Massively^™

WoW's customizable interface is a blessing with a curse in disguise. (That healer's screen looks like the cockpit of a fighter jet!) Eventually, you have to have all the right addons, and keep them updated.

Worse, other people's addons are monitoring your damage taken and damage done. It's no different from any situation where you are on the clock. Your performance will be measured in automated reports. You'd better make those numbers look good.

There are elaborately scripted encounters where one person out of place, or who does the wrong thing at the wrong time, can wipe the raid. Because of monitoring software, you cannot hide in the confusion of battle. Someone will know. And soon, everyone will know.

I tried to make this fun for the better part of a year. I could not make it work for me.

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Thats the main reason I got rid of WoW. No other game is that raid entensive. In my old guild, I had to be on 5 days a week, 4 hours a night to run 25 man raids... You have to join raids to get "DKP" points to be able to greed/need on the epic items. If you did not show up, you would loose DKP points.... I did that for about a month and ended up cancelling my subscription.... WoW is a 2nd job if you want to get good gear, no thanks...

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I'm always a top performer in raids. Definitely not the best, but good enough to be sometimes the best in my class.

I would think performance anxiety would go along with low self esteem in real life. If you truely thought you weren't performing well enough then you would strive to get better and eventually achieve that goal. Most people I see that aren't very good at raiding either don't know that fact or don't care. Anyone that knows they need to get better and cares about getting better will eventually be an excellent raider.

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I'm a very casual raider, as an off-tank or DPS, and just looking at that screenshot makes me cringe. That person is not even playing the same game as I am, it looks like Whack-a-Mole X-treme. I cannot see the environment, the mobs or even my own raidmates -- just health bars! I really feel sorry for healers now.

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> Are you turned off by raids because you get performance anxiety?

No, I'm turned off by a vertical tiered raiding system based on progressive loot where hamster wheel performance according to a script is key, everything is monitored and people are uptight about it because the game is skewed to focus on the end product of "phat lewt" rather than the process.

Sorry, I'm not much of an MMO achiever anymore. I tried collecting all the phat lewt in the world once, and it didn't make people like me much more. The 'respect' gained was just yes-men collecting around you in the hope that you could get them that kinda cool loot too.

I don't find improving a character loot-wise that critical in personal importance - and I won't play a game (*coughWoWcough*) that makes that an essential focus. I like the idea of the player improving in skill a lot more.

I also like the concept of recon raiding though - a group working together as a team and the exploratory/discovery aspect of puzzling out a difficult challenge.

Guess I need to find casual raiding guilds in newer games where people won't obsess over a wipe (oh no, we didn't get the loot, our evening was wasted!) and enjoy more of the process.

> is there a way games can be designed differently so the endgame isn't so draining?

Sure they can.

CoX is a prime example of a non-loot focused game. You don't have to min-max in order to complete in-game missions. You could min-max if tweaking such things floats your boat, but you could also just throw on vendor-bought enhancements and run with that.

CoX's main endgame is close to the mud concept of 'remort' style play. Hit lvl 50, you can do a few things, but you've hit the end, go back to lvl 1 and start it off with another character. Maybe the epic class you just unlocked, or just another archetype for a different gameplay experience. They've shoehorned in things like PvP, inventions and multiple lvl 50 TFs to accomodate people who like PvP, tweaking min-max builds, and 'raiding'-lite, but the repeat alt experience is the core. Along with the easy non-holy trinity reliant group experience.

LOTRO has raiding as endgame, but it's not the only aspect of endgame. There's PvMP, crafting, faction or deed grinding, hobbies, house furnishing and what not. Heck, I'd say that incrementing progress bars of various kinds, depending on your personal interests, appear to be LOTRO's endgame. :)

Ditto Guild Wars. Max level 20 is hit extra easily. And there's still an entire world (or three) to explore, a universe of players to best in PvP, and special titles/elite equipment to grind for, whatever your goal is. Just go collect more skills and tweak thy build (and your heroes, if you use 'em) to a satisfactory level (or near-abuse breaking point if you like) for the current job at hand. That's endgame.

