Massively Single-Player Gaming?

Massively is running an article discussing the trend in recent MMOs to enable and encourage solo play. Where the genre's early offerings, like Everquest and Ultima Online, were heavily dependent on finding other people to interact with, it's common for today's games to allow players to experience most of the content by themselves. Quoting: "It is human nature to want to be the center of attention or at least feel like the hero on some level. It's also not too far of a stretch to call members of our species generally selfish. How can you really deliver this experience if you force your players to ask for help all the time? I think this was simply a natural progression of the genre in trying to appeal to our natural traits. ... Finally, I believe it all comes down to the mighty dollar. Audiences grew and so followed the market and competition. Suddenly, you couldn't make MMOs on the cheap anymore (though a stalwart few still try). Not only are game studios focused on appealing to the solo casual gamer to maximize earnings, they also want to build in artificial time sinks to make players stick around."

Comments

I hate time sinks

[_Shad0w_]

Time sinks do not make me want to stick around, they make me want to go elsewhere. I already have a time sink in my life, it's called work. It regularly consumes 13 hours of my day, factor in an average 8 hours of sleep and that leaves me with 3 hours in which to do things like play games, eat food, etc. If the game wants me to spend time essentially doing nothing, then I'm not playing.

Re:I hate time sinks

[tnok85]

There's a difference between time sinks and solo play. Unfortunately, most 'solo play' is just a poorly disguised time sink.

When done right though, solo play is great for those of us with long hours, or on-call jobs. We can do the multiplayer portion during our time off - but I can't rightly join a group of people when I have no idea how long I'm going to be able to play, or when I can only log on for a half hour.

Having the ability to advance my character, or at least get the illusion I'm not stagnating without being forced to group is nice.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, it sounds like your life sucks.

I used to work 12-16 hours a day until I just got sick of it. Now I work 4 hours every other day and make almost as much money. Remember, work smarter, not harder.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. MMOs should be like sex, you need at least 5 people to participate.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Alcoholist]

I've always been turned off by MMOs because of all the grindage they seem to make you do alone. After the one thousandth time, running around in the sticks looking for beasties to kill gets very old. I always thought grouping was the whole point of these games, but pretty well everyone I know who plays them spends most of their time doing solo stuff because they are looking to level.

I've always wondered if a game that had no leveling system might be more interesting and encourage more team play.

Re:I hate time sinks

[CarpetShark]

I already have a time sink in my life, it's called work. It regularly consumes 13 hours of my day, factor in an average 8 hours of sleep and that leaves me with 3 hours in which to do things like play games, eat food, etc.

It seems common lately, but this is a pretty weird notion; that life is all about having fun after work, and work is just a waste of time. Work IS the majority of your time. It's what YOU do --- YOUR job; YOUR career; YOUR chosen way to exist. It should be something that's meaningful to you -- something you care about and believe in. Either find a way to enjoy it (by enjoying the technical challenge of a high-end IT job, or the service to others that waiting tables involves, for instance) or get/invent a new job that you DO give a shit about. Otherwise, you're a) doomed to a hateful existence; and b) essentially whoring your life away for the sake of money from someone you don't like.

Hell, if you want to spend your time playing games, just quit the job, live off social security, and play games. Why lie about who you are? But if you want your time to be meaningful and your job to be rewarding, then pick a meaningful job that you're capable of feeling the rewards from.

Re:I hate time sinks

[wisty]

This has been threshed out on Slashdot ad nauseum.

a) The Grind makes more money, because MMOs are time based.

b) The Grind makes them more addictive. You can't stop playing, because you "invested" 1000 hours already.

c) The Grind gives you a false sense of achievement, just like poker machines do. You like they way it feels like "work", but nobody ever criticizes you for doing it badly. If you were to spend the time learning a skill, or making money, there would be a much greater chance of failure. The Grind is an effective substitute for real life.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Moryath]

The bigger problem is that so much of the grind requires having other people to grind with.

And the problem with that is the inherent problem of MMORPG's - namely that over time, the playerbase will wane and stratify, and eventually the people you would really like to play with leave the game and the rest either become asshats, or were already asshats to start with.

Take City of Heroes or Final Fantasy XI as two great examples. In City of Heroes, unless you personally know someone in the game who already has a major supergroup (guild) built up, getting anywhere is going to be a chore. Especially be wary of joining a group if someone from a griefing guild called "Endless" shows up.

Final Fantasy XI? Let's see. Cultural separation problems? Check. Hatefests for anyone not running their character as a predetermined "optimized build" and paying massive $$$ to the gil sellers who camp all the necessary "optimal" boss mobs to drop your needed loot, and grief anyone who comes near? Check.

Re:I hate time sinks

[cpricejones]

I agree with this: in practice they can become very addicting. Take Morrowind or Oblivion, both fantastic games that are single player. Both are time sinks, depending on how you look at it. Many people played them, so there were enough people to talk about the game to make it massive single player.

Probably the best example of what you want is Nethack. The game does not take much time but is very, very frustrating for the beginning player. Sometimes it is so damn frustrating you cannot play for more than a half hour. Several people I know play the game, and when we play at the same time on a server like NAO, it's a similarly nice experience. You can take a break from the frustration and watch others play, etc.

I think the trick here is not being attached to the character because in Nethack their life is most likely going to end soon (unless you are good of course), and you will start from the beginning. So it's not as much of a time sink either. The replay value is much better than most games, too, because the world is randomly generated. Now if that sort of idea could be put into a modern game, where everything is randomly generated, then the game might be on to something. However, many people would find that type of game too hard, I think.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Sheik Yerbouti]

Problem with grouping especially in a pick up group is the greater internet fuckwad theory http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/ comes in to play and people actually ruin the game instead of make it better a lot of the time. I want to group but don't often because ppl just want to power game and "zerg' through the content and ruin it for you.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Sheik Yerbouti]

Most work sucks in reality that's why they call it work and not play this is reality get used to it. The number of people that actually have fun interesting jobs are relatively few. You doubt this, really look at peoples faces at street lights and intersection on your next commute to work to a man and woman they all look miserable. Not to be too much of a downer but modern life is for most people is a daily drudgery. Why else would so many be on anti depressants? I would settle for my work being meaningful and yet I don't even get that.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Rich0]

Have you given thought to joining a commune? They work really well. At least they do until they realize that nobody is taking out the trash since everybody wants to be an artist...

The only people I know who would be doing what they're doing for work if they were independantly wealthy, are independantly wealthy.

Re:I hate time sinks

[CarpetShark]

realize that nobody is taking out the trash since everybody wants to be an artist...

It's interesting how you totally filtered out the part I wrote about enjoying menial jobs as a service to humanity.

Re:I hate time sinks

[nedlohs]

There are plenty of jobs that nobody could possibly want to do.

Sure there are less now that we have car building robots and so on.

I worked a couple of months between semesters once on a production line that was taking shrink wrapped cartoons of cigarettes, opening them and putting them into smaller promotional packages that were then shrink wrapped. No one could have possibly enjoyed that work, and it certainly wasn't benefiting humanity.

Harvesting a field isn't fun either, at least that one is essential to humanity though.

Re:I hate time sinks

[nedlohs]

Anyone who works 13 hours a day, either likes their job or is earning enough money that they are going to retire early.

Or is a workaholic and will be exploited by the corporate machine for their entire existence.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Anonymous Coward]

In City of Heroes, unless you personally know someone in the game who already has a major supergroup (guild) built up, getting anywhere is going to be a chore

Are you dense? City of Heroes is a preposterously easy game to level up in, solo or teamed. And I'm not talking about the MA system, either.

Re:I hate time sinks

[GarryFre]

Yeah there are many time sinks and risks associated with having to group. 1. Time spent waiting for groups to get together. 2. Time sinks when someone is taking care of a baby or some other thing they should not be trying to do while raiding. 3. Time sink and risk of loss due to group members being disconnected. The chances of this seem to go up exponentially the more players there are in the group especially during key events of a raid. 4. Playing with strangers who are poor players or suddenly abandon the group in a fit of rage or ninja loot. 5. The parent trap ... one or more group members who have parents who walk in suddenly and demand they quit playing at once and go to bed. 6. Ending up playing longer than I wish to. Games aren't the only thing in my life, and sometimes I am not feeling well and I don't wish to spend that much time playing. I could go on and on, but one of the reasons I quit games is when I reach a level that there is no more meaningful solo content left.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Rich0]

It's interesting how you totally filtered out the part I wrote about enjoying menial jobs as a service to humanity.

Nope - I read it clearly. You're welcome to stop by and mow my lawn as a service to humanity anytime you'd like. Actually, I extend that offer to everybody. And yet, for some odd reason, I still find myself mowing my lawn.

My point is that what you're saying sounds nice and all, but nobody in the real world would actually live that way.

Re:I hate time sinks

[CronoCloud]

I agree, the worst thing about FFXI was the Japan inspired conformism in the player base, which spread to the non-Japanese players too eventually. "You're level foo and don't have a Hat of Foo? No group for you!" "You're playing a Hume WHM with RDM as subclass and not a Taru-Taru WHM with BLM as the kami intended? No group for you!" "You want to play your WHM as a Western style Battle Cleric because you're a Hume with a Hammer, instead of being a "Staff Chick" as the kami intended WHM to be? No group for you!"

I tried and tried telling people that doing things the "optimized conformist way some crazy Japanese min-maxer had figured out" was less fun. Sure, fighting "Very Hard" enemies, with those super optimized builds would give you "perfect" XP but it just wasn't fun, and it was harder than if you fought level appropriate mobs. And if you fought level appropriate mobs, you'd actually make more money. Instead of Goblins in the Dunes, fight Quadav in the Mines. You'll rip though them so fast and they'll drop tons of stuff. And there will be less chance of a damned add or an accident killing the party.

As I said, using EQOA speak, "You're better off fighting hordes of dark blues for safer XP and more loot, than a tiny number of reds"

Re:I hate time sinks

[dmbasso]

Oh, come on mods, even though it was AC's, it was funny.

Re:I hate time sinks

[MorePower]

The main problem is this. There is nothing that I enjoy doing 40+ hours per week. And the really big problem is that even things I do enjoy doing, I hate doing to someone else's schedule. I really like building things with LEGO, for example, so should I go apply for a job at LEGOLAND (as if I would really get such a coveted job)? I bet I would hate it just as much as my current job, because I'm not always in the mood to build things with LEGO, starting at 8:00am and ending at 5:00pm (or whatever hours LEGOLAND builders work).

And that's the thing about jobs, someone else is relying on your output. So you need to adjust to their wants and needs. And that's the part that sucks.

Also, there is no way to "quit your job, live off social security..." Social Security only pays out when you reach retirement age (and you notice, most people do quit as soon as they are eligible for retirement benefits). Welfare is what you would get as a working age person, and unless you have dependent kids they cut you off after 5 years (cumulative for your lifetime) and leave you to starve to death.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Sparton]

Anyone who works 13 hours a day, either likes their job or is earning enough money that they are going to retire early.

It regularly consumes 13 hours of my day, factor in an average 8 hours of sleep and that leaves me with 3 hours in which to do things like play games, eat food, etc.

9 hour work day + 2 hours commute either way == 13 hours.

He's not working 13 hour long days, he's just got a fairly long commute time. I have effectively the same thing; except I play either iPhone games or DS games to and from (or occasionally some sort of reading material).

Re:I hate time sinks

[centuren]

Anyone who works 13 hours a day, either likes their job or is earning enough money that they are going to retire early.

Or is a workaholic and will be exploited by the corporate machine for their entire existence.

Or is barely managing to pay the bills with whatever work they were able to find to support their kids.

Or are in the middle of a desert in the middle-east getting shot at regularly, out of duty and service rather than personal enjoyment or a lucrative income.

While they may not match up with a lifestyle of playing MMO's in one's off time, there's plenty of scenarios in which a person does not have the luxury to pick hours they like, or a job they enjoy.

Re:I hate time sinks

[CarpetShark]

And yet, for some odd reason, I still find myself mowing my lawn.

That odd reason is probably exactly what I'm getting at: that people know you won't appreciate it.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Anonymous Coward]

He didn't say you should do what you like for work instead of getting paid, he said you should do what you like while getting paid. If you paid enough, people would mow your lawn. And there are people who would prefer to mow lawns and be outside than sitting in a chair doing data entry or tech support or any other similarly "menial" job.

There are also people who work in service industries mostly because they like the excuse for social contact with a broad range of people and the frequent good feeling they get from interacting with satisfied clients. For these rare, skilled service providers, it is like being paid by friends to be friendly to them. A true win-win situation.

Re:I hate time sinks

[nedlohs]

If you are willing to travel 4 hours a day for a job, then the same set of criteria apply.

Re:I hate time sinks

[nedlohs]

Subsistence living is a different beast. As is having more kids than you can afford with a reasonable job - what is the point of supporting the kids if you never see them anyway?

Being in the military is a separate thing too, I would assume the "retire early" applies, but modified to be "I don't expect to be doing this for my entire working life, but it is worth it in the short/medium term". Where "worth it" could be a lot of things from expecting a long career in the military not involving being in a warzone all their lives, or a jump start on a civilian career with the training/experience/etc the military provided, or just plain old "I will suffer and risk my life for my country because I am a patriot". And don't forget "I love shooting stuff" :)

Re:I hate time sinks

[centuren]

Subsistence living is a different beast. As is having more kids than you can afford with a reasonable job - what is the point of supporting the kids if you never see them anyway?

I think we're defining "support" differently. The point of supporting your kids is so they can eat, have a home, etc. The level of subsistence where supporting the kids definitely has importance over quality time. I agree with you on "supporting" being things like buying them an xbox, making sure they get a new car at 16, etc.

Being in the military is a separate thing too, I would assume the "retire early" applies, but modified to be "I don't expect to be doing this for my entire working life, but it is worth it in the short/medium term". Where "worth it" could be a lot of things from expecting a long career in the military not involving being in a warzone all their lives, or a jump start on a civilian career with the training/experience/etc the military provided, or just plain old "I will suffer and risk my life for my country because I am a patriot". And don't forget "I love shooting stuff" :)

I'll give you the "I don't expect to be doing this for my entire working life", absolutely. Of course, that doesn't change the present, which with long and repeated deployments can really suck personally, but at the same time include reasons important to that individual for making that sacrifice.

Regardless of my specific examples, I was pointing out that not everyone has the luxury to chose work or hours. This is obviously true in the short term, but it's definitely not a given that it's false in the long term.

I agree work doesn't have to be bad, but it's not always us who has the ultimate say in it. If we end up working a job we hate for a long time, or our entire lives, at least we have the chance to try to bring up our children to have the best chance to not let the same thing happen (be it financial opportunities, or merely teaching them to make better choices).

Re:I hate time sinks

[Rich0]

Absolutely - and those folks out digging ditches and destroying their backs for $10/hr are doing it out of the sheer desire to be of service, and it certanly has nothing to do with the fact that they haven't been able to find a job doing anything else.

