Raiding Poll

[Ironwood]

If you actually analyse what people have said (some even seriously) in here you'll notice a pattern of, well, stupidity.

"You're game sucks, no you're game sucks"
"More raiding would happen if more people raided"
"We have to raid because raidings the only stuff to do"
"Noobs !  Catasses!!"

Pointless.

However, what's REALLY the point is once again something that Lum pointed out with crystal clarity is that the pre 60 game is wildly, wildly, different to the end-game raiding.  And, as Tebonas and I just discussed, it's quite hard to go back.  As a result, some resist going forward (give me more 5 man content) and some resist going back (Another Dragon PLS).

Personally, my problem is that I honestly think that Blizzard are doing all this against the tide and without any reference to the customer base and are instead listening to the 'we've always done it this way'  or, worse, 'Everquest was popular !'

What really concerns me is the internal figures for burnout/churn and raiding vs non-raiding but of course there's no way to know that at all.  All we can go by is Blizzards own PR where they openly admit that despite the Design focus on Raiding THE CUSTOMER FOCUS ISN'T THERE YET.

I suspect they're leading horses to water and the jury's out on the whole drinking thing.

[Ironwood]

here's the funny thing: my gf and I just started a few weeks ago playing and now we can easily eat up 4-5 hours running quests or lowbie dungeons.   I'm sure if we keep up and get guilded by 60, we could stomach the same time requirement once a week for a raid.  Never ever thought I'd see that.  But we're having fun.  Oh and VOIP FTW.

hehhe, you tempt me.

Can't resist :

with 4-5 hours a week, you'll even get kicked from MC.  You are casual.  You have fuck all chance.

[Soln]

you make me sad



but that video was fun


so I am torn

[Ironwood]

You think you're sad ?  I fully expect to be kicked from my Raid guild once the Wife goes on maternity leave and she shows the disparity between my semi-casual time and her HARDCORE.

:(

[Zane0]

Psh, my server has a guild that raids two days a week.  Two.  They've cleared BWL.

Lots of raiding appeals to a subset.  Subset of a subset even.  Still, that doesn't mean that 70% of the WoW playerbase has run UBRS and every other 5-10 man instance to the limit, and are going to quit in a month if content continues this way.

EQ was quite popular back in the day, and it was far more inaccessible. Many explain this to be the result of a "first time MMO" experience.  Now, WoW is quite popular.  "First time" again?  Perhaps, but I think this idea is getting stressed to the limit a year+ after release.  There's more viability to this model -'unfair' as it might be for some- than it seems.

[Modern Angel]

here's the funny thing: my gf and I just started a few weeks ago playing and now we can easily eat up 4-5 hours running quests or lowbie dungeons.   I'm sure if we keep up and get guilded by 60, we could stomach the same time requirement once a week for a raid.  Never ever thought I'd see that.  But we're having fun.  Oh and VOIP FTW.

hehhe, you tempt me.

Can't resist :

with 4-5 hours a week, you'll even get kicked from MC.  You are casual.  You have fuck all chance.

That's simply not true. For one he didn't say 4-5 hours a week. The casual/hardcore debate isn't about casual/hardcore; it's about raiding/non-raiding and even THAT is because most of the non-raiders think every single raider spends 24/7 online.

I raid. I raid ALOT. My guild has no raiding requirements and yet we're making astronomical progress on our newish server. MC cleared in three weekends, ZG in three. All at 4 days of SCHEDULED raiding with no REQUIRED raiding. 3-4 hours each time. Fuck, 3-4 hours is what you'll spend wiping in a PUG in BRD.

The "casuals" spend (and I can almost guarantee this) more time playing in a given week than the average raider; I'll note that I'm specifically leaving out the two or three super catass guilds that every server has.

So, for roughly 8 hours per week I can go on two of my guild's raiding nights and get phat loots or whatever. That time vs. effort ratio doesn't seem so bad to me. I mean, this is what the game is at 60. The only thing I can say is to play another game. It's not changing. They've made their design decisions. There are other games out there.

