Raiding sucks.
There, I said it.
I spent YEARS raiding in games like World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic. You’d think I’d look back on it fondly, but I don’t. Raiding is widely considered to be the highest form of “endgame” for MMOs, an organized activity that demands the highest skill and cooperation between multiple players. The truth of the matter is that raiding is a thinly veiled form of psychological manipulation used by game developers to keep you playing and paying monthly subscriptions.
I look ahead to the release of Guild Wars 2, and I’m irritated and confused by those who claim that it won’t succeed as a MMO unless it has raiding of some sort.
I disagree, and here’s why.
Raiding is about your money, not your enjoyment.
Subscription-based MMOs NEED to be the only game you play. They need to keep you logging in each and every day. If you stop playing consistently, then you may realize that you’re paying for a service you’re not using. Even at a modest $15 per month, that’s enough to make some players cancel their subscriptions. Raiding solves this problem by giving players a constant source of challenges and rewards along with a sense of accomplishment, and while that sounds like a good thing to most raiders, it probably sounds like a good thing to most hamsters too. Push a lever, and get a food pellet. It is the same principle at work in raiding, except the hamster gets his pellet every time, and not randomly.
When you call raiding “endgame,” you’re lying to yourself. The very idea behind raiding is to make a game that NEVER ends. Even if you succeed in defeating the bosses of one raid dungeon, developers like Blizzard will always make sure there is another tier of content just out of reach.
Games should be expansive. There should be reasons to log in and play. I have no issue with large worlds to explore, secrets to discover or challenging PvE content. What I do take issue with is when players are forced to spend their time on repetitive, scripted tasks purely for the sake of advancing to the next tier of repetitive, scripted tasks.
Raiding as “endgame”
Raiding is about gear, not skill.
I’ve already ranted about specialized gear found in subscription MMOs, and the reasons behind why they separate endgame PvE and PvP gear. But let me take things a step further.
While making content challenging is certainly in a developer’s best interest, the real point of raiding is to keep you coming back again and again for pieces of randomized loot. Why else would players return again and again to do the same scripted events over and over for weeks or months? If every player in a raid was rewarded with the gear they needed, the life cycle of the raid would plummet, and it would become obsolete very quickly. Developers of subscription MMOs need you coming back, and they dangle a carrot on a stick to ensure that you will. And why do you need that gear in the first place? Because the next tier of raids requires you to be more powerful than you are currently, and power is determined by stats. All MMOs use players’ stats in one way or another, but in subscription MMOs like WoW and SW:TOR, stats are everything.
I’m not saying that raiding doesn’t require skill and coordination. It does. Sort of.
It does require a certain mastery of the game and your class in order to defeat a boss the first time. You need to execute and push the right buttons at the right time. The problem lies in the fact that the vast majority of boss fights are completely scripted. It only really takes skill to defeat a boss the first or second time. By the fifth or sixth time you’re repeating the same task, it becomes almost boring. Practice makes perfect, but farming sucks.
These days, even getting your first kill on a boss is much easier than it used to be. As games like WoW gained popularity, more and more websites sprung up providing you with step by step instructions on how to defeat the encounter. The top 5% of players in the World defeat the toughest content on the highest difficulty, and everyone else pretty much rides their coat tails. A simple Google search for a specific boss fight will net you multiple videos explaining how to defeat it. Raiding for the vast majority of players is, in reality, just interactive painting by numbers.
It isn’t about skill. Raiding is about incremental, random gear acquisition from memorization of static encounters. In subscription MMOs, the guy with the best gear wins. Getting that gear is all that matters.
The Ultimate Gear Score!
Casual Raiders, or “How can we get more hamsters on this thing?”
In WoW’s earlier years, during the time of their Burning Crusade expansion, raiding was the pastime of the game’s elite. Content was gated in such a way that you needed to not only have the gear to succeed, you needed to defeat the content that preceded it to unlock it. Blizzard then decided that raiding shouldn’t only be enjoyed by players who dedicated 4-7 nights a week to it for hours at a time. Things like raid attunements went out the window. The official reason for this was so that more and more people could experience the content that so much effort went into creating. Raiding shouldn’t only be for elitists! It should be for everyone!
Sounds almost noble.
The real reason this decision was made is because raiding is such a successful psychological motivator. Why wouldn’t developers of subscription MMOs want the majority of their players to invest in it? People standing around with nothing to do may begin to question what they’re paying for every month. All they needed to do was offer different levels of difficulty for the same content, just enough so that every player at every skill level would be able to find a challenge that matched their ability and kept them playing. This was an incredibly simple and effective idea for Blizzard to implement, one that had already served them well in their Diablo franchise (and still does).
