Because people are asses online just like they're asses in real life. Sometimes worse. And the longer I play the more I realize that it is in the best interests of my fun to minimize contact with them.Change people, and I'll interact with them more. Except when I'm feeling like a bit of an ass, in which case I'll be nice and solo.
Create reasons for players to get and give support to other players (especially the same group of players repeatedly), and watch as a player's value for others increases. Once his value for others increases, it is highly likely to follow that he no longer treats others like garbage.
As Katt Williams so elegantly put it before acting as if he were hit in the back of the head while walking away, "You can walk into the club and yell, 'f*** everybody in the club!' You cannot then turn around and walk outta the club."
People tend to be more polite if they have a need to fit in or receive support. That need is selfish, but that selfishness is used in a positive way. Take that need away, people devalue people, and asshats are bred.
With that said, it will never be 100% one way or another. There will always be those who give respect and are polite, just as there will always be those who are total dicks. An environment of cooperation just swings those players who aren't deadset on acting either way towards the positive end of the spectrum.
Trolls make people nervous. We used to game D&D pnp with family members and close friends. We knew there were asshats in the world but they were easy to avoid. Then we all got online together and discovered a shitload of the human race are trolls. So I think it is hard not to solo. You really don't want the headache of running into noobs, shitheads, and asshats. Extra friendly people who don't let things get to them continue to group play.
That's because you're going against the design to grind quest and for gear. The way worlds and the gameplay are designed there isn't much else to do in the game. I mean, you could smell the roses if there were many roses to smell.
Because most players want combat. There are other stuff to do and even MMORPGs which has no combat (like Tales of the Dessert) but those things are very niche.
If people want to smell roses, devs would put them in (supply and demand, you know). The reason why we have combat centric gear centric gameplay is because that is popular.
You can have other things to do while other do combat. I think we're going to start seeing that because the whole quest grind gameplay seems to be worn out. Not many themeparks are on the horizon.
No .. not many themepark MMOs .. because traditional type MMOs are overstaying their welcome.
But combat games? Take a look at all the new online games ... almost everyone is combat centric: Heart of the Storm, Destiny, Titanfall, even Hearthstone is a card combat game. The difference between these new games and MMO is that they are even MORE focused on combat. The problem with MMOs is that they are NOT focused enough.
NOw, you may ask, how about games like Watch Dogs? I will say hacking (and to some extent stealth) is just another form of combat.
Originally posted by Nephaerius nothing changed they forced you to group in order to do content back in the day
o rly?
In UO, right? Or was it AC?
4th Coming?
Furcadia?
AO?
EVE Online?
There?
Planet Entropia?
Neocron?
Or was it Toon Town? Puzzle Pirates? Second Life?
Maybe... just maybe... solo gameplay was a big part of a lot of MMOs "back in the day" and the ex-EQers are a little off on their history. Tinted glasses, and such.
Good point.
Listen, the whole mechanic of "grouping to do content" isn't very removed from "solo everything." Indeed, I see "solo everything" as just a natural extension of "forced grouping."
Why? Well if your game puts an arbitrary limit of "ten in a group," what are you going to do with the eleventh person? See, we've got this notion of "group" so hardwired into our understanding of MMOs, we can't even see anymore how MMOs can exist without it. And to tell you the truth, ya'll, it about killed sociability from the inside-out, when people started to take grouping too seriously in the vanilla WoW era.
When you need ten to do a dungeon, and ten only, you don't care about being social. All you care about is DPS, heals and tanking prowess. You don't treat the experience like a story unfolding. You treat it like an HR department vetting resumes...and how social is that? And so the odd guy, the roleplayer, the comic relief--all the guys who make these games interesting--get left out.
Because there really is no "social" aspect in those combat groups...not at all...besides some leader barking orders like Leroy Jenkins, or people shouting "healz plz." Is that social? It is about as social as the woman at the deli counter shouting "I need two pounds of corned beef" or the checkout line saying "that's $2.35." Who wants to put up with that, especially when we put up with it so much in our daily lives?
