The problem today with MMORPG's is that every raid battle has a specific set of steps in order to accomplish it properly, and people will demand that you know the steps to be taken to not screw everything up and waste everyone's time. So to fix this, we need raids that are randomized and where bosses are unpredictable, so in the end, everyone is a noob and there shouldn't be anymore "kicking out" of party. Honestly, it would make MMORPGs way more interesting to play, because as it is right now, every raid is already planned in advance, everything is timed, the bosses and mobs are always doing the same things *booooring*. Fail to see why people are still doing these after 15 years. Late 90's, early 2000's ok I can understand MMOs were new and all, but in 2015 we should be having way better mechanics by now when it comes to raiding.
None of us are market analysts even though some seem to like to be armchair analysts. We can speculate on what the market wants and evaluate those speculations against what we see on the forums, but until a market analyst with some expertise in MMO markets comes into the discussion we can't discuss the market outside of some high-level speculation. What we can discuss in great detail is our personal preferences and biases about MMOs. Now a high-level speculative discussion about the MMO markets might be more sensible from a business perspective, but from an engagement perspective it makes much more sense to have an in-depth discussion about our preferences. We're all actually experts with regards to our preferences, but few if any of us are experts with regards to the MMO market.
Fallacious appeal to authority....riight...
Have you ever stood in a room and listened to a bunch of everyday Joes that read one article on Wikipedia talk like they're Neil Degrasse Tyson? That's how these forums sound when people start talking about the market and the business of MMOs.
This argument seems about as legit as saying there's no such thing as forced grouping because nobody is forcing you to play the game. It might be true, but it's logically questionable.
Lots of content forces players to group if they want to participate in that content. And yes, you can say nobody is forcing you to play that content; again, nobody is forcing you to play the game at all. You might as well say that the speed limit isn't forced, because my car is physically capable of going 100 miles per hour and I don't really, physically have to obey the speed limit if I don't want.
Actually, speaking of speed limits...let's discuss the difference between forced and enforced. Semantically you are correct that there is no such thing as forced group. There is such a thing as enforced grouping though. "Forced grouping" would indeed imply that I am under complete obligation to perform that action, which we've established I'm not as I can choose to not play that content. "Enforced grouping" would be like the speed limit; it's encouraged, and it might be unpleasant to be non-compliant. Not grouping in most MMOs walls off large amounts of the most meaningful content. I'm going to have less to do, I'm going to have less to achieve, and I'm likely going to be less engaged in my time spent in the game. That's your "speeding ticket" for choosing to be non-compliant.
For all intents and purposes though, arguing the difference between forced and enforced is just semantics. You understand the context of the phrase "forced grouping" perfectly well, but you don't like the phrasing so you decide to try and invalidate the entire concept instead of taking it for what it is.
It's a mechanic that's not designed for every player but no one is forcing you to buy the game or enjoy the mechanics.
its this "have it your way" mentality that people think every game has to be accessible to everyone.
So actually saying that it's not "forced grouping" because you don't have to play the game is entire your point? Then you're definitely just arguing semantics, and that is a pointless endeavor.
So to fix this, we need raids that are randomized and where bosses are unpredictable, so in the end, everyone is a noob and there shouldn't be anymore "kicking out" of party.
Although done in Diablo 3 ... but you can still got kicked if you don't have good enough gear.
I'm a group-orientated player. I firmly believe that games, as in life, are better when experienced with other people.
However, I'm against FORCED grouping. The reasons:
Large majority of current MMO playerbase doesn't like to group, so if you force grouping, you are nearly guaranteeing that your MMO won't attract enough players to be a success. I don't know about you, but I'd like my MMO to be popular so that the devs can keep investing in it for many years to come.
Long term sustainability. Forced grouping (such as low level dungeons, the odd group quest in current mmos) only works when there are lots of people online in the same level range. After a certain amount of time, the majority of players are either at level cap or spread thinly across the level range. This makes grouping really hard, simply because you can't find other players.
For example, I picked up FFXI early 2007, so a few years after release. I was a relative mmo newbie, had no friends playing it etc. After I'd hit level 10 solo, I made my way to the dunes (or wherever it was that most people leveled from 10-20) and started hunting for groups. A typical evening for me would involve 30mins - 1hr of trying to form a group (I was active in searching for people), followed by 45m-1hr of grinding, usually followed by group disbanding and the process starting again.
