Can someone explain raiding in detail?
A good guild will one-shot the first 3-4, take 10-30 tries for the next 3-4, the two penultimate bosses taking 50-200 tries and the last boss taking 200-500 tries.
Wow, these kind of games are shit indeed.
There isn't a kind of game really though, because each game does it their own way. It bothers me how little innovation there is but still, raiding especially is pretty different from game to game.
Raiding in WoW is a lot more of an arcade game version of the process compared to some other games. Ultima Online had a very different type of raid, and I played EverQuest in 1999 which was different to how it is now too. It changed quite a lot in 20+ years, and each game has their own spin too and their own mechanics. That 500 times thing sounds brutal but they do it because they want to. How many times have you played a Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat match? If failing 500 times isn't an issue then people can just enjoy doing it until they nail it. I guess. For me it wasn't very long.
My raiding was mostly in EQ which was more like a survival game, so it was more decisive.
EQ didn't even need raid content because it already had some amazing high level dungeons and some of them if you went deep enough, there was raid content in them. Raid content being big scary stuff that would kill even a full group of people, so you need a lot of people. Just the high level dungeons needed a group of 6 people to make progress. And even then it was generally too dangerous to do a dungeon crawl, so players would just do one area.
If you could get to the far back of one dungeon called Solusek, there was a castle full of fire giants that were serious business. They could kill a group in a few seconds. But if you go there with several groups, so like 42 people, you could maybe defeat all the giants and get amazing rewards from it. And then if you could get past all the giants, there was a massive fire dragon called Lord Nagafen. When you attack him he starts breathing fire over everyone and squishy people die instantly. You can avoid it if you know where to hide, etc. Healers focus on keeping the big guys alive. Everyone else stabs and nukes it with all they have and hopefully they win. That is raiding. It was so brutal but with such good rewards, that what tended to happen was 90 people would show up... And the dragon didn't really stand a chance, even against a bunch of idiots. 90 idiots hurt. So in later content the developers did various things to always stay one step ahead of the players with more complex raid design, such as having players choose a faction which basically limits the number of people who will be wanting to kill a particular raid boss, and then some raid bosses would teleport some players to a side room full of killer mushrooms, etc.
Also it is worth mentioning, that EQ was not only doing this complex mind blowing shit in 1999 when most games barely even had a multiplayer mode... and they were dealing with 100 people showing up from all over the world to kill one dragon in one area of the game. (They had to shift server resources to let this work). And the dungeons (or outdoor areas too) were open to anyone. So you might get 90 people together to go and kill a dragon, but in that same area there may be newbies fighting pumas or something.
World of Warcraft was designed by people who played all this and wanted to make their own version. I would say "wanted to improve on it", but I'm not even sure that was true. They improved on some things, but a lot of stuff was much worse. But in WoW they basically made the raid and dungeons an 'instance' which means a loading screen before you load into an area with a dragon or whatever, and they limit how many people can load into that 'instance' of the encounter. They limit it to around 20 but have tried various things. If another 20 people show up then it can just create a copy of that dungeon 'instance' and another 20 people can do the same thing. (EverQuest deliberately resisted doing that until late on.) To people who started in WoW, this is raiding. To people who started in UO or EQ, this is a repulsive Nintendo-ified version of raiding which removes the prestige, excitement, infamy, legends, and raging nerd tears from when guilds deliberately cockblocked each other from even reaching raid content so they could remain the top dog, etc.
I never cared about all this but millions of people do care apparently and the drama and closeness of the old games is sad to be gone. But whether WoW improved it or not, either way raiding in games evolved and is very finely tuned now that can't be zerged. The devs know exactly how much dps will be coming from the players, and how much dps they can survive, etc. So they design encounters to challenge players, and they have fun/contrived stuff like a giant pillar that crumbles and everyone has to run out of the way as well as doing their usual healing job or whatever. And then that evolved into floors that move and all the players have to run in a sequence while also doing their thing. And if you die it doesn't really matter. In EverQuest dying was nasty so it was a different sort of experience.
In Shadowbane raiding was actually firing catapults at a castle, and when you busted the wall down, real players would come charging out to kill you. Other games do different stuff too. I prefer the EQ way but all of it is kinda goofy and time consuming and my point is that it hasn't really ever been redesigned since the 90s. Each new MMO modernises it in some way so it does improve, but it is still basically the same concept of "moar playerz iz fun" and throwing them all at a dragon or something. I would rather they think about other stuff like world conquering, armies holding regions etc. It sort of happens in some games. Eve has a lot to teach the other MMOs. But so does EQ, WoW, Rift, ESO, everything else.