Sadly no Arkfalls are not raids as there is little to no skill involved in doing them, I could sit a 3 year old down and tell him/her to just press a button and the Arkfall would still be completed. Also Arkfalls can be done in a group of 4 "Raids" should not be a small "Dungeon Group" piece of content.
As for Defiance's End Game being PvP, that would require them actually having PvP that means something or have more then 2 types of PvP. Team Deathmatch and Shadow War(which I've never been able to join at all in over 20 days) isn't enough to call "End Game".
So in essence the OP's post is correct Defiance has no normal "End Game" as of yet to keep people playing more then a month or two months at best.
Your Challenger won't drive? You're probably in the passenger seat.
Can't sell/delete an item? Check all of your loadouts, it's likely still equipped.
Auction house? Why? It'll just render bits purchased lock boxes pointless, and weapons are mostly equal anyway.
Gear/enemy progression? No thanks, it'll only render 90% of the content trivial when you reach the highest zone.
I have been around, Played UO before any of the moden rules, players could kill you and tale all your stuff, hell they could pickpocket you to.
I spent hours doing Corpse runs in AC.
No flight paths, no fast travel, you wanted to go somewhere, you had to hoof it (Or find a mage to port you)
WoW made all those obsolete, showed that not punishing players = success.
I like (for the most part) the system that Defiance has going for it. Note I am not opposed to raids I think creating the Raid style power creep is bad for the game.
What it actually showed, is that waving shiny stuff in peoples faces that takes little effort makes them give you their money
Raids and structured co-ops are great things, but you are correct, it's the rewards that ultimately decide if they would be used, and the answer to the question of "will people do these events for anything less than "phat lewt" and clearly more powerful weaponry.
Your Challenger won't drive? You're probably in the passenger seat.
Can't sell/delete an item? Check all of your loadouts, it's likely still equipped.
Auction house? Why? It'll just render bits purchased lock boxes pointless, and weapons are mostly equal anyway.
Gear/enemy progression? No thanks, it'll only render 90% of the content trivial when you reach the highest zone.
Raids = niche content. Raids as implemented in most MMOs tend to cater to a very narrow subset of the game's population... specifically, raiding guilds. I'd like to think that over the last half-decade, companies have realized that they need to cater to more than just one fraction of their base to survive long term, and that there are far better ideas to implement for so-called 'eng-game' content, especially when dealing with a shooter and not a traditional MMO.
And also especially with such an open-ended progression system as Defiance has. There's really technically no effective 'end-game,' just a point at which what's left to do is too boring anymore for a particular player, which can be ego 300 or ego 3000.
Well, I think a little of both. People play games to have fun, pure and simple. WoW and later companies realized that while some people liked the classic 'no fast travel,' lootable player corpses, losing your stuff permanently, etc. approach, a lot MORE people out there preferred a game that was less a chore and more just a fun diversion. it's not that the old guard has been slowly morphing into the new players, it's that the old guard is simply dying out as newer players take their place. The newer players don't want another job, they want a game.
[QUOTE=SteveMND;515963]Raids = niche content. Raids as implemented in most MMOs tend to cater to a very narrow subset of the game's population... specifically, raiding guilds. I'd like to think that over the last half-decade, companies have realized that they need to cater to more than just one fraction of their base to survive long term, and that there are far better ideas to implement for so-called 'eng-game' content, especially when dealing with a shooter and not a traditional MMO.
QUOTE]
This most certainly is not true. Everyone seems to forget the trickle effect from raiding, OMG that sounds like a campaign speech. It is true you have your raiders and your raider guilds all competeting for the top spot on the server/game. You also have your casual rading guilds who dont care about the "I want to kill it ALL" mentatlity, however they still raid regardless. You then have your casual questers that log on for a few breif hours a night or day and do the zones. What you fail to regard is that even the Casual Questers or ones that simply do not raid still do zones for money and or loot. They use that Loot to sell and make money. They use that money from selling to buy what you might ask........
Gear from Raids......
Atleast thats how it has been in that games I played.
Saying that Raids take up only 10% of the population simply is not true. Maybe the Hardcore raiders that raid 7 days a week 4 hours a day, however every game I played that had raids as an endgame had 90% of the gamer population participating in the raids on some level.
Your Challenger won't drive? You're probably in the passenger seat.
Can't sell/delete an item? Check all of your loadouts, it's likely still equipped.
Auction house? Why? It'll just render bits purchased lock boxes pointless, and weapons are mostly equal anyway.
Gear/enemy progression? No thanks, it'll only render 90% of the content trivial when you reach the highest zone.