[MUD-Dev] SOC: Will company sanctioned cheating hurt the MMOcommunity?

[John Buehler]

Michael Hartman writes:
> Darkwolf wrote:

>> I've been part of 4-5 large raiding guilds between several games
>> (eq1, eq2, daoc, wow) and none of those guilds used team speak
>> (beyond a couple select members who were close friends), most of
>> them did some form of DPs or another and honestly, of the people
>> raiding 90% were there *soley* because of the loot.  They hated
>> it, in fact I've heard raiding as the only activity to do at high
>> levels that makes a difference in your character as the primary
>> reason most members quit those guilds... shrug.

> That is exactly my experience with raiding and raid guilds. I have
> been a part of both raid and non-raid guilds, incidentally.

Because you've got a supporting anecdote, I'll offer a tempering
one.  I despise the grind in these games, and going on raids was fun
for me.

  1. It's different.

Instead of seeing one or two monsters being chewed up by our very
efficient monster processing machine (the group itself), I could see
many huge monsters getting beat on by five or ten groups of players.

  2. It's a dungeon crawl.

The raids that I go on are invariably built as dungeon crawls.  The
groups work their way through a series of monsters, meaning that the
groups are always on the move.  This keeps things interesting
because I'm not looking at the same pixels on my screen for hours at
a time, with the same configuration of monsters coming at us over
and over again.  When camping, just seeing something out of the
ordinary is like food to a starving man.

  3. Strange things happen.

Unexpected stuff happens all the time because of the number of
moving parts involved with a raid.  Lots of people on the move,
frequently seeing content for the first time, can lead to the
unexpected.  Fortunately, with so many people in a raid, it's
tougher for one person's mistakes to completely wipe a raid, so
small foibles can be recovered from.  Not always, but it's possible.

My raiding experience was entirely in Dark Age of Camelot, and I
enjoyed it.  There was the realm versus realm stuff, which was a
multi-group experience, and there were both low level (35+) raids as
well as high level (45+) raids.  The only reason I ever wanted to
get junk was because it helped my guild and my groups.  And much of
my equipment was just handouts from my guild.

To my mind, raiding illustrates how MMOs can be made to be fun.  I
don't enjoy raids because of the loot or the experience (I think
that those things detract from MMOs).  I enjoy them because they're
dynamic and engaging.

>> I don't think most people even in large raiding guilds enjoy
>> raiding all that much, most of them are there strictly for loot
>> and would be there even if it involved pushing the "1" key on the
>> keyboard for 4-5 hours straight to get the items or DPs or
>> whatever they want.

> I agree that most of them do not even enjoy it. I also agree that
> most raids do indeed boil down to pressing the 1 key for 4-5
> hours. With huge numbers of people, individual responsibility
> plummets. Each person ends up having a very simple, specialized
> job, which gets very boring over a few hours.

I don't know how your groups operate when you're hunting, but I
always ended up in very efficient guilds that rely on people having
specialized jobs to perform.  I found raids to be a nice break
because although I retained my specialized job, little surprises
could sometimes permit me to step out of that specialized job, and I
also had the distraction of the novelty of the raid to entertain me.

After doing the same raid 10 or 20 times, I could see how I'd come
to despise raids as much as I despise camping monsters.  "Same old
same old" is what drove me away from the games.

JB
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