't play MMOs at all (A group of people I would henceforth refer to as 'people better than us') should dispel any such illusions.


Sure it sucks, but I think it's kind of cool that something like DKP came about - life is more interesting when players make (and can thus break) their own systems, rather than having them hard-coded into the game.  Just as I enjoyed MMO trading/bartering more when there was no secure trade, I'd be less interested in the DKP system if it were hard-coded into the game.

Because we all know that the lack of secure trading was good for non-duchebags, right?

I firmly believe that if you had player justice mechanisms in place, even non-douchebags would benefit from a lack of secure trade.  When players make something for themselves, it has a personal touch and charm that a pre-programmed system just can't match.

The solution was giving the players the ability to make more things (e.g. justice, protections against thievery), not less.

Ohh jesus, not this line of crap again.

Just to save everyone the bother: yes he actually believes that.  No, he's not kidding. Yes, he may be mildly retarded or at very least sociopathic.

Enough with the 1997 era timewarp troll-bait. If you're going to spew insanity, there's a place for that. (http://www.grimwell.com)

Just to clarify, I'm saying "you could come up with something more 'meaningful' in a way", not "you'd have something that everyone would like better".  Secure trade is the gold standard now because most everyone seems to like it.  But as is the case with so many things, when something becomes popular and easy, oftentimes something more intangible is lost in the process.

No clue what you're saying here. You go from saying that playing a video game is a trivial activity (no shit) to saying that people who don't play video games are better people? Then something thrown in about person A talking to person B about something person B is totally unfamiliar with. This would make person A a douchebag regardless of whether they are talking raids, football, baseball, physics, or politics.

I don't get it your point at all and I'm not even totally sure you even have one.

I like raiding. So shoot me?

If you like to raid, you don't need any more punishment.

Isn't this really more of an 'to each his own' thing? I can understand why raiding would be frustrating to someone who only does it for the loots, but quite frankly, raids are a lot of fun for me because it's a time to accomplish shit as a team and shoot the breeze in Vent. Sure, it may not be fun for some, and it's not fun if you aren't in a fun group of people, but why just make a flat generalisation? People enjoy different things.

Accept in many games, past a certain point all the content is raid.  So if raiding isn't your thing, you are SOL. 

Yeah, like fuckwits.

But the problem is, we're fighting for a piece of the same pie.  If I'm playing WoW, and I want to be able to run an aimed-at-level-40 version of BWL that's about right for 5-10 people, I can't under the current system, because the raiders have insisted that's "content just for them".

If at level 60, I want to run a version of BWL that's balanced for someone to solo or duo, and receive the same rewards for doing so as a 40-man raid - I can't, because the raiders have staked out that piece of the pie.

Again, once the raiders win their battle that the devs should abide by a false equation of "greater risk / difficulty equals greater reward", from there all bets are off, it's all rent-seeking, and you can never just 'live and let live' with other playstyles.  They're out for your piece of the pie, and by extension you're out for theirs.

There's plenty of things that people do that are nothing but a fucking waste of life-time.

Raiding in a MMOG or playing the things is a better use of my time then, say, being an alchoholic and slowly drinking myself to death, or sitting rotting in front of the TV for hours on end every night. Playing or not playing a specific type of computer game is no better or worse than many other pastimes or social interactions.

But if you consider those people to be better than you, go ahead. I won't argue. I'd probably agree.

Who are these nebulous 'raiders' of whom you speak? Is there some sort of special-interest pressure group advocating this, or are you just making a generalisation based on what you see people posting in MMO forums? Sure, your statement may be true of some people who raid end-game content, but I think it's rather farfetched to assume that the vocal majority on the forums represents the same proportion of people who play the game and don't bother with the forums at all. I don't give a flying fuck if someone can do the same content scaled down for lvl-40s in 5-10 man groups, although I do think it's a bit of a pipe dream development-wise.

I think the real issue here is that it's simply not possible to tailor one dungeon for different group sizes and level ranges. I challenge you to design a boss fight like Razorgore or Vaelastraz or even the Zul'Gurub (20-man) bosses for small groups without forcing certain class balances.

Yeah, but those types of people are losers, and they usually sit at the margins of life, not really making themselves noticable.  So it's hardly worth considering them as someone we'd compare ourselves to.

