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Why can't I play with my friends?
Ceridith
Member UncommonPosts: 2,980
Something that's bothered me about many of the more current MMOs is having such specific requirements for grouping. I'm not actually talking about an archetype issue, which can be a problem. More specifically rather, I'm talking about group size.
Why does group content have to be designed and tuned around such specific and arbitrary group sizes? For example, in WoW it's 5 for dungeons, and 10, or 25 for raids. You're forcefully disallowed by game mechanics to bring extra people, and if you bring too few you'll have an extremely harder time tackling content.
MMOs are supposed to be social games, but in many cases grouping mechanics run contrary to this. For example, If I ask my guild if anyone wants to go on a dungeon run, and five people or more respond, well, people are going to get left out. Wouldn't it be better if we could just take everyone along who wanted to go? Or conversely if there's only a few of us around we could be short a person and unable to do the dungeon unless we pick up some random fifth wheel player.
There is the issue that bringing more people than an encounter is tuned for could "trivialize" content, but then the content could potentially scale depending on how many people are there. Then again, does it even really matter anyways? If players bring 20 people to a fight meant for 10, they would still only get the same amount of loot meant for 10 people, but would have to split it between twice as many people.
personally, I think MMOs should allow for more flexibility in group sizes to allow for groups of friends and guilds to be more inclusive, and not forcefully disallowed players from grouping with all of their friends if they choose to.
What do you think?
Comments
CoH let's you play with any size group from 1 to 8.
But CoH does this by having instances be randomly (or semi random) generated and scaling to you group size when you enter.
The upside is its great for what you are talking about. But also very beneficial socially. Your groups are much more easy going and fun and tend to stay together better as people and come and go.
The come and go aspect is very nice and is mostly missing from other games outside of the old camp and grind mechanics or games like old EQ or SWG.
The downside is the repetitive nature of the CoH itself. While its random its also fairly predictable and all instances start looking kind of the same.
Also there is still an upper limit. While there is content for stuff larger than one group. Normal instances still max out at 8. I find 8 to be a pretty good number but if you had 10 people you would still be SOL. CoH scales its content by adding more mobs but also adding more Bosses and Leutenants. Currently the number of mobs per spawn really just couldn't fit in many generic instances if you had say 12 players in the group. Its pretty packed with 8 people. You could conceivably start replacing minions with Bosses though I suppose.
Of course CoH also has many ways to make groups work and is not tied in the Holy Trinity as tightly as some games. Tanks exist and archetypes to make you survive exist. But you can win instances with a number of different configurations that deviate heavily from the trinity even if trinity mechanics exist.
Instanced group content is not all the group content you can do.
There are games out there with tons of overland non-instanced group areas that allow for good flexibility in group size and composition. Most are old school, but perfectly valid and actually good games like VG or EQ2.
There are also games out there with content that scales to the size of your group or the amount of people involved, like CO or Rift.
You just need to do some research and you ll find what you are after.
I'm aware instanced group content isn't the only group content available, however for many MMOs the majority of endgame content is explicitly limited to instances. Honestly I think all group content should be more flexible.
I agree... and I do like the way SWTOR is going, where they don't necessarily scale content for some group encounters, instead they allow you to bring companions.
Scaling is also a possibility, but I hate the idea of scaling (instance scaling especially) because I feel it takes away from the developers ability to make tougher content, or lasting content that requires any kind of grouping at all.
In a lot of ways the grouping system can be more forgiving. I often go through games with 1 - 2 RL friends, and sometimes meet people online as I go that I play with fairly often. Its sad that in most cases, trying to do the "good" group content, we often have to bring in other players, or join a guild -- one of which usually imposes stupid rules like being in vent all the time -- and it just kills it for us (mainly because we chat by ourselves in skype or run our own vent for our friends only).
You still can't get around the fact that the stuff you mentioned is balanced both in difficulty and reward for specifically sized groups.
