I’m embarrassed to say that even though WoW was was not my first, second or even third MMO, I still didn’t actually understand what the word meant when I started here.
(and perhaps I still don’t fully understand it)
That said, it’s not completely obvious to me what my answer to the OP’s question would be. Just because I don’t play a part of the game doesn’t mean I wouldn’t miss its contribution to the overall atmosphere and community of an MMO.
Yes, raiding is a cancer in mmos. – let me clarify, having an end game that revolves around organising other people rather than being entertained… is a waste of dev resources.
Yes because when i tried wow i didn’t know what raiding was. If said content doesn’t exist how does it take away from trying said product, you wouldn’t know about it.
Yes, that’s what I’m saying. I think they could have had similar success if they invested the same amount of development into a different end game.
I guess I disagree. I think the initial devs were a huge reason it had its success. Take them away, I think you take away a large part of what made WoW successful.
Now throw in…has there been a thriving MMORPG that didn’t have a form of raiding?
Why are we firing all the initial devs? Surely they didn’t all work on Molten Core and Molten Core only?
That’s like removing Miyamoto from Nintendo.
Most of the major dev players all came from a hardcore raiding EverQuest guild and were primarily hired due to their hardcore raiding experience.
If raiding was not going to exist in WoW there would be no need to favor people with pre-WoW raiding experience.
Kaplan? Pardo? No reason to ever hire them to work on WoW.
Tried? Yes.
Continued to play for over a decade? Absolutely not.
“Who put this multiplayer content in my multiplayer game?”
Seriously, an MMO without large-scale organized content is like a Vegan KFC. Sure it can technically exist, but what’s the point?
Blizzard had plenty of success pre-WoW though. It’s the main reason I tried WoW in the first place.
I would put a lot of faith into the Blizzard of 15-20 years ago to do whatever they decided and do it right.
Im mean. Ok. It doesn’t change anything I said though.
I still strongly believe that they would have had a different game director. Different dungeon designer. Different quest designer. All of this if they werent going to add raiding to the game.
WoW would have been completely different if different people were leading it, and…going by the experience of “every single other MMORPG in existence” I feel it would not have come close to its longevity without raiding.
I agree, very different game. I just think the old Blizzard could have pulled it off.
Once WoW came out the MMO landscape was forever changed. So many games came and went because they didn’t measure up to it and anything releasing was trying to be the next WoW.
Who knows how many potentially great ideas never made it past the idea phase because “that’s not how WoW does it” stopped them in their tracks.
Yet plenty of games did try things different and failed.
Warhammer Online, Wildstar, Age of Conan, the list goes on and on with other games doing things differently. Often with no (or nearly zero) raiding end game.
Age of Conan, for example had a bunch of dungeons. Nearly no raids. Tons of PVP. Failed miserably.
Warhammer Online…not sure that had any PVE Raiding at all. Was all PVP basically. Failed miserably.
Sure. Didn’t know what raids were until my guild forced me into MC. Even then I preferred dungeons until I did Kara. I have barely raided this expansion which is a regret I have. But chemo wrecked my body and mind and am now too worried I’d be a burden to try it again. Same with m+. I’ve been off chemo for a year and have beaten (tentatively) cancer, but the long term effects are staggering.
Most of the failed games had one thing in common, they weren’t based on a popular PC gaming franchise.
If WoW had been the first thing Blizzard ever made, it probably would have met a similar fate.
Also, Ultima Online had plenty of success pre-WoW and was a sandbox MMO.
At the time I started playing WoW, the entirety of my experience with MMORPGs was… F2P Runescape in like 2006. It would have hooked me regardless. It’s graphics were infinitely better, it’s world was infinitely larger (I cannot overstate how tiny 2006 F2P Runescape’s world was), combat actually had depth to it (Runescape was point and click), and it felt like I actually had things to work toward that had purpose, rather than just endlessly grinding exp.
I got lost in Warcraft when I first played, and I didn’t even know what endgame was at the time, so no, raiding not existing wouldn’t have kept me away at the time.
That said, if the point of this thread is to suggest that Blizzard let go of raiding, I’m still gonna have to give it a hard no. Raiding is one of the very few things Blizzard stomps the competition with. Drop raiding, and the game loses one of it’s edges.
Raiding didn’t matter to me when I was 14 and trying a proper full fledged paid AAA MMORPG for the first time ever. But it matters to me now that Endgame is what keeps me playing in the long-term. Which is really going to be the case for a lot of long-time players that aren’t altoholics.
If anything, raiding needs some emphasis returned to it going forward. Mythic+ has done a thorough job of making it pointless below the Mythic difficulty due to the reward schemes of both forms of content.
You bet I would. There is so much more to WOW than raiding. Raiding is maybe 10% of what is offered. Raiding is over rated.
Putting words in my mouth much? never said anything like this.
Raids are “too large” imho and a waste of everyones time.
Thankfully not only do I disagree, but so does Blizzard.
ok? /5char
So diving into the references?
Hmm… found some interesting reads there, though Radoff’s material in particular appears to be outdated (link defunct).
I would agree here. Other games have done quite well without dumping everything into the more competitive aspects of the endgame.
To tell the truth, putting it into dungeons rather than raiding would have made it a more natural extension of the content encountered while leveling… at least during early WoW, where it was expected that you’d at least do some dungeons.
Breakout hits do tend to loom large over the history of gaming… and sometimes the wrong lessons of their success are learned, and the imitators (and sometimes even successors) fail to grasp the real reasons for their success.
Quite frankly, I think a lot of WoW’s meteoric rise is simply a case of being in the right place at the right time… and subsequently sucking all of the oxygen out of the room, leaving no room for a competitor to gain a foothold. Raiding or no raiding, that’s arguably the one detail that didn’t really matter; so long as there was a relatively steady stream of high-quality content, WoW’s rise would have continued as it did until its peak during WotLK. It’s also unsurprising that only now (probably from WoD onwards), as the game is faltering, that some genuine competitors are making headway; and they’ve also started deviating more from WoW’s model to crave out a stronger identity.
And yes, far too many good ideas get scrapped early on simply for being “too different” than what was previously successful. Unfortunately, this way of thinking is also what leads to stagnancy and rot.