Behind the Curtain: Should raiders get special treatment?
by Craig Withers 
Feb 28th 2008 at 9:00PM
Filed under: World of Warcraft, Fantasy, Culture, Game mechanics, Guilds, Endgame, PvE, Opinion, Behind the Curtain
Loot should always be a secondary concern in MMOs. The modern MMO is a virtual space that allows people to communicate and share experiences in a way that no other medium does, but I've been seeing more and more, the idea that developers should put the concerns of those players whose sole or primary concern is the acquisition of loot above the concerns of other players. It's the old hardcore vs. casual argument of old – one that I honestly don't think we'll ever see the end of, for the simple reason that applying a hard and fast label of 'hardcore' or 'casual' is fundamentally flawed. There is no magical line that you cross, and in the space between one day and the next suddenly become 'hardcore' as opposed to 'casual', and the idea that you must belong to one of those two groups is fallacy, pure and simple.
Where do you draw the line? The number of hours spent in-game? Is a player 'casual' because he only spends twelve to fifteen hours online, spread unevenly across the week, while his room mate is 'hardcore' because she spends sixteen hours online, in solid four hour blocks, four days out of the week? While labels are an attractive thing, and indeed a necessary thing for most of us – they allow us to put people and ideas into neat, regimented places in our subconscious. But taking those labels and applying them to large swathes of gamers, and then attributing them all with the same hopes, desires and goals is not only foolish, it's stereotyping.
I'm not a loot whore, I never have been and I never will be. Gear, to me, is a means unto an end – it allows me to progress through the game faster and easier than would otherwise have been possible. The social side of gaming is more important to me than loot, and before you think, "lol casual", let me point out that the social side of gaming has never been of huge interest until recently. Social gaming is fine in theory, but is dependent on the one thing that so few of us have managed to find in our lifetime – pleasant, like-minded individuals on the Internet. Clearly I'm not the only person who worries about the Internet being a breeding ground for the lowest common denominator.
In my experience there seems to be an attitude prevalent among the vocal minority in the MMO community that raiding guilds, in particular raiding guilds who measure their success by the amount and quality of loot they have obtained – are by their nature better players and more deserving of attention from developers than 'casual' players who only dabble in raids, or simple choose not to raid at all. This is fallacy, and the kind of false logic that should not be entertained.
Note that I'm not saying all 'hardcore' raiders think this way, or believe that they are better people, I'm just pointing out what I've seen of the community in general – a slavish adoration of those who chalk up world-firsts, and players who brandish their Armoury profiles around like some kind of battle standard.
Sadly, you can't please all of the people all of the time, and that's certainly true with World of Warcraft– I love the game dearly, but at its heart the game doesn't offer any more than the continual upgrade of gear, one piece after another. That's not to say you can't have fun in WoW without concentrating on gear, it's certainly possible, but the game wasn't designed with the tools that non-raiding players may want to use. A fully-featured, well-integrated set of RP tools? Fat chance. A completely separate, but self-sustaining PvP environment? You must be joking. A free-market economy tied to a detailed, well-designed crafting system where 'crafter' is a valid player archetype? Look elsewhere.
As things stand, the devs in WoW appear to be taking steps to reduce the difference in gear available to 'casual' and 'hardcore' players, a move that is only to be applauded in my book. High-end loot should of course be of substantial quality, but the argument that the 'hardcore' raiding scene should be the only option for those wishing to obtain such loot doesn't hold any water with me. An argument like that feels like the epitome of players crying out simply for what they want to see and have, rather than what will make the game better all-round.
The implication in arguments like this is that raiders raid for gear and that the acquisition of that gear and the ownership of it – because it sets them apart from those without it – is the be all and end all of their gaming. This is stereotyping again, and there are no doubt plenty of players out there who raid simply for the fun of it – the challenge of coordinating a large group of people, the excitement of seeing new content, the honour of defeating new bosses first – players who raid to raid.
Non-raiders, in my experience, typically come together with much the same goal – to have fun, except they go about it in a different way, which is the heart of the problem – how do you keep all of your players happy, when you can pick ten of them, and get twenty different answers when you ask them what they want from the game?
Sadly, I don't have the answer to that question, but then again, I don't have to – it's not my job. It probably isn't your job either, but hit the Comments below and let us know if you do have any ideas.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
grav said on 4:41AM 2-29-2008
The casuals are the 'loot whores' if you ask me. Raiders NEED good gear, to progress. If you aren't running T5 or T6, why do you need epix? Most heroics can be completed with very modest gear, indeed they're more fun like that. BT will be unlocked next patch... try going in there with blues. Please YouTube it entitled "Why Raiders Don't Need Epix and are All Lootwhores".