You either steamroll and its not fun and you get jack. Or you have a really hard time and it takes too long for too litle reward. Very few things have overland scaling of group size. Once again CoH is the only game I know of to do this. But almost no one does street sweeping anymore so the feature itself is barely utilized.
I can understand disliking the idea of scaling. But I would like to say that after experiencing grouping in CoH that I am firmly of the opinion that 50% of all the social ills you see in MMOs is because of this rigid grouping setup.
Things are simply more relaxed in CoH. Even without a modern grouping tool or whatever there are constantly pick up grousp to join and leaving the one you are in is no big deal. People don't get bitter, people are more friendly.
You can basically do what you want and people want get pissed if you do what you want because they can still continue to do their own thing and not get pissed at you because you ruined their fun or wasted their time.
The exception is Task Forces in which you group gets locked in for a set number of missions and changing the group make up can screw it all up. And the kicker there is that in Task Forces you start to all of the soical ills of other games begin to rear their ugly heads.
So what I am saying is don't underestimate this issue; its huge. Possibly much larger than people's dislike of scaling.
The dynamic events in Guild Wars 2 will do away with that. GW2 will still have fixed group sizes for dungeons etc., but dynamic events scale with the amount of people participating.
Especially interesting as everyone participating will get a reward, and not only the one lucky person who gets the dropped assigned, or the one with the best ninja looting skills.
I'll wait to the day's end when the moon is high
And then I'll rise with the tide with a lust for life, I'll
Amass an army, and we'll harness a horde
And then we'll limp across the land until we stand at the shore
CoH was one of my first MMOs (and one of my favorites too). At the beginning the scaling was pretty cool, and later when they added the difficulty levels, it made it much more fun because you could choose to challenge yourself for rewards.
In my time in CoH I never worried about scaling, - though - they also had content that didn't scale which aided that for me too.
CoH has a pretty good grouping tool... well.. it makes it easy to find groups - or at least it did while I was playing.. (played the entire first year and a half). That definitely aided in PUGs, and cut down on the whining you hear in chat of "LF Healer" or what have you (even if not everyone likes blind invites).
Scaling CAN work... as it did in CoH.. as again, you could scale the scaled content with difficulty settings, but there are other ways to do it that I would prefer.
I don't think that scalable content can provide the same quality of experience. It's not like instances and dungeons are masterpieces in most games, but I'd prefer a treasure room that has 1 winter wolf and 4 worgs rather than a room that has n/4-1 winter wolves and 2n/3 + 2 worgs where n is the number of party members. It's harder to craft an equally entertaining experience for 3-12 man groups than it is to craft one for exactly 6.
And I'm not just saying that developers should take the easy way because it's easier. They're able to produce more content and better content if they don't have to make the content scale.
And even without that burden on the developers, I don't feel as good about winning (or losing) to scalable content. There's always the thought looming overhead: we breezed through the content, but was that because we're good or was it because we only brought 3 people and the mobs were scaled down too far? Think of it like a game of basketball or hockey where you can have any number of people playing (with points and penalties that scale according to your team's size). Would a single game ever go by without someone saying "my team only lost that game because the small-team bonuses are too low/too high"? Those discussions would overshadow the entire rest of the sport. Rigidly fixing the teams' sizes has made for better sports.
I totally agree! Back in the WoW prime days for us, we constantly had 12 of us playing together, so we always had to leave 2 people out when we raided or did two groups of 5 man instances.
Nowadays, we have 7 or 8 players, so we have too few to raid, yet we have to leave 2 or three people out when we do a 5 man.
I have the answer, and the first company to get this right (along with a good game) will be the next champion MMO. Scalable instances. Seriously, why aren't developers doing this!? Scale by party numbers, scale by character level. Do that and you get the solo, small group, and large group players the content they need. Do that and you don't have old instances being abandoned because everyone has out leveled them. It's a no freaking brainer! What's wrong with people!?
A problem with what developers are doing right now is making separate content for all different gamer types. 2 solo instances, 2 raids, 2 5 man instances. Guess what, developers, great, everyone gets 2 instances, but we could have each had 6! Morons!!