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when did grouping become evil?
Ravanos
Member Posts: 897
I mean seriously when did having to interact with other players become the work of the devil?
Every game forum i go to there is usually a faction that wants EVERYTHING solo and if they actually have to form a group to get something wrong they pout and say they won't play the game. I see it tabula rasa as of late, ....
"i can't do this elite mission solo ... I die too much i wont play if this change". god get out of your diaper you whiney B****.
Why should a genre change fo ryou? you knew that you might have to interact with players before you got into this genre so dont give me the "well i only have an hour or so to play so i can't grou". if you have that little of time go find another genre, i did when my life became busy.
Thats like me going to a FPS forum and saying "well my reflexes such and my hand eye coordination is off so can you make this game turned base so i can compete." they would tell me to go find another game.
so take that advice ... find antoher game.
Comments
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
I always prefer to go solo rather than group. But I don't mind grouping when I can however.
When I come up to a quest I cannot do solo. This is what I do: Find another quest. ^_^
-Azure Prower
http://www.youtube.com/AzurePrower
Maybe because people like to fight alone, but in a world with other people?
I'm not Mr. Social in real life, but I by no means want every human in the world to disappear.
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Hmm good point, in defense though I like that there are group oriented quests but i also like solo ones. i dont want the soloable quests too give me super loot or anything like that but sumtimes u can only log on for a hour id like to get sum xpin in for when i group when i have a lil more time.
What was the first MMO to bring solo play (soloing all the way through) on the table?
eqnext.wikia.com
People don't want to be able to solo elites but they do wan't to be able to log into a game & start playing right away , they don't want to have to spend 10-60 min trying to find certain people that are on the same group quest your on
One of the problems with MMOs is people play are different times & pace , lets look at LOTRO for example ? In the first month they had lots of players around the same levels all doing the same quests so grouping was fun because you didn't have to spend 30 min looking for one , cut to now & log into any zone & the population is maybe 10 people per zone & how many of them are wanting to do the same thing .. this goes for EQ2 , Vanguard , even WOW all gamer are going to suffer from the same thing lack of players wanting to do the same group quests at the same time your wanting to do it ..
Then you get the groups where people log half way thru or leave when a better invite comes along or my Favorite , sorry guys Guild needs me to raid .. all these things and many more make grouping frustrating & soloing fun
How do they fix this ? No idea , maybe make groups smaller ? 3 players or maybe make NPC hireable ? or how about no mater what part of a quest your on players can join & complete that part then go back & do they parts they haven't done later .
To play Devil's advocate do you group in fps'? I'm a grouping fan myself but just an interesting question.
I have two small problems with forced grouping. The first is myself; the second is the rest of the entire human race.
For myself, I work a weird schedule, made weirder by my attempts at a personal life. If some, or all, of the viable quests I have rely on me a bunch of other fools at whatever weird hour I can play, I'm boned. Only recourse left is running around, killing mobs in the wild for endless hours. I played EQ. I never, EVER, want to do that again. Quest-based levelling for me, xthx. I'll kill 100 wolves if 10x their total value in xp comes to me at the end.
As for everyone else..I have tow troubles there rally. First off, most "group" quests require a specific makeup. You need a healer, or a tank, or a bloody lock or whatever. Try getting that all together, in some games. I left FFXI because I couldn't stand waiting 3 hours for a healer, then having the group break up after 15 minutes. Or, worse yet, let's say I DO get the group together. At least one of them, by Murphy's law, is going to be a complete moron and screw everything up. One melee hunter, one holy DPS priest, one druid who thinks he can solo God....I could go on.
I like solo questing, as it gives me a chance to progress my character without the hassle of organizing a party. That's not to say I don't do group quests, but I like to pick and choose when and how, and still be able to play when I'm not in a grouping mood.
The biggest problem with grouping is that organization can take a long time, if you're missing a healer or a tank, and there just aren't any available to do the piece of content that you want to do, you can waste so much time. And after you've spent so long getting the group, to go where you need to go, then someone needs to leave, or the warrior is useless and causes your group to wipe over and over again.
Often it involves a lot of comprimise, and you can't go where you want to go, you have to go where the majority of the group wants to go. The pace of the group is dictated by the group, not you.
That said, I love grouping. But sometimes I just want to log on and solo, and if there isn't solo content available that's actually worth doing (ie, not just a slower version of what happens in a group), then I'll play something else, by myself.
I think it's a shame that many games start out with you solo, and then kind of force you onto the party-based game, when you were enjoying the soloing and don't want to stop doing it.
Still waiting for your Holy Grail MMORPG? Interesting...
WoW.
100% Agree.
The new wave, post WoW, of MMORPG gamers have no idea of what can be created in a social game built around social ideals. They have simply been taught that MMORPGs are nothing more then a virtual space that they can run past each other in the wilderness, stopping only to make the other guy feel bad in whatever way possible. I can't even hate these people, because they don't even know how good it can be and have made their choice in ignorance. They have no concept of the rewards of developing social networks, interdependence, and co-operative gameplay with it's shared rewards can bring.