I've gotten back to KoL (Kingdom of Loathing) lately. I can't put a finger on its endgame. It's remort-style, but with lots of options and complexity. It's got too many goals, all of them impossible to achieve at once at the same time on the same character. It's not for a completionist. Pick your goal and get to it. When bored, pick another.

Lastly, the player mindset has to change as well. The success of WoW made me nervous a long time ago, because the tropes of their first game tends to dictate the way players perceive other games. Many WoW players come to other games, all loot focused, and can't adapt if loot and a raid endgame is not the be-all and end-all of the game's existence.

You get the complaints of "itemization is poor" - someone please define itemization for me, I'm still trying to figure out its exact meaning. Are people saying that because the stats on equipment isn't tiered as clearly and obviously as WoW does it, it sucks?

My first loot-focused game was a MUD, so there were no plainly obvious tiers of 'best' equipment. Oftentimes new zones would come out with 95% 'lousy' equipment that was worse than existing ones. We threw all the items into a database, and picked out the 'best,' which tended to be separate pieces from different zones. So you would go around and 'run' aka group raid, the different boss mobs for your patchwork set of min-maxed equipment.

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The question about end game blues is a good one. Unfortunately, it has been framed in a way that may not be helpful for getting at the answer. Dividing this into hard core vs. casual gamers flimsily covers a thin slice of the explanation. One might consider themselves hard core due to their intensity level or long term commitment to the game – not simply raiding. When raids take 2-6 hours of time, not to mention preparation, it is too much for 1) parents, 2) serious students, 3) the employed, 4) athletes, 6) those who date (sorry, I could not resist the stereotype), or 5) narcoleptics. I inhabit multiple categories but won’t tell you which ones.

Performance anxiety also covers just a shinny sliver of those people who avoid instances. It’s a lazy way to describe people who do not value raiding as much as you. Can you say fundamental attribution error? Bad coaches blame all poor performances on psychological shortcomings without looking at the problem in-depth. It allows them to skirt responsibility and place it squarely on the athlete’s shoulders. This is a sub-par explanation in general and when it works it fits so few people our blind spot becomes the entire forest. Even the infinitesimal percentages of people with legitimate performance anxiety probably suffer from one or more of the time-related criteria above. Anxiety goes with performance and raids require performing your class duties so it’s largely natural. To overcome this you need long stints at the computer…which is often prohibitive. It takes time to learn to raid. It takes time to prepare for a raid. Doing research about the game – addons, zones, crafting, classes, skills, etc – is a sidebar that most people can not fit into their lives. Ask my wife, I have tried. The use of term “performance anxiety” might be recast as “frustration tolerance” (time + game demands / reward = tolerance) or some such thing. Most of the anxiety I encountered came from the hard core players who controlled their symptoms by creating an abundance of rules which detracted from the group experience.

The way I see it the issue has a few key problems: time, reward, and competition. As mentioned, time is a monumental obstacle. Until developers find alternative ways to keep patrons seated in their chairs without pyramid sized base block chunks of time this will always be an issue. Because I mentioned the time factor above I will simply say that while the intermittent reinforcement patterns which beckons players into instances for the sweet loot does work for some, it frustrates others. I foresee a time in the future where 3 hour instance runs are an interesting part of gaming history...and the domain of summer vacation or the minority. Anyway, intermittent reinforcement brings me to the second point…reward.

