Raiding Was Introduced

One of the greatest innovations in Online Gaming was the creation of the concept of “raiding”.

One of the worst aspects of Everquest was the creation of the concept of “raiding”.

Those two statements may seem mutually exclusive but they aren’t as I will explain in my analysis below.

Let’s begin at the beginning. Ultima Online and early Everquest were lacking one thing. That thing was the answer to this question: “So, I’m max level/skill. I have conquered all of the content needed to make my character as powerful as possible. Now what do I do?” Or said another way, “The players have beaten everything we added. What carrot do we give them to keep them paying for our service?”

Ultima Online answered that question by adding expansions with new lands to explore and new monsters to fight. Everquest went one step beyond that and created something brand new in Online Gaming; something that turned out to be a really great invention with really poor implementation. Fortunately, as time would show, future game developers learned the lessons of the poor implementation and took the concept and made it better. That something is what later would be called: Raiding.

Raiding is basically the addition of content to achieve once you are max level that typically is only achievable by working with a group of other players. Raiding a target is often a multi-hour investment of time and often those players who are hard core into raiding also spend hours between raids preparing for the next one. Raiding is the carrot on the stick for those who, previously, would have reached the end of the game and moved on to a new game.

The concept of raiding was revolutionary when it came to Everquest. EQ itself didn’t have raiding when it went live. It wasn’t something people talked about on boards. It wasn’t even something that was asked for by players. For most players, it snuck up on them without them realizing what it was. Everquest had the distinction and the disadvantage of being the first game to have raiding. They created it but they also had to take all the lumps to work out the best way to handle things.

Initially there were no raid zones. You might team up with a group of friends and go after a target that required more than one person to take down but that wasn’t really raiding. That was group hunting/questing. Then along came two new Everquest zones: The Plane of Hate and the Plane of Fear. Each one was filled with the nastiest monsters in the game that existed at that time and multiple bosses. Those bosses were so tough that no single group was going to take them down. Rather, you needed multiple groups working together to drop them.

Players developed an appreciation for raiding over a few months. It was very common for a player or small group of players to go into Hate or Fear and join up with other players already there to kill things.

Because those groups didn’t often know each other well, they didn’t often meet with great success. That, in turn, taught players the value of having a raid team that regularly went hunting together. You could learn your buddies strengths and weaknesses and more importantly, the gear you earned from the last kill remained in the group (until the person quit) to help out in your next kill.

The idea of raiding was quick to catch on and soon guilds were sprouting up whose sole purpose in the game was to raid. They required you to already be max level and they often also had certain gear requirements. Those guilds would raid very often and would often pound on targets until they mastered how to kill them. Then they would farm the targets to obtain the items to move forward.

Raiding was new. Raiding was risky, since you could die deep in a dungeon and spend substantial time getting your corpses back. Raiding was exciting. Raiding was a great invention that the MMO world is stronger for having been created. But raiding in Everquest was also flawed. The core flaws of raiding in EQ were several.