There really isnt even any point in telling them either. They know better right? I guess the public wants what the public gets.
The guys I have a real problem with are the 'but I have a full time job and am a daddy now' types who expect the gaming world to change for them, purely on the basis that they themselves have changed. Sure, they enjoyed it when they could jump into it deeply, but now they can't it's whine whine whine about how the group model is 'outdated'. This is so frikin selfish it just burns me... I totally agree that there is a room for these people somehwere, there is room for every play style out there, but the fact they infect *every* MMORPG board with their constant demands and 'worthy' opinions about what makes a 'modern' game is just annoying.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm far from 'hardcore' these days, and I have never raided heavily, but I have always, since '99, enjoyed these games on a purely social level and loved especially those evenings where we, as a group, succeeded wher we should have failed. I still have friends on IM that I talk to from those days, friendships formed on the basis on good memories we share.
I have rarely had trouble finding groups in any games that I have played... But then I have always developed a healthy social network of supportive friends and guildies that help and are helped in return. I have always paid in, so I was pretty much always able to take out.
Maybe if anyone is sitting for hours and hours in any game, assuming it has even a half decent population, then I figure they should probably be spending that time asking themselves *why* they are sitting around all that time... Stop projecting it *all* onto the game, when it is usually your own fault.
The important point I am making is that even if my personal needs changed, I would *not* expect a entire gaming genre to change to suit them. Sure I would play another game that suited me, or I would change to another solo game type entirely, but to stomp my feet and cry for change on *every* board would be arrogant and selfish.
The potentiol of these games has been lost, and instead we have a sterile virtual space full of isolantionist anti-socials that bi*ch and moan if you even dare to chat in the public channels too much. This is despite they can turn those channels off at will.
Crazy.
WoW.
You can solo instances? thats a first for me, even playing as a rogue
Also, lets go earlier, I played UO, granted when trammel was around, and you were not forced to group to hunt things. Just as in wow, you needed help taking down the big things, but hell you could punch headlesses all day and make money, although trivial. I realize you are going to attack my logic up there saying "you dont need a group to get to 70" which is very true, you dont. But most of the fun does not start until you are at the top level, I love going into BG's and instancing, if i can find the time atleast. Yes this was edited in because I did not want to seem as a troll and I wanted to actually bring an arguement to the table
everquest was soloable to 50 , then 60 by any caster class.
the real fault wasnt that players had to group, its that developers made the group size too big.
had they stuck with three the evils of getting a group wouldnt of seemed so harsh and players would of accepted it better.
yes of course we group in FPS theres games thats all forced grouping like Battlefield
its in MMO land where we see all these whiney nooblets that dont wanna group. this is fine really but then they walk into a PVP zone alone and come cryin' on the boards when 4-5 pvpers slay'em. that's what pisses me off
Ultima Online. There wasn't much that i recall you actually had to group for in that game. A lot of stuff was hard as hell to do solo but still doable if you knew what you were doing.
As other's have kinda stated, it's not so much grouping as forced grouping that causes the most grief. The process of trying to find a group, trying to determine loot rights, and then actually managing the group to produce the desired result turns what once might have been a fun experience into a form of work that your actually paying someone for the "honor" of doing. Back before multi-player was massive and the internet was world wide, you were hooking up with actual friends (or at least people in the same city/state) to play. You could talk about things that had meaning to your group and basically have a blast. Now? Yeah, sure your best mates with that guy in Asia claiming to be a 25 year old girlie
..
You also have the undeniable urge for one person to feel as tho they made a difference...movies tapped into this decades ago and no amount of socialist brainwashing about the group being more important than the singular individual is going to change that mindset. We organize not because we like it, but because it allows our individual talents to shine or makes them worthwhile. Once online games started to become mainstream rather than the hobby of basement dwelling code-monkeys they realized they had to start tapping into that urge to get the "normal" person addicted. Enter WoW with all it's spit and polished versions of the very basics of every MMO but with that one little urge met...the rest is history/infamy.
yes i always squad up in a FPS, heck one of the servers play on in BF2142 you HAVE to join a squad or be kicked.
I will add this some of the most fun PVE experiences for me was in games that had grouping for everything. like guild wars to get through the prophecies campaign (ya i know not a real MMO yada yada). I took 3 toons to 20 thats how much I enjoyed it and was thinking of taking 4th toon through the campaigns
also enjoyed city of heroes. you didnt have to group but they at least made it so everyone benefited greatly from being in a group (much more XP).
its in those two games I made support toons and had fun which is somthing i normally never do
I usually look for MMOs with a lot of solo content, but it's not because I don't like grouping. It's just because most games don't handle grouping in a way that works for me. I like City of Heroes and EQ2's options to match your level to your groups, so that higher level players can easily play with their low level friends. I also like "A Tale in the Desert", where socializing is extremely important, but a lot of the interaction can be done when you're playing "solo" (solving puzzles other people made, or designing art in a public place for other people to see). My favorite system for grouping when I don't have a lot of time to play is puzzle pirates, where you can just choice to find a group off a menu, and get teleported to the first ship that will have you. What I don't like is not being able to play a game I like because a group isn't available. Even worse, I don't like it when I found a group of friends, but they are the wrong level or there aren't enough of them.
