I've been raiding a bit more and it occured to me what the guild leader of Cestus Dei said about raiding back in EQ1 when Mata Muram was defeated legitmately. He basically said this encounter marks the dead end of raiding in all MMORPG because Mata Muram can only be defeated by perfection as the encounter has absolutely no room for screw up. At this point you can only talk about how perfect your raid is, as obviously an even tougher raid can demand even more perfection. But mechanic-wise, MMORPG raiding is done. There isn't anything new outside of gimmicks. You can shorten the reaction time or increase the damage or whatever you want, but if you were ever a part of a raid that beat Mata Muram legitmately (or any comparable difficulty encounter in any other MMORPG) you know all there is to know about MMORPG. The only thing left is whether you can react to something in 0.5s instead of 0.6s because that's the new bar for the next impossible encounter.
And it's really hard if you're part of a crew that achieved perfection in some way (I was part of the legitmate side of the raid on Mata Muram, plus a lot of freeloaders exploiting him) to play raids again, and this isn't because you're better. It's basically like why do I have to explain anything to you if the only encounter I expect to be difficult requires perfection? Either you have perfection and don't need it explained, or you do not and we won't win anyway. And if something can be won without perfection, it's obviously not hard enough for me to waste time explaining it to you. For example in SWTOR there's a trash pack that features a Pirate Stimfiend which basically needs two tanks rotating taunt on it as there's no other way to defeat it safely. So I always taunt first, and then I realize no one is taunting second. At this point the guys in raid (usually crying in voice chat) would expect you to bail them out with an AE taunt. But why? You already failed to taunt it at the right time like a perfect player should do, which means one person is going to die. From my point of view, since I'm not the one who made the mistake it might as well be you to die, because if I AE taunt I'm definitely going to die too and you're strictly looking at loss of one person, so that death should go the guy who screwed up. Of course most people don't even realize a missing taunt invariably leads to someone dying later, and there's really no point to discuss the more intricate innerworkings of MMORPG with random strangers who are nowhere near perfection. Players who I know that are truly good don't really have a low opinion of PUG, because perfection is something you either have or not, and it's not like you'll be attempting an encounter that requires perfection in PUG, so while PUG may be incredibly bad, as long as you're not attempting perfection-required encounters, it shouldn't even matter.
And this kind of raiding is very frustrating. For the guys who are at perfection you're usually outnumbered 10 to 1 listening to guys who have no idea what they're doing. For the people who are nowhere near perfection they don't even know that's what they need much less ever obtain that. And why should raiding require perfection? It's not like you can write on your resume, "Part of the crew that defeated the perfect raid." The vast majority of MMORPG players won't even know what perfect playing looks like if they see it, so why have raids that demand anything remotely like perfect playing? From what I gather WoW's LFR is probably like that as you can make a ton of mistakes and still win eventually, though I'm not sure making raids you have no possibilty of losing to is the right idea. A raid can be hard and still allows people to make mistakes. There simply isn't enough people who never make mistakes to support a game, and really you often just get into a 'more perfect' problem. That is a person who is precise 99% of the time may look pretty perfect until you have an encounter that demands 99.99% precision because you give people only 0.3s to react before everyone dies from a mechanic. I've been through the EQ arms race where if 1s is enough time for people to react to a mechanism then clearly the next expansion will feature the said mechanism with 0.1s to react and this kind of arms race is destructive. You'd hit an encounter and your conclusion is that because certain guys aren't perfect and likely will never be perfect you have no chance of actually winning without replacing them. Good luck trying to tell that to people, and even if you can say that I don't think that's the kind of environment you want to encourage.
Another issue is the subtle mechanics that wipe you. Unless you've a thorough understanding of all the game mechanics, there are a lot of seemingly minor things that when you fail to do correctly, will eventuall lead to a wipe. The WoW journal has the right idea with the skull label on the key abilities, but this concept needs to be taken further. You really should say like ability X: "Does whatever to player, this encounter is tuned so that if you fail this mechanism more than (some #) times you will wipe and it is TOTALLY YOUR FAULT." Okay that might not even be enough for people to realize it's their problem, but at least it'd help. Of course if you start doing that, you'll find for a lot of encounter the (some #) is going to be 0 or 1 on any cutting edge encounter, and this again goes to the question why does raiding require perfection in the first place? If you make a thorough analysis for Mata Muram or any comparable difficulty encounter you're going to get the conclusion that failing any mechanisms almost certainly guaranteeds wipe. Imagine if you have this information ahead of you for a PUG, do you really want to attempt something where the (some #) is 2 or less? I certainly would not, and yet plenty of underqualified group attempts encounter where the number is actually 0 (after factoring in their gear/skill level) without even knowing and just blaming each other without realizing that a single mistake effectively ends the encounter.