The addition of things like achievements and titles only served to motivate players even more. The status measure between players wasn’t only about if you were a raider or not, it was about how far you had progressed and on what difficulty. Where you a member of a progression guild? Where did your guild rank relative to other guilds on your server? Raiding may have opened up to more and more people over time, but all it really did was get more and more people running on the same wheel. And all the while looking at their neighbors’ wheels to see if they were any further ahead than they were.
Now it’s to a point where the mention of a MMO without raiding somehow means the MMO is flawed or incomplete. Players have fallen in love with the same mechanics used to ensnare them.
It’s like a gamer’s version of Stockholm syndrome.
Raiding is NOT about teamwork.
Raiders love to romanticize the experience. On the surface, it’s like a classic fantasy novel. A group of adventurers from different backgrounds and with different skills band together to defeat an evil which threatens the land.
When I ask people why they love raiding, they often give the same answer I used to… “It’s about playing with my friends to achieve a common objective. It’s about teamwork.”
Only it really isn’t.
I’ve made several friends over the years because of raiding, but I’ve lost a few as well. Raiding can be fun, but it can also be incredibly stressful. Playing with your friends sounds great, but what if your friends aren’t good enough or don’t have the gear required to be successful? What if they make mistakes which wipe your raid, wasting precious time? What if they’re not playing the right class or role? What if they play the same role as you and need the same gear you do?
Just Google “Raiding Loot Systems” and you’ll find multiple examples of complex systems put into place to determine who gets what and minimize resentment and perceived unfairness. Gear is progression, and competition over it is the norm. That’s what happens when only a fraction of people are rewarded for something the whole group achieved. The amount of drama caused over raid loot over the years is staggering. Grown adults will act out like six year olds over someone else getting a piece of loot instead of them. Every loot system has its flaws, and players frequently put time and effort into manipulating them. Even in random pick up groups, invitations only go out to people who are perceived to be able to pull their own weight via mods which track the player’s gear score. This pre-screening serves to weed out those who wouldn’t be “earning their loot” in the eyes of the raid leader.
The quest for gear and progression often means you stop playing with friends entirely, as there is often an inverse relationship between how skilled a raider is and how friendly he is. Put simply – nice guys really do finish last. It’s usually the obsessive, aggressive, impatient perfectionists who excel, and they usually don’t tolerate people who impair their ability to succeed. This isn’t something exclusive to raiding in a MMO. This kind of thing happens on sports teams, on Wall Street and anywhere else people take competition and personal excellence seriously.
Maybe you’re lucky, and maybe you’re part of a raid team that doesn’t put all the emphasis on progression. Maybe you all get along extremely well. You’ll still have your moments of perceived favoritism, finger pointing and other assorted childish behavior. From my own experience, the most fun I ever had in WoW was being part of a highly successful 10 man raid team. The problem was, the majority of other members of our guild who weren’t on our roster gave us no end of grief over it, especially since one of our raid team members was the guild leader. The whole thing just promoted cliques and high school popularity contests, even when you had the best of intentions.
For subscription MMOs, this kind of competition over loot and raid team spots is an acceptable and necessary evil.
If only we’d used DKP…
A World without Raids
I love Guild Wars 2, and I make no secret about it. There are several reasons for it. It offers a view of what MMOs can be without the Holy Trinity, and it’s free-to-play without being pay-to-win. Because it has no subscription, ArenaNet doesn’t have to concern itself with being the only game you’re playing. If you take a couple weeks off to play a new release, Guild Wars 2 will still be waiting on you just like a single player title would. You’re not out anything. You didn’t let your raiding team down or end up losing your roster spot because there are no raids.
That isn’t to say Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have compelling group content. There is actually quite a bit.
There are several dungeons planned for release, complete with harder, explorable modes that can give you multiple ways to experience the same content and different bosses to fight.
World versus World PvP are huge battles that last two weeks at a time over an immense map, bringing three entire servers together to fight against each other in rated competition. The layout of the map may not change each time you enter the fight, but no scripted boss fight can ever match the unpredictability of hundreds of human opponents. You also aren’t bound by time constraints or raid times. You can pop in and out according to your schedule. If your guild or PvP team wants to treat WvW like raiding, meeting up a few times a week to crush your enemies, you certainly can.
The best thing about the endgame of Guild Wars 2 is that the rewards you get from PvP and PvE are equivalent in nature. There’s no subscription, so there’s no need to make you suffer through two different gear grinds to get the best gear for each game type. Sure, there are ways to customize your endgame gear, but it is cosmetic in nature. Guild Wars 2 is about skill, not who has the best stats.
