Originally Posted by forge

I think if we learned anything from wow, it's that people want 20 man raids over the 40 man. While there are plenty of people who like 40 man, most seem to admit they would prefer 20. But what they get are more 40 man zones, and guilds which have since been designed from the beginning of wow to complete on the 40 man level.

Originally Posted by Fammaden

This is one of the sources of my greatest remaining hopes for the game. That and the somewhat recently posted news that raid group sizes are currently aiming for around 25 or so for the average encounter. Large campaigns, wars, epic battles have their place I suppose, but the essence of RPG's to me are the small group dungeon crawls. I feel like we have gotten away from that over the years. Playing Oblivion has been the most positive RPG experience I have found in a new video game title in years. Instead of racing to level caps and farming the same raid zone for weeks on end, I am talking to NPC's discovering new places, playing my character as a character with personality, and playing my class as I like to play it rather than how the dps/heal/aggro numbers dictate I play it. MMORPG's raiding scenes have really grown into some kind of devilish albatross that dominate every design and play style decision for too many devs and hardcore gamers.

I know there are many people out there like me who crave a return to smaller more intimate grouping styles in an online MMO. I hope VG can bring a game where I don't have to feel like a numbered cog in a big bureaucratic raiding machine just to see the entire game.

Originally Posted by Kuro

Feign Pulling/Kiting FTW.

Originally Posted by The Hiram Key

Like Conquest using the bridge and summon to lower the difficulty of an encounter and in the process getting banned from EQ for "failure to do it the hard way" ? I submit that I agree with you, player ingenuity and resourcefulness are both interesting concepts, but the current generation of MMORPG's managment does not see it that way.

Lame.

Originally Posted by Mkopec1

Thats the biggst faliure in WoW, IMO. The content is not centered and focused around the group, but raid once you hit 60.

Look at all the other PvE focused mmos and you will find that 70% or more of the content is meant for the group, rather than for the raid.

Even EQ in 2006 focuses most of their content on the single group, rather than raid. Why? Because this is where the majority of the playerbase is focused on, grouping, not raiding.

Its silly for WoW devs to assume that once their average player hits 60 they will auto join a raiding guild and do raids. IMO they are really fucking over their bread and butter, the casual, and "core" gamer which could give 2 shits about raiding for 5 hours 5 days a week.

Originally Posted by Lhon

I don't think it's all to appease forum whiners. I posted this on another thread, but I think a lot of it is devs trying to fix the problems with previous games. The thing is they're fixing the problems from a developer's perspective, not a player's perspective. Kiting, Crowd-control, and AOE groups were not problems for players, they were problems for developers because they enabled the players to do things the developers didn't want. Developers have gotten so focused in on rate-of-advancement and balance, that they've lost track of the most important thing: fun.

Originally Posted by Kolle

If Brad is reading this...please don't make boss fights 30 minute marathons because they have millions of health, thanks. Raids lasting 8 hours because of too much trash and too much hps isn't fun.

Originally Posted by Etadanik

I'm fine with this complaint. If a NPC wants you to do something, it should tell you exactly what it needs (or, if the NPC doesn't know what it exactly needs, it should give you enough hints to figure things out - ie for a diamond "I want the hardest gemstone you can find" or have a flexible satisfaction criteria - ie "I want something round and shiny" => can be fulfilled with a pearl, a waxed shield, a cannon ball, etc.). But that doesn't mean leading you by the hands to exactly where and how you can get it.

Of course, part of the necessity for detailed instructions rise from inflexible game design. For example, if a NPC wants "bear skin" for a winter pelt, why the hell must I hunt young_cave_bear as opposed to mature_cave_bear, and why can't I get bear skin from bears on the other side of the world? Shouldn't the NPC be happier that I got him cold-resistant bear skin from the Coldpaw Bear of the Frozen Valley?

"Hey, I got you this ultra high quality magic bear skin instead!"

"Uh... No. I only want poor quality bear skins. GTFO."

I think the problem lies in the way the quest system is designed, frankly. MMORPG quest design has been traditionally - and this is a result of both influences from MUD (in EQ's case) and from RTS/action RPG games (in WoW's case) - linear and inflexible, when really it should be made more like Baldur's Gate or Fallout with multiple-decision trees, involved gameplay, and flexible qualifications.

EDIT: WoW is filled with quests of poor design of the type I mentioned above (EQ was worse, it goes without saying). I recall one time during beta when I tried to do a quest without thottbot. The NPC told me to collect spider silk (or it might've been guts, I forget) from forest spiders, so there I went to the nearest spot and started fighting them. Not knowing the drop rate of the silk and thinking it might've just been a roll of the dice, I sat there fighting them for thirty minutes before becoming frustrated. So I went off to thottbot and, what do you know - the damn spiders I'm supposed to be fighting are the next area over. *This* sort of crappy design, folks, is what really makes WoW-style leading-by-the-nose quest texts necessary. What's worse, they encourage the use of spoiler sites because what makes sense != what the quest giver wants, so if you don't use spoiler sites you're basically screwing yourself. Get rid of this inflexibility and guess what, you can get rid of the leading-by-the-nose as well.

Originally Posted by Etadanik

The rest of your post I pretty much agree with. However, these two statements just strike me as being the entire problem with the game industry today. I know you call yourself the mouthpiece of the casual, but the more I read these two statements the more retarded they appear.

What's the point of playing a game if you just want to be led by the nose? What's the point of playing a game if you want exploration, discovery, independent thinking, and challenge all replaced by the equivalent of a developer-made spoiler guide telling you exactly what to do next, how to do it, and where to do it?

Games shouldn't be passive, follow-the-carrot activities. Ever since the beginning, with games like Chess, games were made with the idea that they were hard to master. This challenge is fundamental to gaming, and few great games have survived that do not possess both depth and challenge. Understand this: you're not forced to play a game. We're talking about a voluntary activity that humans designed to challenge each other, to compete within an arbitrary ruleset, to "beat." The gameplay was the process of beating it - the difficulty was *the point*. How would the gameplay ever be fun if all you had to do was click "Go" and the game beat itself, like so many large budget games do these days?

This is the problem with modern gaming: it's gone from an active, interactive medium to the equivalent of click-and-play movies. I have nothing against movies, but they're not games, and if the future of the industry is to mimick movies then I really wonder whether the gaming industry has a future at all. Maybe the genre peaked back in the 1990's, and the only direction now is down.

Originally Posted by Brodda Thep

It would be interesting to know where you thought this happened. ie when did content focus on end game prematurely? I have always wondered what percentages of subscribers never actually make it to the end game, and thus never run out of things to do.