Look, there's a place for those kind of "team sports" in MMOs, but let's not make the mistake that an MMO isn't social if it doesn't have them. If you look at the games which don't have these fixed limits on "who can group," you'll find that they're much more sociable.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Listen, the whole mechanic of "grouping to do content" isn't very removed from "solo everything." Indeed, I see "solo everything" as just a natural extension of "forced grouping."
Why? Well if your game puts an arbitrary limit of "ten in a group," what are you going to do with the eleventh person? See, we've got this notion of "group" so hardwired into our understanding of MMOs, we can't even see anymore how MMOs can exist without it. And to tell you the truth, ya'll, it about killed sociability from the inside-out, when people started to take grouping too seriously in the vanilla WoW era.
When you need ten to do a dungeon, and ten only, you don't care about being social. All you care about is DPS, heals and tanking prowess. You don't treat the experience like a story unfolding. You treat it like an HR department vetting resumes...and how social is that? And so the odd guy, the roleplayer, the comic relief--all the guys who make these games interesting--get left out.
Because there really is no "social" aspect in those combat groups...not at all...besides some leader barking orders like Leroy Jenkins, or people shouting "healz plz." Is that social? It is about as social as the woman at the deli counter shouting "I need two pounds of corned beef" or the checkout line saying "that's $2.35." Who wants to put up with that, especially when we put up with it so much in our daily lives?
Look, there's a place for those kind of "team sports" in MMOs, but let's not make the mistake that an MMO isn't social if it doesn't have them. If you look at the games which don't have these fixed limits on "who can group," you'll find that they're much more sociable.
Agreed, however we can't really build an MMO around the fear that everyone will be dicks. You and I both recognize these folks and don't think like them. I don't think our experience should be developed around their lack of respect for others.
I simply stay away from guilds that maintain that kind of mentality. There are plenty of guilds to be found full of players like you and I. Despite these inevitable asshats, I still think encouraging interaction and grouping in an MMO is the way to go. Play into the genres inherent strengths. Avoid or diminish the genres inherent weaknesses.
I simply stay away from guilds that maintain that kind of mentality. There are plenty of guilds to be found full of players like you and I. Despite these inevitable asshats, I still think encouraging interaction and grouping in an MMO is the way to go. Play into the genres inherent strengths. Avoid or diminish the genres inherent weaknesses.
If there are so many asshats, interaction and grouping is no longer a strength. It becomes a weakness because it diminishes the fun for the player.
The answer is to control and limit said interactions. Examples:
1) Aggro table, no more trains
2) LFD, no more boring chit-chat to get groups
3) roll your own loot (no more ninja-ing and loot drama).
... find new strength to the genre .. or change the core of the genre. No one needs to tolerate bad interactions since these are only entertainment products.
I simply stay away from guilds that maintain that kind of mentality. There are plenty of guilds to be found full of players like you and I. Despite these inevitable asshats, I still think encouraging interaction and grouping in an MMO is the way to go. Play into the genres inherent strengths. Avoid or diminish the genres inherent weaknesses.
If there are so many asshats, interaction and grouping is no longer a strength. It becomes a weakness because it diminishes the fun for the player.
The answer is to control and limit said interactions. Examples:
1) Aggro table, no more trains
2) LFD, no more boring chit-chat to get groups
3) roll your own loot (no more ninja-ing and loot drama).
... find new strength to the genre .. or change the core of the genre. No one needs to tolerate bad interactions since these are only entertainment products.
I just want to be clear: are you actually positing that interaction between players (read: multiplayer gaming) is actually a weakness in a genre of... Multiplayer gaming?
I simply stay away from guilds that maintain that kind of mentality. There are plenty of guilds to be found full of players like you and I. Despite these inevitable asshats, I still think encouraging interaction and grouping in an MMO is the way to go. Play into the genres inherent strengths. Avoid or diminish the genres inherent weaknesses.
If there are so many asshats, interaction and grouping is no longer a strength. It becomes a weakness because it diminishes the fun for the player.
The answer is to control and limit said interactions. Examples:
1) Aggro table, no more trains
2) LFD, no more boring chit-chat to get groups
3) roll your own loot (no more ninja-ing and loot drama).
... find new strength to the genre .. or change the core of the genre. No one needs to tolerate bad interactions since these are only entertainment products.