That guy in Walmart that hands you your shopping cart clearly dreamed about doing that with his life when he was growing up.

Don't get me wrong - I'm all for finding a source of income that also allows you to generally enjoy your job. I'd say that for the most part I'm happy with my job - even if not all aspects of it are what I'd otherwise choose. However, most people do not have the job options that I have. Many people end up slaving 35 hours per week on a wage they can barely afford to live on with no access to health insurance. That certainly isn't because they didn't come to the realization that there are other things they'd rather be doing. The problem is that the world only needs so many senators, engineers, well-paid artists, athletes, lawyers, doctors, astronauts, and so on, so unless you're REALLY good at one of those careers you end up having to settle for something else.

Re:I hate time sinks

[CarpetShark]

There is such a thing as part-time work. Or, you could temp for an agency for a change of organisation on a regular basis. Or, you could do random freelance jobs that interest you in your spare time. Or, you could do a mixture of any of those, and probably quite a few other things.

Re:I hate time sinks

[subsonic]

Excellent point. Doing a job is something that you find rewarding, and is something that someone else can't (or doesn't want to) do as well as you- which is why you get paid. Hopefully you find it stimulating and challenging, I know my current job sure isn't. But I'm also taking classes and trying to get to a better job.

I love photography, but I know I would HATE to have someone tell me where/when/what to shoot and to stake a paycheck on it.

Also, just to go further down this tangent. Chris Rock once mentioned that the difference between a job and a career is the concept of time. In a job, there is too much time. You just want to get out and get on with something else. With a career, there's never enough time in the day to do everything you need/want to do. I really want a career. But until then, a job will do.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never managed to ascend in Nethack. Not once. The number of times I've even gotten the damned amulet can be counted on two hands with fingers to spare. Yet I still love that game.

Dwarf Fortress has a great motto that Nethack players have internalized: "Losing is Fun". More games should be built that way.

Re:I hate time sinks

[fractoid]

Hatefests for anyone not running their character as a predetermined "optimized build" and paying massive $$$ to the gil sellers who camp all the necessary "optimal" boss mobs to drop your needed loot, and grief anyone who comes near? Check.

Coming from WoW, this statement seems odd. If you could get "needed loot" off "optimal boss mobs" by simply paying in-game currency for them, why would you bother to join a group in the first place?

Maybe this is just the perspective I have after playing 4+ years of WoW, but the general progression that I've seen is that you solo your way to the level cap and 'acceptable' starter gear. Then you look for a group, and work your way through progressively harder content, upgrading your gear as you go. If you could just farm a bunch of gold and buy the top end gear, the only motivation to raid would be to see the content. For me, personally, that's plenty - I try and see each raid instance at least once before the next expansion comes out, although in BC I missed some bosses due to social constraints (didn't see Vashj, Archimonde, anything past Supremus in BT, or any TK bosses). After that, though, farming the same instance over and over rapidly gets boring.

Re:I hate time sinks

[fractoid]

There's only so many times you can pull the "halve your work hours, quadruple your hourly rate" trick. It works if your overheads are low, and it's great if you're going from 50 hour work weeks at McDonalds to a few hours of I.T. consulting a week, but if you're working 12 hours a week you're very unlikely to be earning enough to support a family and pay off a mortgage. Eventually, when you *need* twice as much money to cover the costs of supporting your dependents as well as yourself, you'll end up having to work longer hours.

Re:I hate time sinks

[fractoid]

2 hours commute either way?! That's crazy - how far is your round trip commute, 200km? Or do you think he just has a hideous number of public transport transfers? If I were spending four hours a day in transit I'd seriously consider either moving house or moving job.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Homburg]

I do think that's a very good point. Marx put it well 150 years ago:

The division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, manâ(TM)s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Anonymous Coward]

My excrement should smell like roses too, but that's not likely to happen either. "Fun" is a different word from "work" for a reason. All that "whoring" people do usually lets people do things like "eat" and "have shelter". If you're making $100,000 a year, then yeah - maybe you're whoring. If you're making $15,000 then you're probably just surviving.

People should try to find jobs that they like doing, but it's not an overnight event and most people have to grind through a lot of tedious things before they get what they want.

If it were easy to have the ultimate dream job then everyone would have it already.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Anonymous Coward]

In City of Heroes, unless you personally know someone in the game who already has a major supergroup (guild) built up, getting anywhere is going to be a chore. Especially be wary of joining a group if someone from a griefing guild called "Endless" shows up.

As someone who has played CoH for five years, I can say that the above poster has no fucking clue what he is talking about. It's a very solo friendly game, supergroups are totally optional, and I've never heard of this "Endless" group either.

Re:I hate time sinks

[CarpetShark]

I disagree. MMOs should be like sex, you need at least 5 people to participate.

You seem to be confusing sex with sex trafficking ;)

Re:I hate time sinks

[Scarletdown]

In City of Heroes, unless you personally know someone in the game who already has a major supergroup (guild) built up, getting anywhere is going to be a chore.

That is not entirely true. I have several characters (both heroes and villains) who are doing quite well while not being affiliated with any super group. Specifically, I set up characters on two servers with the intention of not creating my own group at 10. These are:

Screamsicle - Sonic Blast/Cold Domination Corruptor
Full Metal Duck - Assault Rifle/Energy Melee Blaster
Impact Event - Earth Control/Thermal Radiation Controller
Polar Peregrine - Ice/Storm Controller
Willowpaw - Fire/Electric Blaster
Willie Whompem - Triform Warshade
Spring Flurrie - Triform Peacebringer

And on Guardian, I have Bow Chicka Bow Wow - Dark Melee/Electric Armor Stalker.
As I said, these characters are all operating without a supergroup (though if I get an invite to one, I will consider it.) Additionally, most of these characters have operated solo, and I have plenty of others who have progressed through the game mostly on their own. These are in small super groups, which is why they are listed apart from the above examples. My prime examples (since I will admit I like showing off here...) are:

Twilight Dream - My first Warshade on (Dual form Human/Dark Nova). She mostly soloed her way to 30 on Virtue. And her villainous incarnation on Protector (a Ninjas/Dark Mastermind) has also soloed primarily so far.

The Virtue incarnation of Polar Peregrine, an Archery/Ice Blaster primarily soloed her way to 50. I think it took me about 3 months of casual play with her to get to 50. Sure, she did do some teaming, which was a real blast, but the majority of her career was solo.

The Virtue incarnation of Stellar Jay, a Plants/Energy Dominator, has also mostly soloed, and he is in his 30s now.

Sparkle Swan, my Broadsword/Shield Defense Scrapper made it to 32 mostly solo in about 4 days time.

Never-Moore, a Mercenaries/Pain Master Mind is 37, and has also soloed most of his career.

And finally, we have "Crimson Duck, a Fire/Energy Blaster on Liberty. Actually, come to think of it, her career has been a pretty even mix of solo and team play. Sadly, she got knocked off her high horse when she got thoroughly spanked by the Envoy of Shadow in her 30s. That was when it was discovered that she was not as invincible as I thought she was. :) She is currently level 46, and I sorta have her competing with Kilderon, My Ice/Radiation Controller to become my second level 50 hero and my third level 50 character (second was my first level 50 villain, Sonnenblume - Fire/Dark Corruptor. She made the journe

Re:I hate time sinks

[Scarletdown]

There are plenty of jobs that nobody could possibly want to do.

Yeah. There's a good chance that the guys who run Doody Calls (a septic service in Tacoma) don't actually enjoy their work. Bet it pulls in some decent income though. I briefly entertained the notion of opening a competing service called It Happens. However, I just don't have the ambition needed to get into such a crappy line of work. :)

Re:I hate time sinks

[drsquare]

You do realise that if people didn't do any jobs unless they really loved doing them, then the entire economy collapse and most people would starve to death?

We can't all be astronauts and rock stars, someone has to clean the toilets and empty the bins.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Scarletdown]

Belgium! Looks like I had a visit from the Fuck Up Fairy...
Trying again...

Sparkle Swan - Broadsword/Shield Defense Scrapper.

Crimson Duck - Fire/Energy Blaster.

... Ah, what the hell. Here's another look at Sparkle Swan in her level 30 costume. The one in the first shot is what she will get at 40. :)

Re:I hate time sinks

[dave562]

That isn't at all unheard of in southern California. Traffic can be a real time sink.

Re:I hate time sinks

[tomhudson]

I worked a couple of months between semesters once on a production line that was taking shrink wrapped cartoons of cigarettes, opening them and putting them into smaller promotional packages that were then shrink wrapped. No one could have possibly enjoyed that work, and it certainly wasn't benefiting humanity.

That's because you were doing it WRONG! You should have been inserting small "chicken-fart" firecrackers at random (actually chemically-treated slivers of wood) into them at random. People who claim that "smoking calms their nerves" would quickly develop a different attitude if they were to have one blow up in their face at random times.

Re:I hate time sinks

[tomhudson]

The main problem is this. There is nothing that I enjoy doing 40+ hours per week

Really? How about this list:

• breathing - 167 hours/week;
• sleeping - 56 hours/week;
• digesting food - 167 hours/week;

Shit - I'm already up to 56 hours a DAY! No wonder I don't have any free time!

Re:I hate time sinks

[tomhudson]

You do realise (sic) that if people didn't do any jobs unless they really loved doing them, then the entire economy collapse

Guess you didn't notice that the entire economy DID collapse, and that it was caused by people who did the jobs they really loved doing (fucking over everyone else for big bucks at investment firms, avoiding real work by becoming a house flipper, etc.) - not the average joe who did the real work.

Re:I hate time sinks

[SQLGuru]

at least 5 people to participate

I thought it was six: Rosey Palm and her five friends....well, I guess that's seven counting the ahhh recipient.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Ornamental]

Agree with this...the ability to dip in and out of a game, in the odd corners of the day, seems like a good thing. And hard to see how you could be a responsible part of a group effort on that basis.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Aklyon]

I play both,love both, and i agree. (though the # of times i've gotten 'the damned amulet' could be counted on one hand, not 2)

Re:I hate time sinks

[Dr. Impossible]

Communism doesn't work. Sorry.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because the majority of people are miserable doesn't mean they have to be.

Don't resign yourself to a life you hate. Go out find something you enjoy! (but that may take a little courage)

Re:I hate time sinks

[Rocketship Underpant]

So he argued against specialization and comparative advantage, the pillars that make an economy work in the first place? No wonder his ideas failed so badly.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing that I enjoy doing 40+ hours per week.

I don't know about you, but I enjoy sleeping 40+ hours per week.

Well, in all seriousness, though, the weakness in your argument is that a job does not necessarily entail doing the same thing every day, under the same circumstances, in the same environment, with the same people and all that.

Chances are that there's always menial and repetitive tasks that have to be taken care of in every job - chances are there's always going to be some routine, some boredom. But not every job involves the same routine every day without there ever being any challenges or changes.

I don't think there's any job where you'll literally love every minute of it, always, without exception, but there sure are jobs where you won't be bored out of your skull because you're always doing the same thing for 40+ hours a week, every week.

Re:I hate time sinks

[drsquare]

Guess you didn't notice that the entire economy DID collapse

That's hyperbole. At most you're looking at a 5-10% contraction, not 100%. Most of the economy is working fine, and over 90% of people still have jobs. Most of those jobs are not 'artist' or 'space explorer'.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Moryath]

FFXI, in certain game areas, is almost completely taken over by the chinese/korean "gold farmer" types. The ones who you have to pay REAL WORLD money to for either in-game money or in-game items.

The problem is, certain "necessary" items are dropped by mobs that spawn on a very slow schedule (sometimes greater than 24 hours) and are ALWAYS camped by a dozen or more of the chinese/korean "gold farmer" types. Try to camp them yourself and you get a bunch of "go away" message through the auto-translator. Stick around and one of them will run off, train a bunch of mobs, then come back and deliberately die right next to you in order to grief-aggro you. Normal players rarely, if ever, have a chance of getting these items legitimately.

Re:I hate time sinks

[jgrahn]

So he argued against specialization and comparative advantage, the pillars that make an economy work in the first place? No wonder his ideas failed so badly.

But he did use the word "cleavage" ...

Re:I hate time sinks

[tomhudson]

Bullshit! http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/econ-j03.shtml

The official unemployment rate of 9.5 percent does not take into account so-called "discouraged" workers who have given up looking for a job and those forced to work part-time because they cannot get full-time employment. According to the Labor Department report, when these workers are included, the jobless rate soars to 16.5 percent.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that this figure is "above a discontinued and even broader measure that hit 15 percent in late 1982, when the official unemployment rate was 10.8 percent." The Journal added that "... comparisons to the Great Depression (when 25 percent of Americans were out of work) may not look so wild, even if overall economic activity is holding up better."

The US has lost 6.5 million jobs since the recession officially began in December of 2007. All growth in jobs over the last nine years has now been wiped out, and there are fewer jobs in the US today than in May 2000, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute.

So, the economy has given up all growth in the first decade of this century, is less than 10% away from matching the Great Depression in terms of unemployed ... many states and cities are insolvent, the US fed credit rating is in danger, banks and manufacturers are going bust left and right, the median house sale price in Detroit is under $8 grand, there are millions of people who are in default on their mortgages ... the economy has collapsed.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? There are that many of you who love your job, or you're just drinking the Kool-Aid? Welcome to my world, where no one will pay me to do what I like. Which planet are you from? I guess that would explain my suicidal ideation.

Re:I hate time sinks

[PatLam]

Couldn't agree more. I left FFXI exactly for those reasons. It would take at least an hour to form up a group (IF you had the maxed out equipment of the level you were with all the spells and all the skills and everything else pretty and shinny), it would takt about an hour to get to the place your group wanted to go, you'd play about an hour (if not killed or someone supposedly had to "go eat" or "go to work", and you had to reforma group, AGAIN), and then you'd have to stick around for another hour to sell the useless stuff you'd win at the lottery and buff up your guy with the new shinny things to max you out once again. So in all, on the 4 hours on-line, you'd have "played" only 1. Kind of makes you feel like you wasted you time.... And indeed, I also prefer to clear off a whole field of medium mobs and have the xp pour in than fight high-level, high-risk mob.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. MMOs should be like sex, you need at least 5 people to participate.

I believe you're confusing "people" with "fingers"

Re:I hate time sinks

[Sparton]

I dunno, my commute from my place to work is 1 hour with smooth transfers, or about 1.5 to 2 without (especially late in the evening, or just at the end of the workday). I'm reading an CC game design book or playing games to work, so such a long commute time really isn't an issue to me. And as an added plus, I get 20 minutes walking either way, which is not bad considering I sit in front of a computer for all of my work and most of my leisure time.

If I were spending four hours a day in transit I'd seriously consider either moving house or moving job.