The end-game rewards are too few. I did not play WoW to prove my manhood. At least I’m not willing to admit it. Or should I say Elfhood? I did it for fun. Buying into a guild point system that prevents me from rolling on an item until I have played “x” hours (usually a lot of hours) provides too few rewards. Sure, you get to see the instance but that content awe wears off fast. The paucity of gear, levels, or skills (for example) takes the steam out of your iron clad (oops, wrong game analogy). We simply need more non-trivial end-game rewards. And I mean significant things that provide a feeling of advancement. Fun! It is not greedy or lazy to want more stuff (not just gear). These are computer games we’re talking about. The new achievement system in WoW looks great but it’s too late. The question has been asked about how to handle Jedi Knights in the upcoming Star Wars MMO and how to make the end-game in the Star Trek MMO viable. The end game seems like a nice way to handle both Jedi advancement as well as star ship captain training. It’s the perfect opportunity to develop oneself as a crafter, merchant, or whatever.

Finally, competition from other games makes instance addiction seem a horrible waste. Today there are enough good games out there to help you dishabituate from the instance routine. If you can break free of the instance grind long enough to look around you will find many satisfying alternatives. I no longer settle for grinding when I have 12 other hamster wheels to fall off.

I’ll leave the solutions to these questions to those with better insights for such things.

That’s my $0.02.

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everyone on my server raided to early for me. But thats the price you pay working nights

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I think there are three prime components that tend to block people from raiding:

1) THE number one factor is the time investment. A lot of people just don't have the time nor the desire to sit down in front of a game for the 16+ hours a week in order to get into your typical raid. Those that do often get burnt out very quickly as they run the same instances over and over again in order to get enough of the raid geared out to progress to that next level. And god help the raid that loses a few key members and has to start back a few steps in order to get new members geared up enough to run (especially with random loot drops).

Our guild has an open raid policy - where we have a fairly extensive list of people with the gear and the ability to listen and learn who we can pull from on any given night. While this allows many people the opportunity to raid that wouldn't otherwise have a chance, the flip side is often you're stuck teaching the same encounter over and over again until your entire pool of players has learned it.

2) Commitment - while many people do have the time, I think a lot of people are loathe to commit to having to be on each and every night at a certain time. Things come up, and in many cases your not showing up can make or break the plans of 24+ other people. After a while it begins to feel like a second job, which again can lead to burn out and a loss of raid members.

Again, we have that open raid policy and in order to entice people into filling in slots we run via loot council - so someone that's never been in at least has a chance at getting something out of coming without it screwing over the regulars (like pure /roll systems do).

3) Raid requirements - this is the real kick in the pants. If encounters were made to be flexable and challenging then this wouldn't be nearly as big of a problem as it is in many systems. In WoW, if I don't have 3-5 tanks and off-tanks; 7 healers; and 13-15 DPS the raid gets called. Often you have to add in specifics like X mages for sheeps, which only limits you farther in how your raid is made up. On top of that, often tanks and healers aren't the most fun classes to play so there is a significant lack of them around.

This is the one that kills us, and why having a set roster is most often considered mandatory in order to get anywhere.



If a game came along where:

- raiding had more of a flat gear curve (so you aren't locked out if you having ground out the previous raids worth of gear before, or if drops were not random thus making it faster to bring replacements up to par)
- you aren't tied into having some perfect raid set up (at the very least make it so tanks and healers are actually fun to play, and make it so you're far more flexable with what you can bring)
- you aren't tied into having a set number of people (somehow - not sure how to fix that, maybe have the encounters scale with the number of people you bring into the instance... ?)
- the raids are fairly short (can finish one within about 3 hours, with many different instances available throughout the world to keep things fresh)

then maybe you'd see more people raiding. I really doubt some kind of anxiety complex has much if anything to do with 99% of the problems that people have.

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Raid performance is something that is very important for all raiders. You need to understand what you should be aiming for with a bunch of targets of optimum personal performance. Unless you want to get really involved leave the analysis of other players to the officers or raid leader.
Personal performance is also something that should be discussed formally between officers or friends and not in guild/raid chat where you will often be ridiculed by bored players baiting for an angry responce.
However I see people get really pent up about compeition in the raid on who damages best who heals worst ect. and this is really unnessesary unless its causing your wipes!

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