[Ironwood]

 

[angry.bob]

with 4-5 hours a week, you'll even get kicked from MC.  You are casual.  You have fuck all chance.

I just got kicked from the guild I've been in since launch. I play 6 hours a day, but made the mistake I didn't want to deal with AQ with the stuff I've got going on. Apparently that made me dead weight. The endgame of WoW is the worst minimum wage job you can have. The 1-59 is great. Better than a lot of single player games. But the endgame sucks the water out of diarrhea so much it just leaves a brown, musty powder.

5-6 hours a week? Ironwood is correct. You're barely at casual even.

[Ironwood]

It is on a scale tho Bob.  Some will kick you (Calantus's Guild, for example, probably would) and some won't.

I changed it to green for fucktard up there who lacks a spine to make his own post a soapbox and had to hijack mine.


Also, I'd like to note that some people do treat WoW as a job and make money out of it.  However, more distressingly, some of you treat it as a SPORT, with all that implies.  Competition, putting in the hours, training, preparation and whatnot.

To me, it's still a fucking GAME.

This is not an argument that's ever going to resolve.  The thread itself is pointless.

[bhodi]

I don't think the fact that blizz focusing on end game as a raiding content is bad. The problem is not with raiding, it's with the other 4-39 fuckers that you have to raid or party with. Raiding by itself isn't very different than partying. The problem is the extra complication, time, and organization required to get more than a small group of people who can actually PLAY their characters together. As I said a while back, I probably would have quit the game if I hadn't fallen into a raiding guild because PUGs are simply wretched and by all accounts unfun. For your average joe who's unwilling to find a good guild and simply wants to spam LFG STRAT/SCHOLO in the Looking For Group channel every once in a while, well, my hats off to you because I want to /wrists after a weekend of trying to do PUG raiding with my alt.

I think a lot of people who say "raiding sucks!" have never raided with a real guild that knows what the fuck they are doing. A group of people who can show up on time, get in, kick ass, get the phat lewts, and portal out. It's obvious you like killing shit in interesting places and looting them dry because that's what the game (solo, party, raid) is all about, even at the lower levels; The only thing different is the people that you have to do it with.

PUG raiding is so much different than organized raiding that it's night and day, and I think some of you have only done the former. And you're right. It sucks. Like chrome off a bumper or a golfball through a garden hose.

If blizzard would make some REAL effort to streamline the partying/raiding process, give the more casual players more tools to enable them to find like players, get to the dungeon, and start kicking ass faster, I think the end game would be a lot more fun for people. Meeting stones were a waste of time, why they thought people would use that trash is beyond me. Almost every other game I've played has done it better, blizzard took a giant step backwards (or, possibly, sideways) and it's simply hurting that 'casual' 80% of the people who they lured in by the easy entry into the morpgverse in levels 1-59.

[Threash]

Ok, I'm going to drop the sarcasm and ask a serious question :  What are the easy instances ?

The easy instances are the ones your guild has already beat.  Even MC was hard at first.

ZG and AQ20 are not casual. They are just like MC and BWL, only they require 20 people other than 40... but that doesn't make them casual. When my guild was allying with another guild for ZG, we spent 7-8 hour sessions just trying to down a single boss (ended up killing the first 3 bosses in 2 runs though). Field duty style quests ARE casual, but they're also crazy farmtastic. 90 insignia to get an epic at revered (44 at exalted), each insignia takes 30 drops from skeletons. Hmmm.

MC and BWL ARE casual, and so are zg and aq.  You don't have to spend more than 3 hours in any of this zones a couple days a week, not even while you are learning them.  There is nothing not casual about raiding unless you chose to make it so, like someone above said running brd with a pug takes longer than your average zg run.