If I didn't love the hell out of my job of designing video games, I probably would change jobs or at least studio, but as neophyte in the industry, it's not a reasonable option to me right now. As it stands, the reason my commute time is so long is that I moved out with a bunch of other graduates from the same post-secondary I went to, so I'm doing it to save a bit for my near future, and also to help them out (they're not all fortunate enough to land as nice a job as me).

Re:I hate time sinks

[Sparton]

I'm a game designer, so yes, the latter probably applies pretty well for me right now. I love my job though, and the only reason I'm willing to put up with it right now is because I'm a neophyte in the industry, and I have to get experience so I can bypass the Catch-22 and have a bit more freedom in who will take me. Once I get that experience, I'll be a bit more prudent in what I'm willing to inflict on myself.

Re:I hate time sinks

[Anonymous Coward]

Who voted this as insightful? It's about as misinformed as a creationist convention.

The 'casual' gamer

[acehole]

Its a myth like unicorns or a republican with a soul.

There are many levels of time people put into games. How exactly do you definite 'casual'? If you look at it from the MMO perspective (wow for example) do you count a casual gamer as someone who doesnt raid? how about someone who only spends time in the game for raiding and not much else? What about if the non-raider spends more time in game than the raider, which one is casual?

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[Krneki]

Casual is somebody who is not addicted, but how much time defines one or the other depends on who you ask.

Generally speaking causal is who puts RL before the game.

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[Antidamage]

On behalf of most of slashdot, I only wish I had a real life to put before games.

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easy to define casual:

It's a socially awkward player who is afraid that people in a guild would find out on teamspeak or vent that the hotavnger21 female night elf warrior with HUGE boobs is in fact John Conner, male, aged 43 living in a trailer and has only the huge boobs in common with his character.

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[martas]

I have this theory that if there was an Asian-American Republican, he'd have a soul. Double negative, you know.

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[williamhb]

There are many levels of time people put into games. How exactly do you definite 'casual'? If you look at it from the MMO perspective (wow for example) do you count a casual gamer as someone who doesnt raid? how about someone who only spends time in the game for raiding and not much else? What about if the non-raider spends more time in game than the raider, which one is casual?

In my personal opinion, if the idea of paying a monthly subscription for a game appealed to you in the first place, then you are probably not a casual gamer.

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[Krneki]

I agree, nerf RL.

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[Krneki]

So if I hack and account I can safely say I'm not addicted? :)

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[Hatta]

Casual vs serious is all about how much you care. We all know film buffs for instance who take films very seriously who watch a lot of movies, but also read about them, talk about them, think about them. Then there are people who just like to see a movie from time to time. Games are the same way, it's not a hard and fast line either, there are many shades in between.

I guess there are some observations that can be made though. If you've never seen a foreign movie, you're probably not a film buff. If you've never played an imported game, you're probably not a serious gamer. If you've never seen a movie that came out before you were born, you're probably not a film buff. If you've never played a game that came out before you were born, you're probably not a serious gamer. Or you're in your late 30s. If you can't name a few directors off the top of your head, you're probably not a film buff. If you can't name a few game designers off the top of your head, you're probably not a serious gamer.

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[obarthelemy]

Wow's subscription costs about the same as
- 2 movie tickets
- half a nice restaurant meal
- 1/4th of a new game
- a very cheap/bad theater/opera ticket
- a new CD
- a new DVD
- ...

you can play very little WoW (6-8 hours/month), and still get more "entertainment time" for your money than you would with more traditional entertainment.

of course, you won't get the same benefits out of it.. it's pretty much a-cultural... but then again, given how bad most recent movies have been ...

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[bertoelcon]

Someone mod this Insightful.

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[UnknownSoldier]

It's real easy to define on a sliding scale...

* < 1 hr/week of gaming: casual gamer
* < 2 hrs/week of gaming: The addiction is starting...
* > 4 hrs/week of gaming: average gamer
* > 8 hrs/week of gaming: hard-core gamer
* > 32 hrs/week of gaming: I can stop any time...

--
WoW (TM) is the McDonalds (TM) of MMOs

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[centuren]

Wow's subscription costs about the same as
- 2 movie tickets
- half a nice restaurant meal
- 1/4th of a new game
- a very cheap/bad theater/opera ticket
- a new CD
- a new DVD
- ...

you can play very little WoW (6-8 hours/month), and still get more "entertainment time" for your money than you would with more traditional entertainment.

of course, you won't get the same benefits out of it.. it's pretty much a-cultural... but then again, given how bad most recent movies have been ...

I look back on my time playing WoW, and adding up everything I spent over a year and a bit, I sort of wish I had that money back. I enjoyed myself tremendously a good 60-70% of that time, and it was definitely the cheapest way to socialise daily with friends who lived 2 hours away in a big city, at a time when none of us had a lot of disposable income. Still, that "golden age" of my experience was shorter than my hope, and I definitely feel like I wasted some time that could have been better spent (and paid money to do so).

At the same time, a friend who started playing as I was winding down, ended up playing much more than I did, first string in a 6 days/week raiding guild. She loved it, and hated her 40 hour/week office job. Coming home from work and playing WoW, if you enjoy it, is actually really, really cheap. The more you play it, the cheaper it is, since you're not doing other things that cost money. After cigarettes and gas, WoW was really her only expense, so she was able to save money very quickly.

At that age, her job wasn't a career and even living in Silicon Valley a temporary thing. Raiding was what she wanted to do with her time, and she was able to work, put a lot of money in the bank, and enjoy herself in the off-time. When it was time to move back home, she made the trip in a gorgeous mint '95 BMW 850ci.

Of course, the cost of WoW goes up dramatically if your guild holds "drunken PVP weekends", but in those cases you would probably be spending the money on nice alcohol anyway.

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[TheLink]

FWIW, even if you play many hours a week it doesn't mean you're addicted.

e.g. if you can go on a holiday for a week and still not feel the urge to login and play, you're probably not addicted.

I know people who go on a holiday but they still "must" log in a few times ;).

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[Anonymous Coward]

During the school year I tended to buy 2-3 games, and for the summer I'd buy another 4-5 and down them during the summer. This added up to over $300 a year in games (8games tops per year isn't what I'd call hardcore gamer). Recently I started to play world of warcraft, and since then have seen no need to buy a new game. I've paid $45 in subscriptions plus $60 for the game+expansion packs, for a total of $105. Seeing as how I've bought zero games this summer, I've saved ~$75 so far by playing wow.
 
Paying a monthly subscription makes great sense if the game has enough content/replay value in it compared to the average game.

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[fractoid]

When I look back over the past four years and add up all the money I've spent on WoW it comes up to maybe $1500. That sounds like a lot until I think that a carton of beer a week at $45 a carton is what, 10 times that? And then I compare that $45 a week with the $80-$150 a night that I'd spend if I were going out on the town and buying drinks for myself plus any particularly lucky ladies who happened along...

$20/month is *cheap* unless you only get paid pocket money.

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[Anonymous Coward]

About your comment about a-cultural, it really depends on who you know. If none of your friends like music, listening to music could be a very lonely activity (then again, you should question who you pick as friends if no one enjoys what you do) For me nearly every close friend I have plays WoW, some more than others. It makes a great conversation topic and has helped me get closer to people I used to barely talk to mainly due to lack of common interests. So saying you won't get the same benefits is purely a case-by-case thing. I know spending all night playing wow on vent with people I've known for years counts as a benefit, people that in the past I never called, or never called me suddenly spend more time "online". This also leads into hanging out in the mall, having lunch, and watching movies together too, so it's not just being sucked into a computer world.
 
One side note is, I do know there are extreme cases where say two people can only talk about the game, and nothing else, that to me can be unhealthy (one quits the game, then friendship ends basically) All things should be done in moderation.

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[fractoid]

8 hours a week is hardcore? Maybe for Tetris or Wii Bowling. 'Casual' MMO players can play anywhere up to 30 hours a week, I don't believe it's possible to play an MMO game at a 'hardcore' level if you have either a job or a partner.

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Michelle Malkin count? Not a "he" though, and pretty certain there's still no soul.

Re:The 'casual' gamer

[UnknownSoldier]

It depends on your situatation ...

If you're single, then more then 32 hrs is hard-core (I've had up to 72 hrs in 2 weeks for Steam.)
If you're married, then more then 8 hrs is hard-core. ... hence the graduated scale.

And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[AlmondMan]

Killing it through making everything into solo-content, losing out on all the things that the genre would've allowed for. All the many possibilities of player vs player conflict are swept under the rug and turned into endless killing grounds, like the instanced battle arenas in Anarchy Online, WAR and WoW. WAR is a bit on the right track again, with the world being sort of dynamic between the two sides, but things are just going way too fast back and forth. And the world is too stiff.

The idea of players working together, cooperating and prospering in these digital worlds has been lost and we're back in the ego race for the most epeen. Which is sad, because the fun of these games lies in the multiplayer cooperative part. Which was their great attraction piece in times past. Now, it's just a really bad singleplayer game. Consider, if you will, playing any of the many MMOs in an offline game. Everything works exactly the same as the MMO, only you're quite alone. Nothing you do will ever have an impact on the world as it does in proper singleplayer games. The story progresses and things change around your character. In MMOs the best thing you can do is fake this, like they've started doing in WoW, which I find to be just cheap, with the only purpose of it being to greater satisfy the solo player. Leaving nothing in the way of multiplayer ways to see change going on in the world. Sad.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[Opportunist]

One of the reasons I quitted playing MMOs (except EvE). I'm in for the group experience. Why pay 15 bucks a month to play a solo game?

When you like group play, you're pretty much lost right now in MMOs. You can't start anew in an "old" MMO that relied on group play, because everyone is already far above your level and unwilling to go back to level yet another toon, and, well, being a group-heavy game you won't get far alone. And the new games that would have plenty of low level players are anything but group friendly.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[AlmondMan]

I'd like to disagree in that you can't start anew in an "old" MMO with heavy group play reliance. I play Anarchy Online and people constantly reroll new alts and new people are about constantly through the free play offer. The problem is mainly with the old group reliance games that they haven't been updated to reflect the speed that newer games have. Where you can log on and level to max in a couple days, it takes months in the older games, and then there's various things that people consider absolutely necessary items to continue their development, and instead of seeing this as a progression, they just whine about it being a grind. If stuff is not readily available through some quest that has you go out and play the hero in a world that doesn't care and doesn't change, then it's grinding now...

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[obarthelemy]

Very true. I'm amazed at how much effort is poured into adding solo content, and how little is put into making the group experience better. Possible areas of improved, in WoW, would be:

- a Karma system, actually 2, one for skill and one for social intelligence. Assholes and retards spoil the game for whomever groups with them, and it's amazing how many of those there are. Blizzard must have the intellectual and financial means to build a karma system that works ?

- Multi-player combo moves. Buffs are fine, but having combat combo moves that require several players to collaborate would be oodles of fun.

- Vocal chat. 6 years on, we still have to use very un-ergonomic 3rd party programs. Blizzard could at least buy & re-design those, or help their developpers interface with WoW... WoW's own voice chat make the idiotic assumption that we want to disconnect whenever you're not in the game, or switch toons ...

They did at last get the grouping interface mostly right (should take alts into account, though).

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[Anonymous Coward]

In contrast, I'm not a MMO fan. I love WoW because of the world and the complicated skill trees and diversity of character types and the non-linear story lines.

The worst thing for me about WoW (and the reason I don't spend $15/mo on it anymore) is the MMO aspect. I hate the fact that you can't solo dungeons at the level where the loot is beneficial. When you get to level 80, there are a ton of dungeons you still can't solo. You have to advertise for a group and wait for them to organize and wait for the tank and the dps and the healer. You have to roll for loot, which means you have to run a dungeon 5 times to get the drops you want (which ruins any concept of a storyline). Not to mention the lack of enforcement of role-playing on role-playing servers.

If they made a massively single player version of WoW, I'd never stop playing. Even better, let me control several characters at once so I can solo dungeons with a group (like Sword of the New World).

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[centuren]

You can't start anew in an "old" MMO that relied on group play, because everyone is already far above your level and unwilling to go back to level yet another toon, and, well, being a group-heavy game you won't get far alone.

I agree that there are major problems starting anew in an MMO that requires group play, but for a slightly different reason: once an end-game player, always an end-game player.

I realise this won't apply to everyone, but after I passed the point in WoW where I had spent more time at maximum level than I had all other levels combined, a huge part of the game was spoiled for me.

If I wanted to start a new character to say, play with other friends on a PVP server, the first 69 (and later 79) levels were just blown through. The first time I played it, those levels were fun, and meaningful. I remember the first time a friend had a character in the 20s, and how high that seemed. The impossibility of getting one's first mount, the difficulty of low level dungeons, the excitement of training a new ability.

Those experiences all evaporated, and levelling an alt meant mailing hundreds of gold, 16 slot bags, and getting raid geared guildmates to run through all the instances farming drops and checking off group quests. Any efforts I made to band our alts together and spend time doing the early dungeons the proper way fell through, because it was just too hard to drop the end-game focus.

When 79 out of 80 levels are time that just needs to be pushed through and done with in order for the real grind to start, I think the game loses a lot. As WoW has changed to entice a larger user-base, I think the design has encouraged this more and more for those that enjoy the end-game content. Worse of all, when you've had that mindset enough, it easily transfers to other MMORPG's of similar design.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[centuren]

- a Karma system, actually 2, one for skill and one for social intelligence. Assholes and retards spoil the game for whomever groups with them, and it's amazing how many of those there are. Blizzard must have the intellectual and financial means to build a karma system that works ?

Intellectual means would be key here. Someone could design an addon that lets you assign karma points, but for it to work it would have to be well thought out, since the assholes and retards will try to take advantage of anyway they can retaliate.

- Multi-player combo moves. Buffs are fine, but having combat combo moves that require several players to collaborate would be oodles of fun.

This actually does exist, although you're probably thinking about something more explicit to game mechanics. In arena (my experience comes mainly from season 3) you can't survive combat without extremely well executed collaboration between team mates. Hell, just the act of killing a paladin is basically a combo sequence.

- Vocal chat. 6 years on, we still have to use very un-ergonomic 3rd party programs. Blizzard could at least buy & re-design those, or help their developpers interface with WoW... WoW's own voice chat make the idiotic assumption that we want to disconnect whenever you're not in the game, or switch toons ...

That's a really, really good point. We always stuck with vent because we had the server paid for anyway, and it seemed to have less lag, or be less effected by some people having lag (or we just got the impression). I never really thought about how much we used it in ways that you either can't use the WoW voice chat, or ways that it would be much less fluid to set up WoW voice.

They did at last get the grouping interface mostly right (should take alts into account, though).

Parties, raids, etc, all have benefited tremendously from addons. Granting the ability to script addons is probably the thing Blizzard did best.

Most of my suggestions to Blizzard about WoW would be content and story wise. After I'd run every heroic over and over for badges and drops, and as I moved further into raid content, the game became less and less a game. The only reason to care about any of that stuff was what gear I got, or if I had fun with a particular party. There was no sense that I was fighting any bosses for any reason, especially since I had already killed that boss for whatever tacked-on reason was given plenty of times.