Needless to say, it wasn't fun. I'm sure if I'd have been there at launch, it would have been great, or if I'd found a good leveling linkshell to join it'd be better, but as a newbie I wasn't really aware of these things, I only knew that I wasn't having fun and so I quit.
I, personally, am looking forwards to whatever MMO implements scaling tech to a high standard. Something like SWGs scaling quests would be my preference, but anything that scaled the quest to group size/level/gear would work. In SWG, the more people in your group, combined with gear levels, determined the quests you could pick up. So, if you were solo, you'd get low-level easy quests with OK xp but low money. If you got in a 20man grp, you'd get higher level, higher reward quests with better xp.
The goal for me is to have an MMO where, because I'm a group player, I can group with friends and grind mobs/quests from start to finish without any penalties to xp, but at the same time if my friends are busy, I still want to be able to progress solo. This has the benefit of being group orientated whilst not alienating the solo crowd, the devs don't have to redesign the leveling route once the pack has moved past it etc.
Currently Playing: WAR RoR - Spitt rr7X Black Orc | Scrotling rr6X Squig Herder | Scabrous rr4X Shaman
People like what they are used to. People who played FFXI for large portions of their gaming life tend to like games with similar mechanics. The problem with XI has a reference is that it wasn't really popular. It had a decent player-base, probably about 1 million, but then you have people who started playing WoW after that. I would blame XI's lack of popularity due to SE's poor marketing of the game. Blizzard was more proactive in marketing WoW and so people would take more to that kind of game vs XI. Also XI was seriously hard. True originally you could clear everything on a single character, but you had to have a degree of skill plus have a degree of people skills to progress. Plenty of people were stuck at level 70 because they couldn't beat maat, that is if you even lucky enough to clear the level 50 and 55 caps since they could take a long time to get done. Anyway, time progresses and game devs tend to follow in the foot steps of WoW due to its popularity and since more people are used to mechanics in wow, they tend to float to games like that. I do miss server reliance myself also server consequences. The main thing about XI was trolling was as bad as compared to other games. Sure you could be a douche and try to steal or ks etc, but everyone who was actually anyone would know about it and you would be shunned. Only options at that point are to transfer (which had a 90 real life day 'cooldown'), remake completely, or just accept what you did and continue on without making any real progress in the game from that point unless you had a lot of money to buy mercs.
It worked really well in lineage 2. In fact the best experience parties were 9 man groups. That is one thing I miss about mmorpg's, grouping with people. Logging in and seeing who on your friends list is online and starting or joining a party. Or shouting in towns.
Solo play is what killed mmorpg's.
Guilds went somewhere?
"I miss grouping" generally means someone who rejects grouping voluntarily (for whatever reason). And then gripes about it.
IMO if grouping is forced then the game was not meant to be group based.
Grouping should happen naturally in mmos, but the system should definitely be group friendly/focused.
Happen naturally?You mean automated because players will not group unless they have to.
Forced grouping does not mean you MUST group ,using the FFXI example you were just better off grouping,like MUCH better off,so then yes it will happen naturally.
If a developer designs it solo,then that would be FORCED grouping because nobody would need to but would be forced to do it.
I seriously see no argument period,if you want a single player game,then guess what ,thousands of them out there.If you want to play a MMO then guess what ,it had better have MMO mechanics,not Single player game mechanics.
Seems to me the early devs "got it,understood it" where as modern devs seem to just be tossing their lazier effort single player game out there as a mmo just because it has a login screen.It takes a lot of effort to make a MMO feel like a mmo and no instances are not nearly good enough.
Nobody has done the MMO aspect justice yet,FFXI and EQ1 gave us a good glimpse on how it should start out but developers seem to either not have a clue on the difference between a single player and mmo or they simply don't like MMO's but are trying to cash in on the moniker as a FAKE mmo.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
"Forced" anything in an entertainment product? Really?
Game play elements will work if players are having fun. Otherwise, why would they bother?
Tell us how well you do in LoL, TF2, or World of Tanks as a solo player.