Also, making any kind of statistical judgement based on forum posts is stupid. Of COURSE raiders and "hardcore players" are going to be reading forums more. IIRC tigole said something about 25% of all level 60s having seen ragnaros... considering the level 60 population is 1/2 of the 10-60 population according to that census site, that'd mean ~8.3% of people playing wow will actually see all that shiny new content? (and don't forget that there are plenty of guilds that have been stuck in MC for reasons mentioned in this thread earlier, and won't see the insides of naxx, or aq40, or even bwl until the expansion)

Im also going by what i see in the game.  6 months ago there was The Big Three on the server, the only guilds that had mc on farm status and where fighting to see who cleared BWL faster, if you wanted to raid you had to get into one of them.  3 months ago it was more like the big 10-15, now theres gotta be over 30 guilds on the server that run mc and are making progress in bwl.  The number of raiders is just going to get bigger and bigger with every patch that makes classes more powerfull, adds new easily obtainable gear that makes content easier and more and more people reach the high levels.  The percent of "i dont wanna raid ever" people is not going to grow and i still mantain its a very minor one.

[Zane0]

Im also going by what i see in the game.  6 months ago there was The Big Three on the server, the only guilds that had mc on farm status and where fighting to see who cleared BWL faster, if you wanted to raid you had to get into one of them.  3 months ago it was more like the big 10-15, now theres gotta be over 30 guilds on the server that run mc and are making progress in bwl.  The number of raiders is just going to get bigger and bigger with every patch that makes classes more powerfull, adds new easily obtainable gear that makes content easier and more and more people reach the high levels.  The percent of "i dont wanna raid ever" people is not going to grow and i still mantain its a very minor one.

Yeah, although anecdotal, I've had the same experience.  It's pretty interesting to observe really.  For maybe six months my server had two serious alliance guilds and one serious horde guild.  They were the only ones who made progress in MC.  Then, midway through BWL, we started to notice that guilds were popping up, seemingly out of the ground- Ragnaros kills were reported from guilds and people we had never heard of before.  Nef was downed by the "established guilds", but the server third is an hour after the second, and from a guild that didn't exist back in the MC days.

Now, we have 10 AQ40 guilds, 8 BWL guilds, and over 15 MC/ZG/AQ20 guilds.  It really is exceptional growth.

[angry.bob]

Here's the thing though. That shit is only "casual', "easy", whatever you want to call it, during prime time. If you can't play during prime time, it is impossible to do. Molten core is easy? Sure. Go do try to do it at 10:00 am or 2:00 am. You'll be lucky to scrounge up 20 people in a mishmash of auction house epics and  stuff from DM if you're lucky. So not only are they focusing exclusively on crap for a small minority of their playerbase, but it's only viable to even during a few hours a day. There is other stuff they could, and should, focus on that could be used by everyone 24 hours a day. Like dedoing their entire stsytem of PvP for example.

[Ironwood]

Sigh.

When you say Raiding Is Growing, I'm tempted to ask :  Is that not just because that's all there is after 60 ?

Really ?

[bhodi]

When you say Raiding Is Growing, I'm tempted to ask :  Is that not just because that's all there is after 60 ?

It's pretty simple, I think.

1. Casual people are just that - Casual. They don't hesitate to turn off the computer and do something else and/or cancel a game if they aren't having fun.
2. The "majority" of people who play WoW are casual.
3. There isn't much to do at 60 but raid.
4. Over half the online population of any given server is at level 60.
5. A Ho-Jillion people have a WoW subscription and still actively play.

THUS, a majority of people must like raiding, otherwise they would have quit already. Thus, focus on raiding content. Progress is made.

[Ironwood]

Indeed.  That's what I was talking about up there somewhere ^^^^

However, I'm not sure that's not faulty logic that's not what's entirely best for the game.  And isn't that why we're here bitching ?

Basically, you could summarise that argument as 'They're eating crap, keep feeding them it' ?  Especially if you don't really agree with that first point entirely.

Bear in mind that these games sometimes manage to generate a complex web of Social Interaction that's NOT that easy to walk away from.

