Flaming Homo

It will come down to what the market wants. If a game publisher wants to serve a niche market, then they'll cater exclusively to players who want only raiding content. But then their forums will be filled with threads from their subscribers whining about how the population is too small, the servers are ghost towns, the company doesn't advertise enough, there aren't enough new players entering the game, and so on.

It's a competitive market. I doubt that datamining in EQ2 would provide results that vary greatly from the data for WoW. If 98% of the gaming market does not care to play end-game PvE raiding, then a company would have to be either fucking stupid to dedicate resources to developing that content and balancing it against the rest of the game content. Or, they would have to make a carefully reasoned decision to support that style of play knowing full well that the subscriber base, and resulting profits will be small.

Anyone know of any companies that choose to invest in pursuing small profits rather than big profits? I want to make sure I don't have any of their stock in my portfolio so please let me know.

Edwin Ahe

They also will be very stupid if they don`t support such style. Why? Because this 5% of gamers can rise a shitstorm larger that anything, and in the end that company will loose.
Image what can people accomplish on this site.

pagansaint

Excepting that the 98% number you made up, is just that, made up.

For a fact, the number in EQ2 of people who will do PuRaids or Raid with a guild/alliance is closer to the 50% mark of all accounts with atleast one max level toon.

Now as has been stated by widely disparate and unconnected sources, WoW is not a weather bell for MMO development. WoW is a singular and remarkable phenomenon that came about from perfect market timing, instant brand name recognition and entry level difficulty that enabled it to introduce with a much more friendly learning curve game players into MMORPGs.

There will never be another WoW. It has done many things that are detrimental to MMO development while at the same time there can never be another situation that would give rise to the same type of market reaction.

Raiding is more than a niche, it is a game feature. It is a feature that dependent upon the method of implementation can range from anything such as large player numbers against one mob, to two large groups of people against each other.

There is a stigma that has been attached to raiding by the so called "casual" player due to the need of a raid to be a team effort that supercedes their individual instant gratification. These "casual" players are the ones who are more of what they accuse the "hardcore" raiders than those raiders are themselves, their playtimes and time spent playing at their "casual" content is greater than that spent by the "hardcore" to clear their raid styled content.

Sorry, but you are just grossly misinformed and buying into certain people and their propaganda if you believe in the "only the 98th percentile of the population raid" idea.

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Sheya

Whether it's 2% or 50% of the total population in a specific game doing raids is not that relevant only because each game is different from the other. I could probably say that in EQ1 95% of the population does partecipate in raids, that's why they picked that game or better, they stayed in EQ1 rather than moving to newer products.

What that post Illuminator linked was saying, is that in WoW a huge percentage of the population cannot partecipate in raids at the top end, it's probably applicable to eq2 as well with different percentages although I doubt it's anywhere close to 50% as you're stating.

I have no idea of how EQ2 raids are in terms of complexity, but in WoW, especially pronounced phenomenon during the 40 men raid age, a single person fucking up meant another dent in the repair bill for everyone else in the raid, there was a steep requirement in the level of performance needed and a high attention span a lot of people just wasn't able to put in, let alone all the required and mandatory out of raid farming that was necessary to have consumables and repair money.

To give you a figure, during the learning process of Naxxramas (that took well over two months to be fully cleared by the best guilds) a tank could spend anywhere between 100 and 150g per night, in EQ2 terms you should read it like 10 to 15 plat per night of attempts at nailing down an encounter. Very very few guilds could do it, on my server no guild fully cleared the zone.

When Nihilum, one of the best WoW guilds worldwide, cleared Black Temple in a few days from its release, the other raiders screamed in rage that raiding was nerfed, yet as of today, only a tiny percentage of the players even saw the zone, let alone beat it.

The gap between the top and the bottom players is astronomically huge in terms of skills, dedication, and /played time.

If a company spends the majority of their resources (in developing time, more than money) to produce content for the raiders, they better have solid figures telling them that the majority of the population likes to raid all the time they spend online, otherwise they are doing a disservice to their playerbase, which was the point of that article.

One reason I liked EQ2 during EoF is that having 2 expansions catering to the max level crowd, the amount of available content was large and groupers had a lot of dungeons to spend time in.
Now with RoK we have some group dungeons and more raid content than heroic content.

Raiding may not disappear from MMOs, but I think it'll see a drastic reduction in the future games and possibly be relegated to two groups content, a much more casual friendly number of people to gather and equip appropriately.

Maybe I'm totally wrong and non raiders need to watch raiders battle out on world first to have that carrot in front of them all the time even if they will never reach it.

P.S.: How many guilds could kill avatars during EoF? 50%? I seriously doubt it. 5% is more believable and I think it's a lower percentage than that.

Mendanbar

This shit is simple. This game, much like other large structures with many users of many different lifestyles needs many different types of play to succeed. It operates in exactly the same way as the government and insurance companies.

Everyone pays in their fee on the same time frame, everyone benefits at different times or in different ways, but Jesus Christ, stop trying to take someone else's shit away from them after they've already paid in.

I see all these comments about WoW raiding and how so few people experience the content, but do you know what their solution to that is? Do you know how many people out of their ginormous fucking staff worked on zones like Naxx that was for the "best of the best"? One.