A game of stats and drops is perfectly fine if that keeps you engrossed, but I ended up deciding I liked having more in a game. Especially since the big stuff -- progression raids -- usually involved a few hours playing with nothing on my screen but a giant shin, or arse, while I just watched my CD's and hit macro keys over and over. Worse of all tanking with a druid MT, then it's hours of bear ass.

Still, I did have things to do as a warrior tank: must keep shield block up, maximise TPS, keep track of the hot shot DPS players (pulling threat is NOT a badge of honor, idiot), etc. From what I hear, things like hunter shot rotations are much more repetitive and tedious.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[Anonymous Coward]

- Vocal chat. 6 years on, we still have to use very un-ergonomic 3rd party programs. Blizzard could at least buy & re-design those, or help their developpers interface with WoW... WoW's own voice chat make the idiotic assumption that we want to disconnect whenever you're not in the game, or switch toons ...

If they allowed you to use it when not in-game people would be using it for chatting all the time. Sounds like a nice idea, but you'd have to be prepared to have a few bucks a month added onto your subscription to cover the extra servers purely for voice chat.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[Anonymous Coward]

On Karma: Absolutely no technological measures can improve any community when the majority of the community itself would prefer to conduct itself that way. One solution can be to have more communities, like "moderated servers" where griefers find themselves forcibly migrated to another server. Unfortunately, even with the maintenance cost and difficulties of policing aside, any degree of control engenders politics and all the drama that swirls around it.

As for combos and combat, indeed... WoW is ultimately a numbers game based on very simple primitives. Attacks usually only have up to three animations if that many, and everyone clips through each other. Other MMOs address this technology, but in the end it doesn't seem to matter that much when the player base prefers to focus on other mechanics -- like grouping.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[fractoid]

Agreed here. Even WoW, which is notoriously easy to level up in, will force a new player to spend literally months playing solo before they can get to a level where people are still running groups. Hell, on my server it's hard to find even a heroic (hard-mode) 5-man dungeon because everyone has already outgeared them and is on to the second tier raid for this expansion.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[captjc]

If they made a massively single player version of WoW, I'd never stop playing. Even better, let me control several characters at once so I can solo dungeons with a group (like Sword of the New World).

But would you pay $15 a month plus the cost of the game? I would love the idea of an ultra-massive world where I can do practically anything at anytime with 10's of hours of main content and hundreds of hours of scripted and random side quests and trading as a single player game. That said, I would never pay a subscription to play it. I can buy enough single player games that will offer me a moderately sized, more-or-less open world with a good single player experience (Mass Effect, X3 Reunion, Freelancer, and Darkstar One, just to name a few). Why would I pay a subscription for that?

There is nothing I want more than a Massively Single Player On/Offline RPG. Preferably, the Online component would allow LAN play rather than internet only play. I would even make certain compromises as subscription for multiplayer and even the occasional purchasing of moderately priced DLC and add-ons to keep the game fresh as long as my single player content comes only with the price of the game. As someone who also has a gaming machine that, for various reasons, has very finicky WIFI, I would like not to be forced to get online as little as possible.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[BrainInAVat]

I would pay. I did on WoW for a long time. I love the social aspect, I love the ability to buy or trade with others, I love the ability to give or get help with quests or hard kills. But I hate that there's so much a solo player can't do.

My playing style just isn't cut out for groups. I lack the self confidence, I don't have enough privacy at home to voice very often, the amount of time I have to play is sporadic and I can't be relied upon to show up at a specific time or play for a set length of time.

Because of that, there is a whole lot of content I'll never see. What I would love is for every dungeon and quest to scale for the number of players. However hard a raid is for 10 people, scale it down so that a solo can do it with the same relative difficulty. That way everyone can do everything and get all the treasure and equipment.

If I had that I would definitely pay. In fact, the game would be worth more to me and I might consider paying more than it currently costs. As it stands now, though, I quit because I was unable to go much further as a solo player.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[Opportunist]

Multi-player combo moves.

EQ2 has exactly that. Classes are divided into 4 groups (tanks, rogues, clerics, mages), each spell/style belongs to some group, and the combos are done by executing a style/spell of the relevant group when it's your turn. Depending on what kinds of players you have in your group, you can do different combos (i.e. if you have no mage in your group, just do combos that require only tank/cleric or something like that).

Unfortunately it's been nerfed into oblivion, the bonus or damage such a group combo deals is so minimal by now that nobody bothers doing them anymore. It cuts into your style/spell routine because you have to go out of your way to execute the appropriate style/spell in time when it's your turn (group combos have a timer that ticks out if you don't finish it within, IIRC, 10 seconds), and generally you're better off just pulling off your routine than paying attention to the group combos.

Really a pity, it was one of the most interesting features that set EQ2 apart.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[Anonymous Coward]

- Multi-player combo moves. Buffs are fine, but having combat combo moves that require several players to collaborate would be oodles of fun.

Lord of the Rings Online has this. They are called Fellowship Maneuvers (or conjunctions by those of us from beta). Yes, they are oodles of fun :)

- Vocal chat. 6 years on, we still have to use very un-ergonomic 3rd party programs. Blizzard could at least buy & re-design those, or help their developpers interface with WoW... WoW's own voice chat make the idiotic assumption that we want to disconnect whenever you're not in the game, or switch toons ...

They did at last get the grouping interface mostly right (should take alts into account, though).

I kind of like having a separate voice chat for the guild. LotRO has a voice chat function built in, and it is nice for pick-up groups because it works just for the group or raid. My kinship has a Ventrillo server that we can use to communicate privately and independently from the fellowship.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[Opportunist]

Where are all those people?

I've tried AO a few times in the past few months. Every single time I tried to play I was playing alone. No, I'd love to play a doc again, but as you might know playing AO, a doc ain't really the perfect solo class. In other words, you can't play him alone.

Yes, I'd love to play AO again, dated graphics and all. But where is that magical server where new people populate the area?

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[Opportunist]

WoW is currently being haunted by its item-power arms race, and I'd really love to see whether they manage to get it back in gear. They managed to stave off the problem most other MMOs faced way earlier in their life, i.e. that new players can't catch up, by creating shortcuts to the former high level gear that older players grinded for months. That problem came back to them, though, in an unprecedented way: The old raid gear being enough to leapfrog some of the "lower" new dungeons, leaving new players leveling up with a power gap they can't bridge.

Old players in raid gear could manage to avoid normal instances because their raid gear was good enough to allow them direct access to heroics. New players do not have the former top level raid gear, thus would have to do the "normal" instances first to get the necessary equipment to play in heroic, but can't find groups to do just that because none of the (quite a bit larger group of) old players is doing them.

I'm quite interested how it pans out. Even though I don't play WoW, following the development is quite interesting.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[Opportunist]

You know what's interesting? That a lot of "older" games got by without any meaningful endgame, simply because leveling itself took long enough to keep you entertained. And let's face it, what is raiding for gear but leveling in another form?

What do you get for levels? Additional stats, higher crit/to-hit chance, lower to-be-critted/to-be-hit chance, more HP and mana...
What do you get from gear? Additional stats, higher crit/to-hit chance, lower to-be-critted/to-be-hit chance, more HP and mana...

Could be me, but I can't really see the difference. Where is it?

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[AlmondMan]

You're likely a US timezone player, and it's true that in the US timezones the game is much less populated than in european timezones. Depends on when you played though, things pick up and drop off all the time. They plan on having a new graphics engine out for the game within this year, so some advertisement should follow that and help revitalize. They're also working on extensive rebalancing and reduction of grinding and inclusion of new raiding/content for lower/mid levels throughout.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[Opportunist]

No, Central Europe. I tried all three (yes, including the German server) worlds and nowhere I could really find anyone outside the newbie area.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[PaganRitual]

This is a really good point. One of the first things I've noticed about my waning desire to play WoW is that solo the game is absolutely terrible, and it always has been, it's just that at the start the addiction was heavy and I didn't notice as much. Last weekend I spent most of my time in Morrowind instead, and the difference in the two games is just amazing (duh). I've complained in the past (to no one in particular, I've just complained) about the lack of a solid single player experience in an MMO but, quite frankly, I'd probably be happier if for them to purely focus on making everything as multiplayer as possible, if this is the best single player they can muster. Single player and MMO simply don't work together, any attempt appears transparent and lame, and the old MMO requirements come back to haunt the experience every time. The new phasing crap in WoW just means that helping out friends that haven't done specific quests just mean that they are attacked by things you simply can't see, and quests involving NPCs are such a waste of time because, just in case you didn't think it possible, the lack of risk and challenge was lowered even further than before by completely overpowered helpers that did all the work while you just stood around and waited for it to finish.

On the other hand, in my new game of Morrowind, I joined the mages guild, joined the thieves guild, which are full of different people and varied quests. I was tasked to collect mushrooms initially (sigh), but then I was told to was to slip a fake soul gem into someones desk, then travel to a distant area and either convince a man to join the guild, or kill him. I was also asked to steal a diamond from someone, and procure a house key via whatever means available to me from a particular person, be it stealth, violence or my smooth tongue. During this I was attacked by Dark Brotherhood agents, and in the process of tracing them to their source, found a man who had stolen some magical armor from the local Duke. I lured the man underwater, where I paralysed him until he drowned, taking his magical armor and the other magical weapons he had stashed. That diamond is now permanently gone from that vendor. That man is now permanently floating near the underwater entrance to his cave. The key is no longer with the servant. If I loiter around long enough to guy won't disappear from the water and reappear at the back of the cave for the next loser. The key won't magically come back to the guys pocket, the diamond is forever in the hands of the thieves guild leader. The guy I locked in a downstairs room before testing my paralyse/bash-him-over-the-head-with-my-summonded-sword strategy is ... well, he is gone for good too. But the game world has changed. Permanently.

And I've realised that the trade off between being able to permanently change the game world, or help a friend find a dirt mount behind a farm once owner by a guy now camping by a river, only to have the dirt mound never disappear, the man never move on from his camp, and the bad guys that were loitering around the farm to magically reappear a few minutes after us killing them, is a trade off I'm happy to make. And thats before we even consider the fact that I don't have the option to just murder the man himself for whatever he was intending to give me instead of running his errands.

I'm not really making a point, but seriously, 2 player co-op Morrowind would be completely fucking amazing.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, your posts are giving me hope. For games. For humanity.

  I've seen far too many +5 posts in this topic that just made me want to OD on something. He likes his job and everyones problems will be solved if they just find themselves a job they are passionate about. I like soloing MMOs because I can't stand the other players. WTF? These things are just logical contradictions to me, does not compute. It's like 2+2=5 for certain values of 2. I take them to their conclusion and wonder what the point of any of it is. But then I read something like your posts and I remember, even if the mods don't seem to notice.

Keep up the faith! Someday we'll be lead to the land of good games and tolerable occupations.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[AlmondMan]

There is a morrowind co-op project out there ;) do a google :) it's crude and all, but it works.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[Reapy]

I kind of have the opposite view. I hate the trend in multiplayer lately that EVERY game is co op in some way shape or form. WoW is actually well balanced between solo content and group content. Beating dungeons and tough bosses as a group is fun. Most of the new content being developed is for groups and cooperative play.

I want some more solo - multiplayer games. I miss quake FFA style servers, where you shoot everything that moves. Now a days there are 2 teams and half the player on a server you cant shoot at. I miss subspace with 80 people to lob bombs at rather then 1. Some days I just want to zone into a mindless killfest after work. You can't really do that as much online now a days.

There seem to be certain formats you see now a days for multiplayer. I kind of agree though with the shaping of the formats.

*FFA - Very rare now a days. A shame, this mode is fun to relax in.
*2 teams vs each other. - Common as hell. But some varation now a days like left for dead with 4 players vs AI and players, or at least both teams being very different play experiences (splinter cell).
*Human vs AI co op ---Finally starting to see light of day. This way of playing is great esp when you have weaker players, when you are ALL on the same team everyone can have fun. I like this one a lot and hope to see a lot more of this play.

So let me talk a second about MMO PVP. I love PVP, I enjoyed shadowbane, and look forward to trying DFO when it gets us servers and has had a lil bit of patch time. But man, let me say, PVP in an MMO sucks.

For it to be even a reasonably interesting game, it needs to have either no levels (ala quake or even just small like cod4), or a skill system. And by skill system I mean that as you level up you increase versatility, not lethality. What I mean is that at level 1 I can hit you as hard with a sword as anybody else, but that is all I can do. At level 50 you have 100 other ways to kill me. This makes for an interesting game for all players.

Second, in the MMO format, without doing these instanced or set up 'arcade' battlegrounds, you never get an even fight. "World pvp" is fun because it is random and silly, but as a day and day again format it doesnt hold up. First, you have a huge world, where is everybody? You could walk all day back and forth and keep missing each other. Next, group balance. Pretty next to impossible to maintain balance between 1v1, 2v2, 1v15 combat. Which leads into...world style pvp is often a gank fest. Most fights are always hugely unbalanced, 15 players run up and gank 5. While that playstyle is fun, its not as fun as an even set up game.

It is sort of like why we play games. We have fun with them because we are all constrained by the same ruleset, and one team manages to work the rules better with their strategy and end up winning. In the 'world pvp' style it can be very much like the end of wargame. You know that point you hit in your strat game where you made all the right moves, now it is just a matter of time before you win. Except in an MMO it was usually someone else playing the overall strat game, and you are on either landslide winning or losing side, and are just along for the ride.

If a dev puts a way to spring back, often it then takes away the fun of having played the strat game correctly. Great, I can make all the right moves and overwhelm them, but as soon as I do that they push the I win button and heave back.

Honestly, the design implications for making a 'fun' mmo pvp game is hard as hell. And the sad part is there is not a big audience for it.

Cause you know why? The majority of gamers do not want to play another human. Humans are HARD. When you play people unless you are VERY GOOD, your win % is slightly above 50%. When you play AI you usually ride 75% up winning (made up stats but is an in general), and guess like, people like to win.

Maybe that's my jaded psychology, but when I find a game I like, I play, get a little better then average, then either buddy up with the other good players or steer clear of the, cause you know what, at the end of the day, I just want to relax, not get owned in the face and teabagged in my limited spare time. Dev's know this, and the mulitplayer games that have come out this past decade reflect it.

Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre

[AlmondMan]

Oh, I agree completely in that I miss the days of Quake FFA servers and so on. However, I feel that such things are best kept in games that work around that idea, not MMOs that try to emulate it and incorporate it into a world that they want to somehow be consistent and perpetual and ever changing, yet at the same time also static so noone ever misses the content that was in there the first place

I hardly ever bother playing any new FPS games online simply because I don't feel like joining some epic team struggle or work together with people in such games, where cooperation is either win or lose, and depends on communication and so on with people you don't know and don't really care to know either. I like the FFA DM server or other such craziness. I don't like capture the flag or dominate or whatever unless it's on a private server with my friends.