Many of the largest and most popular games work with forced grouping. It just has to be fun and streamlined is all.
hmm .. those are not forced grouping. You are not forced to play those games ... you do it only if you like grouping.
How do I do in LoL as a solo player? I play Diablo 3 .. that is how.
silly semantics ........... fail .. plz dont make me defend Axehilt , not that he would need it .. but wtf , this may be the most worthless response i have ever seen anyone post on this site ..
Man, can't say I've seen a single video presentation of yours that I agreed with. Such consistency is unusual!
Straw man argument in my opinion. Waiting for hours to find a particular archetype, and being subject to the whims of a healer/tank/whatever isn't a lot of folks idea of fun. Especially if it gates a large amount of the games content. You misrepresent things. Folks just want to be able to do something fun and useful on their own in their own time. Something. Don't bitch and moan when people want to see their playstyle get some attention.
Makes me real happy that I started out in City of Heroes, and not UO/EQ/WoW.
I'll also tell you that you won't find legally mandated graft as a design document in politics, but it still happens. Intentionally.
I really liked the idea that monsters are strong and it takes more than one of us to take them down.....I never liked the theory of I can kill hundreds with a single blow......I like that characters should have a role to play and not every one is superman.
I think all the mechanics are there, thanks to the collective lessons learned over the years.
A level-sync/sidekick system is a must so that friends aren't barred from playing together merely because one levels faster.
Party finder, whether for open world or dungeons is a must. Shouting in town is boring.
Rested exp makes great sense.
Soloing should be feasible, but not favorable. FATEs/Rifts/PQs for exp shouldn't dominate group play in a multiplayer game. I use those names so people understand what I mean, RIFT, FFXIV, etc don't need to be changed.
I'm all about multiple jobs on one character, even if not interconnected. It makes it easier to recognize friends when they're almost always on the same character.
Some games, WoW apparently allow open world parties to transcend servers, phasing to one member's realm. It makes it easier to find a group when you're searching multiple realms.
NPCs filling party slots could be fine with sufficient AI, as long as partying with real people is more desirable. Otherwise, you have 5 fools with their own NPC parties trying to fight each other.
This doesn't cover everything, I acknowledge that.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug. 12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
Do you think forced-grouping for decent experience-gain would be acceptable in a modern MMO...
Forced grouping is totally unacceptable in a modern MMO, and it wouldn't last 5 seconds on my hard drive if that turned out to be the case in a new game I started playing.
The quality of the community these days is so shit that I'd hate being forced into close proximity to most players.
This.
The quality of the community is so terrible because the game mechanics do not foster a good community.
When I left XI for Warcrack, I was ... astounded. Several times in my XI career, random people would help me do things whereas WoW was filled with trolls seeing how many analogies about canals they could make. The only people that many players (not all!) in most MMOs are nice to are those that can help them get stuff.
In a community driven game, you form a friendship when you meet a good [role] and want to play with them again and again and again. You end up doing this several times and your friendlist is filled with people that you saw firsthand are solid players and you help each other do things.
I agree 100%. Because FFXI forced grouping, people were nice to eachother generally- BECAUSE you needed people to do literally anything in the game.
Most people never played a forced grouping game like old FFXI so they don't know what it's like.
I too would like to play another forced grouping game. I think there's been enough time since old FFXI that people are kind of getting sick of all the solo-centric MMOs.
Do you think forced-grouping for decent experience-gain would be acceptable in a modern MMO...
Forced grouping is totally unacceptable in a modern MMO, and it wouldn't last 5 seconds on my hard drive if that turned out to be the case in a new game I started playing.
The quality of the community these days is so shit that I'd hate being forced into close proximity to most players.
This.
The quality of the community is so terrible because the game mechanics do not foster a good community.
When I left XI for Warcrack, I was ... astounded. Several times in my XI career, random people would help me do things whereas WoW was filled with trolls seeing how many analogies about canals they could make. The only people that many players (not all!) in most MMOs are nice to are those that can help them get stuff.
In a community driven game, you form a friendship when you meet a good [role] and want to play with them again and again and again. You end up doing this several times and your friendlist is filled with people that you saw firsthand are solid players and you help each other do things.
