Raiding has been the premier focus for End Game Content in the PVE spectrum for horizontal gameplay progression. This is a simple poll. Do you believe Raiding should be exclusive for End Game Content only? If not, do you believe raiding would be beneficial and ad an additional fun factor to players progression through levels? If players had an opportunity to raid while they level, what purpose would it serve? Would it be reserved to have the potential best gear for that level range? What other benefits or reasons why Players could have the opportunity while they level as well? - Of course, in my mind, it would only make sense if the level progression took ample time to journey through.
Let me add some clarity here. If raiding was available for level progression players and end game content, there would be separate dedicated raids for each, naturally.
Please discuss your thoughts below and why you voted.
Comments
In a perfect game world it would be large and have blending areas of solo, duo, group and raid content at all levels. The power curve between gear tiers and levels would be slight enough to ensure people five levels lower and five levels above the mob would not be hindered much, but it would still be there.
In many games, it's hard to fill a group of appropriately leveled players for 5-man group content at lower levels. Larger groups only make that harder.
I remember in EQ there were a few lower level raid opportunities. Hardly anyone raided them though, because a) once you got to a higher level it trivialized the content, b) people leveled at different rates and it was hard to get a raid-sized group in the right level range, and c) if there is an easy way and a hard way of doing things, the vast majority of the people will chose the easy way. There's still a lot of "progression raiding" occuring in FFXIV, for something a bit more recent.
Those problems don't mean that I think progression raiding doesn't have it's place. I think they more point to problems in the way progression is achieved. If you were to have raiding using something like ESO's One Tameril level adjustment, or WoW Legion's level-normalization, I think you could very well have meaningful progression content that isn't necessarily tied to end game.
Not a mechanic I favor so I would go with 3rd choice, toss it out.
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Assuming the typical WoW-like system is used,
Raids are only appealing the first couple times. After that they become boring monotony that's is done out of necessity in order to obtain endgame gear which is pointless since there is typically no endgame content beyond raids anyway (I don't count pvp as content).
A problem with raids, specifically the reward for them, at lower levels is how fast a player levels up. Whatever gear they are raiding for will be obsolete quickly (normally 2-10 levels). It then becomes faster and easier to just skip the raids and use the basic "kill 10 rats" quest reward gear until max level.
A partial solution to make mid-level or low-level raids appealing is to make the lowbie raid dungeons level capped and award things that are constantly in high demand at max level. Make these things tradeable so lower level players can make money selling them to max level endgame people who can no longer get these items themselves (unless they make an alt). This is also a good way to offset some of the usual economic imbalance existing between low level and endgame.
I've said for years that if the focus of the endgame is going to be on raiding then why not make raiding the focus from level one and all the way through. Why start a game out as one thing ( informal small grouping or soloing) and then change it into something else at the end?
If some developers actually believe that everyone loves multi-group raiding so freaking much then why not have a game in which you have to raid constantly from the very beginning just to level up.
Answer: because they know it would flop harder than any game has flopped before. Because very few people actually like that crap.
So the next question is: Then why do we have to have that crap in any game at all?
Answer: I don't know but I wish it could be cut out of MMOs like the cancer it is.
I personally don't hate raiding. I think raiding can be fun but the implementation of raiding as of late isn't as fun. I am not keen on the Blizzard implementation of raiding. I don't care much for the mechanic of stacking to alleviate damage or running out of damage indicators on the floor.
To me, the way to improve raiding is make raiding more immersive, rather than simple linear dungeon with trash and then boss fight.
What raiding were transitioned from what we have now into more of a campaign of sorts. Sort of like acts like a battle. That way it's not just the simple "tank and spank". Where a Raid may be defending a castle from a siege or a siege on a castle. Essentially, I think it would be fun to have different roles a group of players can do to claim victory for a raid.