This is why I never played TF2 and never will either and why L4D was put on the shelf after the initial fun with friends n the demo (nice 49â wasted there)... it's just not my kind of game to play cooperative with a group of people I don't know and most likely never will know. Nor do I have the time to play in any clan so, because I like to enjoy many different games and don't want to sit and get good enough at one to be able to join others... bring back FFA DM please.

Solo Play Should be Offline Play

[RobotRunAmok]

For every sword-and-sorcery or sci-fi themed MMO, there is an offline game, designed from the ground up for solo players. When MMO developers start compromising to accommodate the solo players, the gameplay for the group players is inevitably compromised.

Eve, happily, has resisted this so far, simply because so much of the gameplay flows out of the free-flow Wild West dynamics and economics. You want to be a solo pirate? G'head, Bunky, nothing's stopping you (you'll only catch other startled n00bs, you'll die a lot, and the time v. reward curve will suck, but nothing stops you). The "end game" for Eve is in highly solo-hostile "0.0 space," but there is so much to do in the NPC-policed "Empire Space" that even a soloist shouldn't be able to complain. The soloist always has the option of buying the better gear from his richer grouping brother, but won't be able to derive the best benefit from it (i.e., maximize money made per hour) unless he takes that gear into places where -- if he travels solo -- someone will take it away from him very quickly. The killboards are filled with solo players in their expensive "Marauders" being dragged down by gangs of players in throwaway cruisers and frigates.

Re:Solo Play Should be Offline Play

[EdZ]

Eve also suffers hugely for it. Take exploration, for example. Eve has a huge, persistent and singular (no server shards) universe. But it is essentially impossible for you to actually explore it without carting around your own battlefleet. Solo play is different from group play. The two are not mutually exclusive in an MMO.

Re:Solo Play Should be Offline Play

[RobotRunAmok]

Eve also suffers hugely for it

Eve doesn't suffer for it. The solo player -- playing in the game designed for a multi-player experience -- who feels he is entitled to access content designed for groups, may "suffer," but the game surely does not. Empire space is huge, and soloists can stay there pretty much with no danger. That's Eve's solo game, and it's big, and it's bigger than the "solo games" of most MMOs. If you want to play Eve, but don't want to group, your game is in Empire. If you come to the field with a baseball, and everyone else is playing football, you don't expect everyone else to accommodate you simply because you brought a baseball to a football game. These are online multi-player games. It is absolutely not unreasonable to expect that you need a group to experience them the way the developers intended.

Eve is just more elegant about the way it handles the solo/multiplayer dichotomy than other games. In other MMOs, when you try to access the phat lewts beyond the mountain pass, you'll be informed that there aren't enough people in your group, you need a raid-force, whatever. Eve just lets you go where you want and pay the consequences if you enter Dodge City as a Lone Gunman.

By the way, I read an article in Eon magazine about a solo player who did travel to every system in Eve, taking screengrabs along the way. It was not easy, it was an adventure, but he was good and he did it. So buy a fast, cloaked ship, skill up, and start exploring!

Re:Solo Play Should be Offline Play

[tepples]

For every sword-and-sorcery or sci-fi themed MMO, there is an offline game, designed from the ground up for solo players.

That's not likely to continue for very long, as publishers move components of single-player games online for revenue stream protection.

Re:Solo Play Should be Offline Play

[Anonymous Coward]

set yourself up with a cloak and scan probes. you can have fun with exploring in eve.

Re:Solo Play Should be Offline Play

[centuren]

Eve also suffers hugely for it. Take exploration, for example. Eve has a huge, persistent and singular (no server shards) universe. But it is essentially impossible for you to actually explore it without carting around your own battlefleet. The two are not mutually exclusive in an MMO.

I only just started Eve's free trial, and so far, it's felt like a well-polished single player game. A friend or two will join me soon, and I'll see what that's like.

I disagree with your example, though. Exploring around the universe might require a battlefleet, but wouldn't it be overtly artificial if it didn't? My empire is at war with other powers, and powerful pirates roam the lesser controlled areas (or so I'm imagining, it's all still new to me).

The point is, I don't see myself entitled to exploring everywhere in the Eve universe. I don't feel it conflicts with my solo play, so long as I have other things that I can do. Having areas dominated by fleets that will destroy me adds an element to the game. Perhaps that was your point, also, except that I've yet to see how it suffers hugely (I know there are a lot of complaints about Eve, but I've chosen to not listen to them so far).

Most likely I'm too new to the game to really make any comments on it, but having played a few single player space games (Homeworld, Sword of the Stars, etc), my limited experience with Eve so far is that I like the solo play a lot more than those single player games. Since it's designed to be able to interact with thousands of other players with ships, things that were a pain in the other games are simplified, and I feel like I'm being immersed in a sci-fi setting, not a sci-fi story (from which I can't escape). That's a requirement for the MMO side, and perhaps the big appeal so far.

Re:Solo Play Should be Offline Play

[Anonymous Coward]

I call shenanigans. Eve does not suffer because it is impossible to solo explore. In fact, I would say that one of the reasons Eve persists is because it offers an experience uniquely different from traditional MMOs. If Eve were like a more traditional MMO with PvP flags and the like, it's horrid interface, long grind, and non-traditional skill system would have killed it long ago. Instead, Eve remains because you can't go into 0.0 space in your starter frigate. Although I have moved on to the much more traditional LOTRO, Eve online continues to do well because it offers something no other MMO offers, a true sandbox environment.

Re:Solo Play Should be Offline Play

[brkello]

BS. You have PvP and PvE. Eve tries to cater to both by having low security and high security. The problem is that Eve's PvE is the most boring grindfest after thought up by man. Ever. You run the same missions over and over and over again to earn money to get better weapons and better ships. There is no plot or story being revealed. There is no persistence. I mean, you could have a mission to kill some guy and then get the same mission to same the guy right after that.
 
You can try to pretend that the game is for PvP. If that were true, you would not have Empire. You wouldn't have Eve working on adding more mission content.
 
So no, Eve isn't solely a PvP game. It just has a PvE that sucks worse that pretty much any other game on the market. And quite frankly, the PvP sucks as well since it generally is just getting a bigger blob than the next guy or killing defenseless people when they come through a gate (if you are lucky enough that someone comes through after sitting there for hours).
 
It's great that people enjoy the game. But quite frankly, that type of "fun" is only going to appeal to a small niche. And that all Eve really is...a niche game for griefers.

Re:Solo Play Should be Offline Play

[Jedi Alec]

And quite frankly, the PvP sucks as well since it generally is just getting a bigger blob than the next guy or killing defenseless people when they come through a gate (if you are lucky enough that someone comes through after sitting there for hours). ...YDIW ;-)there's SO much more that can be done if you're...creative.

This is why I quit WoW

[maudface]

I started to realise that I actively hated having to group with other people to the point that I'd obnoxiously subject prospective party members to simple logic tests to find out whether they were functionally mentally disabled or not. I'd just avoid any sort of quest that would require me to interact with other people, at the time realms were closed off so the actual real live friends of mine were invariably on other realms or completely inappropriate levels to quest with me. Where does it get sane to pay a monthly fee for the ability to avoid playing with others online? If I wanted that I'd actually bother to pay for an xbox live gold subscription, at least with that I can still play the damn games instead of having their content entirely withdrawn from me despite having paid for it.

Re:This is why I quit WoW

[centuren]

I started to realise that I actively hated having to group with other people to the point that I'd obnoxiously subject prospective party members to simple logic tests to find out whether they were functionally mentally disabled or not. I'd just avoid any sort of quest that would require me to interact with other people, at the time realms were closed off so the actual real live friends of mine were invariably on other realms or completely inappropriate levels to quest with me.

I played in the golden age of TBC, and when looking for party members one of us would always have a spare laptop ready to fire up WOW Armory to check out anyone who offered to join in for the run. That eliminated a lot of trouble off the bat, and for less clear cases we could ask specific questions like "why are you using this item instead of this other item" or "why didn't you spend more points in this other talent branch". Even if it wasn't a good choice for them, often the answers would reveal that the player wasn't an idiot, distinguishing between someone who needs a bit more experience but plays well enough for the run and someone who would turn the attempt into wipe after wipe.

That's not why

[Dachannien]

When I play games like Guild Wars solo, it's not because "I want to be the hero" or because "I want all the lewts". It's because pick-up groups suck. You spend half an hour trying to round up people to fill out the group, and it only takes one of them being a moron to ruin the entire experience.

For those few of you who don't know, that's the guy who doesn't know how to get where you're going, can't properly follow your directions to get there, tries to boss around the party when he finally does get there even though he clearly doesn't know what he's doing, and then fifteen minutes into the group says, "o man i have 2 go.. mom wants me 2 clean my room".

Re:That's not why

[Hubbell]

Sucks playing class/level/gear based (to the point that they're all that matters) games doesn't it?

Re:That's not why

[Meton5]

The problem is compounded when the forced grouping is integrated into the competitive end, where you need not only the right class, but the right partners. At least in fighters, FPS, and RTS you aren't forced to use whatever the balance team decides is good enough for your class this patch. You can actually pick what is worth picking.

Re:That's not why

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't actually have the slightest idea how Guild Wars works, do you?

Re:That's not why

[Artifakt]

You could have just said "Google Leeroy Jenkins"

Re:That's not why

[stereoroid]

I was going to mention Guild Wars too, as an example of a game that is highly playable as a single player. You can be offline for a month, and it's not costing you anything, since they don't have monthly fees. The quality of the graphics is such that you can just wander around in your own time admiring the scenery, especially with the Eye Of The North expansion.

On one of the few occasions I joining a pickup mission, I ran in to an "expectation" problem. The character I used was a Monk, and what I learned is that there seems to an expectation that a Monk will sit back and cast healing spells, while the other characters can go blundering in to battle without a care. Um... not this Monk. This Monk walks softly, carries a big stick, and is usually too busy Smiting to heal anyone else. 8)

Re:That's not why

[Endo13]

When I play games like Guild Wars solo, it's not because "I want to be the hero" or because "I want all the lewts". It's because pick-up groups suck. You spend half an hour trying to round up people to fill out the group, and it only takes one of them being a moron to ruin the entire experience.

Real MMOs have less of a problem with that than GW though, because in a real MMO you actually have to care about your reputation as a player at least a little bit. In GW it doesn't matter because you'll never see anyone from the same group again anyway. You can be a shit player having good players carry you through the game the whole way and never group with the same person twice, without trying. In an MMO, you can get away with that for a while, but if you do it too much it eventually catches up with you, unless you keep paying for name and/or server changes.

And you're right - pugs in GW absolutely suck. In fact, as a general rule all of the game is easier to play with one friend than with a pug.

For those few of you who don't know, that's the guy who doesn't know how to get where you're going, can't properly follow your directions to get there, tries to boss around the party when he finally does get there even though he clearly doesn't know what he's doing, and then fifteen minutes into the group says, "o man i have 2 go.. mom wants me 2 clean my room".

He's also the guy drawing the cock & balls on the compass minimap, or just otherwise cluttering it up so no one can use it.

Re:That's not why

[Opportunist]

Takes a while to get a collection of good players, but it's worth it.

In "old school" games where you had to group to get anywhere, it meant that you spent your 20s and 30s (provided it's a 50 level game, generally about the first 3/5th of your leveling) with groups that sucked. Mostly. My standards are pretty high, so I'd say about 4 out of 5 people I played with sucked and they didn't meet my requirements. I took a note of the other fifth of the players I played with, though. And so did they. Over time, you got a healthy collection of people you knew you could play with.

Today, this is done after leveling, when it goes into raids, when you hack 4 hours into the dungeon before you find out you have someone with you that "has to go now, it's my bedtime". IMO that's worse than being in a simple leveling dungeon/area where you could simply pick up a new guy or just continue with the rest of the group.

Re:That's not why

[centuren]

For those few of you who don't know, that's the guy who doesn't know how to get where you're going, can't properly follow your directions to get there, tries to boss around the party when he finally does get there even though he clearly doesn't know what he's doing, and then fifteen minutes into the group says, "o man i have 2 go.. mom wants me 2 clean my room".

As a tank in WoW, the type of player I hated the most was the one who believed there was only one way to run a dungeon. They weren't usually horrible players in terms of basic mechanics, but were definitely more prone to let their rigidity hurt their performance. My main frustration was they will have read gone online and read through a complete guide on how to do each corner, each pull (I'm not even counting bosses in this, just mobs). Chances are, the way detailed in the guide is a good way, quite possibly the best.

However, as a tank I'd run those heroics over and over and over to get badges, and to help my guildies get badges. I played with other good players, such that we could easily handle not doing every single pull "by the book" exactly. I liked mixing things up a bit, and even pushing some players that I knew could handle themselves (the rogues always LOVED being asked to evasion tank an elite mob solo).

The rigid, by the book players, would throw a complete FIT. One guy in particular (not a teenager), would have a complete tantrum, and refuse to continue any further at all if we didn't do things exactly as he said we should. That guy was the most extreme, because once he threw his hissy fit, it was no simple matter to calm him down and just get it over with, even if we all said okay, okay. The mere suggestion he was wrong was cause for lengthy arguments.

Less extreme, but still rigid players also objected to changing plans as circumstances changed. Maybe the sheep accidentally got a dot, maybe a wandering mob came in, but I've had players complain bitterly after I'd calmly and quickly swapped the markings and everyone in the party had adapted perfectly.

After the first complaint, I started doing this as a sort of test for players new to the guild, especially healers. A lot can go wrong in a raid or a simple pull, and adaptability is part of player competence. An accidental double pull is a much worse situation than a single pull with a planned (by me anyway), change of markings. I just mean something as simple as updating the kill order symbols as the mobs are killed. If a healer complains about symbols changing, I don't really trust that they are really up to taking in the whole situation and reacting if things don't end up going as planned.

Re:That's not why

[centuren]

I was going to mention Guild Wars too, as an example of a game that is highly playable as a single player. You can be offline for a month, and it's not costing you anything, since they don't have monthly fees. The quality of the graphics is such that you can just wander around in your own time admiring the scenery, especially with the Eye Of The North expansion.

I'm heartened to read this, because I picked up GW a while back ($19 w/EotN expansion, no subscription, how could I resist?) and I've only played it a few levels. I know no one who plays it and I have no desire to pug groups (I turned off my chat window all together, the 'city' areas were just too obnoxious).

I was hoping that when I play it more, groups wouldn't suddenly be vital to play. It sounds like they won't. The expectation problem is definitely present in WoW also, but it does go both ways. As a warrior, if it's PVP weekend I'm not going to react well to someone demanding that I should respec just to tank a heroic (although I might for liked guild members, who would cover the respec costs if they need me).

At the same time, if I'm coordinating raid groups for the day, or kara groups for the week, a junior member who's now decided his pally is going to be ret from now on isn't going be high on the list of players being considered, especially if we're short on healers (for example). That is, he's welcome to build his character however he wants, but there are only so many slots and most of them are class specific, and some classes are just more useful. I don't expect him to stay holy, but in that situation, he can't expect to keep getting raid invites.

