So let's just put the raids debate aside for a moment, and ask ourselves the following three questions:

1. What does TESO currently offer as endgame?

Personally, I know of the adventure zones, which will apparently not be in at launch?
These seem like quasi-raids where you can bring a group of any size into an instance and fight 'random' encounters in the wilderness.

I won't include dungeons, PvP, or questing in enemy factions to endgame. Why?
Because dungeons and PvP are all available throughout the game, and don't set the endgame experience apart particularly from the rest.
As for questing in enemy factions, that's a one time thing. Once done, that experience won't be a regular thing.
Now, as the game launches, the things that I've mentioned are most likely more than enough to keep us entertained for a couple of months.
It's all new, and until we learn how the system works it'll be pretty difficult too.

2. Is the endgame content enough? (Adventure zones, post-launch, I guess.)

Personally, I feel that the most important thing is for the world to feel alive. If they design a living, breathing world with things you can do on a regular basis,
then I'm good. Just like IRL (work, live, have fun, etc..) Now, the problem for me lies in the fact that they probably won't focus that much on the 'living world'- aspect.
Hardly any MMO developer does.

So for me it's rather uncertain what I'll actually do once I hit level 50 and finish the first batch of content. Am I expected to keep doing normal dungeons and PvP in Cyrodiil until the first expansion?
Whatever the content is, I really want something extra difficult to strive for. An incentive to improve myself as a player and build my character.

3. What can they do to improve the situation?

I feel that adventure zones have a lot of potential, but from what I've heard so far, they aren't really making the most of that potential. To be honest, AZ sounds dangerously similar to random outdoor PvE-encounters, especially since anyone can join the instance with multiserver technology. So I think they need to re-think these a bit, and make them a revolutionary form of raids.

Player housing is a second thing they could do. This is just an example, but things like player housing will provide the player with long-term goals they can strive to achieve.


What about you - what do you think the endgame needs?

They would have to come up with something completely revolutionary and new as a timesink instead of raids, but im afraid its not going to happen in a Trinity mmo.


I see alot of people defending "no raids!" on these fora, because all theire used to are the mechanics WoW came up with.


Theres so much potential.

I would be interested in knowing more about these dimensional anchors that they have hinted at. I'll be playing the whole game though, story, crafting, dungeons, exploring, AZs, closing dimensional anchors, AvA, the whole lot, hell I might even RP now that I've seen so many old AoC buddies. I'm most looking forward to doing public dungeons in the AvA zone of Cyrodiil. I'm not limiting myself by refusing to go into Cyrodiil so I don't think I'll have a problem with a lack of things to do.

I do want to see some form of raid content, when I say that though I mean any content where 2 or more groups work in cohesion to accomplish a difficult task. I like raiding for the social aspect and the teamwork, whether it's PvP or PvE it doesn't matter to me.

I think I put a bit over 400 hours into GW2 before I became bored of the game. The problem with GW2 was they didn't have anything that could keep you for very long. You maxed out your skills fairly quickly (before you even hit level cap) and there weren't that many of them to begin with. The WvW got boring pretty quickly as it was mostly just a zerg vs zerg game. Crafting was fun but farming for materials wasn't. In fact, farming in general was tedious and boring because of diminishing returns.

I don't think we'll have these problems with ESO. There's just so much more to do with character progression. You don't have as many limitations on how you develop your character. I'm disappointed bout the lack of raiding but I hope that ZOS will once again listen to its fan base and figure out a way to put them in to the Adventure zones (instanced large group raids). They listened to us when we asked for true ES style first person and they listened to us when we asked to be able to travel to the other faction territories. I think they will listen to us again when we ask them to put some sort of instanced large group raiding into the game. I honestly think they will do it. But I don't think it will be ready for launch.

If they give us more details about the upcoming Adventure Zones and how soon after launch they might have them ready, I think it will be sufficient for many players to keep them in the game until they are ready. As long as it isn't a year down the road. A few months after release would be fine. Six months out might be pushing it as the majority of the player base will have nothing but AvA left to do by then. And most PvE'ers are not really in to that.

It also depends a lot on how well they do their Heroic dungeon encounters. If they are fun and challenging, people will enjoy repeating them until larger group content becomes available.

Many good points!

What about having a 'pool' of weekly raids they can put in the adventure zones. So 1 'raid' every week or two that you can try to beat while it is up, and then another one pops up. This would make raiding interesting and challenging.

Obviously they would have to get repeated sometimes because they can't make 52 raids just like that.

The reason behind the raids could be everything from enemy factions pillaging your region to Molag Bal sending a force to destroy us.