I dont want to talk about why Raiding should be in ESO like other posts do.
I want to talk about the various misconceptions regarding Raiding on both sides of the fence that I have noticed many players have from a more general MMORPG perspective.
Talking about Raiding in the MMORPG world is an important discussion for MMO gamers to have outside the realm of just ESO. If you want to talk about Raiding in ESO specifically please use this thread: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1450868-dear-zos-raiding-is-a-priority-iv/

So here the list of misconceptions I most frequently see:

A) As long as there is enough questing/dungeons/exploration/lore for PvE then an MMORPG is just as well off without Raiding

This is by far the most popular misconception I have seen about Raiding. It is a misconceptions that even the developers of ESO seem to have fallen for.

The truth is that while questing/dungeons/exploration/lore are indeed PvE content, they are not LONG LASTING PvE content. This type of content cannot engage players for, lets say, years to come. There is no reason to theorize about it, we can actually walk through the process of what happens when players get to endgame PvE:

So you hit 50, congratulations! Lets see what is there to do now in PvE.

• You can do some more exploring. You can find a little better gear while exploring, find interesting and fun lore, find quests and fun scripted events. All that is great for the first couple of months or so after you hit 50. Relative soon you will be done with most of the exploring you want to do. I think it is safe to say that most people will rarely go exploring after they experienced enough of the world in the first couple of months.
  
• You can do Dungeons, and "Heroic" Dungeons. Thats a lot of fun too. You will run them 20-30 times and get the gear you want and experience the fun content. That will last also for a couple of months. You can even queue for Dungeons while you do exploring. I think it is safe to say that most players will sparcely run Dungeons after the first couple of months of getting to 50.
  
• You can do Dynamic Events like Rifts and Dark Anchors. That sounds fun for a while, but we know it gets old fast. I think it also safe to say that most people will spacerly do them after the first couple of months as well.
  
• You can do Group Dungeons and Adventure-type Zones that some MMOs have. Thats a lot of fun, possibly meeting other people there and doing content together and building community. Thats something players can do 30-40-50 times. I think it is safe to say that once people have had their fill of Group Dungeons and Adventure Zones they will rarely do them anymore. That content seems to be VERY fast to complete and you can randomly join groups and take down stuff. Lets be generous and give that type of content three months lifetime.
  
• You can do Quests and Dailies, but I think most people will agree that it gets boring fast.

Ok, thats about it. All these PvE activities are indeed great and fun. The problem is that all these activities cannot keep people enganged for more than 2-4 months. Do you really want an MMO that thrives for 2-4 months and then burns out as people leave when they have nothing else to do because of the lack of serious progression PvE content? I think the greatest example of this is GW2. GW2 is an excellent game, but with no serious progressions PvE content. (in fact endgame in ESO sounds exactly like everything that was in endgame in GW2, maybe with a little bit more focus in exploration). People in GW2 got to max level, then they toyed around with the content for a few months, including World Bosses, Exploration and Dungeons, and then they realised that they didnt have anything else to do. So they just moved on to other games. You certainly cant blame them.

Raiding adds longlivety to an MMORPG and this is how:

So you hit 50, congratulations! Lets see what is there to do now in PvE + Raiding .

• You can do everything that was mentioned above.
  
• Now, you while you are doing exploration, Dynamic Events, Adventure Zones etc., you are also getting your character ready for the first organized Raiding. You need to know how play encouters, know your character and gear up for character so you down hard and challenging Bosses.
  
• You enter your first Raid with you Guild. Finally are at the first Boss. The encounter is a ton of fun and everyone plays and coordinates with each other. The Boss wipes the foor with you. In the next few weeks, slowly your guild gears up and learns the enounter. The encounter becomes easier and easier and finally you can your guild take that Boss down. Its time for the next Boss that will also take time to gear up and learn the encounter. All of that time you are having fun playing and coordinating with other people and builidng community and friendships, helping each other out to take down that challenge.
  
• After months, you have finally clear the Raid while having a lot of fun along the way. Not its time to do it on Heroic Mode. In the meantime a new Raid opens up so you want to try that too.
  
• This circle never stops, the game can last for as long as Developers are producing quality Raid content. People can play for years and years to come.

In short, Raiding not only adds community, guild pride and develops friendships and cooperation, it also helps the game last for years. Even if you dont like Raiding, it helps the game overall , which takes me to the next point.

If there is Raiding, then Developers will only focus on making Raid encounter which will destroy the rest of the game.

Raiding does not destroy other PvE content, it HELPS the creation of more Non-Raid PvE content.
You dont need to believe me. Just look at the facts. Games like Warcraft have thrived for years BECAUSE of Raiding. I think that reasonable people can agree that without Raiding, WoW would be dead today. Because WoW is thriving due to the Raiding, it can produce frequent quality non-Raid content. In WoW we constantly see new quests, new storylines, new World Bosses, new Factions, new or updated zones etc. etc. Blizzard NEVER stops creating quality Non-Raid PvE content.
On the other hand, lets look at GW2 which does not have raiding and is not thriving. It is no secret that ArenaNext has only been releasing a trinkle of new content when compared to WoW.

So Raiding actually helps an MMORPG thrive and it helps towards the creation on Non-Raid content. It is a win/win for everyone.
Personally, although I do Raid, even if I was not Raiding I will only play theme park games that have Raiding because it adds to quality content for everyone.

C) An MMORPG must have Raiding in order to thrive.

