The Challenges of Raiding

No one's saying that raiding isn't tough. It's damn tough. There's a reason only 5% of the top guilds in WoW make their way into the Black Temple , and it's not because Illidan forgot to leave a key under the mat. Only the most dedicated, patient, organized, and skillful guilds with strong leadership to guide them can make their way into the high end zones and deal with the challenges they find there. The question is whether that kind of gameplay belongs in World of Warcraft.

It certainly belongs somewhere. Many players obviously love this kind of gameplay and thrive off of it. After all, 600,000 players managed to get in and defeat those zones. Raiding has been a fixture of MMORPGs since the days of MUDding, and there's certainly a lot to be said for the thrill of successfully defeating massive challenges on an epic scale with 25-40 of your peers. But remember that WoW is a game that was built on the premise of accessible gameplay. Solo and small group content is the bread and butter of the game that keeps many people enthralled and helps bring in new players daily. I have friends who play MMOs more than I do that would never have gotten started if WoW wasn't so newbie and solo-friendly.

To me, that doesn't sound like a group of people that thrives on or even enjoys the kind of gameplay which raiding provides. The numbers I outlined in the previous section tend to support my gut feeling there. Clearly, we have two groups of people in WoW: 2 million players who think raiding is fun enough to at least give it a shot, and 7.3 million who could care less about raiding or just don't have time to get involved. I'd bet that plenty of those 2 million players are only raiding because there's nothing else to do at high levels anyway, as you can see from the significantly lower completion of the more difficult raiding zones.

When almost 80% of your players aren't using content that you define as your "end-game," and 98% of your players don't even use two whole instances that you spent a lot of time designing, are you really catering to the needs of your players?

MUDflation? More Like Raidflation

Without raids, we never would have had to mess with MUDflation in WoW. MUDflation is an old term that's recently been discussed quite a bit in the blogosphere, but it's essentially what happened when the Burning Crusade came out and made all the previous raid gear trivial compared to the new common drops in Outland. A lot of raiders were upset about this while everyone else was pretty happy with their sudden huge power upgrades, but it was necessary because of the presence of raiding in a largely casual playerbase.

Because of the extreme gear disparity between raiders and non-raiders, the designers had a choice with Outland: balance it for raid gear, making everything in the expansion practically impossible for 80% of their player base, or balance it for "casual" gear (from solo play and 5-mans), making everything in the expansion absurdly easy for 20% of their player base with some raid gear. Either way, players were sure to cry foul. Instead, they did the smart move: Level the playing field by dropping raid-quality common items on new mobs and quests and balance everything for the new minimum. It made the most people happy while creating only a minimal fuss, and everyone happily went off exploring the new content.

Unfortunately, it also had the nasty side effect of making all the previous high-level instances totally worthless. Why would you bother with hard 5-mans or harder 40-man raid instances when easy greens with significantly more power are only a few levels away? Say goodbye to Stratholme, Scholomance, Blackrock Depths, Blackrock Spire (Upper and Lower), Dire Maul, Zul'Gurub, Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Onyxia, and Naxxramas. Not only did MUDflation remove all incentive to go through some of the coolest 5-man instances in the original game-- it also made sure that there was no point for non-raiding players who hit the new level cap of 70 to go back into instances like Molten Core or Zul'Gurub and see what they missed the first time around.

That's a lot of work to ruin (and a lot of your subscription dollars wasted) just because raids are available to a game community that largely doesn't use them.