The 5 man explore mode is their equivalent of raiding, this isn't some 5 man hard mode WoW dungeons this is designed to be much harder then that apparently...
Give it a chance before writing it off.
Not writing it off at all, in fact I think I may very well prefer these types of dungeons to whats regarded as 'normal raiding' dunno if any of you guys played DC Universe, but I loved their small raid teams that you could get through in 2 hours.
You're just grossly over estimating the number of people who enjoy raiding I think.
Lets say at a minimum 30% of mmo players like to raid, not hardcore just raid every now and then, that could still be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of players.
I think having played MMO's for over a dozen years, lead guilds from 100 to 1000 players I have a rough Idea.
I think the concept of raiding that people are so use to has been thrown out the window with GW2.
While there won't be any "instanced raids" like WoW or SWTOR as an example there will be epic events in area's like orr which require dozens people to finish. I remember seeing the video from 2010 where an event ended with a dragon which needed 30-40 players to defeat.
So there will still be "big" bosses to kill.
Personally I'm all for dungeons and events like they have in GW2, as much as I enjoyed the raiding in wow/swtor, the number of times I spent waiting around because we didnt have enough people for the 16/20/25/40 man raids to get starting out weighs the number of raids actually finished.
People that raid large scale even once a week are probably still within the top 5% of all players in a game, so not having any GW2 won't hurt its success at all.
Agree with this very much I never quite liked the 16 man raids tho I never really had the problems of always short players. Not sure about out yes while maybe only 5/10% may be hardcore, a much bigger % like to raid causally.
It doesn't need to have de facto 'Raids', but it will need something to captivate people who don't want to PvP all the time (which I believe it has already anyway).
This. I have never said that they have to have raids I just think it a bit shortsighted to cut out all those people who like to raid, and its a lot more than some people think.
End game which is 99% of the time raiding is what makes or breaks MMO these days, tho I think as I have said before AreaNet, know what they doing, and I'm sure what they have is fine.
The one thing they have to make sure is that when killing say 'world bosses' it gives people the sense of achievement (this is one of the main reasons beside gear, why I think people raid), and if killing a 'world boss' can be done by every johnny come lately who just tags in does the minimum and gets the glory, this could very well be a problem.
The one thing that stands out in this discussion is how closed minded some people are because they don't like it they don't want it in, where I think the more they add even if I don't do it or like it can only be for the good of the game, and whats good for the game, usually ends up being good for every single player.