I agree 100%. Because FFXI forced grouping, people were nice to eachother generally- BECAUSE you needed people to do literally anything in the game.
Most people never played a forced grouping game like old FFXI so they don't know what it's like.
I too would like to play another forced grouping game. I think there's been enough time since old FFXI that people are kind of getting sick of all the solo-centric MMOs.
There is zero correlation between forced grouping and social behavior. One could easily point to the raid endgame of WOW and many other games as an example of such a design fostering exclusion, elitism, and anti-social behavior. Likewise, one could look at games like Pirates 101, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Second Life, and Metaplace to contend that positive social environments are fostered in extremely solo friendly MMOs. None of which is a valid assessment.
-- Whammy - a 64x64 miniRPG - RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right? - FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
IMO if grouping is forced then the game was not meant to be group based.
Grouping should happen naturally in mmos, but the system should definitely be group friendly/focused.
Happen naturally?You mean automated because players will not group unless they have to.
Forced grouping does not mean you MUST group ,using the FFXI example you were just better off grouping,like MUCH better off,so then yes it will happen naturally.
If a developer designs it solo,then that would be FORCED grouping because nobody would need to but would be forced to do it.
I seriously see no argument period,if you want a single player game,then guess what ,thousands of them out there.If you want to play a MMO then guess what ,it had better have MMO mechanics,not Single player game mechanics.
Seems to me the early devs "got it,understood it" where as modern devs seem to just be tossing their lazier effort single player game out there as a mmo just because it has a login screen.It takes a lot of effort to make a MMO feel like a mmo and no instances are not nearly good enough.
Nobody has done the MMO aspect justice yet,FFXI and EQ1 gave us a good glimpse on how it should start out but developers seem to either not have a clue on the difference between a single player and mmo or they simply don't like MMO's but are trying to cash in on the moniker as a FAKE mmo.
Thank you for getting it!
For sure, there was the wild random blue mage, or red mage, or black mage or beastmaster or puppetmaster or dragoon that preferred to play by themselves, and I never hated seeing them out there in the wild playing their own game. Several players dual-boxed, tri-boxing wasn't uncommon, and a few.... went further than that. They didn't do this because they needed to, they did it because they didn't want to share loot with anyone, or make friends--which is their right.
I bear no ill feelings to a player for wanting to play solo, but most people who joined XI and wanted to play by themselves didn't stick with the game long. They went and found another game.
I'd be willing to do that, except I can't a AAA game that is designed around grouping, that isn't on its deathbed (because they're all old and are showing their age). XI just issued it's last major content update and the story, fittingly, is about the death of the realm (or something like that).
---
I kinda feel machine capabilities were about ten years early, both in what they could render (characters on screen) and in connection speeds. Games do more now because they can.
In the days of dialup, I worked for an online newspaper and had their front page compressed to something like 32k of HTML on average, and you still watch the page load bit by bit. With the advent of things like AJAX, things don't come down in single requests, but my facebook feed currently has a 674k document built and it loads immediately.
In dialup days, we had low-resolution alt-images, preloading of images, and all kinds of other nonsense that isn't even a concern anymore. Tweaking your graphics and images to cut their file size? Noone really cares anymore.
Games are kind of like that.. know what I mean? They had a limited bottleneck in the 5 years surrounding the millennium. Lots of people were still on dialup and comapnies were expected to make a product that could be played on those connections as well.
Now? You think FFXIV prioritizes packet transmission size over features? Nope, if the feature looks like it will draw a crowd, they implement it.
But the problem, and the whole point of this section, is that everyone is playing follow the leader. There aren't many straight-wow clones anymore, but instead copies of copies with small steps forward and off to the side... and when one of the small-steps is successful, it's rolled into the new recipe that all other mmo's follow with their own small step (like adding a dash of chili powder, even though the recipe doesn't call for it.
But the new recipe is long separated from the old games that we'll probably never see the like again.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug. 12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
Do you think forced-grouping for decent experience-gain would be acceptable in a modern MMO...
Forced grouping is totally unacceptable in a modern MMO, and it wouldn't last 5 seconds on my hard drive if that turned out to be the case in a new game I started playing.
The quality of the community these days is so shit that I'd hate being forced into close proximity to most players.
This.