And it's really hard if you're part of a crew that achieved perfection in some way (I was part of the legitmate side of the raid on Mata Muram, plus a lot of freeloaders exploiting him) to play raids again, and this isn't because you're better. It's basically like why do I have to explain anything to you if the only encounter I expect to be difficult requires perfection? Either you have perfection and don't need it explained, or you do not and we won't win anyway. And if something can be won without perfection, it's obviously not hard enough for me to waste time explaining it to you. For example in SWTOR there's a trash pack that features a Pirate Stimfiend which basically needs two tanks rotating taunt on it as there's no other way to defeat it safely. So I always taunt first, and then I realize no one is taunting second. At this point the guys in raid (usually crying in voice chat) would expect you to bail them out with an AE taunt. But why? You already failed to taunt it at the right time like a perfect player should do, which means one person is going to die. From my point of view, since I'm not the one who made the mistake it might as well be you to die, because if I AE taunt I'm definitely going to die too and you're strictly looking at loss of one person, so that death should go the guy who screwed up. Of course most people don't even realize a missing taunt invariably leads to someone dying later, and there's really no point to discuss the more intricate innerworkings of MMORPG with random strangers who are nowhere near perfection. Players who I know that are truly good don't really have a low opinion of PUG, because perfection is something you either have or not, and it's not like you'll be attempting an encounter that requires perfection in PUG, so while PUG may be incredibly bad, as long as you're not attempting perfection-required encounters, it shouldn't even matter.
And this kind of raiding is very frustrating. For the guys who are at perfection you're usually outnumbered 10 to 1 listening to guys who have no idea what they're doing. For the people who are nowhere near perfection they don't even know that's what they need much less ever obtain that. And why should raiding require perfection? It's not like you can write on your resume, "Part of the crew that defeated the perfect raid." The vast majority of MMORPG players won't even know what perfect playing looks like if they see it, so why have raids that demand anything remotely like perfect playing? From what I gather WoW's LFR is probably like that as you can make a ton of mistakes and still win eventually, though I'm not sure making raids you have no possibilty of losing to is the right idea. A raid can be hard and still allows people to make mistakes. There simply isn't enough people who never make mistakes to support a game, and really you often just get into a 'more perfect' problem. That is a person who is precise 99% of the time may look pretty perfect until you have an encounter that demands 99.99% precision because you give people only 0.3s to react before everyone dies from a mechanic. I've been through the EQ arms race where if 1s is enough time for people to react to a mechanism then clearly the next expansion will feature the said mechanism with 0.1s to react and this kind of arms race is destructive. You'd hit an encounter and your conclusion is that because certain guys aren't perfect and likely will never be perfect you have no chance of actually winning without replacing them. Good luck trying to tell that to people, and even if you can say that I don't think that's the kind of environment you want to encourage.
Another issue is the subtle mechanics that wipe you. Unless you've a thorough understanding of all the game mechanics, there are a lot of seemingly minor things that when you fail to do correctly, will eventuall lead to a wipe. The WoW journal has the right idea with the skull label on the key abilities, but this concept needs to be taken further. You really should say like ability X: "Does whatever to player, this encounter is tuned so that if you fail this mechanism more than (some #) times you will wipe and it is TOTALLY YOUR FAULT." Okay that might not even be enough for people to realize it's their problem, but at least it'd help. Of course if you start doing that, you'll find for a lot of encounter the (some #) is going to be 0 or 1 on any cutting edge encounter, and this again goes to the question why does raiding require perfection in the first place? If you make a thorough analysis for Mata Muram or any comparable difficulty encounter you're going to get the conclusion that failing any mechanisms almost certainly guaranteeds wipe. Imagine if you have this information ahead of you for a PUG, do you really want to attempt something where the (some #) is 2 or less? I certainly would not, and yet plenty of underqualified group attempts encounter where the number is actually 0 (after factoring in their gear/skill level) without even knowing and just blaming each other without realizing that a single mistake effectively ends the encounter.