On the other side of scale that I have seen people insist that Raiding is important to all MMORPGs. Thats false. You can have games where players create the content and thus you dont need Raiding to keep players enganged. These Sandbox games live EVE are few in-between and we need more of them. But those game can completely thrive with no Raiding at all, and in fact are better without it.

Nevertheless, for Theme-Park games (like ESO, GW2, WoW etc.), Raiding is absolutely mandatory for the long term health of the MMORPG. Like I explained before in detail, players will run out of things to do in just a few months and move on.

D) An MMORPG will be fine as long as it focuses on good PvP.

Another widespread misconception.
Although there is a small niche of gamers who will play an MMORPG just for the PvP, there are other MMOs out there (not MMORPGs) that do PvP MUCH BETTER than an MMORPG will ever be able to do.
Games like PlanetSide 2, League fo Legends, MWO, the upcoming Defiance game etc. will always be able to do PvP better than MMORPGs which have a lot more baggage to carry and thus have to worry about server stability, balancing and other such MMORPGs issues.
For example, why would anyone play the softlock and hardlock targeting of ESO when they can play the amazing fuild and action combat of PlanetSide 2?

The rise of PvP only MMOs is fairly recent so i think this misconceptions comes from people still remembering DAoC and other such games. I think even Developers have fallen for this misconception. After all, back then the only types of online PvP were games like Counterstrike and Team Fortress.
Modern MMO PvP games had not arrived yet. MMORPGs should never compete with modern MMO PvP games. Modern MMO PvP games are here to stay and MMORPGs should focus on what MMORPGs do best. The RPG portion. MMORPGs should have fun PvP but they need to complement it with good long term PvE.


Ok, thats my 2 cents, please try to not flame too much.

Huge hole in all of this that you wrote, at least for me is the phrase "gear up". It's not fun having to grind for hours every time a new boss is presented, having to grind killed my Diablo 3 experience (though that game did the gear finding horribly bad and relied on the damn auction house almost entirely).

EDIT: switch grind with farm, I meant farm.

Your history on mmo's is way off for a start. Ultima Online had no raids and worked very well without them. It also had a realy good pvp side to the game for the time of its release.
EQ1 started the raid content to keep the loot driven guilds happy because it had no pvp.

WoW picked up raids from EQ1 and made them better, but now its old and pointless. Raids are only put into mmos when there is nothing else to do. In TESO we will have RvR and pvp in Cyrodil, you also have adventure zones shortly after release. No need for raids.

Eve has no raids and works very well as a great mmo for pvp, its the only mmo where my adrenaline was pumping that fast I couldn't hit the keys properly because so much is on the line. And one false move will end it all. PvP in other mmo's other than Ultima Online is meh, because you have nothing to loose. Equipment is soul bound, you don't get item destruction anymore and if you loose in a battleground nothing happens in the game world.
RvR will have the ability to change the game world, ok we wont have full loot rights or item destruction but the ability to change the game world in which we play is a huge drive and motivation. More so than Raids loot farms.

Mungo, GW2 thought their W vs W would be enough end game to keep people engaged too. How is that working for them?

Zenimax benefits from offering options to it's players, and learning from the mistakes of some of the other MMOs.

Oh i was not talking about MMOs historically. I guess I should have clarified that I am talking about the MMO world of today.
Sure Ultima Online was a great game when it released. I used to play it too and I had a lot of fun for the 80s standards.

But MMORPGs have evolved and now - for the first time - we have specialized MMO PvP games with which MMORPGs cant hold a candle against in terms of PvP.

Edit: Please see Section D) of my post titled
D) An MMORPG will be fine as long as it focuses on good PvP.

You say raids are not needed any more then go on to talk about all the PvP you can do. Thats all well and good for people like me and you who enjoy PvP, but there are a tonne of people out there who have zero interest in it. We have no idea what AZ's will entail so you can't say they're an outright replacement yet.

Eve's not the best example to use when it has about 350k subs, hardly the numbers TESO is going to be looking for.

Considering all servers are usually almost full and they haven't had to do any merges yet, I'd say surprisingly well.

500k subs now its the only mmo on the market that has grown since release with its subscriptions. You may laugh at this but its a fact.

You basically made this post as a cautionary tale to the developers, who are almost done with the ESO vanilla box. You also felt the need to pad out this already long post with explaining how raid progression works. I'm not sure that was completely needed. You praised WoW and Planetside 2, while equating GW2 to ESO.

It may well boil down to the fact that ESO might have PvP-centric endgame, while WoW (the game you might have cut your MMO teeth on) is PvE-centric. A lot of people know this template of level, gear, raid and are comfortable with it. That doesn't mean it's the only way to ensure the longevity of a game. People are obviously asking for innovation change and that's hopefully what ESO offers. While also nailing the core experience of course.

I never liked raiding in WoW. It seemed very samey and monotonous. I think PvP as the end-game focus is much easier when it comes to herding the cats, as it were. I know I'm terrible at following instructions and raiding was always too structured for me. The open-world PvP of Cyrodiil seems like a much airier experience then crawling another dank dungeon for weeks on here with my band of misfits. Playing casino odds for that next piece of gear I just must have, so I can get something better immediately, when the next X pack comes out.

I never think we can truly escape the pitfalls of most things. However, If I had to choice to only have PvE or PvP, I'd choose the latter. So I'm glad ZOS made their game seemingly lean closer to that direction.

We are sticking to discussion all aspects of raiding in one thread. Thank you.
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1450868-dear-zos-raiding-is-a-priority-iv/