WoW Killed Raiding

I was thinking this over the other day and it occured to me that raiding in MMOs will never be the same. I have felt this way for years but I have never quite been able to put my finger on why exactly that is. I think WoW is the vehicle for the demise of MMO raiding.

Raiding got to the point where it was taken for granted and it became a feature to be exploited by the publishers of MMO games. It wasn’t always that way.

The first great MMO game was undoubtedly EverQuest. You can make an argument for Ultima Online, but EQ was the game that had the epic boss battles that required real progression for tactical familiarization and gear upgrades and single encounters that required 100 (or significantly more) players to overcome. Raiding as we know it now didn’t exist for quite some time. Not until an update in the Planes of Power expansion brought the raid interface with a maximum of 72 people was raiding even really recognized per se. In later expansions, the facet of raiding was manipulated even more to include smaller raid groups and instanced content where a structured group was the only group allowed into an instantiated zone. Before instanced content in EQ, all zones were open world and accessible to any and all. Before instanced raid zones came about, the raiding guilds on a particular server had to agree on a schedule of the current raid zones based on respawn schedules as opposed to an awkward first come first served approach.

World of Warcraft started off simple. The raid progression was straightforward. The end game raid cap was set at 40 people. Quests for “flagging” for raiding zones were in place. All of this was in place almost from day one. Raiding was a f eature of World of Warcraft because its makers knew what EQ was. They knew what drove EQ players to play that game for unGodly numbers of hours.

I think the disconnect has to do with what raiding is defined as. Are raids a feature or are raids a means to an end? EQ had encounters that required huge groups of people to overcome. Those endeavors became raids. Raids became more organized over time. Now raids are something that are designed into an MMO. Raiding has become so trivialized and taken for granted, it is something that every player of an MMO is expected not only to do, but to be given every opportunity to be successful at. It has got to the point where everybody who plays WoW is expected to be able to “complete the game” as if they were playing a single player RPG. To anybody who was raiding EQ in its heyday from 2000 to about 2002, this is just sad.

Raiding is what the best players did together. They were exclusive groups because the designers of EQ’s end game content made the encounters hard. Guilds comprised of players who did not have the composure to learn from mistakes and many many “wipes” never succeeded. The top guilds were looked upon as arrogant elitists. That was mainly because those who felt that way were excluded. They were excluded because those top guilds needed to maintain a certain level of competence and qualification because otherwise, they would waste a lot of their personal time playing EQ by wiping unnecessarily because new or unskilled players made costly mistakes.

It is just not that way anymore. Blizzard has managed to bring down the level of difficulty for their game to the lowest common denominator. It is clear that this is what they want.

Unfortunately, because they have done this along with their status as the utimate 800 pound gorilla, most subscribed to MMO in history with numbers (at their peak) that will never be achieved again by any MMO, they were in a position to influence how we see MMOs for the indefinite future. They have influenced us all to expect an MMO “for the masses”. they have influenced us to expect instant gratification. They have influenced us to not want a real challenge. They have influenced us to not have to work all that hard to build a heavy duty player-character. They have influenced us to expect to win.

That’s not how things always were, but unfortunately it is probably how things will always be from now on.

And that’s sad.