Sorry for being so long winded, but as a player that often looks for games with lots of solo content that still actually agrees with most of what the OP said, I wanted to explain myself.
Thing is the games already have changed. And it started years ago.
Didn't you ever notice that ALL of the games that came in the immediate aftermath of the original EQ offered something that either completely changed or took away some tedious aspect of EQ? From Anarchy Online and their mission terminals offering instant content at will, to the much faster travel and quest-based system of games like WoW to the difficulty sliders, instanced missions, and more solo friendly designs of games like City of Heroes and Guild Wars-- games have been changing for years now.
Hell, even EQ started drifting away from EQ beginning with the Planes of Power expansion because the world had just become too big by then, so they had to come up with ways to get people around easier, and enable them to get where their friends were faster.
MMO's have been drifting away from the long, tedious, boring grind of the original EQ since EQ came out. It just became more noticeable with World of Warcraft because they took all of the boring parts of EQ out of the game at the same time, wrapped it all up in a world that people already knew, and made their game very casual friendly, enabling Blizz to hit the jackpot.
And let's face it-- none of us are getting any younger. People's realities change. Once you do things like graduate from college and get a job, get married, have kids, etc., your priorities change, and as a result, so do your expectations from a game. Many, many more people want to be able to log into a game, get started playing right away, and do things on their schedules than would rather waste hours traveling across a game world or putting a group together. That's just how it is. And it's been moving in that direction since 1999.
Grouping became evil when MMos tried removing the Grind.
My foindest memories are of my EQ days getting a group and going to some cool zone and setting up a camp, and having someone pull mobs over and over back to that camp for the group to kill. thats where a lot of the socialization happened for me.
I dont see that anymore in mmos. You group now for specific quests or to kill a specific mob ,then everyone goes back to their own seperate thing.
Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.
Lao-Tze
I'm no big WAR fan but I'm hoping their "Public Quest System" works out for them. that has always been my idea- to slam people together in groupos. city of heroes had 'hotspots' in siren's call whereas all the noobs can help beatdown the opposing faction's NPC armies but they didnt take it all the way
I predict a game that makes it so people can just casually walk up and team together that will make PVE fun. and they can make the content hard if they provide ingame Voice Over IP likle the FPS games do
I personally prefer the way DAoC played pre-WoW. You could solo all the way to max level or you could group and get there faster. It was easy to form groups. You could place yourself LFG in the LFG window and wait to be picked up, which didn't take that long back then, or you could go to the location where you wanted to grind and join or start a group there, or you could start a group and set out to your grinding spot soon after. I always found a group as soon as I logged on and I didn't start playing DAoC until 2002.
Games where you grind on mobs are easy to find groups for and are games I actually prefer. I had a blast grinding in DAoC, because killing was fun and so was talking to the other people in your group. Back then, I never dealt with rude, inconsiderate, or people with low IQ's in-game. All of that came about 2 yrs after WoW was released.
Games whose best way to level is questing will result in a harder time to group. As another poster said, you have to be able to find a group of people on the same quest, that actually wants to do it at the same time as you. That is much harder than finding 8 people within the same level range as you that wants good xp.
I love quests, but I prefer the way DAoC used to primarily do them. You had an Epic quest line that started at level 5 at your class trainer. You would begin step 1 of the quest at lvl 5 and would do the next step at 10 and so on every 5 levels until lvl 45, which is when you do the last step and get your Epic Armor, which was different for each class. Those quests weren't kill quests either. The Master Level quests were nice too.
So I love quests, I just prefer quality over quantity. Leveling up by doing quests alone has always resulted in the same...you going out and killing 100 wolves, except at the end of the quest you get a lot of xp, some money, and maybe an item. This results in a group that would have stayed in that spot and grinded for several hours into a group that lasts for about 20 minutes and then breaks up.
To another poster,
Most MMORPGs have given you the option of soloing to max level way before WoW came out. It is the introduction of quest based leveling that killed the grouping part of the game. I think WoW popularized this model, so I fault WOW for this. I know EQ had quests and such, but they didn't make nearly the impact that WoW did.
MMORPG's w/ Max level characters: DAoC, SWG, & WoW
Currently Playing: WAR
Preferred Playstyle: Roleplay/adventurous, in a sandbox game.
Oh yes, I remember those days. And don't get me wrong, I had HELLA fun when me and my regular group A) were all on at the same time
Were able to find a place that wasn't overcrowded, C) Were able to find a place that wasn't overcrowded and D) Were...well you get the picture. You could spend hours in a spot and pull hundreds of mobs, making a killing....or you could maybe scrape a handful away from the 20 other groups camping there, and barely get by. Thems were the days, thems were.
Actually I think they would point you in the direction of the Battlefield series games. Those are made for downies with no skill.
Hope you got your things together. Hope you are quite prepared to die. Looks like we're in for nasty weather. ... There's a bad moon on the rise.