Inspired by reading you response Torval, Id vager that a lot of people dont actually manually group up with people to make friends in the first place. Its just as often just people scouting for the most skilled players to add to their ressourcenet (Friendslist) so they can optimize their time online/ gameplay. And there is no harm in that, but it does have a strange ring to it every now and then, when these very socalled selfproclaimed social people, claim they are out to make friends, when in fact they just need strong "npcs"
I've always found the whole "no LFG forces you to be social!" argument to be odd for exactly that reason.
I generally play tanks and healers -- more often the latter than the former, but typically I have both. In games/times where there hasn't been a decent LFG tool, my friends list was invariably full, but extremely few of the people on said list were 'friends' in any meaningful sense. Most I barely knew, or cared to, and as often as not there were several on the list I outright disliked or despised.
People were on the list not because they were friends, but instead because they were reliable and good (or at least, better than the average PuGger, a low bar indeed) at some necessary function.
In such games my "Friends" list was anything but, and, as such lists were generally limited as to how many people could be on them, oftentimes my actual friends weren't on my friends list and instead were kept track of via chat methods external to the game.
While I miss a lot about the 'old days' when getting through a dungeon required a carefully constructed group working together in precise order, lots of CC, careful pulls, and all the rest, I certainly don't miss having to often be around people I often really didn't like but tolerated (and, no doubt, was only myself tolerated by them) because they were good at what they did.
Torval said: "The larger the server, the more time it takes to build a broader reputation. You can still build one. It starts by building it in smaller circles and expanding that out." ------
This straight up never happens on megaservers. You have your circle you brought with you and that's it.
Like every other server. If you have 10 friends playing Pantheon you don't need to talk or socialize with anyone else. Unless you want something from them, just like on a unified server.
No, games with ~1k players on a single servers saw lots of each other over and over again. It created familiarity. There were about 4-5 elite guilds everyone knew and respected. You knew their leaders by name and a lot of their officers.
It was very common to see multiple people you grouped with the days before sitting in a city crafting. It was easy to strike up conversations and meet new people because you had broken the ice with a dungeon or raid.
Megaservers and cross server grp fingers destroyed this.
Games like eq, daoc, even vanilla wow. Community is why mmos were fun. Devs completely lost sight of why gamers enjoyed it so much back in the day.
The way mmo's were: Community, Exploration, Character Development, Conquest.
The way mmo's are now : Cut-Scenes,Cut-Scenes, solo Questing, Cut-Scenes...
Torval said: "The larger the server, the more time it takes to build a broader reputation. You can still build one. It starts by building it in smaller circles and expanding that out." ------
This straight up never happens on megaservers. You have your circle you brought with you and that's it.
Like every other server. If you have 10 friends playing Pantheon you don't need to talk or socialize with anyone else. Unless you want something from them, just like on a unified server.
Not at all how it works, but you knew that. In EQ, even people in mega-guilds still had to rely on randoms for groups. The chance that there's actually 5 guildmates (esp of 10) online in your level range to form a proper group is almost nonexistent. This is also one more reason why I'm against mentoring without extreme moderation, because it also stands to allow players to circumvent the community at large and fosters exclusion rather than inclusion.
I don't see why group finders can't just be interactive classifieds.
A person creates a "ticket" and inputs what they want to do "go to this dungeon"/"fly to x sector"/"whatever".
Then other people put in similar tickets and when there are matches you are notified with a list of people looking for similar things. You contact one of them, they get a small chat window open up so they don't miss it on the scrolling chat window, you talk, agree to go here or there and then meet them.
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Those aren't solo players. They would be groupers that have played solo, but solo players don't generally group much at all. If someone plays a game mostly solo they're not going to group when that wall hits them. They'll either idle or find another game.
This manufactured soloer that has no friends and can't group themselves out of a wet paper bag is just a fantasy invented by people needing to point fingers and find blame.
My husband was one such solo player. He played GW1, WoW, Rift, and a few other MMOS for years while ill (he had terminal cancer), but only once ever grouped with anyone save me (and that went badly). He liked playing in "living worlds" where there were live economies and other people running around doing whatever it was they did, but had no interest in any endgame and felt too pressured in group content to want to bother with it.
He had no in-game friends, nor interest in making any, no aspirations of being the best or having the best gear, and certainly no particular worries about what anyone else might have thought of his playstyle. He would start a character -- almost always a hunter/ranger type -- level it until he got bored, and then start another. He had dozens of near-identical (save race, typically) characters in several games.
He was a 'soloer', and far from the only one of his type I've known -- in a guild I helped run in Rift we had several. As with my husband, as someone who often is quite social in games, at least when I want to be, I could have easily gotten any of them into groups, even carried through content if they'd wished it. But they didn't, they weren't soloers by necessity, but instead by preference.
Pretty much by definition, the notion that grouping tools are there for his ilk is so laughable it's shocking anyone would even seriously suggest such a thing. As with far too much of the discussion around here when it comes to MMOs and how they "should" be played, it can only come from a narrow-minded belief that everyone must, should, or does want the same thing.
