No.

It was deliberately designed & developed and 8 million players signed up for it…

My first ever character is still only 65.

My Molten Core raiding Shaman does BG’s now for amusement.

My Warrior’s tanking level 70 instances.

The wife and I have a myriad of characters and play styles to enjoy together, and that goes from level 20 through 40, and our level 70 duo.

And I’ve been playing since release.

Some people play the endgame like there is no other game. And, heck, if you aren’t outdoing Nihilium you’ve kind of lost the race, haven’t you?

Kind of like just creating your level 20 PvP-Only character in Guild Wars and never seeing the 1-20 content. Or those that argue if you’ve got one 60 then all your other alts should be 60 too. No fair making you do the content, the confounded content, twice. That’s no fun at all.

The game doesn’t require end-game raiding. The game allows it however. And certain personalities can’t resist the purple gear. It does become a drug. Reminds me of the guildie, ex-guildie (they got sick of her and she /gquit) who kept hankering after heroics, heroics, heroics, she needed badges, badges, badges, and when nobody jumped to the bait, most listening weren’t even 70, she just went back into her battlegrounds, lusting after the purple loot to be had there.

Time to step back and stop and think about it.

Sounds like you have and will find a slower pace in LotRO. Enjoy the shire.

It’s worked to an extent, but with 2 groups now pushing for Gruul in the near future and our weekend group a light-year behind on gear because we haven’t made the same progress in Kara yet, we’re looking at some up-coming problems I think.

What I’d like to see which would take the pressure off would be relatively simple to achieve I think. Simply remove the automatic raid-reset on a Tuesday. Let guilds spend longer working through an instance than just one week.

We spend one night clearing the 1st half of the bosses and then the second night working on 1 or 2 bosses. Let us choose when to manually reset the instance (minimum time 1 week) and let us work on the same Kara instance for 2 or 3 weeks. It would reduce the drops for some of us, but it would actually achieve the goal of removing the pressure to raid more often than we want, just so we can see the end of that place.

To bring this back to the original topic though, my wife and I tried out LoTR a few weeks ago. It was fun, but it’s sat untouched on our desktops for the past couple of weeks. I think it will turn into an interesting game, but right now it feels too unpolished to want to play for long periods. Some nice touches, but it feels like a weaker WoW clone struggling for an identity of its own. Aside from the odd Hobbiton moments, I struggle to feel any real attachment to my characters & the link to LoTR isn’t particularly immersive :( Still, I think we’ll come back there every few months and see how it grows with time.

For anyone that wants to stop in and say hello, my wife and I have rolled charachters on Landroval. I am Cyndre the Elven Minstrel, and she is Alontis the Elven Champion.

In a way, it’s rather educational, as we end up forced to confront and analyze the aspects of a game we enjoy and those we don’t.

I’m curious if this all-or-nothing achiever need to raid and grind endlessly for days tends to strike us in the first MMO we play, simply because it is the expected path laid out by the game. Then it tends to follow us across games in our mindset until we realize it has become too much of a chore.

(An achiever-raid type MUD I played had approximately a life cycle of four years for its hardcore players before they exhausted its content and got tired with the ‘same old same old’.)

Maybe the design of the virtual world and its definition of ‘success’ is also partly to blame. Certainly it is easier to put down more casual MMOs than something that glamorizes or awards prestige to activities that require a huge time investment.

Yet there’s still a subset of people to whom a game is a challenge to be beaten and they -must- play in an all-or-nothing style. It’s just their personalities.

If you design a game, you need to do it aiming to provide fun to as much as your playerbase as you can, for as long as you can. That means making your content accessible.

Designing for the 1% is bull. There, I said it ;)

If you design your raids and encounters so hard that first you leave very little room for error, and second that the path to success that you present to the players relies on optimal group composition, then yeah that’s a design mistake. You’re designing for the 1% of your playerbase that can handle it.

The team size issue is a bit deceptive. I think it’s one factor, no doubt. However you slice it, a 40-man team provides more redundancy than any other smaller team, but the solution is not to design for 40-man teams or bigger to count on that redundancy, because that’s a bit lazy and ignores the logistical side. The best solution in my view is to keep the required group size small manageable and design your encounters in a way that doesn’t require optimal group composition or hours spent getting keyed or farming.

Reducing the group size was a good move. Making the encounters quite unforgiving if things are not ‘just right’ wasn’t. It’s like writing with your hand and erasing with your elbow; it doesn’t matter how much easier it is to get 25 people together instead of 40 if now you make them even more susceptible to failure than before.

I felt like the commitment to real serious raiding got more complex and involved with less people than it was with more. There is absolutly no room to take a night off when your team is so reliant on your very specific set of skills.

Take my wife and I for example… I a Warlock and almost always the top damage dealer, and she a Priest, who is typically the main tank healer, due to her skill level. If we had a bad night or didn’t show up at all, the raid basically didn’t happen or went very unsmoothly. So the pressure to always perform at your best, and the phscological obligation to your team is stronger now than ever before.

Back in the ole days of EQ’s 70 man and wow’s 40-man teams, if you didn’t show up, they could almost always replace your, or hell, just go with 39. If you had a bad night or were off, it was almost unoticeable. Instead of 2 Holy Priests in the raid, we used to take 8. Instead of 2 warlocks we had 5. Instead of 6 total healers we had 15, and so on. Each person’s impact on the success or failure of the raid was smaller.

I think at this point, however many years into the lifespan of the game, Blizzard needs to just go ahead and solve the logistical side of raiding to stop bleeding those customers. And yeah, I said solve. Not ease, not tweak, not modify, not retouch lightly. Solve.

They already took the first step in BC when they realized “OMFG Epic experience” didn’t have to take 40 people. 40 people was a logistical pain in the butt and a design mistake. Now they need to keep walking, and take the second step which is realizing they need to remove the necessity to farm, get keyed, achieve special conditions, etc. pre-raid.