Sony does the same thing, they put more people on the content that more people will experience, but they still dedicate a person or two here or there to take on some of the raid content. What the hell is the problem with that? You're still getting your content. It's not like they took people away from your precious solo and group content to perfect our raid content. If anything, it's far from perfected.

I'm sure half of you jackass think they build raidzones from scratch. Newsflash, a huge amount of it is recycled from things that are already in group zones or solo zones, leaving them someone to shape it, and someone to design a few mob encounters, which, I would assume is not IMMENSELY time consuming.

I mean, seriously, compare raid zones to the heroic zones they were built off of

Labs - HoF
Lyceum and Temple of Scale - SoS
Deathtoll - somewhat unique, though a lot of the skins and the like were probably pulled from Bonemire

CMF - Klak'anon
FTH - Crypt of Valdoon
MMIS - CMM
EH - Lesser Faydark

Tomb of Thuuga - general tomb shit
Protector's Realm - Crypt of Agony
Executioner's - KC
Venril Sathir - Sebilis
Overking - Chardok (in this case, the pattern is almost exactly alike too)
Chamber of Destiny - Chelsith
Veeshan's - Skyfire + Caves


In ALL of these cases, most of the trash (if they have them) are pretty much non-raid mobs with their size enlarged by 50-100%. They probably have a boss that is some other mob with size increased by 100-200%, and a new skin of armor or something just to make it look slightly unique. On the very high end in each of those, they have ONE completely unique looking mob (dragons in VP and Trak, Mayong and Wuoshi, Tarinax).

Chamber of Destiny is the one semi-exception to that, as it's like 75% of the leviathan bosses from Chelsith, plus the "main part of the beast" in the middle, that admittedly is new, and looks cool as hell. But having said that, you can see from the HUGE majority of the stuff that it's not like they're sitting around all day inventing tons and tons and tons of new shit and seeing what they can get over on the casuals. They just tweak it a bit, reshape it, and voila, raid zone.

STOP TRYING TO TAKE OUR SHIT AWAY!

Tbiggs

Is this a job interview or what?

I'm pretty sure i can come up with some of the right answers though. You just have to get creative.
-B-

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Dogs have owners. Cats have staff.

Mendanbar

I'd like to add to this... seriously, where do you selfish bastards draw the line at "if it's not directly affecting me, it's worthless." Do you assholes go into Best Buy looking for a TV and grief the employees because they bothered stocking some universal remotes? Because 60% of the people want a TV, I want a TV, and fuck you for stocking something that helps someone else get what they want instead of having another TV that I could compare a price against!

Stop being so frigging selfish.

Sheya

Huh? This may be true, and I said "may", for EQ2, certainly wasn't for wow and I'm not even bothering with details here, hence that article linked before.
There is no one (sane of mind) asking for raids to be removed afaik, but the whole topic will maybe be seen under a different perspective in the future, for the worse or the better.

Mendanbar

I've always seen the figure thrown around that there was only one dev thrown full time at designing Naxx. Maybe that was wrong, I don't know, but the numbers can be looked at any number of ways.

That article throws out the number of 600K people experiencing those raids and how it's out rageous that that's the case out of the total player base. The thing is this, though, those 600K players at $15 a month are paying $9,000,000 a month for what is likely a primarily raiding experience. Over a year, that's $108,000,000.

Let's say a healthy average developer income is... $75,000. That includes the hardcore coders all the way to the art designers, the composers, etc. I would even bet that half of their devs would come on here and say that they WISHED they made that, but we'll leave it at that for now.

I'm going to divide that $108,000,000M in half to take any arguments about Blizzard needing to make a profit right out of the room, and give them an exorbitant profit of 50% of net income to illustrate how retarded these arguments are.

In order to compensate for marketing and all that shit, we'll divide that 54,000,000 by 3, to float a crazy number that 2/3 of their operating cost is selling the product and not making it.

That leaves $18,000,000 yearly from those hardcore raiders alone. Even reduced to that amount, that leaves cash for 240 developers to strictly focus on content for those raiders.

Does Blizzard use EVEN CLOSE to that number to develop content for those raiders?

No fucking way in hell.

So, in summary, Even though ZOMG 95%!!!!!!!11 of the population doesn't raid, it's more than cost effective for them to do it and support it. Stop being a bunch of selfish cocks and arguing against it.

Illuminator

It will probably be you who has to leave the genre in the end. Unless the new games introduce raiding as a playstyle that is gratifying without requiring a regularly scheduled playtime, and that keeps a pace for all skill levels without the snail trudge pulling one over-healthed/idle/monolithic encounter at a time.

For all the RPG's I played through youth, I never even heard of "raiding" when I signed on to this game at the suggestion of my roommate. Nor did I have a clue what it was for another 3+ months in. Nobody was riding my nuts trying to tell me how much fun it was, and I didn't even care to find out until I saw the items raiders were getting, combined with how shitty the original game's quests were.

Even Chinese plat pharmers will join a PU raid to get their MoA's. But is a statistic on those terms even useful?

Instant gratification is when you have fun the moment you start playing, not necessarily that you immediately have great gear and stats. But if having fun only happens when you have great gear and stats, then you end up with the conundrum we see here and now.

If heroic players and under feel they're getting an unbalanced game that isn't fun because of time and attention spent on your "game feature", then it isn't so unreasonable when they want to see you destroyed or driven away in the long run.

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