Re:That's not why

[jo_ham]

And as a view from the other side of that fence, as a die hard healer, I hated PuGs where the tanks really *wouldn't* push it. It usually manifested itself as ultra slowness, and a refusal to pull (or having to be prompted before each pack) if I didn't have full mana.

In TBC as a priest, with downranking and a brain you could heal forever with rank 2 GH and CoH and never have to worry about mana, unless things got really hairy, and yet still you'd have tanks that just wouldn't push the boat out. I can understand being sensitive to the needs of the guy keeping you alive, but after the 5th "heeler drink!" prompt in party chat while we all sit staring at a 2 pack of mobs, it starts to get tiresome.

In Wrath the heroics are so easy, that even with downranking gone, and mana regen outside the FSR severely down, it is still very easy to keep even a modestly geared tank up.

Re:That's not why

[centuren]

And as a view from the other side of that fence, as a die hard healer, I hated PuGs where the tanks really *wouldn't* push it. It usually manifested itself as ultra slowness, and a refusal to pull (or having to be prompted before each pack) if I didn't have full mana.

In TBC as a priest, with downranking and a brain you could heal forever with rank 2 GH and CoH and never have to worry about mana, unless things got really hairy, and yet still you'd have tanks that just wouldn't push the boat out. I can understand being sensitive to the needs of the guy keeping you alive, but after the 5th "heeler drink!" prompt in party chat while we all sit staring at a 2 pack of mobs, it starts to get tiresome.

In Wrath the heroics are so easy, that even with downranking gone, and mana regen outside the FSR severely down, it is still very easy to keep even a modestly geared tank up.

My best friend was a priest, and we levelled up together. We ran all the heroics, did 2v2 arena, and got into big raiding at the same time.

As a senior tank and then MT, I helped a lot of green warriors learn about tanking, and I always included advice on keeping your healer in mind. Beyond the obvious like "keep an eye out in case someone screws up and their mob/add goes after the healer", I'd stress things that a lot of tanks don't think about, mostly having to do with the tank now knowing how better to play the healer's character. A few I remember:

- The healer will tell you if a mana break is needed (just as the DPS will), otherwise just mark up the next pull and keep going.

- If the healer isn't ultra green, definitely give the benefit of the doubt before you start worrying aloud if they're getting the right heals on you (but keep an eye on your HP spikes, all the same).

- Between pulls, stand in front of the healer. Accidental pulls happen all the time, but if your priest gets one-shotted, not only will you wipe, you'll all have to run back.

- Never tell a priest that you need healing. That's literally all he's doing. (My favourite tip)

Re:That's not why

[RedK]

That one is bull. I've seen a lot of people say "You need X class to do Y instance" or "X type group to beat Y boss". And you know what ? It's never true. I've always been very liberal in my choice of classes for groups, and if the people I was it were open minded enough, we never had any problems. I'd go so far that usually, all the problems were from people saying "We can't do this with X class". After we kicked those people, usually everything went smoothly.

Re:That's not why

[Veggiesama]

At least in World of Warcraft, you definitely need a particular group composition (at high levels). In particular, you need one tank, one healer, and a bunch of other goons that try to cause damage. It's fine to try some strange combination (like 3 rogues for damage, or 2 paladins to heal, etc.), and it can actually work with a decent team, but you still need some guy to tank, and some guy to heal. If you don't, your team dies, and that's about it.

Even if you have the right composition, there's no guarantee that your team actually works well together. All it takes is one guy to do something stupid and then the whole group suffers (make a bad pull, fear a mob into another group of mobs, forget to repair, etc.). It was very difficult to compensate for your group's weaknesses, since every class had to be uber-specialized to fulfill its role properly (however, it's my understanding that Wrath of the Lich King is trying to make classes more versatile with dual talent builds, and all that).

Sitting around and waiting for a healer/tank to log on or join my group was the worst part of WoW, so I quit playing. You really needed a large group of friends who play all the time to really enjoy that game, since looking for people to join pickup groups was a lesson in frustration.

Re:That's not why

[RedK]

Yes, you do need 1 guy to tank and 1 guy to heal. There's 4 class for each of those roles, so I'd say that doesn't make for very strict group configurations. But that's besides the point, I was saying some people think it requires certain classes for certain instances, when it's patently false. Take for example Heroic Blood furnace. People used to say you need a Warlock for banishes in there, while we just did it numerous times with numerous different classes and often times without a Warlock in sight. Heck, I used to kite the demons before the last boss as a Paladin with just high aggro and other people slowing them down (rogues/hunters/mages or even myself with the daze). But I've been thrown out of pugs (as a tank too..) for even mentionning "Let's get that mage and go, we won't find a stupid warlock and we don't need it". Of course, 45 minutes later, the instance was cleared for my new group and the old group was still looking for a Warlock.

The difference is between the sheep who can't do anything if it's not written on a web page, and people that actually can play. There's no such thing as a strict group make up, only idiots who say it does because Wowhead told them so.

Online worlds FTW; online players suck.

[EWAdams]

I want the colossal richness and depth available only through online worlds, without the horny adolescents, griefers, and other social incompetents that MMOGs seem to attract.

Give with WoW with just me and the NPCs, and I'll pay for it. Not otherwise.

Re:Online worlds FTW; online players suck.

[NightRain]

What richness and depth? MMOs have sheer size, but any richness and depth they have comes from the fact you're dealing with other human beings. Remove them, and they are invariably suffer in comparison to a dedicated single player game from the same genre

Re:Online worlds FTW; online players suck.

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed within reason.

I wish they would do like Diablo 2 and scale the difficulty to group size. If people come and go, it doesn't matter. But a group of 5 actual friends (like my situation) can experience all of the content in the game.

There are so many areas I've never seen because I don't want to group up with 20 strangers.

It's like paying for premium cable channels you never watch... oh wait. we do that too don't we?

Re:Online worlds FTW; online players suck.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why, as a single player fan, I'm waiting for the AI to get good enough to simulate PCs. Heck, even better, let me have a say in the behavior of NPCs who fill in for the PCs.

I'm a fantasy purist and I'm tired of people naming their characters Metallica and CyberViking217 in a medieval fantasy game.

Re:Online worlds FTW; online players suck.

[Draek]

So, like Fallout 3 or Oblivion? or just like playing Guild Wars on an European server?

Re:Online worlds FTW; online players suck.

[centuren]

I want the colossal richness and depth available only through online worlds, without the horny adolescents, griefers, and other social incompetents that MMOGs seem to attract.

Give with WoW with just me and the NPCs, and I'll pay for it. Not otherwise.

I'd expand this to say, make a boss drop his loot, and rely less of repetitive play for content. He either has something or he hasn't. Killing the same boss 20 times for rep, badges, and the hope of a drop hardly helps maintain immersed in that richness and depth.

Re:Online worlds FTW; online players suck.

[k8to]

Having played wow, I disagree. I played it for about a year. I raided in top server guilds, totally mastered multiple classes. I know it pretty much inside out.

The game would be better without other players.

Re:Online worlds FTW; online players suck.

[Veggiesama]

I don't see richness and depth in online games. Most of the worlds are ridiculously large, but they take a regular game's worth of content and stretch it for hundreds of hours. For instance, you might fight a wolf at level 1, but you'll fight that same wolf at level 50, but now he's reskinned and slightly larger. You'll still be collecting wolf pelts the whole way through. Nothing has dramatically changed, except for your character's abilities, which let you kill in new and interesting ways. You're still killing in the same "right-click then press 1-2-3 until it dies" fashion, though.

Re:Online worlds FTW; online players suck.

[NightRain]

I didn't comment on whether it would be a better game or not. The original comment was that you get a level of richness and depth only available to online games, and this would be better without the people.

My point is that sure, WOW might be a better game without the people, but it would be better again if it were written from the ground up as a single player game so that things your character did changed the world and the reactions of the NPCs. However large and pretty a world is, it doesn't count as rich or deep if your actions don't alter it in the slightest. That's a side of online games that is worth putting up with, because there are other people in it. Remove the other people, and that flaw becomes impossible to see past.

It's the D-Bags...

[MogNuts]

It's because of the d-bags. We love the idea of all the new content, ever-changing worlds, new quests, new gear, or trading for awesome gear you can't normally get at your level. Then we play with people and remember that it's still the same thing as playing with online as it ever was--awful. D-bags, cheaters, impatient people, and all the other awful people online. Just think, the same trolls and flamebaiters and morons who post random comments on forums/articles (excluding /.; those people make ./ trolls look like saints) are the same people you'll be playing with on an MMO.

Hence the single-player MMO--providing all the benefits with none of the drawbacks.

Re:It's the D-Bags...

[Dunbal]

I completely agree.

I remember back in the Compuserve/GEnie days, before the internet became popular. We used to have to pay $6+ per hour to connect. I would play multi-player games, read and post on forums, and there was never any serious trolling/griefing. Then along came the internet and unlimited monthly access for a flat rate. Suddenly all the MPG's I played were filled with beggars asking for free stuff, or griefers just trying to ruin the game for everyone. Massive access to forums also caused the quality of the posts to deteriorate to simple flame wars.

The effect of price on behavior was very obvious. I can think of two possibilities: Either a high price enforces "good behavior" because no one wants to waste money acting like an idiot, but people are willing to act like idiots when something is free; or as an "elitist snob" (yeah yeah, think whatever you want) I tend to favor the idea that people with more money tend to be better educated (with few exceptions) and mannered, and so an expensive, exclusive "club" will have less "trash".

Re:It's the D-Bags...

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like the goonies in Eve Online ;)

Re:It's the D-Bags...

[hibiki_r]

I completely agree.

I remember back in the Compuserve/GEnie days, before the internet became popular. We used to have to pay $6+ per hour to connect. I would play multi-player games, read and post on forums, and there was never any serious trolling/griefing. Then along came the internet and unlimited monthly access for a flat rate. Suddenly all the MPG's I played were filled with beggars asking for free stuff, or griefers just trying to ruin the game for everyone. Massive access to forums also caused the quality of the posts to deteriorate to simple flame wars.

The effect of price on behavior was very obvious. I can think of two possibilities: Either a high price enforces "good behavior" because no one wants to waste money acting like an idiot, but people are willing to act like idiots when something is free; or as an "elitist snob" (yeah yeah, think whatever you want) I tend to favor the idea that people with more money tend to be better educated (with few exceptions) and mannered, and so an expensive, exclusive "club" will have less "trash".

It doesn't have to be free: Xbox Live is choke full of imbeciles, and people pay for the privilege of having to play with them.

Re:It's the D-Bags...

[Opportunist]

Well, how about that the average bored 12 year old can't blow 6 bucks an hour on online access? Not to mention that he could never get an ISP to sign a contract with him and few parents would consider paying that?

Re:It's the D-Bags...

[michaelmanus]

I completely agree.

I remember back in the Compuserve/GEnie days, before the internet became popular. We used to have to pay $6+ per hour to connect. I would play multi-player games, read and post on forums, and there was never any serious trolling/griefing. Then along came the internet and unlimited monthly access for a flat rate. Suddenly all the MPG's I played were filled with beggars asking for free stuff, or griefers just trying to ruin the game for everyone. Massive access to forums also caused the quality of the posts to deteriorate to simple flame wars.

You're complaining about one thing: a lower barrier of entry. And you're right. When a game is available to the lowest common denominator, it's bound to have, on average, a worse community than one that is harder to get to.

The solution is moving to a game that requires more effort. There are MMO communities out there that are harder to get into - customized private mmo servers, old muds, new muds, indie sandbox mmos, browser mmos, etcs... Any games with a niche crowd. There is no shortage of these out there.

It's not that this has ever changed. That $6/hour game was a total niche - something the mainstream wasn't interested in. Now there's a genre that takes off from those MUDs. But the games you nostalgia-ize about are still around; you just stopped looking hard enough.

The adage that the new is terrible and that the old is lost forever has failed again. It's never the outside that changes meaningfully; it's the perspective of the observer.

Re:It's the D-Bags...

[Amphetam1ne]

£30 for 12 months of live is way cheaper than £5 - £8 /month for an MMO. Besides which, I tend to just play with my friends and the good mannered, non-dbags that I've picked up on my friend list along the way. I very rarely play with randoms and not at all for co-op games.

TBH live is more like an MMO than most people like to admit. You create an avatar and spend ages trying to find an unused variation on the name you want. You grind quests (games) to increase your level (gamerscore) and frequently undertake these quests with friends, or just chat codshit to them while you're off doing your own thing. The content updates are far more regular and the quests more varied than any other MMO I ever played.

Re:It's the D-Bags...

[Anonymous Coward]

Xbox Live is five bucks a month. In the CompuServe days, you paid six bucks *an hour*.

Any annoying high-school kid can scrape up five bucks per month. XBox Live is about the cheapest form of non-free entertainment available.

But who would pay six bucks per hour for an online service if they just wanted to be a dickwad on it? That's right, nobody.

Of course, nobody would pay that much for an online service nowadays, anyway. Might as well take that money to the local strip club for a night out. Fifteen bucks a month for World of Warcraft is only marginally more expensive than Xbox Live (many players get 100+ hours a month out of their subscription). So its not high enough to weed out the D-bags.

I think Everquest used to have a sort of 'elite' server which you paid 3x as much for as normal server access, but it was policed by more humans and most of the D-bags would not bother to pay so much to play on it. It was a nice way for the rich folks with more money than free time, to get their hassle-free gaming experience. Blizzard should set up something similar.

Re:It's the D-Bags...

[bughunter]

Your last idea is close, very close. I played the same games on AOL at a nickel a minute (NWN, GSIII, etc), and ran up $400/month bills regularly, even though it severely strained my finances at the time. That's a huge barrier; you had to be pretty damn addicted to pay that kind of scratch month in and month out. Sure, there were some d-bags, but they were far fewer, probably only the few who could afford someone else to pay their massive AOL bills.

Serious gamers are willing to pay $3/hr for their games, but trolling and griefing just isn't worth $3/hr to very many folks, certainly not enough to detract from the serious gamers' experiences.

And ironically, when AOL went flat rate, I abandoned their games, because I just couldn't get on. AOL had perpetual busy signals for three months, and by the time I could connect again, the addiction had broken. And the atmosphere was different - the games were full of beggars, clue-resistant newbs, and griefers. (And of course, playing CivII, Baldur's Gate and WCIII satisfied my gaming needs at far better cost efficiency.)

Nowadays, playing WoW is like going to an urban basketball court, instead of playing at AOL's private club. You gotta know which courts [realms] to play on, and at which times, and have a posse [guild] to hang with, especially in the rough neighborhoods [pvp servers].

Re:It's the D-Bags...

