Meh in reality EQ was always about group type content. And thats what the masses mostly engaged in. Raid content in EQ was contested and therefore only available to a small minority of players. Maybe a few expansions in some second tier guild would be allowed access to the scraps of last year or whatever. But even then the way the items and clickeys worked in EQ, even the old raid content was still useful to farm for those rare nugs of loot.
Im not saying NOT to have raid shit in the game, but dont sell it as something that the masses participated in. Maybe in WOW and instanced shit they did, but not in EQ.
You're not wrong that most moment-to-moment play in early EQ was group content. That's historically accurate. But the leap from "most people grouped" to "raids didn't matter to the broader population" is where this gets shaky.
Raid content absolutely shaped the game even for people who never stepped foot in Plane of Fear. It shaped the economy. It shaped guild hierarchies. It shaped server politics. It shaped aspiration. People inspected Epics in EC tunnel like they were Ferraris. The fact that only a minority participated directly doesn't mean it wasn't central to the ecosystem.
But let's be honest about
why raid participation was limited in 1999. It wasn't some elegant philosophical design choice about "purity" of group gameplay. It was because of technical limitations, instancing not being standard (this is the biggest one - most servers had 2+ "raid" guilds capable of killing most/all content but instead had to fight over it and the lesser guilds were left with scraps or nothing at all, which flat locked players out of the raiding system through no fault of their own), server capacity realities and the genre being brand new.
Most players didn't interact heavily with raids because the
genre itself was novel. Just existing in a persistent 3D world with other humans was revolutionary. People weren't min-maxing content cadence or calculating retention loops. They were just blown away that Upper Guk existed. That novelty carried a lot of weight that design didn't have to.
Fast forward to now and that novelty is gone. The audience understands progression systems. They've seen instancing, lockouts, scalable raids, cross-server tech, expectations are different, attention spans are different and competition for players' time is brutal.
So when people say "don't oversell raids," sure - that's fair. EQ wasn't WoW with 40-man instanced content on farm. But pretending raids were some irrelevant side activity that didn't influence the broader experience isn't accurate either. Even if 80% of players never killed Nagafen, they sure as fuck knew who did. They saw the loot. They saw the drama. They saw the forum posts and the forums that spawned from it. That aspirational layer mattered.
If you remove meaningful raid infrastructure in a modern MMO and rely almost entirely on small-group loops, you'd better have a long-term progression plan that doesn't hinge on 1999's novelty factor. Because back then, just logging in was the content. Now? Logging in is step one.