I don't see why group finders can't just be interactive classifieds.
A person creates a "ticket" and inputs what they want to do "go to this dungeon"/"fly to x sector"/"whatever".
Then other people put in similar tickets and when there are matches you are notified with a list of people looking for similar things. You contact one of them, they get a small chat window open up so they don't miss it on the scrolling chat window, you talk, agree to go here or there and then meet them.
That was something like what COH and FFXIV had/have. You could write in what you want to do and what type of experience you're after in the spaces.
I recall the days in EQ1 where you didn't bother logging on if you didn't have more than an hour to play. It took 20 minutes to find a group and 10 minutes to agree on something then 10-15 to get there. Group finder would help with most of those issues. they have to get with the times or it will be a niche game for the hardcore only.
I don't see why group finders can't just be interactive classifieds.
A person creates a "ticket" and inputs what they want to do "go to this dungeon"/"fly to x sector"/"whatever".
Then other people put in similar tickets and when there are matches you are notified with a list of people looking for similar things. You contact one of them, they get a small chat window open up so they don't miss it on the scrolling chat window, you talk, agree to go here or there and then meet them.
That was something like what COH and FFXIV have. You could write in what you want to do and what type of experience you're after in the spaces.
That seems to make the most sense. This way you have a system that is actually matching people to their preferences while they play and then they can contact each other, be social, and make plans.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
I recall the days in EQ1 where you didn't bother logging on if you didn't have more than an hour to play. It took 20 minutes to find a group and 10 minutes to agree on something then 10-15 to get there. Group finder would help with most of those issues. they have to get with the times or it will be a niche game for the hardcore only.
How is a "group finder" different than the LFG and LFM tools found in EQ1 today? What features in particular are "with the times" missing from EQ1 that you are looking for?
You can socialize if the objective takes an hour but to spend an additional hour or two looking for people to help you then an hour or two doing the task. That is entertaining? I get the social part, I get the moving away from WoW group done and leave without saying a word. That bugs me also and understand the move away from that but you can still have the need to have social questing and have a way to have players look for others wanting to explore the same area.
Basically if you cannot handle not having a group finder tool dont play this game. There could be a group browser for people to flag themselves but that's it. MMOs stopped being MMOs the day WOW Put the LFD tool it. If fucked up MMOs beyond repair because it has made people too god dam lazy for anything other than to jump on a treadmill for a month or 2 then quit. I am defending this game even though I do not plan to play it because of the fact it will be a group all the time game like EQ1 and FFXI. I like the MMO Balance of SWG, or UO or Vanilla/TBC WOW. Today's MMOs are fucked. You either DEAL with what the designers of the game want who are not trying to have more than a few hundred thousand players or go play another MMO. It's long past time that MMOs stop Aimming to be the next WOW, a Game for EVERYONE. I do think some mechanics dont belong in MMOs that are old school or too far out of line but requiring people to socialize is the most important pillar of an MMO which WOW fucked.
Group finders are for games that don't really need guilds, where all the content can be soloed so people haven't taken the time to develop any relations in the game. So the only way they can get a group is with a dungeon finder.
Why would a solo player need a group finder? They play solo. If they used the group finder to play the game then they would be groupers waiting for a group. This isn't rocket science, or so I thought.
You know who wants grouping tools? Groupers who like to play the game.
What he means is the solo players will eventually need to group for some content (assuming all content in generic said mmo isnt 100% soloable) and at that point they will need a group finder because they have not made any friends.
@Dullahan has said it pretty much perfectly... there will be a tool/tools for grouping but not instant porta group finders. This also goes a long way to making your in game reputation matter when a group leader is deciding between 2 people of same class who are requesting to join a group which in turn helps to better the community and give people more reason to be community builders not so toxic. All positive things in my opinion to creating a strong community and make Pantheon more like a living world than just another mmo
Those aren't solo players. They would be groupers that have played solo, but solo players don't generally group much at all. If someone plays a game mostly solo they're not going to group when that wall hits them. They'll either idle or find another game.
This manufactured soloer that has no friends and can't group themselves out of a wet paper bag is just a fantasy invented by people needing to point fingers and find blame.
Even if you could find a couple outliers like that they are an extreme fringe case and not the norm.
Grouping tools are for groupers, not soloers. I don't care what he thinks he meant, or what you think he probably meant, you're way off base if you think grouping tools are to help friendless soloers.
Inspired by reading you response Torval, Id vager that a lot of people dont actually manually group up with people to make friends in the first place. Its just as often just people scouting for the most skilled players to add to their ressourcenet (Friendslist) so they can optimize their time online/ gameplay. And there is no harm in that, but it does have a strange ring to it every now and then, when these very socalled selfproclaimed social people, claim they are out to make friends, when in fact they just need strong "npcs"
That is exactly what the more competitive guilds I've played in did. In fact we would sometimes go a slot short on a group run to pick up new players and see if they were a fit.
