The Spirit Realm

If you don't like it (btw I'm not in that top 3.2% you're whining about) go play WoW.

Please to explaining how devs are catering to raiders in SoF? IN DETAIL
They designed an equality tierage system of gear for groupers in SoF that's just a few percentage points shy of what the raiders can get.

It depends on what you mean by being "marginalized". True, raiders can crush the group game, but raiders play for raiding, not grouping, that is just something to do in off time. "Groupers" on the other hand face their challenge only in the group game. The problem is not so much the difference in power, but rather that people are more focussed on what other people can do than what they can do.

Raid gear has to be significantly better than group gear otherwise the incentive to play the raiding game is eliminated. That is a problem for mid tier guilds at the moment, since the stuff their members can get from grouping is as good as or better than what they can get raiding in many cases. Under those circumstances guilds become more a source of reliable group members than a force capable of doing large scale events. The real issue I think is not so much itemization on 54 man raids, but rather that there is nothing inbetween. You would think that there would a range between 6 and 54 man raids with intermediate rewards, but unfortunately there isnt.

The problem with raiding in EQ is simple: it's an artificial mechanic imposed on the basis of an arbitrary number (54) for the sake of simulating a certain sort of play style (cooperation between a large group of people) that, unfortunately, ends up being more about the loots than the play style itself. I happen to enjoy raiding, but not everyday. Unfortunately, the game is setup such that raiders have little to gain from groups and vice versa, such that most of the times what I see is people logging in only for raids and playing their alts the rest of the times. Personally, I think raiding should be one of those once or twice in a week rumps like college parties where everybody in a guild gets together and kicks the crap out of some powerful mobs as opposed to a completely separate play style. By comparison, the professional, militaristic, and de-personalized nature of many high-end raiding guilds today does not encourage any sort of social merry making. Instead, raiding feels more like corporate work than anything else, and that's sad.

As far as the content development goes, yes - the lack of in-between content is a problem but illustrates one of the necessities of sustaining raiding as a separate play style. Namely, you can't spend all your time making raids of various sizes because raiding guilds, for which raiding is a full-time devotion, need a tremendous amount of content to keep them occupied and if all the raids are of different sizes what you end up with is a lack of targets for any one guild size. This would not be a problem if raiding wasn't a full-time, guild-dependent play style, but it is.

SoF is a step in the right direction, but I don't think it changes the fundamental setup. The problem with the raiding game is not necessarily high-end vs. low-end, it's the lack of any sort of smooth integration with the casual grouping game that characterizes most of EQ before the level cap. Simply put, raiding must be committed to as a full-time activity or else you don't get much from it. That's something the vast majority of EQ is unwilling to do and that's why raiding fails to be accessible to the masses.

Changing that is required if raiding is ever going to be a de facto standard in MMOs. Otherwise, it's just going to become an obsolete concept - as it already is becoming post-WoW (out of the new MMOs that are coming out, how many focus on high-end raiding?)

One anecdote isn't enough to change statistics, I'm afraid.

See OP post. I've also seen other statistics that suggest raiders, as a whole, are a minority within EQ and a relatively small one at that (~25% of the population). That's counting guilds that are still stuck at CoA/Demi, who may not have raided anything else for the past 2-3 years.

WoW, which follows a similar but less exclusive model than EQ, has similar statistics, by the way. Most people just don't raid. See: http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2006/05/raid-numbers.html for one analysis.

And while it's fine to explain that away as "well, it's just a matter of personal preference," once you start looking at the economic costs of developing raid content, you'll realize, as many new MMO companies have, that raid content isn't worth the % of development time that's currently spent. Yet, if you don't, those who do raid won't have enough content. The whole ordeal becomes a trade-off problem and it's becoming increasingly clear that the trade-off does not favor raiders. Hence the reason MMOs are moving away from the model.

The problem is that raiding is a full-time play style, and while open raids might seem an exception to this rule, I find that most successful open raids simply end up becoming raiding organizations attended by regulars no different than if they were a guild. Now, you can play the group game while raiding, but unless you play EQ 5+ hours every day you're never going to be able to sustain both play styles vigorously (nor would you want to, really). Raiding is not a once or twice a week activity which you can do when you felt like it and still get something out of it (I don't know how it works on your server - but on Test, which is arguably one of the most casual servers around, open raids still mostly use DKP, which means that you won't get much out of them unless you raid frequently). It's something that most raiders do almost every time they play EQ - in fact, most serious guilds have to schedule off time so that their raiders can go exp, because otherwise people in the guild (who don't play 5+ hours everyday) won't find the time to level/grind AAs.

I'm not arguing anything about raid gear vs. group gear or whether there are more casual raiding guilds (there are, but these guilds are usually stuck behind the curve so much that sooner or later it becomes pointless to raid because the group gear is better). What I'm saying is that everything wrong with raiding in EQ today can be directly traced to the fact that it's an exclusive, full-time play style that, instead of complementing the grouping game (that Rashere himself admitted was the "heart" of EQ), actually replaces it in many cases. Thus you end up with two competing play styles not unlike PvE vs. PvP, and having to design content for both becomes a balancing act that becomes more difficult the further along you go.

In effect, today's EQ is fundamentally divided. That's why almost every single issue that comes up becomes a pissing match between raiders and groupers, and the two sides are so entrenched in their own group interests that whatever the devs do, one side will feel slighted.

And again I disagree. You have been given examples that one can raid less than 5 days per week and still be succesful. We are also semi-open, i.e. let non-guild members raid with us. I find it funny that you insist that the raiding game is broken, when there are more than ever possibilities for cross-over.

And again I emphasize that exceptions do not constitute the rule. If the cross-overs are as frequent as you claim they are, there would not be a raider vs. grouper divide, and statistics such as those given in this thread and by the OP would not exist.

You can keep denying it based on your own experiences, if you desire, but anecdotes are limited in their usefulness precisely because we all have them. If not for statistical data, it'd be just your word against mine, and I can assure you my experiences are quite different. But in this case, I think the stats speak for themselves; in fact, even if they are not supremely accurate as data from SoE, I've seen SoE verify the results more than once - Rashere himself said that raiders constitute a relatively small minority of those who play EQ. That being the case, the only matter left for interpretation is how we view the data. I happen to think that the raiding game should be something that the majority of the players experience, which consequently means it should be integrated into the grouping game such that the two are complementary.

Btw, the current raiding architecture isn't "broken." It's just not very good, and becoming obsolete.