[Righ]

For example, it would seem that almost everyone in an MC Raidgroup loses all aggro management skills after a while.  Coming back to smaller groups, more and more you will notice the Rogues, Mages and Hunters that have no idea about keep level with the MT and get their stupid ass ganked.

Last time I ran Strat with my epic laden hunter, I changed into Beaststalker gear before setting off. Right tool for the job, etc. You can go in decked out in purple shit and wait much longer for the tank to build more hate, and only use auto-shot, auto-attack and wands, but then you'll just doze off.

My beef with WoW raids is not with the casual/hardcore shit. I can be as hardcore as the next guy if I'm having lots of fun. My beef continues to be with the fact that you can't find 39 other people without it turning into asstardery 90% of the time. And the repetition. And the repetition.

If you want interesting statistics, grab Census+ and run it regularly. You'll see that half the population isn't level 60 - mostly those folks are bored people with 60s playing alts. Of the level 60s online, half of them are kicking around in one of the major cities, shooting the breeze, not adventuring. That doesn't seem especially wonderful to me.

[Modern Angel]

Sigh.

When you say Raiding Is Growing, I'm tempted to ask :  Is that not just because that's all there is after 60 ?

Really ?

Well, yeah, but that's the game they've designed. Agreeing with Lum's sentiment about 1-59 and then 60 that he wrote about awhile ago. I don't want to say that oft-quoted "Raid or quit" that Tigole supposedly spewed out but... if this was a single player game and people decided they didn't like the last 25% I don't think we'd be having this conversation.

[Dren]

Just to give a very casual non-raiding "lifestyle" in WoW:

1. Log into WoW at 8-8:30 p.m.
2. Decide which alt to work on and get started.
3. Listen to chat while working on quests/professions/selling on AH.  If a 5-10 man raid is getting formed, show interest but don't commit.
4. By 9:00 p.m. the raid still hasn't started.  Log off for other alts to pick up items/cash/resources from other alts.  Play on AH for a bit. AFK a lot putting kids to bed, reading books, parenting things.
5.  9:30 p.m. rolls around and the raid is just gettting started.
6.  Log off.  Have to get up in 7 hours.

I have 6 alts.  2 are 60.  2 are 50+. 2 are 20+.  I can only play in small chunks so I'm left with leveling alts, collecting cash/items for alts, playing the AH game, and once in awhile getting into a 5-10 man raid.

WoW allows me to do this and I'm fine with it.  My expectations for a MMOG right now are pretty low.  Let me play on my own time, solo, with some chance at more.  My small chunks of time typically reward me with a level up or at least half a level up or at least a nice find on an item/crafted item. Each playtime is rewarded with something.

[Tebonas]

I think a lot of people who say "raiding sucks!" have never raided with a real guild that knows what the fuck they are doing.

Raiding sucks!

#3 guild in Everquest on my server for a long time. Personally I was in the thick right up to time (only Xegony missing), and some forays into time with another character because they had a shortage of Shaman for the raid.

In WoW right now they killed Nef and are fooling around in Silithus and AQ40 (Battleguard Satura was the latest kill if I'm informed right).

And still, raiding sucks for me. Thats neither a quality statement about my own skill as a player nor a quality statement about my guild. Its the fact that raids are nothing more than blown up group encounters. There isn't more skill needed at all. Just more persitance and more dedication to loot gathering. And yes, more people have to concentrate at the same time. If you don't have short attention span disorder that is no problem either.

At most a quarter to half of the people in a raid encounter need the skill, the rest just needs to follow orders. If you are not one of those organizers, don't flatter yourself. The purple gear you obtained you obtained from the sweat of other people and your unfailing ability to obey them...

We did insane shit as a single group in Everquest. Encounters others did with two groups. That was where the fun was for me. Thats where the fun should be for me in WoW. Not everybody just needs to get his shit together to be a top tier raider. Some people ask themself why they should haul around all that dead weight...

[Arrrgh]

I keep seeing people ignore the Play On stats, or claim that they're wrong without any explanation of what exactly is wrong with them.