No harm in that at all in my opinion. It's the best way to build a really solid guild. If players can click together in a group pvp or pve runs then there is a good chance they'll work out in the guild. There is a social dynamic to grouping, being able to cooperate and work in a team, that speaks strongly about character. It's fun to shoot the breeze, but a good guildie and groupmate knows how to cooperate and compromise. That's generally who I like to end up socializing with in group content.
Aye thats generally how things work proforma and Im not even sure how in an MMORPG setting it could work any different. Its just that these debates often end up beeing people using the word "friends" a lot, when the pattern I have seen especially in raiding guilds, is that once a raider stops raiding, the person, unless it was a very very skilled player or outgoing person who might have taken on the role of raidleading or similar, would actually be forgotten in mere weeks. In some cases removed from a guild, in more cases, the ex raiders would hardly get a hello later on when greeting their "friends" in /g.
People use the word friends a lot and often claim that soloplayers are unwilling to make friends, while the way I see it, its almost the opposite, soloplayers do indeed want to make friends, but in the true sense of friends, not just an appropriately fitting tool for an ambitious person or guild.
It wont change though. People will always play the "friends" card when debating these things and alienate soloers by claiming they are antisocial, which Im sure some are, but the majority really isnt.
You can still be social and have group finder. I personally don't want to wait the extra time to find a group b/c of no group finder, and chat spam sucks. I want to play the game and have fun especially since my time is limited. I think it's a poor business decision.
I guess my group finder will be through my guild.
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You know people are starving for a game like Pantheon when people rush en masse to Everquest's Phinigel progression server. It was, by far, the only MMORPG that kept my interest. I hope Pantheon releases in 2017.
Not that I understand much about it, but the way sharding works now it's supposedly quite easy to split or reconcile servers at any time. There is no need to create megaservers which work against player reputation and community.
Correct, it's all on the cloud now. Splitting servers, choosing their location, launching new servers, etc. all a matter of running some simple scripts.
Also wouldn't want to do a mega-server for gameplay reasons. The population needs to match the amount of content on a shard. Allowing too many people to be on a single shard would create over-crowding and too much fighting over resources; likewise, under-crowding is the antithesis of a group focused game.
--
-------------------------------------------------------------- Brad McQuaid CCO, Visionary Realms, Inc. www.pantheonmmo.com --------------------------------------------------------------
You can still be social and have group finder. I personally don't want to wait the extra time to find a group b/c of no group finder, and chat spam sucks. I want to play the game and have fun especially since my time is limited. I think it's a poor business decision.
I guess my group finder will be through my guild.
Grouping tools and a dungeon finder are very different.
Most people are saying they are against the megaserver/grp finder. But a LFG tool where you can find players who are lfg and talk to them is fine.
Also, a really robust /who system is really helpful when lfg/lfm.
The way mmo's were: Community, Exploration, Character Development, Conquest.
The way mmo's are now : Cut-Scenes,Cut-Scenes, solo Questing, Cut-Scenes...
Aye thats generally how things work proforma and Im not even sure how in an MMORPG setting it could work any different. Its just that these debates often end up beeing people using the word "friends" a lot, when the pattern I have seen especially in raiding guilds, is that once a raider stops raiding, the person, unless it was a very very skilled player or outgoing person who might have taken on the role of raidleading or similar, would actually be forgotten in mere weeks. In some cases removed from a guild, in more cases, the ex raiders would hardly get a hello later on when greeting their "friends" in /g.
People use the word friends a lot and often claim that soloplayers are unwilling to make friends, while the way I see it, its almost the opposite, soloplayers do indeed want to make friends, but in the true sense of friends, not just an appropriately fitting tool for an ambitious person or guild.
It wont change though. People will always play the "friends" card when debating these things and alienate soloers by claiming they are antisocial, which Im sure some are, but the majority really isnt.
I am going to jump in here. Soloer's DO NOT BELONG PLAYING AN MMORPG. If you are not willing to Make friends then go play a console game. I hate to say it but you are basing your Bias on a very small portion of the MMO population.
First you are basing your stupid point of view on HIGH END RAIDING GUILDS that only give a fuck about progressing. You stop helping them YES they forget about you. That is about what less than 1% of the enter MMO Community. And yes if you join a large guild that is 300 people online the guild as Cliques and yes you might not make friends. Again less than 1% of the mmo community.
Maybe you should have joined a smaller to medium size guild. YES you can make friends there that less a life time. You know how I know, I ran several Smaller to Medium size guilds that also RAIDED. I have a few Dozen friends that a few times a year say hello even though they do not play any MMOs anymore. They maybe are not as close of a friend as they were when we played 20 hours a week, BUT we still say hello and see how each other is doing and how are the kids and all. Guess what, THAT IS WHAT AN MMO IS. You based your stupid point of view off what, less than 1% of all guilds?