Structured PvP is a completely level playing field that players can access almost immediately on their first day of owning the game. Your sPvP character is completely separate from your PvE/WvW character and is max level with access to the same exact gear that everyone else is. The emphasis is on competitive and challenging game play, not a gear grind. This is as valid an endgame as any shooter on the market, and no one questions the endgame of one of those. Tribes Ascend is completely free-to-play, and I play it for hours every week for a similar PvP experience. I don’t need to grind for higher and higher tiers of gear to make me want to play it. All I need are fun maps, good class and gear balance, and a game that rewards skill over everything else.
I don’t think a lot of people get this. I don’t know if it is because they’re brainwashed by years of WoW dominance and subscription models to think that MMOs can’t coexist in the same market, or are under the delusion that every MMO must be all things to all people. The former just isn’t true, and the latter never has been. Even World of Warcraft can’t offer everything, despite its efforts. Trying to be only made the game worse over the years, and its popularity has more to do with what others have done wrong rather that what Blizzard has done right.
I will tell you this. Guild Wars 2 is a game that doesn’t care what other games you play. It doesn’t need to be all things to all people. It doesn’t need to make you run in the hamster wheel or chase a carrot on a stick to keep you playing.
That’s the best endgame strategy I ever heard of.
This was a good read, I sure will share this to some of my friends.
Thanks!
“Your sPvP character is completely separate from your PvE/WvW character and is max level with access to the same exact gear that everyone else is. The emphasis is on competitive and challenging game play, not a gear grind”, your statement contradicts. There is no level of competitiveness when everyone has the same gear and are reduced to the same thing.
Actually, there is no contradiction. The playing field is level from a gear perspective and competition is focused on coordination, communication and skill. The winner is who plays the best, not who has the better stats because of a gear grind.
listen GUILD WARS 2 SUCKS NO PVE END GAME ONLY A GOOD GAME IF U LIKE PVP SWTOR ROCKS F THSI GAME
Again, while your use of all caps is certainly enthusiastic, you couldn’t be more wrong.
While Guild Wars 2 does have a very strong PvP aspect, including a massive World versus World system that puts other MMOs to shame (ever hear of the disaster that was Ilum in SWTOR?), it does in fact have PvE endgame.
The entire final zone of Orr is essentially a giant raid zone, with an incredible amount of dynamic events that are interwoven leading up to the confrontation with the great dragon, Zhaitan. Because each of these events have consequences for fail and win conditions, and because they are all tied together, each time you go there you’ll have a different experience.
Many of these events are large scale in nature, easily able to accommodate entire guilds who want to conquer them together.
In addition to that, each of the 24 possible dungeon combinations remain viable regardless of your level for two reasons:
1. The down leveling system which ensures you’ll always be presented with a challenge no matter where your adventures take you.
2. The fact that drops always scale to your maximum level, regardless of what zone you’re in
This means no PvE in Guild Wars 2 is ever obsolete.
There are dozens of other features I could talk about to illustrate my points, but it would take more time than I have at the moment.
The short version is that Guild Wars 2 is the next generation of MMO. Everything else is playing catchup.
You’ll see this for yourself as games like SWTOR, Tera, Secret World and even World of Warcraft all go free-to-play.
You can’t justify a monthly subscription with a F2P title like Guild Wars 2 on the market. The writing is already on the wall.
THIS JUST MEANS HES A BADDIE RAIDER AND IS WHY HE HATES RAIDS SO GW2 WILL BE GOOD FOR BADDIE RAIDERS
While your choice of all caps certainly makes a great argument, I can assure you that over the course of my 6+ years of raiding I was always in one of the top guilds on my server and earned my raid spot by being a skillful player.
Raiding is only tough the first few times through new content. After that it just becomes robotic repetition. These days, it is even easier than ever, as the difficulty in games like WoW is far lower than ever before. Furthermore, more and more sites have popped up with step by step instructions on how to beat every boss.
Bottom line: Unless you’re in the top 5% of guild world wide, getting world firsts on heroic mode content, then most of the work is being done for you.
Doing the same thing night after night, week after week, chasing the next tier of gear doesn’t make for great gameplay. It’s a carrot on a stick created to stretch your play time, string you along, and keep you paying a subscription fee.
It’s nothing more that a hamster wheel for MMO players.
I couldn’t agree with you more about GW2. The whole MMO community needs a shake up and hopefully GW2 will be the game that does this.
I’ve played GW2 beta for two of the three weekends and initially thought ‘this game is crap’. Then I realised why I thought that…..I was comparing it to WoW/SWTor. As soon as I got out of this mindset I occured to me what a breathe of fresh air this was for my gaming experience.
There has been a lot of deliberation over how non-raiding and end game content will affect players crossing over from other MMO’s. What I would say is that people need not compare this to any other game and start playing GW2 with a complete fresh perspective.