The quality of the community is so terrible because the game mechanics do not foster a good community.
When I left XI for Warcrack, I was ... astounded. Several times in my XI career, random people would help me do things whereas WoW was filled with trolls seeing how many analogies about canals they could make. The only people that many players (not all!) in most MMOs are nice to are those that can help them get stuff.
In a community driven game, you form a friendship when you meet a good [role] and want to play with them again and again and again. You end up doing this several times and your friendlist is filled with people that you saw firsthand are solid players and you help each other do things.
I agree 100%. Because FFXI forced grouping, people were nice to eachother generally- BECAUSE you needed people to do literally anything in the game.
Most people never played a forced grouping game like old FFXI so they don't know what it's like.
I too would like to play another forced grouping game. I think there's been enough time since old FFXI that people are kind of getting sick of all the solo-centric MMOs.
There is zero correlation between forced grouping and social behavior. One could easily point to the raid endgame of WOW and many other games as an example of such a design fostering exclusion, elitism, and anti-social behavior. Likewise, one could look at games like Pirates 101, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Second Life, and Metaplace to contend that positive social environments are fostered in extremely solo friendly MMOs. None of which is a valid assessment.
Did you play FFXI when it had forced grouping?
Elitism in raiding is one thing- you need to spend a lot of time and be decent at the game to raid, and if someone is bad they can make you fail.
But you can't afford to be too much of an elitist if you need to group just to level up. And grinding levels in a group is not difficult so there's no reason for elitism anyway.
As for games like Second Life- there's nothing else to do but be social.
The easy-to-extrapolate correlation is that when people depend on others for everything in a game, they're more likely to be willing to help. This is not a far-fetched idea.
While I agree with @HoldenHamlet, I have to say, for transparency's sake, XI did have some elitists but it wasn't common. Even skilled players, who were entitled to the attitude, couldn't stand to be around and their ignorant nonsense.
And so yeah, nobody played with them. People had them blacklisted. Make an open world mega boss wipe the claimed alliance and you probably got gm'd, and for sure got on people's sh!tl!st. There were a number of times people wouldn't play with someone for being in a certain guild ("linkshell"). And it wasn't elitism nonsense of not playing with a noob guild, but people who wouldn't play with guilds that were known to cause drama and try to make others fail.
Since you played all your jobs on the same character, it meant that you had trouble getting parties if you were known to be an a$$hat.
I can describe every aspect of FFXI's community (players of EQ or other MMOs could do the same for their games) but you'd never get the point til you experienced it first-hand.
And this isn't nostalgia glasses, I've acknowledged the flaws that XI and force-grouping in general has, and how modern innovations in MMOs can temper those.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug. 12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
The main form of elitism I found in FFXI was certain jobs were considered not as efficient at killing things. Especially Dragoons. They often had to wait for many hours to get a party.
This wouldn't be a problem if the game was balanced regularly (which FFXI wasn't when I played).
I always love how it is always the other guy that hasn't got a clue... it just so happens, he thinks you're the one without a clue... just saying.
1. If you want to play a game with like minded people (clueless or clued), don't rely on some anonymous system to put you together. Get out from under that rock you live under, make some real friends and play with them. After all, the automated systems are only there for the wall flowers who can't be bothered with having real friends. It actually says a lot about you if you rely on them to play the game.
2. If all you ever do is play by yourself (i.e. with people you don't have any clue about when you group up with them), then it really doesn't matter if they are clueless or not. You either play with them or don't. Given that obviously your only option is to play with them (having refused to climb out from under that rock)... beggars can't be choosers.
3. Wait for Blizzard to release an expansion in which the only other characters in the game are automated minions ala Garrison followers. Then you can raid mythic any time you want and be assured that you are indeed, the first person on your computer to beat the game.
Man, can't say I've seen a single video presentation of yours that I agreed with. Such consistency is unusual!
Straw man argument in my opinion. Waiting for hours to find a particular archetype, and being subject to the whims of a healer/tank/whatever isn't a lot of folks idea of fun. Especially if it gates a large amount of the games content. You misrepresent things. Folks just want to be able to do something fun and useful on their own in their own time. Something. Don't bitch and moan when people want to see their playstyle get some attention.