O and to add to things. A friend of mine who we been friends since 1998 and we have not playing an MMO together since the start of Cata is now coming back to MMOs to play FFXIV with me. Another friend of mine who we talk all the time but have not played an MMO in 2 years together is now playing FFXIV with me. I still talk to at least 8 or 9 friends also every few days all of which I met before LFD was put in and we still are FRIENDS. Yet if they ended up coming back to play MMOs and played FFXIV they would end up having someone to run content with, they would just need to give me a few hours or day heads up because I have kids that are young and I cannot just drop everything to play an MMO. Yet my friends who are playing give me 4 to 6 hours heads up or say like my friend Tags says hey tomorrow 9 or 10 AM lets run a Dungeon. You know what I will be there.
That's TRUE friendship not the stupid point of view that you created based on such a small part of the MMO Player base. If you REALLY wanted to make friends come on over to FFXIV and I would run with you. Hell the Husband Wife team my wife and I met just 2 months ago have become friends as well and now together we built a raid team. All based on Friendship, not hardcore you must be on 30 hours a week
Been looking at Pantheon for awhile. I have a feeling the world will be an amazing place to explore. However as far as the huge focus on group content goes, that leaves the impression that there is not much to do when you just want to progress on your own every now and then, means I will likely have to give the game a try and early leave and then wait for a game with a design similar to WoWs.
And I am actually the generation of MMORRPGer that started with DaoC and EQ, but I got lonely pretty fast in those games. Sure we could go to caves and places where we could watch people needing players and maybe get invited eventually, but as far as group play that way goes, it actually felt pretty much the same as joining groups in current LFD and LFR design. People werent all that more talkative back then than they are now, it was pretty much the same. Some groups were chatty, a lot were not.
People are still pretty much just people, some are shy, some cant type fast enough in between fighting, some people simply are not bothered to talk a whole lot, if they dont feel they have anything relevant to say.
I personally like LFR and LFD and now premader finder like we see it in WoW, but I also dont really struggle to make friends through these things.
However a friend made in an MMORPG is also not just a human ressource. I dont make friends with people just to have a handpicked net of players available when I want to do things ingame.
Basicly I just make friends with people whom I feel I can turn to if I need help with a question, and I offer myself as a friend the same way.
No LFD tools in Pantheon, well, to me its a shame, but to the demographic of players who long for this kind of gameplay, it will be a great adventure Im sure. Not all games are made for my own preferences and Im okay with that. I will just wait a bit more. Im really waiting for the full out VR designed and supportet MMORPG anyway tbh, so any game in between now and when that one comes out, wont be more than a smaller adventure in between destinations.
While the primary focus is on group content, there will also be solo and raid content.
Also in-game tools to help people find groups, form friendships, create guilds, and keep people together so they can focus on playing the game and not finding each other will be a huge part of Pantheon.
--
-------------------------------------------------------------- Brad McQuaid CCO, Visionary Realms, Inc. www.pantheonmmo.com --------------------------------------------------------------
You can still be social and have group finder. I personally don't want to wait the extra time to find a group b/c of no group finder, and chat spam sucks. I want to play the game and have fun especially since my time is limited. I think it's a poor business decision.
I guess my group finder will be through my guild.
Guess it will be through your guild and the old EQ way. Be thankful we won't have to meet up somewhere like East Commoms to sell our wares.
You can still be social and have group finder. I personally don't want to wait the extra time to find a group b/c of no group finder, and chat spam sucks. I want to play the game and have fun especially since my time is limited. I think it's a poor business decision.
I guess my group finder will be through my guild.
Guess it will be through your guild and the old EQ way. Be thankful we won't have to meet up somewhere like East Commoms to sell our wares.
Oh? Have they said how things will be sold between players?
You can still be social and have group finder. I personally don't want to wait the extra time to find a group b/c of no group finder, and chat spam sucks. I want to play the game and have fun especially since my time is limited. I think it's a poor business decision.
I guess my group finder will be through my guild.
It is not a poor business decision because the core people who would play this game and would play it all the time and keep a sub would leave. Hell I am not even going to play Pantheon because the grouping all the time, I like my grouping setup like UO, or SWG or Vanilla/TBC WOW. BUT I will Defend their decision to do so because YOU will be able to find a group if you cultivate friends. During my 6 months in FFXI before I played Vanilla WOW, I only didnt get a group twice, once because I didnt get on until late one night and the other because it was a Saturday night and all my friends could not be on and at the time there was 7 of us. The rest of the time we called each other and setup times and this was 2004.
There are so many tools outside of the game today that you do not need a group finder tool. Make friends have a Skype or Discord channel for them, get their Phone numbers, hell I have a few on speed dial. And RARELY will you need a LFD tool in this game. I will say I can see a Group Flagging system in this game and a way to browse these people, But if you have a group of friends you will be OK.
Hell even my time in vanilla WOW or TBC WOW I rarely had problems getting 5 man groups going, 15 man groups required a day or 2 prep, text messages, phone calls and emailing people. 20 and 40 mans needed a lot of a lot of work. ALL of this got done without LFD and LFR. So stop crying about it.