Besides... 'casuals' has become a misnomer. True casuals don't have 150 badges. A better term would be grinders, people who are unable or unwilling to tackle the social and scheduling challenges of raiding, who want the WoW endgame to consist of one long grind after another. Why should being able to kill 8000 fire elementals or run Mech 50 times equate to mastering a boss strategy and applying it as a team? I can't overstate the social challenges involved in 25man raiding as well.
PvP is a tricky one, you don't need skill to get honor/arena but you do to get it fast. Moreover measurement of PvP skill in a BG environment is tricky... so I don't blame the devs *too* much for this imperfect system.
Your dismissal of world firsts is akin to dismissing chess grandmasters. "Pff... they've just spent way too long reading chess books, they've memorised the game big deal, get a life!". To get a world first, you can't sit around farming loot for 6 months. You can't wait for someone to write the strat for you. There aren't any nice timer bars. You have to figure the whole damn thing out by looking at combatlogs.
Oh and quit your emo QQ. "Clearly I'm the only person who worries about the Internet being a breeding ground for the lowest common denominator."? OMG internet is dying! Since when? Dumbass remarks like this don't serve any purpose.
"how do you keep all of your players happy, when you can pick ten of them, and get twenty different answers when you ask them what they want from the game? Sadly, I don't have the answer to that question, but then again, I don't have to – it's not my job"
Actually, it kind of is. Informed journalistic coverage can have a profound influence on the attitudes of those in power. Instead you chose to have a public whine, without any constructive suggestions on how it could be better. What a copout, is your mother proud of you?
So as not to be entirely hypocritical... TBH I feel Blizz have made stunning moves in this space. PvP honor and arena points are the way forward, unskilled players can gain epix but not fast enough to stay far ahead of the patch curve. Blues for reputation provide a stepping stone into PvP. Triple tier tokens, while still randomised (boo hiss) provide much faster gearing and hence progression; it truly sucks having to farm old content to overcome gearchecks. Tier tokens for PvP gear rocks.
What would I like to see? More badges from 25-man, so that 25-man raiders can stay ahead on the badge curve without farming heroics. More and more interesting heroics (Tribute run \o/), to keep the casuals entertained. 2-3 times as many nontier items. "War effort" style grinds for noncombat pets, RP outfits and gimmicks. Remember Talvash's scrying dish? Let us buy them and make more of them.
Now I'm pissed at you for this shoddy workmanship. You're probably pissed at me for lambasting you. There's only one question I ask you, however. How can you make your next article better?
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Craig Withers said on 7:50AM 2-29-2008
"Oh and quit your emo QQ. "Clearly I'm the only person who worries about the Internet being a breeding ground for the lowest common denominator."?"
My mistake - that should be, "Clearly I'm NOT...", thanks for pointing that one out to me Grav - I've edited the article to reflect the change.
I agree that the random tier token drops is stupid - it can't be that hard to set loot drops to reflect the makeup of the players in a group/raid, can it?
Also, your point about more badge drops in 25-man instances is a really good idea, it never occurred to me at all, you're right that it would certainly allow raiders to stay ahead. There would probably still be outcry from the non-raiders, but I guess some people are always going to find fault with what you do.
Ghen said on 8:34AM 2-29-2008
Your points about current MMO loot based games are totally true. Thats my main reason for quitting WoW when I hit 70 and did every quest up to and including getting the dragon mount and hit a brick wall. The only thing left for me was raiding and I just was not going there.
Don't get me wrong, raiding is FUN! but grinding raid zones for loot is not. Going through UBRS was a perfect difficulty. If you screwed up you were going to die and there was definitely a chance of not finishing the zone. But with a halfway decent amount of teamwork it flew by easily. Kharazhan is way too difficult in comparison. You have to have everyone know every strategy and perfectly play their class (in Moroes for example) or else you will wipe 8 times and go to bed a failure.
So after getting to illhoof once and one other good try (forget where we got) and have the guild group break up after that there was no way I was starting over because the learning curve was just too extreme and loot grinding was taking away the FUN of raiding.
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Ghen said on 8:35AM 2-29-2008
insert your own .'s
thush said on 11:33AM 2-29-2008
I got bored after running kara and gruul so many times. Once I got a chance to kill every boss it got old. I don't like farming. Personally, what I would like to see is a quest for a tier set. For example, T4 comes from kara/gruul/mag so they could make a quest that has you kill every boss in kara/gruul/mag to turn in for a FULL T4 set. Then you can move on to T5. It would be more compelling for me is my point - not that it's the best idea in the world.