So if they're wrong why are they wrong?

http://blogs.parc.com/playon/archives/2006/03/raid_content_us.html

[Zane0]

Doesn't account for alts.

[Righ]

On the contrary, it does. Of course if you play your "60 priest having fun all day but switch to" your "60 warrior to tank a dungeon", then you "show up as two". I think this was addressed in the comments, which is why I cut and pasted most of it rather than type it. It is possible that every time a sample is taken, showing only 5% of the current server population raiding a raid instance, the other 95% of players are simply going to be raiding during another sample point, and that everybody who plays on the server is a hardcore raider with at least one character. It's possible, but its more than a little unlikely, don't you think? It's also NOT what the study set out to prove. The average raiding character spends ~5 hours a month in raid content and represents 5% of characters on that server.

[Zane0]

Oh, I don't disagree with the conclusion at all.  It's just inaccurate to a point, though I have no idea by how much.

It's difficult to draw anything beyond this conclusion, though.  To argue that raiding is a waste of resources, for instance, you'd have to know the proportion of non-raiders hitting the content wall vs. non-raiders satisfied with the current rate of content.  That is of course, a very hard number to figure out.

My hunch is that Blizzard has a good handle on this number if anyone does, and they seem to have their act together in other areas.  We'll have to see what they do in the long term, though there certainly seems to be a very evident bias at the moment.

[Arrrgh]

It's just inaccurate to a point, though I have no idea by how much.

Why is it inaccurate?

[Zane0]

Because it doesn't take alts into account. :/

They say as much at around the bottom:

"Further, I would guess that a very large percentage (probably at least 33%) of people who raid MC or farther have more than one level 60 - but they only raid with one of those level 60s. So if I'm on my 60 priest having fun all day but switch to my 60 warrior to tank a dungeon, I show up as two. This is going to be undeniable and uncorrectable source of error in surveys like this."

Quite true. We have no way to detect alts. Making virtue of necessity, we only discuss this in terms of characters.

[Threash]

It's just inaccurate to a point, though I have no idea by how much.

Why is it inaccurate?

I play three chars regularly, my raiding rogue, a level 19 paladin that i mostly pvp with and ive been leveling a hunter (up to 39 now).  That census would show me as three people when im really just one, most people have several chars that they play regularly but most raiders only have one single char that they raid with.  Its very rare to find someone raiding with more than one char, while most raiders and non raiders alike all play at least one alt.  That greatly skews the poll in favor of non raiding.

Edit: i forgot to mention i also have several chars around 35 that i use for trade skills stuff for my main which seems pretty common and further lowers the accuracy of that census.

[Arrrgh]

If every raider who spent more than an hour was always one character, and every non raider was three different characters as you first said that would put the raiders at 11%. If every non raider was five different characters the raiders would still be only 18% of the total.

If you didn't realize that and based your idea on how many people raid from simply reading threads like this you'd assume...quick count of the replies in the thread...80% of WoW players raid regularly.

Raiders are just far more likely to post than non raiders.

[pants]

MC and BWL ARE casual, and so are zg and aq.  You don't have to spend more than 3 hours in any of this zones a couple days a week,

I would disagree on MC being casual - just due to the lots of respawns you have to fight through.  If you are learning MC, and it takes 3 hours to do, say, Luci/Mag/Gehennas - if you exit and come back tomorrow, you got a lot of trash to re-clear.  Noone likes re-clearing the same boring trash which is why a lot of guilds want to push on further into the zone - theres not a lot of good safe spots to camp out in either unfortunately.  MC was 'the' raiding zone for a long time in WoW, so imo thats why the common impression is that raiding is for 6-hour-stints.

I do agree that BWL, ZG and AQ are much more 2/3 hour raid-friendly - which is a fantastic idea in my book.

[Calantus]

Ok, I'm going to drop the sarcasm and ask a serious question :  What are the easy instances ?