If it is given half the chance it deserves it will probably be the game we have all wished for…
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This entire article stinks of being in poorly ran and performing raid guilds. I’ve been in the same top WW raid guild for years on EQ2 and I have rarely been ‘mad’ playing it. Although I can see this view raids from playing WoW and SWTOR which have terrible raiding.
Actually, as I’ve stated multiple times, I was fortunate to be part of guilds which had extremely successful raiding teams. Not top in the world mind you, but easily within the top 2% of players. When you consider my raiding career happened during a time when WoW had upwards of 12 million subscribers, there were a fair amount of people in that 2%. Most of my guilds were ran well also, not all, but certainly the majority. I cannot speak to the raiding scene of EQ2, but I can speak very intelligently on what raiding actually is and the universal issues it presents in a MMO. The fact that Guild Wars 2 doesn’t need to ram this static, repetitive, gated nonsense down the throat of it’s players as “endgame” is a great relief to me. ArenaNet is building something that will stand on its own merits, a game people will play because they find it challenging, fun and entertaining — and not one they only log into because they’re afraid to miss out on loot that may or may not drop for the 4th night in a row.
A mature analysis that I agree with for once. I salute you sir, from one highly experienced player to another. And don’t fret, most “young” players can’t even comprehend what you’re talking about, having never lived MMOs since their beginnings like us, how could they possibly compare or know good from bad?
Thanks for the feedback! I agree 100%.
YOUY ONLY WIRTE DIS STUFF BECUZ YOU SUCKE RAIDER!
Just joking. I thought the article was well written. I plan on playing GW2 as I like to experience all new MMOs to see what they have to offer. Im excited to see these differences in action. I, like you, was a hardcore raider in various MMOs and it was pretty much as you say. 20% fun and 80% well, BS and waiting and griping. Really looking forward to GW2, hope it is all that you say.
Complete utter bullshit. I have my favorite MMO and it’s not GW2 nor WoW. I’m a healer and I wouldn’t trade that for a WoW ripoff without Holy Trinity. It’s why I like these Kind of MMO’s. No true raiding means the game will be shit from the pow of a pve guy. I loved the raiding in Burning Crusade, it was the most fun raiding experience I have ever had in WoW. I played as a tank. If you felt frustrated raiding you either had a crappy guild even if you don’t admit it or you sucked at raiding. Crappy dungeons with crappy cosmetic loot ( no matter how anyone defends them) will bore people really fast. See you in a moth and will talk then how awesome GW2 is after release.
1. My guilds were amazing during my time in WoW. I played with talented, wonderful people, and it was fantastic to experience the game with them. I’m looking forward to playing with some them in Guild Wars 2. Their skill level was well above average, as was my own, and we were consistently in the top percentage of progression guilds while raiding less frequently than many of our peers. We did more in less time. I simply grew to dislike the raiding system itself once I saw it for what it is.
2. Healing in trinity games could essentially be replicated on an iOS app. Just add the Grid display and change the background for the dungeon setting your in. Give players 5 different abilities – Big Slow Heal, Little Fast Heal, Instant Heal over Time, Damage Shield, & Debuff Cleanse. Add a fixed resource like a Mana bar. I’m sure it would be a fun little mini game with all of the essential complexity that goes into most actual raid encounters. Throw in the need to shake the device every so often to “move out of fire”. Done.
2. The Trinity is stale. It’s predictable. It makes content formulaic. It centers on playing the UI and not the game. And it brings people together out of co-dependency instead of interdependency.
3. Guild Wars 2 isn’t a subscription MMO, nor is it anything even close to a WoW clone (which is laughable to suggest). It’s about skill and not gear. If you hit max level and run the dungeons in PvE and decide to take a break till more content is released – that’s perfectly fine. You’re in no danger of falling behind. You can play other games while playing Guild Wars 2 because you’re not being held captive by a raid cycle. They don’t NEED raiding, because they don’t need to trap players in their game. You’re free to play it as much or as little as you would a console or PC game you spent $60 on, only with Guild Wars 2, you get a hell of a lot more content than you will with any other stand-alone game.
Here is an excerpt from an article I wrote on why Guild Wars 2 is the best MMO for busy adults.
I respect that you have a different opinion on the matter, but I feel equal parts sad and frustrated with players who continue to defend and enable WoW (and its clones) to live on on long after it should have died out. On some level it smacks of Stockholm syndrome. You’re defending your captor, keeping him on life support, and stalling the inevitable evolution of the MMO genre by tossing away your monthly subscription month after month.
I just hope that one day you’ll stop swallowing the blue pill and see raiding, and by association subscription MMOs, for what they are.
Until then, thanks for your feedback and best of luck to you.
I had high hopes for gw2. Its just terrible.