What I mean is that let your class excel in certain areas of the raid that would make sense for the battle in a lore perspective. Of course you take in account the combat roles but what about other roles that can be fulfilled in time of battle? A quick example might be, Assassin classes can do recon missions to scout out the type of NPC's that will be attacking. Perhaps you have a class that can set traps in strategic areas of the battle field ect. Of course this would require a ton of resources do to do and would cause server tension. If you spread out the chaos, and have certain battle points then that could help alleviate. I think it would be crazy fun to have a more immersive raid where different groups participate in different aspects of the battle where you just don't have a Main Tank, and Off Tank and DPS and healers standing around just doing a singular linear rotation. That becomes repetitive.
Honestly, I WISH raiding was exclusively for those looking to gear up. The issue I have is when raiding is the barrier to your end game. Take WoW, for instance, which locks the story behind the raid, meaning to see the end or "complete" the game, you need to raid. Thank goodness for LFR!
Secondly, is the people management. Honestly, I can't imagine raiding all the way through the leveling process with 25 people. I would appreciate the bump in challenge, but not enough people give a fuck about actually learning raids to have it act as a successful leveling mechanic, in my opinion. Most people are just like "Give me the elevator pitch on this guy." One sentence, no more or you lose them, lol. I know that's a harsh and wide-spread generalization, but I don't think it's entirely inaccurate.
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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Ideally, a PVE game would have enormous amounts of high quality and widely varied content. That way, people could play a game forever, never have to repeat content, and never run out. But that isn't practical to implement.
So what most PVE games do is to put a lot of work into making as much good quality content as they can. But eventually, players have played through it all and run out. What then? Future patches can add more content, but you can't keep add it as fast as players can play through it.
One answer would be, to say, congratulations. You've beaten the game. Now quit and go play some other game. And stop paying for this game while you're at it. So you can see why games don't do that.
The alternative is giving players something to do. It needs to be something that can absorb large amounts of player time while requiring minimal developer time. This will be your "endgame", to try to get players to keep playing your game--and paying for your game--after they've run out of interesting content to do.
So you throw in things like arcane gear requirements, artificial and lengthy raid lockouts, or the necessity of organizing dozens of people with particular class combinations. No one actually likes those things, but they slow players down a lot, which is the whole point of an endgame.
But that combination of pain isn't very enticing in itself. You want players to actually hang around to participate in your endgame. And how do you do that? Make it give really good loot. Because some players will do just about anything for epic loot--and won't notice that there isn't any real content left in which they can put that epic loot to good use.
So what are those large groups of players decked out in exotic gear supposed to do once assembled periodically to get that epic loot? Well, that isn't very important. Ideally, it would be something fun, but you're not relying on the endgame being fun or interesting to get people to participate. The great ideas you had for fun content were implemented in the lower levels before players smacked into the endgame wall.
Combine all the ways to slow players down that you can think of with epic loot to get players to put up with it and you have the modern raiding endgame. The reasons why you don't do that at lower levels should be obvious: because a lot of players will realize that it's stupid and quit your game rather than participate. You've got legitimate content to get players to pick up your game and play for a while. The endgame only needs to get them to stay longer than they reasonably should have.
By having things this way, people could take the time and level up while also learning how to play in various situations and still do things with groups. It also makes it easier to do content since its more broad and lowers the likelihood that people will get bored playing. You can only run the same raid over and over in various modes on multiple toons so many times until you can't take it anymore (yeah, i'm looking at you WoW).
Probably the best kind of content that XI introduced in my opinion was voidwatch. Pretty much you could get a group of people together between 6-18 players of various classes and just spawn boss type monsters in the open world. You get exp/money/currencies/gear/sellables by doing it and the minimum level to do it was I think 75. The loot was individualized as well, so you didn't have to deal with ninja lotting etc. If more games have content that has broader ranges of levels that people can do them, then I think it would make many games more enjoyable.
You can say GW2 did a good job in theory with this, but the fact that the game had no real direction because the content was forced to be done at certain levels vs player controlled made rewards feel pointless at the end since your gear is just forceably scaled anyway.