Sure it is.  Just make 'em easier, or (CoH style) grant temporary powers to party members that allow them to make up certain roles in a scaled down fashion.  Class interplay isn't really the point anyway.

http://www.csun.edu/~vceed002/health/docs/tv&health.html

Content would be consumed too quickly, especially if we're using Blizzard as the measuring stick.  At the current ratio of drops per person, a raider waits an average of a couple weeks per item at least.  This is only tolerable because the social dynamics of a 40 person raid can keep things entertaining; it will not be tolerable for a 5 or 10 man group.  Furthermore, fights such as Vaelestraz are guaranteed to kill 12 of your 40 man raid on a good day; not easy to scale.

Rate of content consumption is never a valid argument against a play dynamic, if you're looking at the game for the perspective of a player.  It only works if you use the perspective of a money suit.

Boyo, you must have lived some kind of priveliged and sheltered life so far. Probably the most naive thing you've written here.

.

If there's something yet to be done that is challenging and that makes one's character distinctive, it's always something to gun for, even if it takes a long time to reach.  Even if it's out of reach at the moment, it remains a "carrot".

The pure achiever (and these aren't even necessarily "hardcore") plays to attain perfection for his character.  If he gets the best stuff, he has won the game.  If there isn't something else to reach for soon, he won't be hanging around. Content consumption will affect whether the achiever has things to achieve or not, and thus whether he is enjoying himself or not.

For the many with a hybrid of motivations, a lack of achievement can rankle, and when combined with other issues they have with the game, may shift their decision to play.

It is a valid argument when looking at a game from a perspective grounded in reality. Try it.

And TBH, it kinda sucks when you always have content to work on. My server is new so my guild had to hit up ZG->MC->BWL->(AQ20)->AQ. We're only just up to Sartura with the gates having been open for 2 days and to be honest I'm getting a little tired. It was only 2 months ago at most we first zoned into MC and we've been learning one boss or another constantly til then. I want a breather. I want the content to stop for a while. I wanna farm the shit we know for a while before the next shiny hits live.

From a perspective grounded in reality, if a game has great content but not enough of it, that just means you play until you run out of content, and then stop to go do other things, coming back when more content is added.  It doesn't make the game any worse, any moreso than a movie is 'worse' than a game because it only entertains you for 2 hours.  I mean, really, are you going to sit there twiddling your thumbs if the game isn't giving you something to do?

If anything, I'd rather have a game with 10 A+ content units than 100 B+ content units - because not only am I having more fun, then I have more free time as well.

Some enjoy the sustained and ongoing experience that virtual worlds provide.  If I wanted to burn away for a couple months and then move on when things got old, I'd be more inclined to play non-persistant games that don't come packaged with long term subscription fees.

One month is not 'long term', and for most of us 15 dollars a month is not an earthshattering fee if even if you're not playing it 'all month'.  Also, the 'sustained and ongoing experience' is usually crap - which precludes the whole 'virtual world' aspect.  In order to have a real sustained and ongoing experience, you need a game where the players can make their own content, usually via PvP.  A PvE game can probably never be a 'world' to begin with, so why bother caring whether it's 'sustained' or not?  Of course, all that is IMHO, but if I were really looking for what you imply, I wouldn't see the allure in persistent-world games much.

Well when we're talking about a single month of playing, one doesn't even get to endgame content, so there'd be no reason to complain about it.

Where do you find the authority to make this conclusion?  From your own extensive experience with endgame PvE?  It is relative indeed, but it's also rather silly to say this just after trying to argue for one side over the other in this thread (which is stupid, but you did it!) with a series of trite and tired moral platitudes.

Again, I'm not seeing the logical reason there should be a difference between 'game' and 'endgame'.  I certainly see it from the business suit side - keep people playing longer, make more money.  But from the player's side, not seeing it.

Having more free time is not my objective when I get into an MMOG. I've got X amount of free time to burn on whatever amuses me. So long as something is entertaining I don't feel the need to tally up how much free time I have left after it.

DKP is communism, only with a capitalist sheen. I'm constantly amazed that people who are otherwise politically conservative love them some DKP.

DKP is least like communism among the major loot systems. Random rolls are the most "communistic". Everyone's on equal footing regardless of contribution or aptitude.

A central loot committee that assigns based on need and good of the guild is pretty communistic. Corruption and favoritism plague these systems. Ingenuity and hard work is not necessarily rewarded in this system.

DKP, on the other hand, is the most like free market. Those players who want to benefit from the guild put in the time and the work. It's like sweat equity with the wealth of the guild allocated based on contribution.  Trying to apply a free market, real world business model to online guilds gets absurd really quickly.

