If you like WoW, you're an idiot.

I had a friend that played WoW back in vanilla that just so happened to lead one of the top 10 guilds in the world. His guild was at the forefront of the raiding scene for a very long time, tackling every piece of content delivered with extreme efficiency and then some. The guild was geared towards making the raid more efficient -- this is the nature of a high end raiding guild. The guild bank, the leadership, everything, and they did it at a level that very few could emulate. In a time where people were complaining to high heaven about repair bills and consumables, this guild managed to not only pay for every single repair bill and consumable, but they did it with extreme regularity. 40 flasks on their first Onyxia kill? Everyone kitted out in fire resist gear before the first Ragnaros kill? Yeah. The whole 9 yards.

And then the guild died. It was a sad day, but such is life in the player generated world of MMO raiding. Guilds form, guilds raid, and guilds die, and so he moved on to another guild with not quite so greener pastures. It was a complete wreck from top to bottom, and wasn't even halfway through Zul'Gurub by the time Naxxramas was released, if you can believe that. Fortunately, my friend had his head on his shoulders, instead of up his ass, and he helped build this guild from the ground up, and managed to see the inside of Naxx with them in the space of just less than three months by applying the concepts he had learned in his many years of MMO experience.

This is player generated content. You see, the social climate, the player skills, mentality, the leadership structure, everything was completely different in this second guild than in the first, and so the challenges that the raiding content provided for this second group was a new set of challenges to figure out and overcome for the entire group, and thus himself by extension. He couldn't just pull money out of his ass to pay for everything, or tell his members to be more supportive of the raid rather than themselves. He practically couldn't do anything that made his last guild as successful as it was, because the social climate of the guild, server, and indeed game as a whole had drastically changed since his previous one.

It bothers me that the new MMOs coming out today constantly undercut the social aspect of MMOs by writing it off as nothing more than catering to poopsockers. Nothing could be further from the truth, and indeed if your game doesn't have an extremely well thought out, comprehensive raid game that the rest of your MMO is literally built around, it will fail.

Well. Maybe fail is a strong word there. It's certainly not going to be the next WoW, or even siphon players away from it. It's like these new companies see all the changes that WoW is making to lower the bar and barriers so that they can include the bottom line a bit more in their actual game, and they completely overlook the fact that the raid game is the single most worked on aspect of WoW, literally no other component in WoW even begins to compare to raiding in terms of dev time and resources. Why haven't they figured this out yet?

I don't know. I know Zoid was in the IRC today telling me to shut the fuck up if I haven't killed HLK, though. As idiotic a straw man it is, it does bring up a good point. Why haven't I killed HLK? It's 'hard' content, right? I like 'hard' content and should really enjoy the encounter, right? Not quite.

Let's take a standard 5 man dungeon. Most people would consider these to be way too far on the easy side right now. In fact, I'm fairly certain even Blizzard agrees with this assessment since they're taking rather large steps to change this aspect of it. It is, in short, a boring experience for a group. You can join up, not talk to anybody, and short of one of your players stopping to, I don't know, suck a fat dick instead of heal your ass, you're probably going to be fine. How do we change this aspect to get people to communicate? There's a few different ways I guess, but the obvious answer would be to require the group to use CC. The two primary ways you can go about this is to either remove AE threat from tanks, or increase the threat to your tank from each additional mob until any more after a certain limit kills them.

Now, I'm not so interested in the armchair dev thoughts on how to accomplish the latter. I've heard everything from MAKE TEH MOB SLEEPZ0R TEH TANKZ0R to WELL JUST MAKE IT RAEP O CLOCK. Nothing gets really to the core of the issue, which is: what makes a good group experience? If the mobs in the rape train scenario are not controlled properly (i.e. by the tank maintaining threat/life or by the group CCing it) you wipe. It certainly creates a challenging dungeon given the ways you can arrange the puzzle, but is it fun?

I don't think so. I like the other route, just remove AE threat from tanks and call it a day. Suddenly, even a DPS can tank a mob for a short while, since you don't necessarily have to kill the tank for tanking too many mobs -- he can't hold them all anyway. Now your healer can step up his game, he can triage members of the group by saving who he deems important and letting the others die. It's still a challenging encounter, because you could very well die if your healer doesn't choose correctly, but failure is mitigated on a much deeper level in a much greater variety of ways.

The raid game is similar to this. A raid group that tries to kill a boss but can't in this New WoW has nothing to fall back on but to tell their players to hit the 1 key harder, or don't stand in fire, or any other thing you can think of. The mechanics today are mostly tied to things like how fast can someone move out of the fire, or how many GCDs a player can use up in the shortest time span. No longer is it how do I manage the guild bank? How do I gear out my raid? How do I arrange the leadership so that the important tidbits trickle down? It just doesn't exist.

Now, I have nothing against the people who really like a raid game where personal skill trumps social skill, but it's just not my cup of tea. I don't think any of the things I've said here today are in any way outrageous, or even far off the mark. In fact, I'm fairly certain that since my left pinky has created and destroyed more guilds than the entirety of this board combined, that I'm the most knowledgeable motherfucker on the face of the planet when it comes to a guild's social structure. Do I need to kill HLK to say these things? I don't think so.

How about you get back to me when you break Plane of Fear with 6 people in 1999. GOOD LUCK.