Ralph CarothersCasual Raiding in WoW? Part 3
May 6th 2008 18:48
So, as a casual guild that has been having some progress in the larger raids, what challenges do we end up facing?
Our biggest challenge is burnout. Burnout is basically what I described in my first post about past MMOs. You steadily lose interest in the game for a variety of reasons. Either you want to change what your role is, but can’t so the tedium just wears you out, or you’ve just lost interest in general. This is largely why we allow players to switch roles within the various classes in our guild. It tends to remove a large part of why people burn out in the game.
The second biggest challenge is how to deal with the changing of roles. If people stop being healers, there can be no raid. As you get better at something, the ratios can and do change on what you need. Usually, we try to stock approximately ¼ of the raid with healers. When people leave a healing role, it tends to be the biggest thing that can stop a raid in its tracks. If that happens to a twenty-five man raid, we simply try to transform the raid into something else. A “screw around” run where we go explore someplace new for awhile or go to old content and stomp all over that. We basically look for something where the players can just have a bit of fun.
Most of the problems I’ve listed can be alleviated to a degree by simply growing the guild a little bit. “We’re light on healers. OK, let’s recruit one or two then!” Most of the time, we try recruiting by inviting people we see in the LFG [Looking For Group] channel that fit the role we need to go on a raid with us. After they see how our guild is run, they usually run to our board to sign up. Our guild has also kept to a pretty strict “mature players only” rule as well. The guild members are generally over the age of eighteen so we don’t need to worry about a lot of drama. We only ask that people try to better themselves as they continue on. If they need help, ask. It’s nothing we wouldn’t ask of ourselves first.
Overall, we’ve been finding that Blizzard has given some really great things to casual gamers. They seem to honestly look forward to furthering the progress in all of the twenty-five man raids currently in the game. We’ve downed bosses in everything up to Mount Hyjal. Right now, we’ve kicked the first boss in Hyjal down to 24% health. In the near future, we plan on trying to focus on one instance at a time before moving steadily along to the next big fight.
Blizzard has helped a lot with the newer gear designed to get people up to speed faster for the end of the game, as well as for the expansion soon to follow. Long-time players have been seeing a lot of random players, as opposed to already established guild members, joining together for lower level content as well. This is a clear indicator that more people are embracing more casual play styles.
Our biggest challenge is burnout. Burnout is basically what I described in my first post about past MMOs. You steadily lose interest in the game for a variety of reasons. Either you want to change what your role is, but can’t so the tedium just wears you out, or you’ve just lost interest in general. This is largely why we allow players to switch roles within the various classes in our guild. It tends to remove a large part of why people burn out in the game.
The second biggest challenge is how to deal with the changing of roles. If people stop being healers, there can be no raid. As you get better at something, the ratios can and do change on what you need. Usually, we try to stock approximately ¼ of the raid with healers. When people leave a healing role, it tends to be the biggest thing that can stop a raid in its tracks. If that happens to a twenty-five man raid, we simply try to transform the raid into something else. A “screw around” run where we go explore someplace new for awhile or go to old content and stomp all over that. We basically look for something where the players can just have a bit of fun.
Most of the problems I’ve listed can be alleviated to a degree by simply growing the guild a little bit. “We’re light on healers. OK, let’s recruit one or two then!” Most of the time, we try recruiting by inviting people we see in the LFG [Looking For Group] channel that fit the role we need to go on a raid with us. After they see how our guild is run, they usually run to our board to sign up. Our guild has also kept to a pretty strict “mature players only” rule as well. The guild members are generally over the age of eighteen so we don’t need to worry about a lot of drama. We only ask that people try to better themselves as they continue on. If they need help, ask. It’s nothing we wouldn’t ask of ourselves first.
Overall, we’ve been finding that Blizzard has given some really great things to casual gamers. They seem to honestly look forward to furthering the progress in all of the twenty-five man raids currently in the game. We’ve downed bosses in everything up to Mount Hyjal. Right now, we’ve kicked the first boss in Hyjal down to 24% health. In the near future, we plan on trying to focus on one instance at a time before moving steadily along to the next big fight.
Blizzard has helped a lot with the newer gear designed to get people up to speed faster for the end of the game, as well as for the expansion soon to follow. Long-time players have been seeing a lot of random players, as opposed to already established guild members, joining together for lower level content as well. This is a clear indicator that more people are embracing more casual play styles.
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