I just want to be clear: are you actually positing that interaction between players (read: multiplayer gaming) is actually a weakness in a genre of... Multiplayer gaming?
*some* interactions between players .. not all. Say pvp, or quick grouping is not a weakness.
Chatting is.
There are more than one form of interactions. Not all are strength.
*some* interactions between players .. not all. Say pvp, or quick grouping is not a weakness.
Chatting is.
There are more than one form of interactions. Not all are strength.
Part of me wants to admit that in practise, you are correct. Sad but true. In part that's just me getting older and crumpier:) However, that's a very subjective measure and I'm very certain there are a lot of people who find joy in chatting with their friends in parties and guilds. Of course there are. For those, I'm certain it's not a weakness. It's one of the reasons to try to find like minded people in the game or play with ones that come with you.
However, therein lies the perhaps biggest difficulty. Making friends in mmorpg's is not that easy anymore at least for a vast chunk of people playing them. A bit older people very much need incentives to even say "hi". Kids on the other hand need to see consequencies for bad behaviour.
As Frenchie above outlined, player dependency in games is so low these days that there is so little incentive to actually try to get to know someone. This directly results in the bad behaviour you see in games and becomes a weakness of mmorpg's. In this light, it is ironical how you advocate more solo play and less interaction as you seem to realize the problem. Or perhaps you realize it, but happen to enjoy the situation due to your circumstances and literally have no interest in the genre beyond that?:)
There are ways to encourage interaction and making friends. I'm sure you agree that increased retention leads to increased revenue even in ftp games. But then again, have you ever seen a game die?
Listen, the whole mechanic of "grouping to do content" isn't very removed from "solo everything." Indeed, I see "solo everything" as just a natural extension of "forced grouping."
Why? Well if your game puts an arbitrary limit of "ten in a group," what are you going to do with the eleventh person? See, we've got this notion of "group" so hardwired into our understanding of MMOs, we can't even see anymore how MMOs can exist without it. And to tell you the truth, ya'll, it about killed sociability from the inside-out, when people started to take grouping too seriously in the vanilla WoW era.
When you need ten to do a dungeon, and ten only, you don't care about being social. All you care about is DPS, heals and tanking prowess. You don't treat the experience like a story unfolding. You treat it like an HR department vetting resumes...and how social is that? And so the odd guy, the roleplayer, the comic relief--all the guys who make these games interesting--get left out.
Because there really is no "social" aspect in those combat groups...not at all...besides some leader barking orders like Leroy Jenkins, or people shouting "healz plz." Is that social? It is about as social as the woman at the deli counter shouting "I need two pounds of corned beef" or the checkout line saying "that's $2.35." Who wants to put up with that, especially when we put up with it so much in our daily lives?
Look, there's a place for those kind of "team sports" in MMOs, but let's not make the mistake that an MMO isn't social if it doesn't have them. If you look at the games which don't have these fixed limits on "who can group," you'll find that they're much more sociable.
Agreed, however we can't really build an MMO around the fear that everyone will be dicks. You and I both recognize these folks and don't think like them. I don't think our experience should be developed around their lack of respect for others.
I simply stay away from guilds that maintain that kind of mentality. There are plenty of guilds to be found full of players like you and I. Despite these inevitable asshats, I still think encouraging interaction and grouping in an MMO is the way to go. Play into the genres inherent strengths. Avoid or diminish the genres inherent weaknesses.
That's the point though...combat grouping /discourages/ interaction.
A combat group is like a football team or a platoon or a ballet company. It is a bunch of individuals that are made into one unit by virtue of specialization, training, and suppressing their individuality. But if you look closely, none of the components who make up these "teams" really has to "interact" with each other in a human sense. In American football, you don't have to know that the tackle is a good fisherman. You just have to know he'll block the linebacker on the second count. There is no room for individual expression here. And so you'll find the coach punishes players who do their own thing, or the choreographer punishes girls who talk at the barre, or the lieutenant punishes the enlisted man who goofs off.
Combat groups create /unified action/, or all the parts working towards a whole. But they do not produce /interaction/, or all the parts behaving as they are in front of everyone else. And so, what you find in games designed around combat groups as the fundamental unit of organization is an inevitable reduction of subjects to mere stats.