No offense, but you’re probably doing it wrong. That’s not meant to be sarcastic either. It may not be for everyone, if you absolutely must have raiding or if you hate fantasy, then this may not be your MMO of choice, but the game is far from terrible.
In fact, it excels on several levels. I’d go into detail, but it I already have elsewhere on this site,
There is a learning curve, however. If you don’t stay mobile, don’t dodge, hit every ability on cool down instead of situationally when their needed most, try to force your character into a holy trinity role, or basically do any else that essentially boils down to playing it like it’s World of Warcfraft, then the real problem you’re having is sitting between your chair and keyboard.
If you need help unlearning how to play the way WoW taught you to play, I’m happy to help.
“If you need help unlearning how to play the way WoW taught you to play, I’m happy to help.”
Post the link to that article please. Thanks
This is a very well-written, straightforward and mature article.
I completely agree with you. It’s about time that a new concept of MMO comes to surface.
About the “psychological motivation” you mentioned, I may add that Freemium MMOs also make use of this concept. These Freemium games literally force you to either pay to get the best gear with the best stats or constantly grind to keep up with players who pay.
Cheers!
So glad I came across this article, great read. Everything you said about raiding is true, I admit I enjoyed it myself but there would be weeks where it become a pointless exercise that made playing games a full time job, missing raids meant u got dropped with many players taking the game too seriously. Glad guild wars isn’t just another mmo with a different title
[quote]Raiding is about your money, not your enjoyment.[/quote]
Of course its about money, the incentive for not only developing a game but making it fun for the end user is MONEY!You sound like a hippie trying to protest Corporations. Don’t get me wrong. I like the fact that Guild Wars 2 is not subscription based and I firmly believe that if it was subscription based it would die a lot faster than it will currently.
[quote]The very idea behind raiding is to make a game that NEVER ends.[/quote]
Again, Why do you want a game that ends? The answer is I don’t think you really do want a game that ends. This next statement tells me that.
[quote]There should be reasons to log in and play.[/quote]
[quote]Raiding is about gear, not skill.[/quote]
You’re right. Raiding is about gear but not in the same light that you’re portraying it. This is no different than real life. It’s called Desire. Surely you have seen a fancy new sport car pass you on the road and thought to yourself “Man I really want that” and depending on your own motivations, you may have dedicated the time and effort to aquire the money involved in getting that new car. Why? Because it’s cool, it’s desireable, and when you drive by someone else in your new car you like to hear how awesome it is. This is the same concept in MMORPG’s. Desire drives you to do what it takes to get what you want, desire drives you to keep playing, and fulfulling desires makes the game enjoyable for you the same as buying something new in the real world. Now I’m not saying that looting systems are not flawed in past games and I like how Guild Wars 2 handles the looting to a certain extent but lets be honest, I haven’t “Desired” playing the game at all. To me this game kept the grind and removed the Desire aspect. The grind is still there, you just don’t get any reward for it. So don’t kid yourself.
Raiding should be viewed just like life. Only those who dedicate the time and effort to get where they want to go in life are the ones that are the most successfull, get the job they want, the car, the house, and ultimately are happier with life. You sound like the generation that expects everything to be handed to them on a silver platter without the hard work that comes along with it and that may be the only chance this game has to survive is to appeal the “Book Readers” who love storyline and hate anything to challenging. Maybe they suffer from so many failures in life that an escape to a game that gives them what they want with no effort is so appealing.
[quote]Structured PvP is a completely level playing field that players can access almost immediately on their first day of owning the game.[/quote]
I actually like structured pvp only because it gives you a chance early on not only to figure out what class you’ll really enjoy but how you want to spec them. However, I feel that the autoleveling should have stayed with structured pvp only. Autoleveling to 80 in WvW removes any desire for me to want to level my character up. Why, because I’m not rewarded for my efforts. If I am not rewarded for my efforts, what is the point, I can go play a first person shooter which is really what the PVP in guild wars 2 has become. As a former DAOC player (and a huge fan of their pvp system, even in the times where I got rolled) I have to say, I am highly disappointed with the WvW system they have created to make everyone “Equal”. Equality is not challenging, it’s not fun, and its not desireable. You should have learned this by now in life.
First off, thank you for your comments.
Raiding is about your money, meaning that it is an artificially gated content experience. Its sole purpose is to keep you running on a never-ending gear treadmill in order to stay competitive. You need to keep playing, and keep paying, in order to have the gear to get the invite to join the raid. Once in the raid, you repeat the same, static content night after night chasing random loot drops. Gear >>> Skill in a raiding setting. The only reason you need this gear in the first place is to qualify for the next tier of raids. It isn’t about creating compelling or even challenging content – Blizzard has steadily gone downhill on both fronts for years. What they do excel at is getting people to pay $15 a month for an eight year old MMO model.