That depends on the guild, and related to how well they complete each of the instances. At a minimum it's any instance your guild has on farm, but how well it is on farm is also a factor. I know when we used to wipe on drakes and wyrmguard pulls some of the eziraiders wouldn't come to our 2nd BWL clears (when we did Razor->Brood, Firemaw->Flamegore, Chrom->Nef) even though we had killed Nef. Now I would class BWL/Ony/MC as the easy instances for our guild, but naturally a guild struggling through BWL wouldn't have it up there, and a guild still going through MC wouldn't have any up there ('cept maybe Ony).


As far as kicking people who cbf'd with a new instance because they have shit going on I'm pretty sure we wouldn't kick them if they said something. We had a guy take 2 weeks off because he wanted to play Oblivion 24/7 instead of WoW while we we learning the later part of BWL. But he said something so we knew not to expect him to be there and had no ill feelings when he came back after getting bored with Oblivion. I sure as hell would be more sympathetic with someone who had a lot of RL stuff going on and so didn't want the added stress of learning something so long as they said so. It's the people who just don't come online when the hard stuff is scheduled without saying a word just because they cbf'd working on an encounter or wiping a few times. It's just like going AFK. It's simply not possible to expect people not to go AFK for drinks, food, toilet breaks, etc. It is, however, perfectly reasonable to expect they say something first so you know you can't rely on them while they are AFK. Nothing like pulling a boss only to find that one of the healers is AFK so an offtank goes down and the whole fight goes to shit... cept maybe logging in and flying down to CH only to find out that only 35 people bother to come online that night.

As for casuals, I literally have no problem with them being guilded and coming along to the occasional raid they have time to go to. We had a number of people who were just friends of our raiders who might come to 1 raid a fortnight, maybe. Hell, we had one guy who had 3 level 60s in our guild, none of which had ever raided with us, because he didn't want to raid at all and was only there to be guilded with his friends. But those were done under a specific understanding that such would be the case. You can't just masquerade as a core member, demanding spots over more dedicated players as well as make it harder to judge numbers for recruitment, and then just not show up to progression because you'd rather not do nothing but wipe during your play time. Something needs to be worked out with the guild or, failing that, people should go find a guild that is more casual and thus suited to their playstyle. There are guilds that have been clearing MC and Ony for months but have only just started to attempt BWL because they just don't have the time and/or inclination to do it while MC is still producing loot and fun for them.

[Signe]

I suppose you have to make rules to enforce fairness... first come, first server wouldn't really be fair, I guess.  I have to say, however, that I could never be in a guild like the ones that Cal and Sorinaugh are in... they don't even sound like fun.  Everything sounds way too serious to be fun.  I guess that's why raiding doesn't much appeal to me. 

I thought Paelos, who seems to have turned into a little hardcore WoW monkey made some sense.  It's not the raiding, it's the numbers.  Organising forty people for a raid and then trying to execute strategy over the intarweb sounds just frustrating to me.  And the raids take way too long... and you have to do them in bits!  If you do this several times a week, you're likely to be spending more time raiding in a video game than with your family.  If you don't have a family... well, I can guess the reason why.

I love playing games.  I don't love drama.  Raiding seems to go hand in hand with drama.  Someone should dig up that video with that nutty guy shouting on TS.  That's how I imagine many raids end up.  These WoW raids definitely seem to illustrate the animosity between hardcore and casual.  I suppose you can't really be a casual gamer who would like to raid every now and then if you don't want to be looked at by many people as a cancerous leech  Definitely not the sort of thing I want to be involved in.

[Modern Angel]

MC and BWL ARE casual, and so are zg and aq.  You don't have to spend more than 3 hours in any of this zones a couple days a week,

I would disagree on MC being casual - just due to the lots of respawns you have to fight through.  If you are learning MC, and it takes 3 hours to do, say, Luci/Mag/Gehennas - if you exit and come back tomorrow, you got a lot of trash to re-clear.  Noone likes re-clearing the same boring trash which is why a lot of guilds want to push on further into the zone - theres not a lot of good safe spots to camp out in either unfortunately.  MC was 'the' raiding zone for a long time in WoW, so imo thats why the common impression is that raiding is for 6-hour-stints.

