Tannim222 wrote:

Thanks for the post. I've read up on all of these articles as they were published. Personally, I don't see an issue with "raids" but there a bunch of caveats by what I mean as "raid".
Traditional raiding is consists of many of the points brought up by the writer of those articles. It can devide the player base in numerous ways. It cattle-herds the player base through the funnel of the raid content in order to adequate progress to the next set of content. It is also typically the advent of "end game progression".
Instead, let's approach a raid for what it does at its base: provides a place for large-scale, multi-group combat. This can be done dynamically like in GW2, or strigently like in WoW.
With the definition of large-scale, multi-group combat as the basis then events can be a "raid", multi-story-arc-missions can be a raid. As long as we avoid some of the larger issues with player-base segregation with the typical raid being the funnel for progress, including the rewards from such being the part of the requirement for the necessity in continuing progress, I think its ok to provide raids in one or more forms, not as the writer states where it needs to go, it just needs to change.

I am not sure if I entirely agree with the writer of those three articles either, but he brings up some good points about the hidden cost and pitfalls of the traditionaly raiding endgame.
One of the things I liked most about city of heroes was that it almost entirely lacked that pressure. There was the hami raid and it was a lot of frustration mixed in with a lot of fun to do that every now and then. But equally fun was the occasional rerun of the invasion event when somebody completed that event in the warzone. And just hanging out in the Pocket D, or playing through another set of missions you somehow managed to overlook previously with a new out of the box alt.
Compare that to a game like SW:TOR, where there is a lot of pressure to do raids, or pvp. Or better yet pvp-raids (not that they have managed to implement those but it is almost a given that Bioware are working on it). Playing a character through all story chapters to level 55 (soon 60) is fun, but after than you realise that doing it again is not nearly as awesome. A lot of effort has gone into creating a narrow path to the end of the game, and not much into providing alternatives. Sure, there are hardmode missions (exactly the same you already did but with nastier enemies), a few raids and PvP battlegrounds. But that is like playing through a game all the way to the end only to be told. Great, now that you are here, we have this entirely different game that you are actually supposed to have been playing all along.
CoH allowed you to do what you wanted how you wanted it, and I like that lack of pressure a lot more I must say. I sure hope that City of Titans will keep intact that aspect of its beloved precursor.