When I made mention of raiding never ending, it’s to counter people who call it and endgame. There should be reasons to log in and keep playing, but those reasons should be about your own enjoyment, not because you have to dedicate night after night to the same thing over and over again long after it’s lost its appeal. In Guild Wars 2, I can pursue my own endgame in any way I see fit. I can get gear numerous ways. I can play in dungeons or WvW, run dynamic events, tackle jumping puzzles. I can even craft gear that is on par with the best gear in the game if I choose to. ArenaNet gives players a world to explore and have fun in, and rewards them in the process. Blizzard chains you to a wheel that you push in a circle in a single direction, grinding against raid lockouts, random chance, loot systems and mind-numbing repetition – and you pay them monthly for the privilege.
I’m going to take issue with your “people who work hard in life earn their rewards” logic. It doesn’t apply to raiding. Raiding isn’t about hard work. Raiding hasn’t been challenging – really challenging – for a few years now. Blizzard has done everything in their power to dumb it down, only adding heroic modes on as a sort of lip service to the hardcore. EVERY mode should be hardcore mode.
Guild Wars 2 has dungeons which will punish you. I haven’t had this kind of fun since Burning Crusade when the heroic dungeons had attunements and were tuned extremely high. GW2 dungeons have their own flaws, but you have to work to beat them. Traditional raiding relies on stale, cookie cutter holy trinity design which has held back the entire genre. Every encounter has to be designed with a number of tanks and healers in mind. Those narrow parameters greatly limit what developers can do with each encounter. Eventually, it all ends up being the same thing – tanks hold the aggro, healers stare at their healing UI and play whack-a-mole, and DPSers watch damage meters and try to master the perfect damage rotation like its a game of Simon and they’re following the flashing lights. In the GW2 dungeons, no plan survives the battle. You have to think on your feet and react quickly because the situation can change at any moment. It’s far more dynamic, challenging and enjoyable than the old model.
First of all, you are rewarded richly in WvW. Karma is king, and you swim in it if you’re winning. You also get a fair amount of coin and experience, not to mention the best PvP experience in the MMO genre. It puts anything Blizzard or BioWare came up with to shame. WvW boosting to 80 is not the same as sPvP. Structured PvP is a 100% level playing field. Every character is level 80 with full access to all weapons and skills. WvW isn’t like that. In WvW, only your base stats are boosted to 80. You’re still playing your PvE character. An actual level 80 is more powerful than a boosted one. You’re not equal.
BUT…
Even if you were, so what? The real challenge comes from defeating a foe with superior skill, tactics and execution. Winning just because you have better gear or stats is hollow and meaningless. That’s why GW2 will succeed as a PvP eSport. At the end of the day, the better player wins the fight – not just the one who AFK’d and half-assed his way through BG grinding to get the gear advantage.
Imagine if real life was you working hard and getting random rewards that doesn’t even apply to you. Imagine that you hand some car dealership $60k and they hand you a little smart car instead of what you want. Next time you give them $60k, you MIGHT get that sports car. Until then, keep getting badges so you can get a Corolla in case you don’t get that sports car a month from now.
That’s raiding. The problem with raiding is the potential lack rewards at the end. Can you honestly say that every time you went raiding you managed to get something you desired? The randomization basically says “come back until the RGN is in your favor”.
This game requires effort, and everyone gets something at the end of the day. Go into Ascalon Catacombs and play it through. Even in story mode, the difficulty is higher than any normal level dungeon in WoW, and higher than any heroic up to WotLK (after years of heroics and raids I left Cataclysm alone). If you don’t think GW2 doesn’t give you the desire to play the game through, it’s because you’re thinking too much about it. Just play the game, learn how it works. Get to 30 and do your first dungeon and then at the end of the day, you don’t like it, don’t play it. But don’t state things that are false. Raiding is not like real life.
Centurion, the only thing you can do to prove these raiders wrong is to post your armory from WoW so they can see your raid credentials. That’s the only way they’ll stop saying you’re not a real raider.
Thanks Zen. I couldn’t agree more. The randomness is where the wheels fall off of the comparison between real life and raiding. That and a game should be a game, not an analogy for a job.
The thing that gets me is people will say that Guild Wars 2 doesn’t have an endgame, even though the dungeons (as you mentioned) are far more difficult than anything I’ve experienced. They remind me a lot of the Burning Crusade heroics. Back before the nerfs when you still had attunements. You had to think on your feet a lot and react in order to survive. You didn’t worry so much about mastering a static damage rotation. You had to think outside the box, adapt and overcome. That’s what I love about the dungeons in GW2. In a 25 man encounter, you can carry 10 people. In a 10 man, if you lose a couple people you can still power through it. In a 5 man dungeon in GW2, if you lose even a single member you’re going to be in serious trouble.
