May News/Discussions

[Chesspiece_face]

In response to a lot of the raid related stuff on the front page lately (from the dissolution of DnT, to the new information coming in WotLK) I thought i'd post this:

10 Man Raiders: Second Class?

David Sirlin's response to the new WotLK info as well as a follow up to his previous gamasutra article.

I tend to agree with his position on 10 man vs 25 man. As was noted in the DnT incident there is a lot of moaning about he casualization of WoW but if "raiders" really wanted a logistically difficult fight regardless of loot rewards than 10 man versions of raids, etc. wouldn't impact anything, they would still do the logistically difficult fights. If 10 man versions of the 25 man instances were introduced with equal rewards and nobody did 25 man instances anymore doesn't that just imply that people don't want to do those anyway and only put up with it because of the loot?

Thomas states the issue very well around comment 50:

Thomas Says:

May 15th, 2008 at 9:59 am
It seems to me that the problem for the WoW designers is that here is that there are two separate and distinct aspects of the difficulty of large-scale raiding. On the one hand, there are the encounters, and on the other hand, there’s the social challenge of gathering together a group of unruly, selfish, and often very young people. A lot of people, including, I expect, the designers, would enjoy the challenge of completing 25 man encounters if it didn’t mean they have to build their lives around the game — which isn’t intrinsically more difficult than a smaller group, but is certainly a different experience. As a game design problem, the issue is how to take advantage of the design space having many players creates without allowing the social challenges to prevent anyone from raiding. The solution heretofore has been to bribe players to play in large groups with superior gear.

So if raids are fun, but raiding isn’t, what are the designers supposed to do? I tend to think it’s an insoluble problem. Encounter design, no matter its quality — and Blizzard’s quality has been very high — can’t eliminate the hassle of keeping a big guild running. Player matching systems, which have been only moderately successful for 5-man groups, won’t be able to scale up to those sizes, and player-matched groups couldn’t complete a 25 man raid anyway. As Sirlin has convincingly argued, bribing players to perform unfun tasks by offering stronger characters is a pernicious and terrible design that destroys fun and creates an unhappy, addicted player base. And raiders are the last people who would do something just because they enjoy it; they are the kind of powergamers who are really controlled by economic motives (minimizing risk and maximizing reward at all costs.) Raids are fun, but raiding isn’t: if designers can’t get people to raid without bribing them with gear, then raids shouldn’t exist...

...I do think playing in large raids is fun! Organizing them is hell. The problem is that WoW, which has succeeded by streamlining away the boring and unfun elements of other MMO’s and retaining their core interest, fundamentally can’t streamline away the social obligations of raiding, which can be fun at smaller sizes but are inevitably a headache in a large guild. It’s one of the few aspects of the game Blizzard can’t control, and in my opinion gear rewards in 25-mans are an attempt to design around it since they can’t fix it.

Try not to think of it as rewards for the difficulty of performing a certain task; that’s a canard. From a design perspective, the carrot on a stick is just one part of the package of a game event which is supposed to be fun when taken altogether; this social problem causes it to take on too much weight in raiding because it has to compensate for fundamentally unpleasant activities. I like the idea of vanity items as rewards for raids, but I assume the reason Blizzard moved away from them (according to interviews, they were in the initial design for 40-mans in WoW) is because they didn’t provide enough motivation to get people to raid. That’s a sign that the raiding experience is fundamentally broken.