Just because guilds don't hire members in at varying loot pay rates doesn't make DKP communism.

ALL loot systems are communist, or at least socialist in flavor. They all try to allocate wealth from a central authority. And it's because the loot systems are fundamentally broken that you HAVE to put some form of looting order in place, because not everyone will be rewarded for going on raids, and many will be punished (repair bills with no loot to offset the loss).

The next step is to have controls put into the game that manage DKP's. I will weep then, oh will I weep.

It just proves to me that MMOG developers are all hippy commies (http://www.f13.net/commentary.php?subaction=showfull&id=1129654069&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&).

When a hunter goes out, shoots a deer, and takes it home to eat, that's communism?  Raiding is just a more elaborate and sanitized form of that.

A hunter is solo. He can make whatever rules he wants about his deer meat. Raiding takes 20-40 (or more) assholes working together as a collective. The spoils have to divvied up "fairly."

Something fundamentally broken in your comparison of raids to a form of government when you can equally equate guilds top down management of loot to large corporations. Now if the game itself enforced, with penalties for not doing so, the distribution of wealth to the unwashed masses of these guilds, you'd have an arguement.

My guild (and by inference our loot distribution system) is an Oligarchy.. I'm guessing a lot of guilds are, those that aren't straight Autocracies. It seems to work OK.

Your last point is crucial, though. DKP doesn't actually measure contribution only participation -- i.e. the raid leaders, MT, healers and class leaders all accumulate points at the same rate as the people that are AFK half the time during the raid. In the "real world" the CEO (aka the raid leader) does not accumulate wealth at the same rate as the mail sorter. However given all the political and social drama with the other types of loot distribution systems I still think DKP is the best way to handle this problem.

Having X amount of free time, I want to get in as many interesting experiences as possible.  Hopefuls for this summer, in addition to MMOs, include krumping, parkour, learning to surf, and trying to get some academic writing published.  The dollars I put into the MMO are not important; I want the most bang in terms of fun for time invested.  No slow, by-the-numbers progression; I want some Sesame Street shit, where it's gratification from start to finish.

In the end you die, turn to dust, and everything you did in your life has exactly the same meaning as everything else: zero.

One leisure activity really isn't any better than any other, for hte most part. Is surfing really a great way to spend some valuable time?

If you don't want to spend a lot of time in a MMORPG then don't. Some people read books, some watch TV, some work out, some play sports, etc. In the end all these activities are basically equally meaningless.

If you are looking for instant gratification MMOPRGs probably aren't for you. A lot of people do spend too much time playing MMORPGs, but I can 100% assure you that plenty of people find your leisure activities worthless - and they aren't patrolling message boards making sure to tell everyone that.

"LOL you surf bums - get some jobs!"

If people are playing MMORPGs to the point where they are not eating, cleaning, going to work, taking care of kids then that's a big problem. If they are playing MMORPGs to the point where they can't surf and play cricket who really gives a shit? You, apparently.

Edit: Let me also point out that you've accumulated 400 posts in about 2 weeks. Your time is not that valuable.

The Claremont Institute once tried to tackle this by using the fatalistic approach as bludgeon to beat atheistic liberalism with.  "How then, shall we live? The entirety of liberalism's answer is that it is better to play chess than checkers... We have seen the future, and it is an endless adult-education seminar."

Except, maybe it's just me, but "It is better to play chess than checkers" was always an appealing life philosophy to me - that by using more of our talents and exploring more of our possibilities and potential rather than fewer, we achieve greater self-actualization.

As for instant gratification in MMO's - why not, exactly?  I started with AC1, and it gave me instant gratification.  So does DDO, so did ToonTown, so did Puzzle Pirates. Neocron could have, if they came up with a better way to level.  CounterStrike (yes, you can mod it to give it persistent/MMO components) does. I see no reason why other MMOs can't do the same.

Sounds boring, also sounds like a good foundation to build a cult around. I think I'll stick to what I find fun.

EDIT: I'd venture that I'm more self-actualized than anyone who would use a word like "self-actualization", especially those who feel the need to project their lives and beliefs upon others. I just do what I do... enjoy doing what I enjoy doing. I don't analyse my life or try to weigh how meaningful or worthwhile it is. I don't see why people bend over backwards to make themselves different, or "better", nor why they care that others do not. I guess maybe that's how they have fun, good on em I say, just wish they'd just stop bothering me.

