Since
the launch of Wrath of the Lich King it seems that
each new patch brings with it easier access to raid gear and additional
raid
instances to explore. 
As Byron Mundry
stated in his article about the href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/74349">Public
Test Realm, most new content is
cleared within a day or two of its release.
 The
proliferation of strats and the
extreme ease of content for those with a hardcore raid mentality is
contributing to a culture of belief that WoW is too easy of a game to
be taken
seriously. 
Is this really the case? Is
WoW too easy of a game? Or has the saturation of “end
game” raiding given
players a false sense of entitlement and unreal expectations about what
to
expect when viewing the raiding landscape? And in the end, does it
really
matter? Isn’t this more about fun than personal
accomplishment? The final
question is one you need to answer for yourself, I will not be going
over that
aspect at all in this article as WoW writer extraordinaire href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/74471">Jay
Johnson has done that
research for us and offered his opinion on the matter in another
excellent
piece.

With
prior PvE–centric MMOGs, and more specifically style="">EverQuest in
particular, there was a
clear delineation between the raiding haves and have-nots. style="">  Those
that had the fortitude to weather the
extreme time commitment required to accomplish most end game tasks were
easily
recognizable on the server with a simple glance. In WoW the
availability of
near end game gear to all players, through nearly all means, can create
confusion when trying to separate those that have reached the pinnacle
and
those that merely only want to look like they have. style="">  The
achievement system that was introduced
has done a nice job of making this clearer to both guild recruiters and
the
public at large, but with so many guilds having done such a large
portion of
the current content it is still hard to determine style=""> if
players are href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/72813">overgeared
and underskilled
as discussed a few weeks ago.

In style="">EverQuest, particularly
in the early incarnation of the raiding side of the game, you really
could
determine one of the most important elements to an end game raider,
fortitude. 
There were several raid zones
that were simply not clearable in a matter of hours even if you had
them on
“farm” status. The Plane of Sky, the Plane of Fear
and the original Plane of
Mischief were among those that even the best geared and most highly
skilled
players would require anywhere from a full day to an entire weekend of
playtime
to get through. 
For those that never
experienced this type of content, allow me to illustrate it for you:

style=""> The
Plane of Sky was
one of the first real progression style instances and was a series of
large
floating islands that required your raid to complete events to unlock
the next
island in the chain. The typical “hardcore” style
PoS raid would usually go in
on a Friday afternoon or evening and play continuously in some form or
another
until late Saturday or early Sunday. Many raids would set up sleep
rotations to
keep members safe while the constantly respawning trash was kept clear. style="">  Necromancers
were a must have here to summon
the large portion of the raid from one island to the next, as the keys
to gain
access were simply not easy to acquire. Keep in mind that this
isn’t WoW style
Warlock summoning, the only way for a necromancer to summon you was if
you were
dead. Couple that with EQs pretty
harsh death penalty and you can quickly
understand that the dedication required was really on a whole other
level than
most of us will tolerate these days.

My
point here is this, back in those days if you saw someone
running around with uberweapon_101 from
Plane of Sky, you knew that they had
earned it and that they probably had a serious href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/74485">addiction
problem. 
With the current raid and
gear climate it is
harder to determine who will stick around for the three or four weeks
of
learning a boss like M’uru in Sunwell Plateau or who will
suddenly have to stop
raiding due to “personal issues”. No current game
content, even with hard
modes, has achieved the level of difficulty of the second to last boss
in SWP
and many hardcore raiders are wondering if Icecrown will achieve that
level of
separation difficulty. 
There are
currently 450 guilds in the world that have cleared all current content
with
the exception of ToC 25 Hard Modes (which are sadly easier in most
respects
than Ulduar hard modes so expect that number to skyrocket soon), the
number of
guilds that successfully killed M’uru before the massive
difficulty nerf was
less than 20% of that. 
If Icecrown
Citadel does bring the difficulty level of its spiritual predecessor
how will
it be received among the current player population?

Blizzard
has always done a good job of managing the
difficulty level of its raids proportionally, grooming players to ramp
up for
the next challenge by pushing them to play better and funneling them
through
progressively harder content (well except for 4/5’s of Hyjal
and all but the
last three bosses in BT last time, but hey you can’t win em
all eh guys?). 
If past performance is truly
indicative of
future results then I expect Icecrown to be the
“crowning” achievement in this
expansion, but I also foresee that style="">  it
will fall with a greater quickness and with less content nerfing than
did
Sunwell. With the seemingly limitless amounts of high item level gear
available
there will be less of a gearing roadblock than at any other time in the
game’s
history which will allow for harder content to be introduced and
conquered,
satisfying players and developers alike. style=""> 

All in
all it seems that these days just about everyone is a
raider, and while the numbers of those that are the rare combination of
dedicated and skilled or just too stubborn to know when to quit is
still small,
it is time to embrace the fact that it’s no longer an elite
few that wear that
mantle. Look on the bright side, now you and grandpa will have
something to
talk about around the table on thanksgiving. style=""> 
Until next week, stay safe
and have fun in Azeroth!