This PA strip sums up raiding well

[Don]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/07/18/doctrine

I was reading that LOTRO just stopped doing raids because it was mostly a waste of money for a tiny portion of the population and that's probably a very good idea. WoW's LFR is certainly a lot more successful than traditional raiding and that's basically just raiding made easier. I understand the obsession with hardcore raiding for players, but I never thought it made much sense for the developers to pursuit them given how little overall impact they have.

[Eric]

Raiding in a healthy MMO gives the userbase something to chase, the carrot on a stick to speak.

I think WoW's kind of suffered with the introduction of LFR to be honest, you can literally login, beat the LFR raid in a week, and see all the content and never have to login again until the next content push.

Before they introduced LFR, you at least had to work at your toon a bit and climb that progression ladder. Now the ladder has been kicked over and you can just walk over it. This results in players not having a reason to learn their class, or strive to be better, why try when you can see everything for no effort?

I can understand a small MMO like LOTRO, which has massive population issues not able to sustain a hardcore base, but WoW had a cool 11 million at one point, and they pretty much ate themselves alive for no good reason.

A game without an actual, vast hardcore culture leading it is a terribly dead game. Make no mistake about it, the game is driven by the top end guilds down to the competitive guilds, down to the casual guilds, down to Tommy Questypants. Nobody is enticed to play a game where the most exciting happening on your server is that some kid finally collected 1,000 pets and is Pokemon battling in Durotar. The game dies when the hardcore contingent no longer wants to play.

[Don]

I'm not convinced people are motivated to chase after raiding stuff. If you take a game like EQ which was very exclusive on who gets to raid since the spawns aren't instanced, sure you get people talk about the raiding stuff as some kind of goal but most people were never going to actually kill anything important precisely due to how exclusive it is, so unless people are too dumb to figure out that they never actually beat anything I don't see how that can be some kind of motivating factor. The original Naxxmas was utilized by something like 0.1% of the population, so unless the 99.9% can't figure out that they're never going to inside Naxxmas it's hard to imagine how that could've possibly added any value to the 99.9%.

Let's take a game like SWTOR, which seems to be at least making some money somehow. You can get an exact snapshot of the raiding population by doing a /who "Molten Core" or any other raiding zone and it'll show you everyone in that zone, and that number is usually very close to zero outside of the day everything reset, and it's rarely more than 50 people max. Is it really the case those 50 guys per server is somehow keeping the dream alive and sustaining a game? Sure it's hard to get precise numbers on the distribution but pretty much all statistics show hardcore raiding is a very small portion of the population. I'm not sure what to make of stuff like LFR. Those seem more like 'medal for achievement' deal and can't really be considered as serious raiding.

[Eric]

Yeah but EQ never hit 12 million subs either, also EQ's raiding is on a different plane of difficulty from anything WoW's ever attempted, the hardest raiding WoW ever had was probably AQ40, and that's because half of the encounters were bugged to hell and back and it was impossible to clear the last 2 bosses.

But even in Vanilla, you had people clearing Molten Core & Onyxia by the end, and pugging Blackwing Lair and the first bosses of AQ40 the best part of WoW was that actually hitting that hardest difficulty never really seemed out of reach if you worked for it, which gave you purpose.

Now you don't have to work for it at all, and it's literally handed to you on a silver platter, what's the point? heh.

Like I said, carrot/stick.

[Don]

Well Molten Core can hardly be considered as hardcore raiding other than the keying process, which is more tedious than hardcore. If you look at statistics it's something like 0.1% of all players ever stepped foot in Naxxmas, and probably a comparable amount in AQ40, but then the number goes up considerably for Blackwing Lair and definitely for Motlen Core/Onyxia. But I don't think 99.9% of the guys who never stepped foot in Naxxmas in vanillia is saying 'the prospect of going in there is totally worth $15/month even though everything in there will be obselete by the next expansion'. Likewise even the guys who did Molten Core is a small minority in WoW's population and I doubt the Joe Casual who might not even know Molten Core is a zone and is grinding away for his welfare epics is truly motivated by raiding. Keep in mind that WoW did have plenty of solid content for everything else. Sure maybe while you're doing your grind to exalted it helps to have something to look forward to in the far future but unless you want to say people are stupid enough to always be motivated by stuff they're clearly never reaching, I just don't see how the carrot & stick argument works. WoW had plenty of substance that wasn't related to raiding at all.

Even EQ, a game with a lot of raiding mystique, had its best selling expansion in the casual dungeon expansion, and the super hardcore raiding expansion was precisely what led to the initial exodus to WoW at least on the raiding end. All the raiding guilds that tried to make a name for themselves were the ones that couldn't cut it for Uqua, which was apparently designed by a spiteful employee who want people to quit the game. An average 'top end raiding guild' in other games would have a hard time beating the first trash pull in that zone. My guild was easily within top 10 at that point and that was better than big names like Afterlife or Fires of Heaven who can't even get to the first mini boss in Uqua. We got to the first mini boss and barely beat him after like 5 months and then we found out he has to die at the same time as the other mini boss and it was like 'what the @#*(@ are they thinking???' One of the optional boss in that expansion was not beaten until the next expansion with full raid loot from that expansion and more importantly the level cap increase allow you to stun the adds that are previously too high to be stunned which negated a very significant portion of the event's difficulty. So if people are motivated by raiding that certainly is way more hardcore than anything WoW had except maybe Naxxmas, but I sure didn't see anyone returning to fight encounters where you could have everyone die in the first 20 seconds.

I do think some kind of entry level raiding is good, which is probably something around the normal or flex range of raiding for WoW, but I'm not really sure if anything harder adds anything. Now, I realize if you got something like WoW you do get the super hardcore raid for cheap because it's basically the same encounter as the easier version with bigger numbers and slightly altered mechanisms, so you might as well do that. But I'm not convinced the existence of the super hard raids themselves is necessary for the well being of a game. I know LFR does lead to 'why bother try hard', but I believe Blizzard's official word is that LFR is widely successful which is why they continued it into WoD and probably doubled down on making it even more available, so it had to have been quite well received.

[Eric]

They doubled down in MoP, I don't know about WoD, in WoD they're pushing Flex Raiding a bit harder, I don't even think LFR in WoD drops Epics, just rare items, no item sets, no trinkets.

My understanding is Normal 5-mans <= LFR <= Heroic 5-man < Normal Raiding < Heroic Raiding < Mystic Raiding