[centuren]

It's because of the d-bags. We love the idea of all the new content, ever-changing worlds, new quests, new gear, or trading for awesome gear you can't normally get at your level. Then we play with people and remember that it's still the same thing as playing with online as it ever was--awful. D-bags, cheaters, impatient people, and all the other awful people online. Just think, the same trolls and flamebaiters and morons who post random comments on forums/articles (excluding /.; those people make ./ trolls look like saints) are the same people you'll be playing with on an MMO.

Hence the single-player MMO--providing all the benefits with none of the drawbacks.

I agree with your thoughts on the d-bags, but not that a single player MMO will provide all the benefits. The single biggest benefit to my MMO experience, and the only reason I started playing one at all, was that I could play with friends. My friends are scattered around the country now, and in high school we used to have gaming nights all the time. Playing WoW, we got to play together again, socialising every night and having a lot of fun. When people started quitting or moving servers (for good reasons, all), WoW suddenly lost it's primary appeal. Even though I still had plenty of decent guildmates to play with, it just wasn't the same.

There's just something fun about getting a text message on a Sunday evening from one of my oldest friends saying only: "arena arena arena arena arena arena ", and then spending the next 3 hours yelling and swearing over vent. It was like being back in the high school computer lab playing Quake death match over a LAN, complete with someone throwing a mouse in to the garbage from time to time.

Re:It's the D-Bags...

[Anonymous Coward]

i point you towards the movie caddyshack and leave off with '...the aristocrats'.

the ability to paint with a wide brush is not exclusive to you.

more to the point, at the time you were paying 6$/hr to play, what was the type of person to play? one who had a reasonable need and use, likely primarily work oriented, for a computer? so, really, your just pointing towards another version of 'endless september'.

Re:It's the D-Bags...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool. That sounds like an engineering problem.
.
Perhaps one can implement a rating system that lets you rate characters you've grouped with, and displays the overall rating as a percentile. I think most of the little kinks could be worked out.
.
But of course, even good people/characters sometimes have to quit before the dungeon has been cleared, or the quest finished. That's where scaled content could come in. If you're in a 5-man dungeon and one character leaves, let's say for instance a mage character, then the remaining enemies could have their HP lowered to 80% and lose any abilities that may be showstoppers without a mage character in the group. Another guy leaves? HP goes down to 60% and more abilities are possibly removed. The drop rate of rewards would have to be lowered as well, otherwise everyone would solo. Sure, people would find ways to exploit the system. But that could probably be fine-tuned for every dungeon and every combination of characters, with surprisingly few problems. Probably.

Re:It's the D-Bags...

[subsonic]

That is an interesting idea. Make a "prestige" MMOG. I wonder if Blizzard has considered adding a special "snob server" so that those who take their gaming seriously could port over their characters and play in a "cleaner" environment. As part of the higher price you get to play in a world that runs smoothly and isn't full of D-bags and griefers- perhaps up the number of moderators and admins.

It was one of the things that eventually turned me off of MMO gaming, subscribing to something that just annoyed me. i would have fun on one or two adventures with groups, but the rest of it, the grinding and trolls/griefers/jerks quickly eroded any feelings of fun I was having.

Re:It's the D-Bags...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with your point, disagree with your method. I used to play an MMO where leveling was 100% impossible without a group of six people. Gathering a group of six people could easily take an hour, so it was expected everyone had at least 3 hours to group together, when you had to leave it was expected you not only give a one hour warning, but attempt to find a replacement for yourself (or indicate to the leader that they should try it) to have as little disruption as possible to the play experience. Nearly everyone conformed to these etiquette standards because it was mutually beneficial. Idiots, bad players who can't learn, assholes, where easily weeded out (no one would group with them, they can't level, they quit). Also you are incorrect that people with more money tend to be better educated, at least in this topic. It just means their families are better educated. I went to a private school where a good number of people were quite wealthy, and damn where they some of the dumbest and least educated of the crowd. The reason there's alot of assholes in WoW is because it's too easy, not the low price point, and guess what? Rich kids have had it too easy all their lives, which leads back to "assholes".

Re:It's the D-Bags...

[Veggiesama]

Nowadays, playing WoW is like going to an urban basketball court, instead of playing at AOL's private club. You gotta know which courts [realms] to play on, and at which times, and have a posse [guild] to hang with, especially in the rough neighborhoods [pvp servers].

You also need to know proper etiquette and customs [bragging about your ePeen, using annoying and repetitive emotes, and informing others that they need to "l2p"]. Don't forget about avoiding those embarassing social faux pas [corpse-camping a dude who has a level 80 character hidden behind a bush, ready to rape you].

Gaming as a service?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a natural progression to where one gets a metered amount of content/rewards/joy per month. The cost of the next month will always sound cheap compared to what one gets, just like those multi-issue cooking books that appear disturbingly often, but it adds up over time to a raw deal.

Ultima Online

[Kethinov]

Ultima Online (at least on the free shard UOGamers) doesn't require any kind of interaction with other players on any meaningful level. I quite commonly solo my way through PVM as well as PVP in the dueling system without having to talk to anybody or organize people like other more guild-centric MMORPGs require. The most I ever typically interact with people is the occasional chat with someone I encounter or buying/selling stuff.

Try it out. http://uogamers.com/

"Your Multiplayer Experience May Vary"

[pwilli]

Therefore, I chose to do all "challenges" in WoW by myself, wherever possible. The moment I couldn't do stuff on my own/finding a (working) group to do it would always take more than 1 hour, I quit. I am definetly not the "I need to be THE hero" type of player, therefore the timesinks in WoW ("Hey everybody, look at my super-duper 1000 hours worth of playtime pet, I'm awesome!") and other MMOs don't work for me either.

A single player WoW with bots would've been awesome.

Re:"Your Multiplayer Experience May Vary"

[PaganRitual]

Yeah I have to admit, I still make sure I always stop and laugh repeatedly at anyone prancing around on that cat mount from Winterspring that required about 400 turn ins of that stupid cat meat quest. You're paying $15 a month and hours of your life for that? That's borderline depressing.

Personally, Hell yeah!

[lindseyp]

I don't spend so much time gaming. But having wasted a good many hundreds of hours on MUD's back in the day. I can say the one thing I found inherently unattractive about the recent flavour of MMORPGs was the fact that you had to go find friends, become part of a guild or team, and work through all those stupid politics and social chores just to be able to play.

I don't necessarily want to make friends. I just want to play. What I *Love* about multi-player games is the fact that you meet real people along the way, and have the *opportunity* to befriend or interact if you so choose. What I don't want in my escapism is some social obligation to go through the same bulsh*t with people to "get my game done" as I have to at work to "get my job done".

Article misses the mark

[Synn]

Players didn't get sick of group play, they got tired of having to wait 30 mins to an hour for the proper group to form just so they could play the game. Then you'd get an hour into a dungeon only to have the cleric leave and you'd have to exit and sit around waiting for another cleric to show up, because you couldn't play the game without one.

Re:Article misses the mark

[Opportunist]

Easy solution: Roll a cleric.

Yes, it's not flashy to be the healer. Personally, I see it that way: Any other pet class has one pet. I have 4 (provided the party has 5 members).

There has always been a lack of healers in almost every MMO there is. To a lesser degree, a lack of tanks. The only thing you never had any shortage of were damage dealers. The reason?

Simple: Damage dealers usually have the least problem soloing.

Re:Article misses the mark

[jo_ham]

But then you have the problem of being a healer.

It's harder for you to solo, unless you have a dual spec system that has finally been introduced to WoW, it takes longer for you to level, and then when you do get to your endgame, or even when you're just looking for lower level content as you level up you get everyone in a 50 mile radius whispering you to come and heal their woeful pug.

I've been a healer in WoW since it first came out, and it's a very rewarding experience if you can find a guild and then build up a small portfolio of decent tanks and dps outside the guild if you don't have guildies online, as long as you can deal with people named Leggolasss or Sephiroof whispering you when you're clearly doing other things saying "heal naxx 25?" or just "healer?" often misspelling the word. Most of them just do a /who priest and spam everyone in the box.

Re:Article misses the mark

[Opportunist]

Healer since EQ here.

Harder to solo doesn't really bother me as long as it's not hard to find a group. I play for the grouping experience, but, as the article points out, this becomes harder and harder. Games are more and more geared towards the formula "solo grind, grouping only for raids", which means that fewer and fewer dedicated healers exist. Being hard to level (since you're forced to solo grind and your class is simply not suited for it) means few people do it in the first place, and those that do take longer than those classes that solo easily.

I have to admit I'm a bit pissed at people complaining about the lack of healers, while at the same time being completely unwilling to remedy it, either by playing one themselves ("but it takes soooo long and is soooo boring") or teaming up with healers while leveling ("but I don't need him to level, I only want one when I raid").

Talk about having the cake and eating it too.

Re:Article misses the mark

[k8to]

I usually play a healer, and this problem is still existent. Players flake, or suck, and it ruins the experience.

Re:Article misses the mark

[Whorhay]

It'd be nice if someone could design a high quality MMO that didn't require a traditional healer at all. WoW could almost have done this but they followed the same path as EQ. They upped the difficulty on each progressive fight by making the enemies do more and more damage until you get to the point that a tank character needs focused healing to stay alive. And later other healers had to focus on healing everyone else constantly because AoE's became so prevelant.

Heck I remember a few grouping experiences in EQ simply because we couldn't find a healer. We focused on killing our target as fast as possible. Then our tank would strip off all his HP increasing gear and we would bandage him, we were exploiting how gear affected HP and how you couldn't bandage someone past half health. It wasn't a very fast group but it was better than nothing which was the only alternative.

What's all this QQ about?

[Kreigaffe]

Simply put, people are a waste of time.

Let's go back to two games I played and HATED because of the forced-grouping. EQ and DAOC. EQ was *terrible* about requiring a group to do... anything. Except for certain classes. DAOC was the same way. In both cases, the intention was always to force people to group up to do pretty much anything at all. Hell, even just getting from Point A to Point B was often dangerous alone.

It's just not fun. Period, end of story.

To build an MMO like that, you're assuming there will be an equal distribution of the classes required to do anything. You're assuming there will be as much tanks and dps as healers. That's.. not true, at all. Never happens. And nobody wants to spend their limited time in-game sitting around waiting for people to show up so MAYBE they can go push a single button over and over and gain a half a level. Spend 2 hours looking for a group, and 1 hour actually grouping? It's just not fun any way you slice it.

Forced grouping works GREAT in certain games, and certain aspects of games. Look at D&D. You KNOW when you're playing D&D that you'll have a group with you, because if you don't.. you're not playing. You don't decide to play and then sit around your table waiting for random people to walk by and ask them if they happen to be the class you need in your group. That happened in EQ and DAOC constantly. It's dumb. In WoW, end-game raids are generally scheduled, and even those that aren't? They're at least end-game, where the majority of your player base will wind up, so at least there's a wide pool of people to draw on. Even that wasn't enough, though, so WoW has added tons of tools to help people find other people to group with for end-game content, and of the 3 archtypes -- tank, dps, heal -- most classes can handle at least two of those jobs, and with dual specs it's really, really simple. And honestly, it still kinda sucks. A few people don't show up to a scheduled raid, you have to spend time looking for fill-ins. PUGs don't always even get off the ground.

Basically, forced-grouping in MMOs fails because people don't like sitting on their ass typing "LFG" over and over and over when they're *supposed* to be playing a game and having fun. Once you add all the retards into the equation, you wind up spending too much time typing "LFG" and once you're done with that, it's probably 50/50 odds that you'll have to start doing it again shortly because whoever you find will be too stupid to group with.

Honestly WAR handled it pretty well, at least up until level 30 or so (when I quit..). Solo you'd be fine 99% of the time, but each time you added to your group you became more and more effective. WoW group play compared to solo I often found to actually slow me down, even with guildies on vent, but WAR it really always payed off but never was necessary. Really a shame they got so much wrong with that game, because they did get a lot right.

Re:What's all this QQ about?

[the_humeister]

For anyone else who was confused:

• EQ=Everquest
• DAOC=Dark Age of Camelot
• WAR=Warhammer On-line: Age of Reckoning*
• LDG=Looking for group
• PUG=pick-up group
• dps=damage per second

*I think, although really should be WOAR.

Re:What's all this QQ about?

[Rich0]

Couldn't agree more - I don't really care for MMOs that force reliance on groups to generally have fun. I'm willing to sacrifice some levelling for being a little more of a loner. When I do take part in group activities I try to do ones that don't really leave the group depending on me too much - so that I can cut and run at any time.

I live in the real world. If something comes up that I need to take care of, well, I'm going to be taking care of it. If that means I send a message to my group to say "gotta run" and then disconnect - we'll, that's fine by me.

So, I avoid games that do forced grouping, and when I am in a group setting it is usually a social thing (people doing the same thing together - maybe dividing chores a little but where if everybody stopped working together everybody could still get the job done alone). I'm always up-front about real-life. As a result, I generally have fun, and people are happy to see me, and don't mind seeing me go.

Too many MMOs are designed for people how have hours on end to dedicate to the game, and who can get away without having any interruptions at all.

Re:What's all this QQ about?

[Minwee]

Forced grouping works GREAT in certain games, and certain aspects of games. Look at D&D. You KNOW when you're playing D&D that you'll have a group with you, because if you don't.. you're not playing. You don't decide to play and then sit around your table waiting for random people to walk by and ask them if they happen to be the class you need in your group. That happened in EQ and DAOC constantly. It's dumb.

That's because when you wanted to play D&D you usually wouldn't just wander up to your kitchen table, sit down and then wait for random people to join you. Not being a complete moron you would usually contact your friends who also played and invite them to join you first.

But for some reason that seems to be how you were playing EQ and DAOC. Why did you think that would work?

Re:What's all this QQ about?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm willing to sacrifice some levelling for being a little more of a loner.

That's actually not true int WoW. You level faster solo because you are not sharing the xp of the kills.
Of course most dungeons are off limits (until later) but if you stick to quests you'll level quite quickly.

Diablo II

[Rockoon]

Diablo II.

An online multiplayer RPG without most of the MMO horseshit. You can group up, play solo, or mix the two up.

In this game, the fun is the journey more than the destination. There are always monsters along the way that your character will have trouble with, regardless of your "build."

Re:Diablo II

[centuren]

Diablo II.

An online multiplayer RPG without most of the MMO horseshit. You can group up, play solo, or mix the two up.

In this game, the fun is the journey more than the destination. There are always monsters along the way that your character will have trouble with, regardless of your "build."

Yeah, I can see the adventure now:

*click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click*

ooh, a drop!

*click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click* *click*

Re:Diablo II

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd probably like Guild Wars then.. In many ways, it felt like a Diablo III

Re:Diablo II

[spamrat]

You'd probably like Guild Wars then.. In many ways, it felt like a Diablo III

In what ways?

Guild Wars just never felt anything like what I'd expect from the Diablo series to me.

It just seems closer to just giving instructions to your character, and not all that reactive to me. I think it has to do a lot with the actual mouse usage for attacking, skill usage, movement. Guild Wars does allow movement with the mouse, and to a degree attacking, but it always feels more like giving commands to the character and not playing as the character.