I do agree that BWL, ZG and AQ are much more 2/3 hour raid-friendly - which is a fantastic idea in my book.

I'll agree with that. They need to drop the stupid respawn rates in MC. It's not their core raid instance anymore, or shouldn't be. Our plan is to do MC until people are reasonably geared and then never set foot in it again unless it's to do an occassional Tier 2 pants run. The guys running my guild are smart. They know MC is only fun for about a month and then it starts to become Molten Chore.

[Threash]

I love playing games.  I don't love drama.  Raiding seems to go hand in hand with drama.  Someone should dig up that video with that nutty guy shouting on TS.  That's how I imagine many raids end up.  These WoW raids definitely seem to illustrate the animosity between hardcore and casual.  I suppose you can't really be a casual gamer who would like to raid every now and then if you don't want to be looked at by many people as a cancerous leech  Definitely not the sort of thing I want to be involved in.

If that was how most raids went that clip wouldnt have been so popular.  The problem isnt casual raiders who only show up once in a while, the problem is with those people who show up to the raids that take no effort just to collect loot while skipping the progress raids.

[Sogrinaugh]

I suppose you have to make rules to enforce fairness... first come, first server wouldn't really be fair, I guess.  I have to say, however, that I could never be in a guild like the ones that Cal and Sorinaugh are in... they don't even sound like fun.  Everything sounds way too serious to be fun.  I guess that's why raiding doesn't much appeal to me. 

I thought Paelos, who seems to have turned into a little hardcore WoW monkey made some sense.  It's not the raiding, it's the numbers.  Organising forty people for a raid and then trying to execute strategy over the intarweb sounds just frustrating to me.  And the raids take way too long... and you have to do them in bits!  If you do this several times a week, you're likely to be spending more time raiding in a video game than with your family.  If you don't have a family... well, I can guess the reason why.

I love playing games.  I don't love drama.  Raiding seems to go hand in hand with drama.  Someone should dig up that video with that nutty guy shouting on TS.  That's how I imagine many raids end up.  These WoW raids definitely seem to illustrate the animosity between hardcore and casual.  I suppose you can't really be a casual gamer who would like to raid every now and then if you don't want to be looked at by many people as a cancerous leech  Definitely not the sort of thing I want to be involved in.

Actually, fun is always what your trying to have.  Sometimes it is, sometimes it isnt.  If you spend as much time online as most of the "core" members of a raiding guild do, and you're not enjoying yourself, i strongly encourage you to quit.  Games are a fucking waste of time anyway, if you aren't enjoying your /played, the disservice you are doing yourself is criminal.

The "fun" of a raid is crushing an encounter with surgical percision and getting phat lewt.  Its 40 disparate individuals acting as a unified whole twords a singular goal, and achieving it.  Its a beautiful thing, when it works, really.  You can read a thread like this and get the impression that "raiding is easy", but the reality is that unless you are in the top percentile of guilds that have Ouro/C'thun on farm status, your claim is hollow.

Yes, when you are doing a bossfight that requires consice communication, you need to be serious to the point that you are not cluttering vent with useless bullshit for 10 minutes.  If you feel thats asking too much, then yes raiding probably isnt for you.  The "50 DKP MINUS!" style isnt how how we run raids, and i can't image many of the forward-moving guilds do either.  At least not the ones that have a high percentage of working adults, nobody is going to come home from a day at work and listen to your shit while indulging in a hobby.  Their is some blame-gaming that goes on but i put alot of effort into killing that.

The more skillfull and coordinated everyones play, the smoother the machine runs, the more everyone enjoys the experience.

Basically, raiding can be alot of fun, but to make it so requires alot of effort.

[Sogrinaugh]

The problem isnt casual raiders who only show up once in a while, the problem is with those people who show up to the raids that take no effort just to collect loot while skipping the progress raids.

You win