I mean, D3 even removed a lot of the limited “end game” buy adding an AH. But I’m not the first person to point that out…

GW2, on the other hand, may lack a WoW-style raiding and gear progression endgame but offers both WvW (which worked perfectly well for DAoC’s endgame, thank you) and also lends itself to an elder game of continued adventuring around Tyria. I think GW2 will have plenty to keep a levelcapped player occupied, but it won’t have the sharp divide from what you did before level cap that WoW has.

The emphasis on replay value is a lot different than the MMO focus on an unending game. Raiding worked because it was a way to beat the game. And then a new tier was released and you essentially started the raiding game over again. You don’t need an extra way to keep players engaged if the game is actually fun to play again.

As for different types of endgame, there is certainly a considerable market for making everything about fluff, but personally I’m not a fan of anything I’ve seen so far. I don’t feel that mini games add anything to the “MMO-ness” of an MMO, and I can play thousands of them for free at the click of a button and without having to start up a large game client. And fluff items are basically about acquiring stuff for the sake of having stuff (where in a more traditional raid endgame, gear is acquired to unlock more content), which is again something I don’t care about for very long.

It’s not that endgame has to be raiding for me, but it has to be about unlocking new content/experiences and ideally it should be social as well.

While the games are on the surface as different as games get, I do think that D3 has moved too far away from the crazyness of it’s roguelike roots. It is too well balanced, too tame, the items especially don’t have the radical game changing potential that for example a poison res ring in dungeon crawl stone soup does.

I’m not sure it’s possible to make that sort of roguelike crazyness work in a mainstream game – it’s too unbalanced, too unfair in some ways. And it’s certainly the case that none of the standard MMO’s make items even as interesting as diablo does. But I do wish they would try.

And this was back when level 40ish blues (I think the class D0 sets started in low 40s) were considered to be the best you could get pre-raiding. Purples were almost unknown among non raiders, so the DMF neck was considered very worthwhile. (Don’t ask me why, it just was!)

They were not fun. And not really done by solo-ers since half the rep grinds were only really possible to max if you raided. People really do underestimate how massive the gap was between raiders and the proles was in Vanilla. There really was astonishingly little you could do at the cap. And the PvP grind required you have raid gear to survive the ass whuppins from the raid geared pvpers.

What solo-ers did have going for them was that it took months and months to reach cap.

Though there was that D2 questline that Blizzard did introduce for solo-ers and people who only ran dungeons. Which was probably the best quest series in vanilla, like the a mini Scepter of the Sands questline except it pretty much required you have some friends in T2 raid gear to actually finish the last fight.

And yeah. DMF had an epic neck.

It wasn’t very good.