Sure you can argue that you have more skills readily available than just the left and right mouse button setup in the Diablo series, but you could easily swap to any other skill while in the middle of combat if needed instead of having to go to a town or outpost to change what skills are set for usage.

The other thing that did bother me with Guild Wars is that virtually anywhere outside of starting areas, you basically need other players (or heroes and mercenaries for those who are still going solo) to not get your ass handed to you if you aren't sufficiently overpowered for the area or some sort of farm build that requires a very specific setup that doesn't deviate much that only works in a handful of locations at most. Though I did like the fact that it at least allowed you to still play through areas by yourself while still having the support needed in the form of heroes and mercenaries.

Re:Diablo II

[Rockoon]

Do you realize that unlike MMO's, DiabloII has a skill aspect similar to single player action games?

Re:Diablo II

[PaganRitual]

Yes, the Diablo games are terriible, horrible, hardly even 'game' games, but WoW is basically true 3D Diablo-game with a Warcraft Total Conversion mod, in case you weren't aware. You'll spend all your time simply clicking buttons and waiting for cooldowns much like Diablo. Once you actually start to notice this, it becomes very painful to play. WoW just has a few bits outside of combat, and combat isn't quite as click/dead/loot/click/dead/loot as Diablo, but it's not far off.

Re:Diablo II

[Whorhay]

They didn't claim that the story line was incredibly complex or that their were was a remarkable depth and breadth of storytelling.

Diablo2 is still a fun challenging game that I've found has lots of replay value. Even with a Ladder Reset looming I'm having lots of fun trying out a build I never did before.

It's by no means a perfect game. Very limited inventory and stash space. A death penalty at the higher levels that can take a long long time to work off. Corpserunning naked to retrieve your body from a monster that already killed you once while you were fully equiped, and probably smacked you down before had time to react. The difficulty of the game can make dramatic jumps when whole packs of fast moving and or ranged monsters turn out to be completely immune to your primary attacks. No way to realocate a charactes skill or attribute points without using character editors, which only work in singleplayer mode anyways.

Re:Diablo II

[brkello]

And how is that really different than any other game? Any game stripped down to its basics is just clicking buttons and waiting for your next turn to do something.

I just tried WOW

[Anonymous Coward]

I had just 2 weeks of vacation, and I tried WOW for some fun. I found out that the main game concept is pretty appealing, the graphics are awesome and I really loved the mood of the game (especially thanks to the magnificent background music). However I also cancelled my account already, citing the amount of time sinks as the main reason. Everyone knows that WOW basically starts when you reach level 80 (when you can access the really high-end content). Just grinding for a year to reach the point where you get the maximum amount of enjoyment out of the game was not really appealing to me.

In fact, I doubt that the time sinks in fact benefit the game makers after all. Although they might make some people stick around for longer time paying their monthly fees the time sinks also make some people quit very fast.

Animal Crossing

[tepples]

Consider, if you will, playing any of the many MMOs in an offline game. Everything works exactly the same as the MMO, only you're quite alone. Nothing you do will ever have an impact on the world as it does in proper singleplayer games. The story progresses and things change around your character.

In other words, the Animal Crossing series. Or what am I missing?

Running on single node internet!

[VincenzoRomano]

It's simple!

NO. the main reason is actually simple

[unity100]

finding other people to interact with to do anything takes time. and its dependent on other people's will.

kids of yesterday are grown up people now, with jobs and families to take care of, or other responsibilities, if not married. they have limited time to to allocate to gaming. usually, maybe 1 to 3 hours in weeknights, and that may not be every night.

therefore, when they come online to do something, they cant afford to spend 30 minutes to find enough people to do something, then lose another 15 minutes because of other people's issues (kid cries,spouse calls, doorbell rings, phone call etcetc), and then try to do that thing they set out to do in remaining 1-1.5 hours. and even then the result is dependent on other people's proper participation. if sufficient number of people in your interaction group cant cope with what you are doing, you all fail. pooof. 3 hours of gaming time gone. half of which gone with waiting.

therefore, they prefer solo play more and more. it depends on you, you dictate the schedule, you spare the effort, you get the result. natural, since waiting for opportunity to be able to play a game while logged into the game itself is not a proper definition of fun.

Re:NO. the main reason is actually simple

[julesh]

finding other people to interact with to do anything takes time. and its dependent on other people's will.

It's not just that it takes time. It takes a commitment of time.

I recently gave up on an MMO that I'd been playing for a while. I was a guild leader, albeit of a small guild, and had built up quite a good character. But I found that actually _doing_ anything with that character required organising with other members of my guild when we'd be logged in to do things, and actually committing to doing that was something I can't really justify. My life changes a lot, often without notice. I'm self employed. I have to be willing to jump at any time and start working, and that frequently meant letting my guild down. The two were incompatible, so the game had to go.

Re:NO. the main reason is actually simple

[unity100]

that too.

Player matching

[AlpineR]

I sense a demand for a service like eHarmony, Match.com, or Chemistry.com geared toward finding compatible gamers rather than sexual mates. Put all the immersive RPGers on one shard, all the 1/2 hr a night casual grownups on another, the emo teens on a third, etc. Maybe include a function to vote misbehavers off the shard.

Re:Player matching

[NiTr|c]

Funny you mention this. I've been debating creating a site like this for a personal project. Like a general match-making system for any type of game or games. I question how well it would actually work, but it's interesting that someone else has had the same idea.

Re:Player matching

[k8to]

It's a nice theory, but there's a lot of antisocials who get their entertainment by harassing those who aren't interested. Where do they go?

Satellitr link

[Anonymous Coward]

All I play are single player games because I'm so far out in the boonies that all I can get is dial up or satellite Internet ( think massive massive latency ).

Asheron's Call Had (Has?) Great Solo Play

[fyrie]

I can't speak for its current state since I don't play anymore, but AC was very solo friendly. There were tons of quests and dungeons that were doable without a party.

Re:Asheron's Call Had (Has?) Great Solo Play

[julesh]

I can't speak for its current state since I don't play anymore, but AC was very solo friendly.

This could have something to do with the lead engineer / designer preferring to solo almost exclusively.

Not Ultima..

[Anonymous Coward]

The very reason I liked Ultima Online was that it did NOT require groups of people to play. You gathered with groups not because you were forced to, but because you wanted to.

Newer games like EQ and WOW Force you group, which frankly sucks.

World of Warcraft solo play

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck finding anyone to group with unless your level 80, and geared for 25 man Naxx or Ulduar. I'm currently trying to get a quest done in RFK for 5 days now and I'm leveled out of LFG limit, the one where you choose what dungeon to LFG for.

Its heroic this or Ulduar that. There is a reason Blizzard set up the 'mentor' a newbie/recruit a friend program. Its the only way they can attract people to play a game that has already left the station.

WoW is now newbie unfriendly. Hell they made new Death Knight start at lvl 55 but you had to have a existing character at that level. I'm betting it gets patched out so the only requirement id the WoTLK expansions and the hell with levels 1-54.

For most people, that's how EQ was played

[typidemon]

Especially those of us who got outleveled by their friends.

Re:For most people, that's how EQ was played

[Minwee]

Some people amused themselves by setting off firecrackers in their hands. I didn't have a lot of sympathy when they blamed the firecracker makers for their burnt fingers either.

Funny to mention UO there...

[tengeta]

I still have a RunUO server on my system that I start up every now and then to screw around in old style Ultima Online. You usually needed people, but a good hour of fun can be provided with GM commands at hand.

And that is exactly the problem

[SmallFurryCreature]

The problem is both in the players and the game design. Since my most recent MMO is Lotro, I will use that as an example. The game does several things right. It typically lists quests properly as being either solo or group play. It also, later on, tends to make areas that are group only while there is plenty to do were you can go solo.

It also gives enough healing to the non-healing classes to reduce the waiting for main-healer symptom. For instance, humans have a skill to do a near full heal once every hour, not fantastic but enough to buy you a second chance in a wtf situation. While the main healing class is the minstrel (similar to cleric/priest) other classes like captains and lore-masters can if played properly do a decent amount of healing. Have a party that plays together and a burglar led group can also pull of masive healing. An all burglar group is unstoppable. We did a Helegrod raid with all lore-masters and the rift with just burglars. It means the game does allow players to mix and match at will.

Yet many players fail at this. They insist on the tank, healer, dps because they can't get their heads around the fact that other mixes can also work and even be a lot more effective. The sad fact is that most players just don't have what it takes to think outside the box. Why should you come up with intresting hybrid classes or let people select their own skills if everyone is just going to go for tank, healer, dps?

But Lotro also does things worng. Its world is rather spread out and fast travel is a mess with lots of routes taking ages if you even got enough reputation. Most people never bother with the reputation since when you are done with all the quests in an area, you still have nowhere near enough. This means that for some quests, you have a hard time finding help, simply because most people do NOT come online just to spend half an hour travelling. The one clas with summoning skills is a LOT easier to group with. "Hi can you help me with this book quest in Forochel" "Ooops sorry mate, I am in Moria, it would take me ages to get there." "I can summon you, and later my hunter can port you right back to Moria" "Ah no problem, invite me".

Other errors in Lotro are that group quests are all over the place, often seperated by lengthy time wasting solo quests. So you just got a group and voila, half leaf because the next group part takes an hour to get to and they got other obligations. It is annoying. it wouldn't be all that hard to write the story line in such a way that you first spend sometime solo building the story and save the epic battle for the end.

It is not that people don't want to play in a group, but that the game developers put so many obstacles in the way that all the fun is beaten out of it.

Group loot: Do we REALLY need more greed into the world by dropping only 1 item for the entire group? It might SEEM like a way to force the group to play the quest a number of times, but all it really does is create greed and resentment.

Fast travel: Put something like a summoning horn outside every group quest area, so that people can join whereever they are. The costs for this should be trivial. People want to play, not spend ages in slow-fast travel.

Chat channels: Is it REALLY that hard to allow people to quick link to quests and restrict posts to say once per minute?

Less loot: Nothing kills a group faster then constantly having to sort out loot. Not every critter has to drop something. Just give everyone some cash at the end and a copy of the special item at the end. if the game is fun, people will come back for more and if it isn't, they will just quit playing faster if you bore them.

The funny thing is that companies that beat the fun out of group play then claim that people only want solo play and kill group play even more. But in the end you then end up with a game that is a very poor excuse for a single player game, with a monthly fee and 12yr olds.

Antisocials

[AlpineR]

I've heard of shadow bans from forums - to the banned user it looks like their comments are being posted normally, but everyone is ignoring them. In reality, only that user can see their own comments. Similar trickery could make a matched game too lame for griefers to bother with.

Or they could be put into shards where everyone is antisocial. For some people the game isn't what the designers say, it's doing what the designers don't want you to do. A bunch of antisocials could be quite happy griefing, cheating, and BSing each other, especially if they're not fully aware that the other shards aren't as Lord of the Flies as their own.

Or they could share a shard with the other player types who aren't antisocial themselves but do in fact tolerate or enjoy their presence. I hate hackers in Starcraft so much that I sometimes enjoy hunting them down and killing/griefing them without the use of hacks. So a shard of cops and robbers might give the antisocials a place to go and give the paladins some evil to conquer.

So... a Bethesda game?

[Rambling Paladin]

The Elder Scrolls games (and now Fallout, I suppose) basically are single-player MMO games. Massive open worlds with a billion things to do (most of them kinda shallow, but still fun), except you'll never have to worry about xxxDeFKnyGHTxxx stealing the rare mob you were waiting to kill so you'd get a 1% chance to get a Sword of Awesome +100.

Technology issues and short-sightedness

[Rocketship Underpant]

I think that's a problem with game architecture. Any given Wow server has dozens of dungeon instances that require a group or raid of 5-40 players of the right levels and classes to experience properly. However, Blizzard's hardware infrastructure cannot handle the number of simultaneous players you need on one server to make forming groups at any time for all this content viable, and there is a queue system limiting the number of players allowed to log in at any time. This problem gets worse with every expansion, as the amount of group content available increases but the number of simultaneous players permitted remains constant. On top of this, lack of coordination between game world design and game client software results in concentrations of players in specific areas that exceed the ability of the client to render those zones at a playable framerate. In summary (for the case of WoW): 1. A smooth multiplayer experience requires a higher population than current MMO hardware can handle. 2. Smooth software operation on the client side requires yet a lower population than the (insufficient for multiplayer) populations currently allowed. Some of this can be fixed with better server-side infrastructure and better game design, but I don't know if it all can be fixed at present.

Blame AOL

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you starting experiencing the d-bags when AOL released all its moronic customers onto the internet.

That's when I remember the "tone" of the net changing.

Follow the money..

[Anonymous Coward]

Game companies would rather have 500,000 brain-dead paying idiots for subscribers than 10,000 intelligent thinking ones. Yeah of course this is why MMOs and games in general are mostly horrible. Unless you actually enjoy playing spreadsheet simulators with pretty graphics, competing with thousands of other people for the highest numbers. Which I know many gamers do enjoy but I'll pass and I do not want to play text RPGs either. Are there any MMOs out there that are not anti-social competitive nightmares, but still have a populated world and decent graphics? Yes, I actually want to play with the other players! I don't see them as THOSE players who ought to be avoided at all costs. If the game's other players are so bad that they need to be avoided, I don't want to play at all. Give me a game that actually encourages socializing with all those other people but still has deep gameplay and I'd be on it in a minute. EQ actually fit the bill pretty well for years, though it was highly competitive it was also highly social, but it's completely dead to me now. I am a homeless ex-gamer, I want to come back but I have nowhere to go.

3 solutions

[kenp2002]

A: Score players by referral. Search for players using a threshold based on referrals. Just like filtering slashdot posts, filter players. Assholes quickly dissapear then

B: Scale content. Go into Molten Core solo, in a group, or a raid of 40. Just scale the content, number of drops, etc accordingly.

C: Provide players the tools needed to police their own. Griefers are the result of the player population (the masses) having no ability to deal with griefers on their own. Bounties as an in-game mechanism can go along way with dealing with griefers. Especially when there is a real penalty for dying when you have a bounty on your head.

Feature:
Bounty - A player, once per day, can place a bounty of X gold on another player. For evey Y gold placed on the target upon death the target will lose 5% of their exp and will have to wait 1 hour for every Y gold before logging back in. Each time they die Y gold is removed from the bounty pool.

Y=1000 Gold

A player has a 5,000 bounty. Upon dying the player will be booted for 5 hours and lose 25% of their exp. The next time they log in the bounty pool is now at 4,000 bounty. Upon dying the player will be booted for 4 hours and lose 20% of their current exp. An so on and so on.

This assumes 1000 gold is a decent amount of cash in your game. This mechanism would go a long way to disciplining griefers. Can be used as a tool to grief? Yep, but pretty damn expensive tool to abuse.

multibox

[space_jake]

see subject