Caught this on Terranova. Nick Yee has updated his site with four new articles. The good ones are the two about raids: an overview and some testimonials. Nick finds many common themes among the raid experiences of these games, even as these games are as different as they are.

Primary takeaways for me:

    1. This is a really nice resource. Designers are supposed to be able to compare and contrast all of the elder games that are out there, but it takes so much time to get to a high level in most of these games and earn the trust afforded a key role in a raiding guild, that it becomes impossible for a designer to know all of the ins and outs of what works and what doesn’t work.
    2. Many claim that combat in these games is overly simplified and that the MMOs are failing because of it. However, this article sheds a different light. It shows that high level raid gameplay is incredibly complex, and virtually all of that complexity comes from trusting and interacting with other players. Combat remains simple so that players can communicate easily to other players about their roles. That complexity is both fascinating and incredibly infuriating, but a lot of fun when it works. The question then becomes (a) how to make it work more reliably and (b) how to make it so the more interesting and complex interactions are what the casual user sees, instead of the incredibly boring experience of whacking rats by yourself.
    3. This article is a laundry list of features that are desperately needed by MMOs, but are cut before ship. Who doubts that we need better tools for communication, mobilization and control of groups of groups?

Hopefully, many design teams will look at this article, realize that the endgame IS what separates us from playing small-scale RPGs like Diablo and Baldur’s Gate, and really focus on making large scale group gameplay what it’s supposed to be. “Massive” is our genre’s unique selling point. We should act like it.