Not that I understand much about it, but the way sharding works now it's supposedly quite easy to split or reconcile servers at any time. There is no need to create megaservers which work against player reputation and community.
Correct, it's all on the cloud now. Splitting servers, choosing their location, launching new servers, etc. all a matter of running some simple scripts.
Also wouldn't want to do a mega-server for gameplay reasons. The population needs to match the amount of content on a shard. Allowing too many people to be on a single shard would create over-crowding and too much fighting over resources; likewise, under-crowding is the antithesis of a group focused game.
Yep you dont want Mega servers but you also dont want what the hell WOW did which was having 200+ PVE servers alone which made smaller MMO communities. The private WOW Server Nost shown us that 15K people online at one time on a server would work. So do 2 US servers, one ET/CT based the other MT/PT based. It would be large enough for good med tier guilds to be successful and for people to have people to become friends with.
Aye thats generally how things work proforma and Im not even sure how in an MMORPG setting it could work any different. Its just that these debates often end up beeing people using the word "friends" a lot, when the pattern I have seen especially in raiding guilds, is that once a raider stops raiding, the person, unless it was a very very skilled player or outgoing person who might have taken on the role of raidleading or similar, would actually be forgotten in mere weeks. In some cases removed from a guild, in more cases, the ex raiders would hardly get a hello later on when greeting their "friends" in /g.
People use the word friends a lot and often claim that soloplayers are unwilling to make friends, while the way I see it, its almost the opposite, soloplayers do indeed want to make friends, but in the true sense of friends, not just an appropriately fitting tool for an ambitious person or guild.
It wont change though. People will always play the "friends" card when debating these things and alienate soloers by claiming they are antisocial, which Im sure some are, but the majority really isnt.
I am going to jump in here. Soloer's DO NOT BELONG PLAYING AN MMORPG. If you are not willing to Make friends then go play a console game. I hate to say it but you are basing your Bias on a very small portion of the MMO population.
First you are basing your stupid point of view on HIGH END RAIDING GUILDS that only give a fuck about progressing. You stop helping them YES they forget about you. That is about what less than 1% of the enter MMO Community. And yes if you join a large guild that is 300 people online the guild as Cliques and yes you might not make friends. Again less than 1% of the mmo community.
Maybe you should have joined a smaller to medium size guild. YES you can make friends there that less a life time. You know how I know, I ran several Smaller to Medium size guilds that also RAIDED. I have a few Dozen friends that a few times a year say hello even though they do not play any MMOs anymore. They maybe are not as close of a friend as they were when we played 20 hours a week, BUT we still say hello and see how each other is doing and how are the kids and all. Guess what, THAT IS WHAT AN MMO IS. You based your stupid point of view off what, less than 1% of all guilds?
O and to add to things. A friend of mine who we been friends since 1998 and we have not playing an MMO together since the start of Cata is now coming back to MMOs to play FFXIV with me. Another friend of mine who we talk all the time but have not played an MMO in 2 years together is now playing FFXIV with me. I still talk to at least 8 or 9 friends also every few days all of which I met before LFD was put in and we still are FRIENDS. Yet if they ended up coming back to play MMOs and played FFXIV they would end up having someone to run content with, they would just need to give me a few hours or day heads up because I have kids that are young and I cannot just drop everything to play an MMO. Yet my friends who are playing give me 4 to 6 hours heads up or say like my friend Tags says hey tomorrow 9 or 10 AM lets run a Dungeon. You know what I will be there.
That's TRUE friendship not the stupid point of view that you created based on such a small part of the MMO Player base. If you REALLY wanted to make friends come on over to FFXIV and I would run with you. Hell the Husband Wife team my wife and I met just 2 months ago have become friends as well and now together we built a raid team. All based on Friendship, not hardcore you must be on 30 hours a week
Sounds nice. I might take you up on that offer, I have considered playing FFXIV for quite a while.
Apart from that Im not sure you need to get up in the red field about anything I say. I believe you, friends come in many different ways, ofcourse its possible to make deeper connections with people in raiding guilds aswell.
Im merely stating a point of wiew that people who end up choosing a more solominded path, are often people who are done feeling like a tool for someone elses pleasure. Otherwise they do want to make friends, just I guess not so much with caplocks people who react strongly to things, when they encounter things they dont like reading.
Been looking at Pantheon for awhile. I have a feeling the world will be an amazing place to explore. However as far as the huge focus on group content goes, that leaves the impression that there is not much to do when you just want to progress on your own every now and then, means I will likely have to give the game a try and early leave and then wait for a game with a design similar to WoWs.
And I am actually the generation of MMORRPGer that started with DaoC and EQ, but I got lonely pretty fast in those games. Sure we could go to caves and places where we could watch people needing players and maybe get invited eventually, but as far as group play that way goes, it actually felt pretty much the same as joining groups in current LFD and LFR design. People werent all that more talkative back then than they are now, it was pretty much the same. Some groups were chatty, a lot were not.