LaRouche beat you to it.  All his little culties take classes at LaRouche headquarters on Rhiemann, Gauss, classical musical composition, etcetera.

Which, come to think of it, is actually kind of cool.


Because we have been born into a very unique situation - into the developed world, relatively young in an era with almost limitless knowledge at our fingertips (interesting theories abound about what that means for the future of education), and thus the potential, assuming we find ourselves dedicated enough, to eventually change the course of world events and otherwise significantly impact the lives of others.

Dick Cheney started out his life path by leaving Yale and laying power lines.  The barriers to entry (assuming you're aiming for something non-elected) have only lessened since then.  I've known people who were doing absolutely nothing with their life who later on ended up at KSG and went on to big things. Nobody who knew Ronald Reagan at 30 would have predicted he'd someday be president.

The world is important enough that there's no good reason/excuse to simply leave it be as it is.  The personal development is your own best guard that you won't fuck things up as, say, Cheney and Rumsfeld have. (Or substitute liberal names, depending on your ideological persuasion - my intent is not to make this into a Politics thread)

I actually agree with Mediocre on this one.

I made a conscious decision years ago to try and push myself to see what I could contribute at the top end.  Sitting and watching Jerry Springer and losing whole hours to worthless spectacle was not the kind of person I decided I wanted to be.

So, yes, I agree that it's better to play chess than checkers.  Even closer to the mark would be, "It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

Though, I am not sure I agree that you should be telling other people to play chess and that checkers sucks.

Yet you're sitting there debating gaming bullshit with the rest of us. Losing whole hours to worthless spectacle describes MMOGs pretty well. Sure there's social interaction and all the rest of it, but it's hardly a high water mark of quality use of time. Now and then, I imagine how much painting I could get done if I didn't spent so much time playing teadmill MMOGs that never end and never truly go anywhere. May as well throw the rest of the games we play on that pile too, you keep the puzzle solving and leteral thinking and whatnot, but lose the social interaction.

I'm not knocking the games so much as saying that they're not a huge step over watching TV, though I do think that using your brain for puzzle solving and communication is better for you than watching Jerry. But Jerry's fun to watch sometimes too.

Correction, I am sitting at my desk at a job I am leaving in three weeks debating bullshit with the rest of you.

A well paying technical job, I might add, that is particularly well suited for idle discussion on message boards.  And yet I am leaving it...

Conundrum?

edit: Also between the first post and the second I spent five hours digging into how ATM (not that kind, the other kind) networks work.  Hardly wasting time involved in the pursuit of spectacle.  Anyway, I am not saying you can't spend some time in leisure activities, I am saying that I don't want to be one of those people who does the least amount possible ALL THE TIME so that they can go be vegetables.

Oh, I'd agree that that doesn't necessarily follow from our shared starting point - that's my own little addition, based partly on secular notions of the social contract and partly on general tikun olam thinking. But this is interesting, so let's delve a bit more.

I will say this, though - it bothers me, in some sense, that many people with the means and opportunities necessary to enact great change (i.e. they can afford broadband and WoW so they're not desperately poor) are more daring, more driven, more dedicated, and spend greater energy of thought and analysis on a video game than on real-world problems.  Never before, as a world, has there been so great a disparity between our capabilities for progress and our willingness to use those capabilities.

I'm certainly not immune to this; my dad always used to give me shit when I was little about how I could spend hours studying complexities of video games but wouldn't put the same amount of time into serious intellectual work.  I'm not that bad these days, but there are still times when I'll find myself having an easier time slipping into a MMO (or F13) than I would writing a paper or learning something new, and I try to self-correct.  Of course, everyone loves a little "checkers" (i.e. Springer) from time to time, and the person who never does is probably one burned out motherfucker. But that's not to say our collective balance isn't a bit off from where it should be.

When I say "Checkers sucks, play chess", I'm not implicitly adding "Because I always play chess and not checkers and thus I'm so great".  Hypocrisy isn't my worry; I think that if everyone calls everyone else out on their shit regardless of their own failings, when reasonable, we all end up better than we would autonomously.  Hell, I don't do the "online societies" thing really, but I have an anonymous myspace account solely for the purposes of yelling at random people I've never met to quit fucking up.


"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best, if he wins, knows the thrills of high achievement, and, if he fails, at least fails daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

ATM is such a pain due to logistics.  I'm greatful we dumped our machines that used it.