The really hardcore thing about them though is the fact that the drops are almost meaningless. You can farm them repeatedly for tokens to buy the exotic weapons and armor that comes from each dungeon, but you’re not forced to. There are other ways to get gear that has the same stats. You can craft it, or you can amass karma doing things like events or WvW combat and purchase it from vendors. You can even mix and match gear gained from all three methods and customize the look using transmutation stones. You’re never forced into dungeons as the sole mean of gear acquisition. If repeating explorable modes isn’t fun for you – don’t do them! You’re not punished for playing the game any way you see fit.
But… if you want that challenge. A REAL CHALLENGE. You can put your abilities to the test clearing them just for the satisfaction of doing it. Not because it’s going to make you any more powerful than other players, but because it’s a badge of honor you can wear saying “I did it”.
I tried bringing up my armory, but I haven’t played for so long that the site gives me an error.
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/hyjal/Evidicus is the link to the Warlock I started playing in Burning Crusade. I can’t even find the Dwarf Warrior I played in Vanilla, but I’m sure that armory link is dead too.
I haven’t touched the game since February of 2011.
Centurion you are awesome, thanks for the great read. I love how calmly you are able to answer some of the more “ignorant” response here, very classy.
Looking forward to your next instalment of the Vanguard, keep up the good work!
Thanks! I wouldn’t call anyone ignorant for having opinions which differ from mine. They’re entitled to them same as anyone. It’s a controversial topic too. I have friends who I’ve raided with for years who get extremely defensive at even the suggestion that raiding isn’t the ultimate in endgame. It’s understandable. When you’ve sunk countless hours into an activity, any activity, the last thing you want to do is have someone say it’s a waste of your time. Time is precious. It’s the one thing in life we can never get more of. Time spent raiding isn’t free. It comes at an opportunity cost of every other thing you could have spent that time on instead – hobbies, work, love life, friends and so on. To suggest raiding isn’t a good use of your time is like saying you’ve sacrificed all of those other moments you could have had for nothing. Of course people are going to get defensive. What they don’t understand a lot of times in their hostility is that I’m trying to help them. I hold no animosity towards any of my fellow gamers. You’re all my peers.
I really must congratulate you: first for writing a very good, mature and thought-out article, and second for the way you deal with people who have fallen in love with Caps Lock. ^^ I wish you all the best in the future (and will probably randomly stumble over another article of yours in the middle of night some… night?)
Awesome article. I have never gotten stuck in raids doing MMO’s as usually I’ve lost interest in the games before getting that far. After reading this article I’m glad for that. GW1 is the only MMO where I’ve fully completed the story and most of the titles/side quests and I still jump in once in a while as there is always more to do and discover. GW2 so far seems even bigger and better yet so I really can’t wait to get to that point in the game. I’m about a level 40 right now.
The problem with most of the negative comments here are that they’re trying to look for things in GW2 that it isn’t offering and probably go against their ‘Manifesto’ itself. ArenaNet doesn’t even claim that it will be the Next Gen MMO or WoW Killer either. It is challenging the current build of a typical MMO.
If you’re going to try and play GW2 you have to tell this yourself first. “This isn’t the MMO I tried and come to love, let’s see what this has to offer.” I don’t hate Raiding and the Trinity. But you must be willing to play a whole different game if you want to enjoy GW2. You want to play with your Healer? You still have other MMOs for it. GW2 doesn’t force you to play it hence the no SUBSCRIPTION thing.
I look at GW2 like this actually (see below), that’s why I came to love it.
PVE: Think of it like Skyrim. (Skyrim is better but this isn’t the only thing you get for purchasing)
sPVP: Counter Strike / BF3 / TF2 (only fantasy themed)
WvW: Your taste of “Massive”
Dungeons: Your Raiding Fix but you need to play it Action Style (Dodge and keep moving damnit!)
I do agree that the endgame (upon Reaching level 80) will feel empty if you don’t like the other features of the game. The good news is the game has only been out for almost a month, I’m pretty sure there’ll be lots of new content in the near future.
I agree almost completely. As someone that has burned out on raiding (EQ, WOW, EQ2, SWTOR, RIFT, etc) GW2 is a welcome change. The only part of your article that isn’t completely accurate is the level playing ground in sPvP. I do believe that it will be fixed, but as it is certain classes are too bugged to be considered evenly matched.
Anyone, this piece was well written and I enjoyed reading it.
Also, this article really makes me want to write a raid healer android game.
Wish I’d found your blog sooner, I love this article. You express a lot of my sentiments about gaming perfectly.
