Let’s start at the beginning. What is a raid in a MMORPG environment? A raid can be described as a group of people playing together with the same aim – mostly fighting against a boss in a raid instance.
A „group of people“ could be as well described as a team and „together“ evokes some kind of cooperation and collaboration. Basically we now have two main facts: teamwork and cooperation.

The next important point is caused by the game design itself: To go on a raid, you need a particular amount of people online at the same time. If there is only one player missing, you probably won’t be successful. Everybody in a raid is dependent on the other member. This is our third main fact: reliability.

Teamwork, cooperation and reliability – what do these three words evoke?

• Teamwork needs some kind of coordination and communication. A team is only pulling together if they are working in a coordinated way. So somebody has to coordinate the team members by giving them a common aim to achieve. This is in addition our first indication why some sort of management or leadership is needed. By coordinating the team, the leader often needs to write out some groundrules which are applying to everybody in the raid.
  Communication is very important as well because everbody needs to know what all the other team member are doing. Without communication, nobody knows what to do. Coordination would be impossible because nothing can be coordinated without a particular knowledge. A raid wouldn’t work without any communication. In this case every member should have the ability to communicate.
• Cooperation is also based on the communication. You can only cooperate if you’re knowing what the others are doing and what you’re supposed to do. Cooperation is also meaning that every member has to have the ability to compromise. You shouldn’t be selfish in a raiding environment because the success of the whole team is important. If the team is successful, everybody will achieve their personal aims too.
• Finally every raid member needs to be reliable. All the communication and coordination wouldn’t work out well if the team couldn’t rely on particular raid members. The reliability has a broad bandwidth: It goes from being online at raiding-times to the improvement of the own playstyle to enhance the whole raid by doing a better job.

Core concept of a raid – Roundup

A raid in a MMORPG environment is composed of players who are communicative, reliable and are able to compromise. These players are working together in a coordinated way to achieve things they can’t achieve alone.

In general, I also like to answer user – in this case your (!) – questions. So, if you’ve a question about the whole topic of raid-management, just write me an e-mail (questions[at]learning-by-gaming.net) and I’ll do my very best to answer them.