People are still pretty much just people, some are shy, some cant type fast enough in between fighting, some people simply are not bothered to talk a whole lot, if they dont feel they have anything relevant to say.
I personally like LFR and LFD and now premader finder like we see it in WoW, but I also dont really struggle to make friends through these things.
However a friend made in an MMORPG is also not just a human ressource. I dont make friends with people just to have a handpicked net of players available when I want to do things ingame.
Basicly I just make friends with people whom I feel I can turn to if I need help with a question, and I offer myself as a friend the same way.
No LFD tools in Pantheon, well, to me its a shame, but to the demographic of players who long for this kind of gameplay, it will be a great adventure Im sure. Not all games are made for my own preferences and Im okay with that. I will just wait a bit more. Im really waiting for the full out VR designed and supportet MMORPG anyway tbh, so any game in between now and when that one comes out, wont be more than a smaller adventure in between destinations.
While the primary focus is on group content, there will also be solo and raid content.
Also in-game tools to help people find groups, form friendships, create guilds, and keep people together so they can focus on playing the game and not finding each other will be a huge part of Pantheon.
I like reading what you write. I believe if these things are in the game and done well, with room for casual solo time in between grouping sessions, then Id feel a small butterfly of hype. Having watched some of the photage from the game, the exploration alone would be enough to make it worth the adventure.
Aye thats generally how things work proforma and Im not even sure how in an MMORPG setting it could work any different. Its just that these debates often end up beeing people using the word "friends" a lot, when the pattern I have seen especially in raiding guilds, is that once a raider stops raiding, the person, unless it was a very very skilled player or outgoing person who might have taken on the role of raidleading or similar, would actually be forgotten in mere weeks. In some cases removed from a guild, in more cases, the ex raiders would hardly get a hello later on when greeting their "friends" in /g.
People use the word friends a lot and often claim that soloplayers are unwilling to make friends, while the way I see it, its almost the opposite, soloplayers do indeed want to make friends, but in the true sense of friends, not just an appropriately fitting tool for an ambitious person or guild.
It wont change though. People will always play the "friends" card when debating these things and alienate soloers by claiming they are antisocial, which Im sure some are, but the majority really isnt.
I am going to jump in here. Soloer's DO NOT BELONG PLAYING AN MMORPG. If you are not willing to Make friends then go play a console game. I hate to say it but you are basing your Bias on a very small portion of the MMO population.
First you are basing your stupid point of view on HIGH END RAIDING GUILDS that only give a fuck about progressing. You stop helping them YES they forget about you. That is about what less than 1% of the enter MMO Community. And yes if you join a large guild that is 300 people online the guild as Cliques and yes you might not make friends. Again less than 1% of the mmo community.
Maybe you should have joined a smaller to medium size guild. YES you can make friends there that less a life time. You know how I know, I ran several Smaller to Medium size guilds that also RAIDED. I have a few Dozen friends that a few times a year say hello even though they do not play any MMOs anymore. They maybe are not as close of a friend as they were when we played 20 hours a week, BUT we still say hello and see how each other is doing and how are the kids and all. Guess what, THAT IS WHAT AN MMO IS. You based your stupid point of view off what, less than 1% of all guilds?
O and to add to things. A friend of mine who we been friends since 1998 and we have not playing an MMO together since the start of Cata is now coming back to MMOs to play FFXIV with me. Another friend of mine who we talk all the time but have not played an MMO in 2 years together is now playing FFXIV with me. I still talk to at least 8 or 9 friends also every few days all of which I met before LFD was put in and we still are FRIENDS. Yet if they ended up coming back to play MMOs and played FFXIV they would end up having someone to run content with, they would just need to give me a few hours or day heads up because I have kids that are young and I cannot just drop everything to play an MMO. Yet my friends who are playing give me 4 to 6 hours heads up or say like my friend Tags says hey tomorrow 9 or 10 AM lets run a Dungeon. You know what I will be there.
That's TRUE friendship not the stupid point of view that you created based on such a small part of the MMO Player base. If you REALLY wanted to make friends come on over to FFXIV and I would run with you. Hell the Husband Wife team my wife and I met just 2 months ago have become friends as well and now together we built a raid team. All based on Friendship, not hardcore you must be on 30 hours a week
Sounds nice. I might take you up on that offer, I have considered playing FFXIV for quite a while.
Apart from that Im not sure you need to get up in the red field about anything I say. I believe you, friends come in many different ways, ofcourse its possible to make deeper connections with people in raiding guilds aswell.
Im merely stating a point of wiew that people who end up choosing a more solominded path, are often people who are done feeling like a tool for someone elses pleasure. Otherwise they do want to make friends, just I guess not so much with caplocks people who react strongly to things, when they encounter things they dont like reading.
But thats just some soloers, not all.