Makes me real happy that I started out in City of Heroes, and not UO/EQ/WoW.
I'll also tell you that you won't find legally mandated graft as a design document in politics, but it still happens. Intentionally.
Comments
Lol, WoT, ... all make big money. PvE games, not so much.
However, I'm against FORCED grouping. The reasons:
For example, I picked up FFXI early 2007, so a few years after release. I was a relative mmo newbie, had no friends playing it etc. After I'd hit level 10 solo, I made my way to the dunes (or wherever it was that most people leveled from 10-20) and started hunting for groups. A typical evening for me would involve 30mins - 1hr of trying to form a group (I was active in searching for people), followed by 45m-1hr of grinding, usually followed by group disbanding and the process starting again.
Needless to say, it wasn't fun. I'm sure if I'd have been there at launch, it would have been great, or if I'd found a good leveling linkshell to join it'd be better, but as a newbie I wasn't really aware of these things, I only knew that I wasn't having fun and so I quit.
I, personally, am looking forwards to whatever MMO implements scaling tech to a high standard. Something like SWGs scaling quests would be my preference, but anything that scaled the quest to group size/level/gear would work. In SWG, the more people in your group, combined with gear levels, determined the quests you could pick up. So, if you were solo, you'd get low-level easy quests with OK xp but low money. If you got in a 20man grp, you'd get higher level, higher reward quests with better xp.
The goal for me is to have an MMO where, because I'm a group player, I can group with friends and grind mobs/quests from start to finish without any penalties to xp, but at the same time if my friends are busy, I still want to be able to progress solo. This has the benefit of being group orientated whilst not alienating the solo crowd, the devs don't have to redesign the leveling route once the pack has moved past it etc.
Many of the largest and most popular games work with forced grouping. It just has to be fun and streamlined is all.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
"I miss grouping" generally means someone who rejects grouping voluntarily (for whatever reason). And then gripes about it.
How do I do in LoL as a solo player? I play Diablo 3 .. that is how.
Forced grouping does not mean you MUST group ,using the FFXI example you were just better off grouping,like MUCH better off,so then yes it will happen naturally.
If a developer designs it solo,then that would be FORCED grouping because nobody would need to but would be forced to do it.
I seriously see no argument period,if you want a single player game,then guess what ,thousands of them out there.If you want to play a MMO then guess what ,it had better have MMO mechanics,not Single player game mechanics.
Seems to me the early devs "got it,understood it" where as modern devs seem to just be tossing their lazier effort single player game out there as a mmo just because it has a login screen.It takes a lot of effort to make a MMO feel like a mmo and no instances are not nearly good enough.
Nobody has done the MMO aspect justice yet,FFXI and EQ1 gave us a good glimpse on how it should start out but developers seem to either not have a clue on the difference between a single player and mmo or they simply don't like MMO's but are trying to cash in on the moniker as a FAKE mmo.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Edit: Also COH was one of my favorite MMO's of all times, can we still be friends??
A level-sync/sidekick system is a must so that friends aren't barred from playing together merely because one levels faster.
Party finder, whether for open world or dungeons is a must. Shouting in town is boring.
Rested exp makes great sense.
Soloing should be feasible, but not favorable. FATEs/Rifts/PQs for exp shouldn't dominate group play in a multiplayer game. I use those names so people understand what I mean, RIFT, FFXIV, etc don't need to be changed.
I'm all about multiple jobs on one character, even if not interconnected. It makes it easier to recognize friends when they're almost always on the same character.
Some games, WoW apparently allow open world parties to transcend servers, phasing to one member's realm. It makes it easier to find a group when you're searching multiple realms.
NPCs filling party slots could be fine with sufficient AI, as long as partying with real people is more desirable. Otherwise, you have 5 fools with their own NPC parties trying to fight each other.
This doesn't cover everything, I acknowledge that.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
Most people never played a forced grouping game like old FFXI so they don't know what it's like.
I too would like to play another forced grouping game. I think there's been enough time since old FFXI that people are kind of getting sick of all the solo-centric MMOs.
- RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right?
- FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
For sure, there was the wild random blue mage, or red mage, or black mage or beastmaster or puppetmaster or dragoon that preferred to play by themselves, and I never hated seeing them out there in the wild playing their own game. Several players dual-boxed, tri-boxing wasn't uncommon, and a few.... went further than that. They didn't do this because they needed to, they did it because they didn't want to share loot with anyone, or make friends--which is their right.
I bear no ill feelings to a player for wanting to play solo, but most people who joined XI and wanted to play by themselves didn't stick with the game long. They went and found another game.
I'd be willing to do that, except I can't a AAA game that is designed around grouping, that isn't on its deathbed (because they're all old and are showing their age). XI just issued it's last major content update and the story, fittingly, is about the death of the realm (or something like that).
---
I kinda feel machine capabilities were about ten years early, both in what they could render (characters on screen) and in connection speeds. Games do more now because they can.
In the days of dialup, I worked for an online newspaper and had their front page compressed to something like 32k of HTML on average, and you still watch the page load bit by bit. With the advent of things like AJAX, things don't come down in single requests, but my facebook feed currently has a 674k document built and it loads immediately.
In dialup days, we had low-resolution alt-images, preloading of images, and all kinds of other nonsense that isn't even a concern anymore. Tweaking your graphics and images to cut their file size? Noone really cares anymore.
Games are kind of like that.. know what I mean? They had a limited bottleneck in the 5 years surrounding the millennium. Lots of people were still on dialup and comapnies were expected to make a product that could be played on those connections as well.
Now? You think FFXIV prioritizes packet transmission size over features? Nope, if the feature looks like it will draw a crowd, they implement it.
But the problem, and the whole point of this section, is that everyone is playing follow the leader. There aren't many straight-wow clones anymore, but instead copies of copies with small steps forward and off to the side... and when one of the small-steps is successful, it's rolled into the new recipe that all other mmo's follow with their own small step (like adding a dash of chili powder, even though the recipe doesn't call for it.
But the new recipe is long separated from the old games that we'll probably never see the like again.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
Elitism in raiding is one thing- you need to spend a lot of time and be decent at the game to raid, and if someone is bad they can make you fail.
But you can't afford to be too much of an elitist if you need to group just to level up. And grinding levels in a group is not difficult so there's no reason for elitism anyway.
As for games like Second Life- there's nothing else to do but be social.
The easy-to-extrapolate correlation is that when people depend on others for everything in a game, they're more likely to be willing to help. This is not a far-fetched idea.
And so yeah, nobody played with them. People had them blacklisted. Make an open world mega boss wipe the claimed alliance and you probably got gm'd, and for sure got on people's sh!tl!st. There were a number of times people wouldn't play with someone for being in a certain guild ("linkshell"). And it wasn't elitism nonsense of not playing with a noob guild, but people who wouldn't play with guilds that were known to cause drama and try to make others fail.
Since you played all your jobs on the same character, it meant that you had trouble getting parties if you were known to be an a$$hat.
I can describe every aspect of FFXI's community (players of EQ or other MMOs could do the same for their games) but you'd never get the point til you experienced it first-hand.
And this isn't nostalgia glasses, I've acknowledged the flaws that XI and force-grouping in general has, and how modern innovations in MMOs can temper those.
Spec'ing properly is a gateway drug.
12 Million People have been meter spammed in heroics.
This wouldn't be a problem if the game was balanced regularly (which FFXI wasn't when I played).
1. If you want to play a game with like minded people (clueless or clued), don't rely on some anonymous system to put you together. Get out from under that rock you live under, make some real friends and play with them. After all, the automated systems are only there for the wall flowers who can't be bothered with having real friends. It actually says a lot about you if you rely on them to play the game.
2. If all you ever do is play by yourself (i.e. with people you don't have any clue about when you group up with them), then it really doesn't matter if they are clueless or not. You either play with them or don't. Given that obviously your only option is to play with them (having refused to climb out from under that rock)... beggars can't be choosers.
3. Wait for Blizzard to release an expansion in which the only other characters in the game are automated minions ala Garrison followers. Then you can raid mythic any time you want and be assured that you are indeed, the first person on your computer to beat the game.
Sense of humor is my #1 requirement (especially in gaming), so I guess you pass....
(Yeah, CoH had a lot of functionality that I wish had been emulated.)
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.