Gear yourself or gear your guild?

I love how WAR does it. Everyone works together to capture keeps, capture cities, capture forts... Everyone works together for a common purpose...

In WoW... everyone is on their own... it sucks...

Ah, guild drama over loot. One of several reasons that I do not raid anymore.

@David: Guild drama is not a WoW-thing, it has been around since the first MMOGs -- including some MUDs.

5 years ago, this wasn't even a question, let alone an article..

Blizzard's ability to bring in the Casual gamer and make them an annoying level 80 noob both A) killed the game for a lot of people and B) brought rise to this problem.

If you can level from 1 to 80 by yourself, never having to rely on anyone or help anyone else, and WoW is your first MMO, so you have no concept of working together to accomplish Guild goals, when you get to endgame, why would you stay and help your guildmates?

Would you even know better?

Exactly.

WoW Raids. Stand around for an hour waiting for everyone to get their ducks in a row. Spend an hour before a fight explaining it to everyone who never listens or pays attention. Spending a couple hours trying to find replacements because your party has to be just right before you can down the boss.

Most of all, spending four hours in an instance without much of a chance of coming out with anything to show for it.

This isn't the story for the really large, hard core raiding guilds. This is, however, how it went for most of us. And it grinds on constantly just for the sake of that little reward that might come your way.

And let's not forget the drama.....

I'm glad I'm no longer part of it. WoW has never good at bringing people together for the massive, multiplayer side of things.

I have to say that the ' part of something more important than yourself ' aspect of MMO hobbying is something I have never understood, and - if I'm honest - it tends to creep me out.

I can see that it must somehow be a big component of leisure activities for some folk, but I'd personally never be part of an MMO organisation that expects ( essentially demands in the article case ) me to spend my free-time on something that isn't fun for me.

There are plenty of important / tangible demands upon us when we aren't playing games - I doubt I'll ever comprehend people forging them inside games too.

Good god, reply system. That was for MightyIdle.

If doing the raids were, you know, FUN, this wouldn't be a problem.

In LotRO I constantly find myself going back to running raids and instances long after I have gotten every piece of loot I can use, because doing them with my kinship is a fun experience.

Maybe having something like a system that would require multiple runs to get a certain achievement would help the problem in other MMOs.

Me and my friends learned real quick that raid guilds are to be used to gear yourself. In our case getting gear so we can pvp. I have 4 other friends that play and we can't necessarily 5 man the 25 man raids so we use guilds to grab gear we want. We honestly couldn't care less about the other people in guild or the progression of the guild itself or its well being as long as the guild can down the boss that holds a piece of loot that will me and my small group of friends.

It sounds really wicked but there is just too much greed and selfishness in a linear themepark MMO like WoW. You really have to look out for yourself and small group of friends.

Only people with weak minds or social problems belong to "hardcore" raiding guilds. Those with more common sense move on to different games that are actually fun and move to guilds that arent run like a 8 year old is in charge, as the old saying goes, "there is nothing more cruel than the mind of a child".

The MMO companies, *we will use the french owned and run blizzard game called WOW as an example*, use raiding as a time sink to simply take your money, and those that hang around handing that money over for content that will take weeks or months to attain are as bad as the companies that make this trash.

Raiding was created for one reason, and it wasnt made for the player to get them into the game. Raiding is the only way to slowly give out "gullible loot" as i call it, epics to the raiding guilds and keep them making those monthly payments, it is a business model plain and simple. Why would instances that only give one or two pieces of anything to a party of 25 or more be created?

As more folks whined about the lack of loot this example (wow) adjusted the business model, added more loot to keep folks subbing to get that now seemingly attainable epic loot. Drama in any guild over loot is a joke of the highest magnitude, you even have crackpot PHD's touting leadership in these raiding guilds, an even sicker joke. And all the while the MMO companies see this shit and laugh all the way to the bank.

They made the upper achievements too easy to acquire, and so people not accustomed to hard work and team work are getting the benefits, then dropping out, letting the rest of the team down.

There is now little way of really appreciating the achievements of the elite player (not that I'm one by any means) and that's sad. The only way this happens now is that people race to the next cap or manage to be the first to take down all the content....


Blizz need to balance the desires for 'everyone to win' against the ongoing challenge their game offers, or we are going to be faced with more of this type of thing, which isn't good business for anyone.

For me, it's an easy question: Stick around and help the rest of the guild get geared up, but also be sure to make sure that I spend time doing stuff that's beneficial to myself as well. It's about striking a balance.

As far as guild drama goes.../shrug. Part of the game. I've learned to live with it. Thankfully my heavy-RP/part-time raiding guild doesn't have much, if any drama.

"Only people with weak minds or social problems belong to "hardcore" raiding guilds. Those with more common sense move on to different games that are actually fun and move to guilds that arent run like a 8 year old is in charge, as the old saying goes, "there is nothing more cruel than the mind of a child".

I wish that they had the rock-hard discipline that you do. After all, you have seen through the illusion that the Man has created!

Keep smokin'!

By the way, you sound hurt. Did WoW hurt you?

And I am curious as to what kind of mind you think is required to post such a stupid comment, on a website about make-believe worlds?

Beau