That’s one of the reasons I got hooked on Guild Wars; not necessarily that there was no monthly fee and it was more affordable, but because the lack of a monthly fee resulted in it being designed differently. Games with monthly fees add a host of obstacles just to keep you paying and playing. Raising the level cap without adding meaningful content, making areas reallllly far apart and difficult to get to so it takes you a significant amount of time to accomplish simple quests (I’m talking about you, FFXI -.-).
Fantastic article. Coming from several years of WoW, this article just about sums up everything I could ever want to say to a noobie in MMO gaming.
Keep up the fantastic reads, Centurion
There’s an emotion I get in a good wargame, it was expressed best in the movie Patton – “God help me, I do love it so.” I’ve only played WoW for 3 years, and I never got into raiding, but I had a lot of fun both as a healer and a tank in random dungeons, as well as leveling in PvE. I had too much fun playing different classes and races to ever get a character to the raiding phase. I leveled a priest from 15-70 doing nothing but random dungeion healing though. It was fun and satisfying on a basic level. But I never had that feeling. I always was standing back from the game, gaming the game. Playing it from my head instead of my heart.
There were hints that things could be different. Pugging as a warrior tank could get joyfully chaotic at times, but never enough to give me that feeling. So I tried different MMOs: Aion, Conan, GW1 (sorry, but yawn…), CoH. None of them could keep my attention and I always drifted back to WoW after a while. Rift’s eponymous spawning group events came close but were too abstract and the rest of the world was too poorly developed to hold my attention (I hadn’t realized how important roads were until I played on maps where they went nowhere sensible. I hadn’t realized I actually sometimes care about the text in quests until I found quests that had none). TSW would have been my new game if GW2 hadn’t been around, but I only have time for one MMO, and as interesting as TSW can be, it can’t give me that feeling.
There are other things that make GW2 special that I’ve come to appreciate as well. One commenter called it a WoW ripoff. This is ludicrous–it is as different from WoW as possible while still being a fantasy MMO. If anything GW2 is the anti-WoW. It took a while for my gut to stop clenching reflexively every time I saw another player running toward a resource node I wanted. But now instead of hating them for getting there first, I feel a comradere with my fellow gatherer as we mine, log, or harvest together. The simple pleasure of finding a fellow traveler fallen victim to the various dangers of the world and resurecting them as we exchange “ty” and “np.” The gratitude when the roles are reversed. All these are feelings I’ve never experienced in an MMO before, and I like them.
But the feeling that told me that this was my new MMO was what I felt on the first open beta weekend of GW2, when I realized in my first 5 minutes that it was different from any MMO I’d played before. Instead of the static world of NPCs with !’s over their heads, it was a world of action–and something was always happening somewhere nearby calling me to rush inexorably into the fray. The awesome directed chaos of the melee is something no other MMO can come close to. Sometimes when I’m playing lower level content where the risk of dying is less, I turn off the UI and immerse myself in it. I love it. God help me, I do love it so!
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Thank you for a great read. I have been reading about this game, and finally bought a digital copy today. I am guessing that I will be playing this for awhile.
Have just found this article. Initially I had to agree with some comments and I also was a bit disappointed in the game play. I then played some WoW and got destroyed when realizing that there is a holy trinity in WoW and that there is no game mechanics just a reel of spells that are on loop. After some exams I came back to GW2 and within 20-30ish hours got my warrior lvl 70 and realized that GW2 is just crazy, dodging signets and weapon swapping make such an improvement its outrageous that anyone is saying guidwars is crap. I cannot wait to get my warrior to 80 and then play my mesmer in sPvP. The flexibility of this game is amazing and the speed it can take to get to max level (32hrs I believe is the record) is unneeded. One criticism id have is that there should be some game adjustments to WvWvW because I and others have a large amount of lag (even at running at min graphics). Thanks for the article extremely informative
omg i found this tom guy so funny U JUST SUCKED RAIDING MAN F THIS GAME RAIDING IS AWESOME YEAH, you just explained everything so logical calmly and this guy UUGHH CAPS LOCK IM STRAIGHT UP
this person just didnt understand the hamster wheel fact, if these people with those replies say that after reading your article, just proves very low intelligence and not questioning what your doing or playing.
I stop playing wow and try my best to enjoy gw2 althought i have to be honest i find it very hard, blizzard with all those achievements and raidings grinding etc makes you think, well u played for 2-3 maybe 7 years all this time u cant just quit.
Thank you for this article, you must have a good education, it just helps to understand that its all about the money and trying to get more and more people running on the wheel.
you THINK your having fun raiding but if you can take a big step back, its actually really bad and addictive, hours and hours spent raiding and grinding = dosnt get you anything nor anywhere in life