I just dont like when people take a narrow minded approach. Often times people who cannot play an MMO without a LFD/LFR tool are very narrow minded. I also messaged you privately about my FFXIV server and FC. I also have a raid/Group of friends that run together. We just started grouping together in the last 2 months. Funny that we all ended up in the same guild with the same view on games. The problem we have is people get busy but at least we make a concerted effort to do things together, The one night we did Tmaps and it was enjoyable as all hell.
I have a strong opinion because I have made many friends prior to LFD many I still hear from a few times a year. Problem is the LFD tools today kill a lot of social interaction because you get 95% or greater of the players today telling you to just queue and stop asking for a group. That is a piss poor attitude for an MMO player to have. You should want to play with people and make every effort to make a premade before queuing. Yea there are times you just queue however you should try to make a premade as much as possible.
Pantheon will have a robust social and group-finding system, but will not fast travel you to that group. No auto-pathing, mini map, exclamation points or sparkling quest objectives. It's up to you to explore and figure things out.
This.
You really need to get your title changed Brad lol
Comments
I generally play tanks and healers -- more often the latter than the former, but typically I have both. In games/times where there hasn't been a decent LFG tool, my friends list was invariably full, but extremely few of the people on said list were 'friends' in any meaningful sense. Most I barely knew, or cared to, and as often as not there were several on the list I outright disliked or despised.
People were on the list not because they were friends, but instead because they were reliable and good (or at least, better than the average PuGger, a low bar indeed) at some necessary function.
In such games my "Friends" list was anything but, and, as such lists were generally limited as to how many people could be on them, oftentimes my actual friends weren't on my friends list and instead were kept track of via chat methods external to the game.
While I miss a lot about the 'old days' when getting through a dungeon required a carefully constructed group working together in precise order, lots of CC, careful pulls, and all the rest, I certainly don't miss having to often be around people I often really didn't like but tolerated (and, no doubt, was only myself tolerated by them) because they were good at what they did.
No, games with ~1k players on a single servers saw lots of each other over and over again. It created familiarity. There were about 4-5 elite guilds everyone knew and respected. You knew their leaders by name and a lot of their officers.
It was very common to see multiple people you grouped with the days before sitting in a city crafting. It was easy to strike up conversations and meet new people because you had broken the ice with a dungeon or raid.
Megaservers and cross server grp fingers destroyed this.
Games like eq, daoc, even vanilla wow. Community is why mmos were fun. Devs completely lost sight of why gamers enjoyed it so much back in the day.
The way mmo's were: Community, Exploration, Character Development, Conquest.
The way mmo's are now : Cut-Scenes,Cut-Scenes, solo Questing, Cut-Scenes...
www.CeaselessGuild.com
A person creates a "ticket" and inputs what they want to do "go to this dungeon"/"fly to x sector"/"whatever".
Then other people put in similar tickets and when there are matches you are notified with a list of people looking for similar things. You contact one of them, they get a small chat window open up so they don't miss it on the scrolling chat window, you talk, agree to go here or there and then meet them.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
My husband was one such solo player. He played GW1, WoW, Rift, and a few other MMOS for years while ill (he had terminal cancer), but only once ever grouped with anyone save me (and that went badly). He liked playing in "living worlds" where there were live economies and other people running around doing whatever it was they did, but had no interest in any endgame and felt too pressured in group content to want to bother with it.
He had no in-game friends, nor interest in making any, no aspirations of being the best or having the best gear, and certainly no particular worries about what anyone else might have thought of his playstyle. He would start a character -- almost always a hunter/ranger type -- level it until he got bored, and then start another. He had dozens of near-identical (save race, typically) characters in several games.
He was a 'soloer', and far from the only one of his type I've known -- in a guild I helped run in Rift we had several. As with my husband, as someone who often is quite social in games, at least when I want to be, I could have easily gotten any of them into groups, even carried through content if they'd wished it. But they didn't, they weren't soloers by necessity, but instead by preference.
Pretty much by definition, the notion that grouping tools are there for his ilk is so laughable it's shocking anyone would even seriously suggest such a thing. As with far too much of the discussion around here when it comes to MMOs and how they "should" be played, it can only come from a narrow-minded belief that everyone must, should, or does want the same thing.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Aye thats generally how things work proforma and Im not even sure how in an MMORPG setting it could work any different.
Its just that these debates often end up beeing people using the word "friends" a lot, when the pattern I have seen especially in raiding guilds, is that once a raider stops raiding, the person, unless it was a very very skilled player or outgoing person who might have taken on the role of raidleading or similar, would actually be forgotten in mere weeks. In some cases removed from a guild, in more cases, the ex raiders would hardly get a hello later on when greeting their "friends" in /g.
People use the word friends a lot and often claim that soloplayers are unwilling to make friends, while the way I see it, its almost the opposite, soloplayers do indeed want to make friends, but in the true sense of friends, not just an appropriately fitting tool for an ambitious person or guild.