This would probably force the devs to create more raiding content, but so what. One of the reasons I like to PvP is that I know for a fact I'm going to get a specific piece of loot. A quest chain to get tier loot would give me a lot more motivation to then go back and kill Illhoof 900 times to drop the druid staff. whatever, there's probably better ideas but it's more fun if you reduce the PvE grind. PvP grinding at least isn't a scripted event - random PvP encounters in the same BG or arena are more fun than the same, extact scripted event in some cave for several hours.
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Scopique said on 1:50PM 2-29-2008
I don't have a WoW-related experience, but as someone who plays MMOs for the ongoing updates and large worlds to explore, any game which suddenly took a turn towards pushing people towards the "loot whorish" bent would not appeal to me.
Just sayin is all.
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loopinvariant said on 2:38PM 2-29-2008
It seems that those who don't raid are always quick to misinterpret what is going on with the raiders. I was, and being new to raiding my perspective is changing.
Raiders face large challenges in order to coordinate groups of people to face repeated failure until a fight is mastered. This costs them gold (pots, repairs, etc), time, and generates a lot of frustration. It truly is harder to get the PvE gear than it is to get the PvP gear.
So raiders are complaining that here is an almost equivalent set of gear (Galdiator/Vindicator) that people are getting just for showing up. The two paths are not equivalent in difficulty, yet are equivalent in rewards.
Blizzard made the raid content to be explored and conquered, and the difficulty level is fine. But they have provided an equivalent path that requires very little work to achieve the same in-game status (and dance around it all you want, when people see shinies on a player it equates to status), and they have given people who travel the PvP route a way to walk into high level dungeons almost fully geared, without the work required by the PvE players needed to get there.
There is nothing wrong with either path. Both lead to their form of entertainment and glory. But Blizzard has allowed the PvP path to achieve its level of glory and also cross into the PvE path, without providing the PvE crowd with an equivalently casual way to gear up unless they play a part of the game they are not interested in (PvP).
Taken as a whole, it simply reflects Blizzard's focus on PvP content in the game now, turning the game into the equivalent of a MMO FPS.
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Kyoji said on 1:28PM 3-01-2008
I think it kind of awkward to complain about people who go after loot in a very loot oriented game. From the moment you pick up WoW, till the moment you put it down, a large large part of progression is getting better gear for your character. This becomes all the progression your character has left after it reaches max level. While some may continue to see, or experience the new content, they still need to gear up to do that.
I honestly believe not much can be done about the "mightier than thou" attitude a lot of high-end raiding guild members have; its my firm opinion that the game provides ample room for this attitude to not only gather, but grow. Too much importance is placed on loot for it to not have a huge huge social impact in the game. WoW's character progression is a very flashy, shiny, public one, and unless this changes peoples attitudes wont. A perfect example of the exact opposite is Guild Wars, where gear -does- play a large role, but not nearly as much as what skills you have, and how much skill you as a player have, especially in PvP. Character progression is much more personal, whereas that new T6 helm you just got will be worn proudly for everyone and their brother to see and oggle at as you idle in Orgrimmar.
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souljaboy said on 12:11AM 3-05-2008
I dont care, i just want free epix and fast. pirox ftw
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dlr said on 10:43AM 3-05-2008
I would love to see the raiding content and have the nice gear without having to put up with the crass, lude, and self righteous elite you-know-whats that are in nearly all of the raiding guilds on my server.
It seems like the point of the game is to level and get better gear. So that would imply that everyone is and should be a loot-whore. The problem is that you are subjected to another part time job where your boss is a socially malformed 15 year old.
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coldsupper said on 4:21PM 3-05-2008
As a PvPer and a Raider (really not that hard or time consuming) I really have no problems with the introduction of loot-for-badges/loot-for-honor+token system that Blizzard introduced. I PvP because I like to PvP and I raid because I like to raid, there's nothing inherently better with either of the playstyles.
All in all, it opens up a bigger pool of players that are decently geared to fill up the ranks of guilds looking to experience the raiding content. Every raiding content in WoW is a gear check, Kara is a gear check from 5-mans and Heroics, SSC/TK is a gear check from Kara/Mags/Gruul, so on and so forth. The more people get to progress and experience content the better. The only problem I have is how everything gets toned down and made easier after a while, I see no purpose in making an encounter easier when it is obviously achievable, only requiring time and practice.
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