Specifically things like instanced 5 man dungeons (like Ragefire Chasm or the Deadmines in WoW) which are explicitly designed to challenge a full party of a certain level range. Notably, not endgame content. I’m sure the answer changes based on different factors (e.g. how good are the rewards? What are the drop rates like? Are similar rewards available elsewhere? How long is the dungeon? Am I late picking the kids up from soccer practice?), but I’m curious what folks’ thoughts are. I’m personally sour on the idea, but I understand that my attitude is “the less MMO an MMORPG can be, the happier I am”, so MMO designers should probably disregard my opinion.
Supplementary Context: usually about once a year, I get the bug to hop into an MMO. However, I am not a good MMO player. I tend to flit around my gaming library like an ADHD pixie on cocaine, and there’s no telling how long my interest will sustain itself. Therefore, any “meta” choice I make is purely by accident, and I don’t spare even a moment of thought on “efficiency”. In fact, I’ve often thought of my dalliances in MMOs as digital tourism. By and large, I’m there to craft, read quest dialogs, and poke around in the weird corners of the map for a couple weeks before logging off for another few years. Anytime I’ve ever done group content (which is, admittedly, not often), I’m desperately trying to keep up while someone nukes everything in the dungeon as they sprint towards the end. I wind up feeling like my lackadaisical approach is probably fucking up someone else’s farming loop. Now, I don’t think either the sweatlords or I are playing the game “wrong” so to speak, but our priorities are in conflict. Maybe I’m letting people-pleasing anxiety get the best of me, but I feel like the person that cares enough to grind a dungeon reward as fast as possible should get right of way over my happy ass who will intentionally sandbag my way through a dungeon if the vibes are right. Therefore, I tend not to engage with such content, if it’s not possible to solo.
This has all come to a head because my current preoccupation is Star Wars The Old Republic. Given this game’s much greater emphasis on story and dialog than a typical MMO, I actually feel like there’s RP content that I want to see in the dungeons, irrespective of any item reward. To the game’s credit, many of these can be done solo by selecting the “story” difficulty option before loading in, but not all of them. I just don’t want to be the asshole holding up the party cause I want to watch the 3 minute into cutscene (or whatever) while everyone else is hammering their skip buttons trying to get to the boss.
Not necessarily asking for advice, as the solution seems obvious to me (it’s “talk to your fellow players”, like it always is), but I thought this might foster some discussion, especially from old heads who might have lived the raid life back in the day, but now have different priorities.
For me, dungeons and raids were THE thing that made me want to play WoW. It’s fun working towards a goal with others and there are so many possible encounter designs you can make that would be basically impossible if the content was meant to be done solo.
That said, two caveats:
It’s fun to work with people you trust and like, not randos. So while I do appreciate the dungeon finder they added to WoW in WotLK as it really let me experience the dungeons long before I was able to establish myself with a guild, I do see the ways in which design catering to that system has hurt a lot of content. My favorite period of WoW was actually early Cataclysm before they nerfed the launch dungeons. They were difficult in a genuinely engaging way and at least when I played with guildmates, I was pretty happy to spend an hour or two trying and failing at a heroic dungeon. Unfortunately that isn’t true for most players queueing with randos, so they got dumbed down.
I had a very similar experience to what you described but in FFIV. The leveling experience was pretty heavy on story, which was nice, but for the final part of the story of the base game, you needed to go do basically a big dungeon. Not quite a raid, but more people than the normal dungeons. It was pretty clear that most of the people queueing for this were just there to farm whatever and they were rushing through the place, not even killing enemies, so I just had to run after them to keep up. There were a few mid dungeon cutscenes, but you could skip these individually. While I watched the cutscene, most of the group moved along and they did so so quickly that at some point they would trigger a new cutscene before I had finished the first so that as soon as it was done it played the next one. This didn’t update my position, so even if I wanted to continue the dungeon, after a certain point I just couldn’t. It was such an awful experience it made me quit on the spot.