It wont change though. People will always play the "friends" card when debating these things and alienate soloers by claiming they are antisocial, which Im sure some are, but the majority really isnt.
I guess my group finder will be through my guild.
Proud MMORPG.com member since March 2004! Make PvE GREAT Again!
Also wouldn't want to do a mega-server for gameplay reasons. The population needs to match the amount of content on a shard. Allowing too many people to be on a single shard would create over-crowding and too much fighting over resources; likewise, under-crowding is the antithesis of a group focused game.
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Brad McQuaid
CCO, Visionary Realms, Inc.
www.pantheonmmo.com
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Most people are saying they are against the megaserver/grp finder. But a LFG tool where you can find players who are lfg and talk to them is fine.
Also, a really robust /who system is really helpful when lfg/lfm.
The way mmo's were: Community, Exploration, Character Development, Conquest.
The way mmo's are now : Cut-Scenes,Cut-Scenes, solo Questing, Cut-Scenes...
www.CeaselessGuild.com
First you are basing your stupid point of view on HIGH END RAIDING GUILDS that only give a fuck about progressing. You stop helping them YES they forget about you. That is about what less than 1% of the enter MMO Community. And yes if you join a large guild that is 300 people online the guild as Cliques and yes you might not make friends. Again less than 1% of the mmo community.
Maybe you should have joined a smaller to medium size guild. YES you can make friends there that less a life time. You know how I know, I ran several Smaller to Medium size guilds that also RAIDED. I have a few Dozen friends that a few times a year say hello even though they do not play any MMOs anymore. They maybe are not as close of a friend as they were when we played 20 hours a week, BUT we still say hello and see how each other is doing and how are the kids and all. Guess what, THAT IS WHAT AN MMO IS. You based your stupid point of view off what, less than 1% of all guilds?
O and to add to things. A friend of mine who we been friends since 1998 and we have not playing an MMO together since the start of Cata is now coming back to MMOs to play FFXIV with me. Another friend of mine who we talk all the time but have not played an MMO in 2 years together is now playing FFXIV with me. I still talk to at least 8 or 9 friends also every few days all of which I met before LFD was put in and we still are FRIENDS. Yet if they ended up coming back to play MMOs and played FFXIV they would end up having someone to run content with, they would just need to give me a few hours or day heads up because I have kids that are young and I cannot just drop everything to play an MMO. Yet my friends who are playing give me 4 to 6 hours heads up or say like my friend Tags says hey tomorrow 9 or 10 AM lets run a Dungeon. You know what I will be there.
That's TRUE friendship not the stupid point of view that you created based on such a small part of the MMO Player base. If you REALLY wanted to make friends come on over to FFXIV and I would run with you. Hell the Husband Wife team my wife and I met just 2 months ago have become friends as well and now together we built a raid team. All based on Friendship, not hardcore you must be on 30 hours a week
Also in-game tools to help people find groups, form friendships, create guilds, and keep people together so they can focus on playing the game and not finding each other will be a huge part of Pantheon.
--
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Brad McQuaid
CCO, Visionary Realms, Inc.
www.pantheonmmo.com
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Guess it will be through your guild and the old EQ way. Be thankful we won't have to meet up somewhere like East Commoms to sell our wares.
There are so many tools outside of the game today that you do not need a group finder tool. Make friends have a Skype or Discord channel for them, get their Phone numbers, hell I have a few on speed dial. And RARELY will you need a LFD tool in this game. I will say I can see a Group Flagging system in this game and a way to browse these people, But if you have a group of friends you will be OK.
Hell even my time in vanilla WOW or TBC WOW I rarely had problems getting 5 man groups going, 15 man groups required a day or 2 prep, text messages, phone calls and emailing people. 20 and 40 mans needed a lot of a lot of work. ALL of this got done without LFD and LFR. So stop crying about it.
Sounds nice. I might take you up on that offer, I have considered playing FFXIV for quite a while.
Apart from that Im not sure you need to get up in the red field about anything I say. I believe you, friends come in many different ways, ofcourse its possible to make deeper connections with people in raiding guilds aswell.
Im merely stating a point of wiew that people who end up choosing a more solominded path, are often people who are done feeling like a tool for someone elses pleasure. Otherwise they do want to make friends, just I guess not so much with caplocks people who react strongly to things, when they encounter things they dont like reading.
But thats just some soloers, not all.
I like reading what you write. I believe if these things are in the game and done well, with room for casual solo time in between grouping sessions, then Id feel a small butterfly of hype. Having watched some of the photage from the game, the exploration alone would be enough to make it worth the adventure.
I have a strong opinion because I have made many friends prior to LFD many I still hear from a few times a year. Problem is the LFD tools today kill a lot of social interaction because you get 95% or greater of the players today telling you to just queue and stop asking for a group. That is a piss poor attitude for an MMO player to have. You should want to play with people and make every effort to make a premade before queuing. Yea there are times you just queue however you should try to make a premade as much as possible.
noooooooo!!!!