Hostility Towards Raiders

This post about raiding over at Clockwork Gamer is a pretty good summary of why I don't enjoy raiding. It also attracted an insanely judgmental comment from some random poster. The basic gist of the comment was that all hardcore raiders are utter losers that need to get a life.

I don't agree with that at all. MMOs are a huge time sink regardless. I don't think that whether you spend that time raiding, solo questing, or in a crafting hall really changes it. However, the overt hostility towards raiders was interesting to me. It's something you see a lot on message boards and blogs. Now please indulge me while I ramble for a bit....

I personally am not much of a raider. I like to see a raid once or twice, but I don't enjoy doing them anywhere near enough to gear myself and 11-39 of my "closest friends." I'm the guy that will occasionally go on a raid if the guild needs an extra DPS and I happen to be on. I'll have solid gear, but not the best (because, you know, I don't raid). I'm also perfectly happy not to roll on anything. I'm not one of the loonies trying to gear up for raid x in a series of y after all (and to my tastes they are loonies).

However, I also fail to see any reason to get belligerent with others that do enjoy serious raiding. Just because I don't enjoy something doesn't mean that it sucks, or that people who like it must suck. If you enjoy playing a "game" with that kind of focus, more power to you. I certainly put more hours than it takes to raid into much more inane activities when I was a lad (becoming good enough at Super Mario Brothers II to consistently go through the game with any of the four characters the long hard way without dying a single time comes to mind...).

So, where is this hostility towards raiders coming from? It's something you see over and over in "raiders versus casuals" debates on the internet. Raiders usually seem to assume that it's just sour grapes from players that aren't willing to put in the work to get "phat lewts." However, I think it's a little more than that. I'll use WoW as an example, but these comments could apply just as well to EQ or any number of other MMOs that have raid focused end games.

I hit the cap twice in WoW, once at 60 and once at 70. And both times the game fell flat on it's face for me because Raiding was the main activity I was being pushed towards by the game design. Each time I felt betrayed by the designers. The casual friendly game I knew suddenly dried up, and the bulk of the remaining content was for a play style I had neither the spare time nor the desire to seriously engage in.

However, I didn't head out onto the internet with a torch and a pitchfork when it happened. I recognized that I was clearly not the target audience for the existing end game, and voted with my wallet. When a game that did actually have an end game that was enjoyable to my tastes came along, I also voted with my wallet (I've spent more time and money on LoTRO now than any previous MMO).

I can also see where hitting a brick wall at the level cap might not effect everyone the same way as me (shocking!). If you are the kind of simian that hangs out on most message boards, and you hit an endgame that says "screw you casual boy!" in big red letters, it probably seems logical to blame it on whatever market segment the endgame does cater to. Thus you end up with random idgits that troll the web posting "Raiders are teh suxxors! Get a damn life!" every time someone posts on a blog or message board about what "serious business" raiding is.

They aren't jealous of raiders and their gear/ dedication/ spare time. At least not directly. They are jealous and upset that the endgame of WoW, EQ, or whatever MMO caters to raiders instead of them.

Radiance Gear in LoTRO

This week there are two posts about the radiance system in LoTRO I'd like to highlight. This post by Unwise lays out pretty clearly most of the issues I have with it. This counterpoint post by Middle Earth Adventurer points out that Turbine will likely lessen the requirements for content as time goes on, and that casual players will get to see everything eventually. He is likely correct in that, and adding radiance gear that you can get in three man dungeons will make it fairly easy for even casual players to get up to 40 effective radiance. However, that still doesn't address my main gripe with the radiance system. It marginalizes crafted gear and the gear that your can get doing PvP.

In pre-MoM LoTRO, you could gear up for the Rift doing whatever you enjoyed whether it was standing in the woods farming thousands of hides from wargs (i.e., crafting), bashing creeps in the moors, or running instances. I'm very happy to see the variety of instances that radiance gear drops from being increased. It's a great change. But we are still forced to run instances repeatedly to gear up for the final raid in the game. I like to beat an instance once or twice to see it. I don't enjoy farming them for drops.

For me gearing up through crafting and then going through the Rift a couple of times to see it was perfect. I didn't even roll on drops my second time through, I never had any intention of running it enough to get geared. I liked that I could focus my major efforts on what I enjoyed (tailoring), and still get to dabble in the rest of the content. That simply isn't going to be possible with the new 12 man raid we are getting in Book 8.

In others news, as I am starting to sound like a broken record on this issue, I think this will be my last post on it for a while :-)

The endgame of LoTRO

I recently went through a period of burnout with LoTRO. I backed off of it for a few weeks, logging mainly for kinship events. I am happy to report that the as of this weekend the burnout apparently has worn off, and I'm in a clam like state of contentment leveling alts again. The break also allowed me to gain a fresh perspective on LoTRO.

To my tastes, it's still the best PvE MMO by a pretty wide margin for any number of reasons. The tales you participate in are well thought out and evoke the tone of Tolkien's work very nicely. The graphics are amazing, especially considering the system I'm running it on (yes, it's a toaster). The crafting system is really well thought out, at least 1-50. It strikes a nice balance between utility and depth, and the addition of crafting guilds has only improved it. I also love the flexibility of many of the class designs. Nearly every class has at least two roles that they can perform well in. Even the Hunter (arguably the most myopic class, and the best single target DPS in the game) has unparalleled travel utility and can function as a crowd control specialist if traited properly.

Unfortunately, it is now also glaringly obvious to me that Turbine seemingly doesn't care about one of the core strengths of pre-MoM LoTRO: it supported many routes to gearing up in the endgame. You could get gear through crafting, PvP, or six man content that was almost as good as gear from the Rift. And in terms of performance, you could handle any content that someone decked out in raid gear could handle. Once you spent time gearing up doing whatever you enjoyed, how well you knew your class counted for far more that what gear you had on. That just isn't true any more.

Let's leave aside the issue that you have to have a full set of radiance gear to do the watcher raid (and thus have access to one of the primary sources of first age weapons). The gear that you can get doing six man instances utterly outclasses the gear you can get doing anything else. I have the full three piece sets from coin drops (I only currently have one piece of radiance gear), and even that makes the best gear I could craft look completely stupid. Even worse off is the fan of PvP. The PvP gear is arguably the hardest gear set in the game to get, and by a wide margin. Yet it's also the worst set of level 60 gear you can get in terms of stats. Only crafted "epics" give it a run for the money (i.e., in terms of sucking).

We have exactly one path to high end gear right now, six mans. Presumably, with book 8, we will have two paths: 6 man content and raiding. If the raid gear is worse than the radiance sets, nerdrage on the LoTRO forums would reach to the heavens. I doubt anyone at Turbine is that insane. However, that will still do nothing to address crafting and PvP. We have gone from a game that rewarded at least four different play styles roughly equally, to one that may eventually support two playstyles. That is a major contraction.

What irks me the most is that the only "fix" that's needed is for the stats on the crafted and PvP gear to be revisited. Replace all of the stat points on crafted gear that are wasted on funky resistances with power and morale buffs. In other words, make the 58 crafted gear analogous to the old 48 gear. And up the stats on the PvP gear by 10% or so across the board. Let someone that enjoys crafting or PvP at least earn gear that is as good as the coin drop gear. A simple (in terms of developer hours) change that would make so many players happy. Yet Turbine seemingly has no intention of doing so.