Combat groups discourage interaction, because they make things like class, stats, gear and immersion breakers (like voice chat, apps, and game guides) more important than roleplay prowess or friendliness.
They also discourage interaction because what do you do with the eleventh person when the group has a limit of ten?
This isn't so much about guilds. Guilds are a separate problem, but I'd have to say that forced grouping only encourages the kind of bureaucratic efficiency that gives rise to what we might call 'dicks'. But can we even blame the dicks any more than we can blame the coach or the choreographer or the lieutenant? They are trying to put together winning teams in a game that is organized as a kind of team sport by design. That's what we get when we take the "group" as the fundamental unit of balance and the fundamental form of social interaction.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints." --Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls." --Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
*some* interactions between players .. not all. Say pvp, or quick grouping is not a weakness.
Chatting is.
There are more than one form of interactions. Not all are strength.
Part of me wants to admit that in practise, you are correct. Sad but true. In part that's just me getting older and crumpier:) However, that's a very subjective measure and I'm very certain there are a lot of people who find joy in chatting with their friends in parties and guilds. Of course there are. For those, I'm certain it's not a weakness. It's one of the reasons to try to find like minded people in the game or play with ones that come with you.
However, therein lies the perhaps biggest difficulty. Making friends in mmorpg's is not that easy anymore at least for a vast chunk of people playing them. A bit older people very much need incentives to even say "hi". Kids on the other hand need to see consequencies for bad behaviour.
As Frenchie above outlined, player dependency in games is so low these days that there is so little incentive to actually try to get to know someone. This directly results in the bad behaviour you see in games and becomes a weakness of mmorpg's. In this light, it is ironical how you advocate more solo play and less interaction as you seem to realize the problem. Or perhaps you realize it, but happen to enjoy the situation due to your circumstances and literally have no interest in the genre beyond that?:)
There are ways to encourage interaction and making friends. I'm sure you agree that increased retention leads to increased revenue even in ftp games. But then again, have you ever seen a game die?
1) Of course it is subject. All judgment of entertainment is subjective. However, I am going by the reaction of the market, and behavior of MOST players that chatting is a weakness and not desirable to MANY. May be not to you, but certainly it is to me, and i am glad i don't have to chat in many new games.
2) No incentive to know anyone is a direct consequences of the preferences (of many) that they are in the game to play, not to make friends. And yes, MMOs are just games to me, i have fun my way .... if chatting is not fun, why would i tolerate it when i have full control of what entertainment product i use?
3) Yes there are ways .. but why bother when most are not interested? you can increase retention by upping the skinner box, making interesting content, or just rotate out players (there are so many of them in the world). Encouraging social is not the only way to make money.
In fact, LoL is pretty toxic socially and it makes a lot of money ... so I doubt devs need to encourage people chatting and making friends online to earn a buck.
Listen, the whole mechanic of "grouping to do content" isn't very removed from "solo everything." Indeed, I see "solo everything" as just a natural extension of "forced grouping."
Why? Well if your game puts an arbitrary limit of "ten in a group," what are you going to do with the eleventh person? See, we've got this notion of "group" so hardwired into our understanding of MMOs, we can't even see anymore how MMOs can exist without it. And to tell you the truth, ya'll, it about killed sociability from the inside-out, when people started to take grouping too seriously in the vanilla WoW era.
When you need ten to do a dungeon, and ten only, you don't care about being social. All you care about is DPS, heals and tanking prowess. You don't treat the experience like a story unfolding. You treat it like an HR department vetting resumes...and how social is that? And so the odd guy, the roleplayer, the comic relief--all the guys who make these games interesting--get left out.
Because there really is no "social" aspect in those combat groups...not at all...besides some leader barking orders like Leroy Jenkins, or people shouting "healz plz." Is that social? It is about as social as the woman at the deli counter shouting "I need two pounds of corned beef" or the checkout line saying "that's $2.35." Who wants to put up with that, especially when we put up with it so much in our daily lives?
Look, there's a place for those kind of "team sports" in MMOs, but let's not make the mistake that an MMO isn't social if it doesn't have them. If you look at the games which don't have these fixed limits on "who can group," you'll find that they're much more sociable.
Agreed, however we can't really build an MMO around the fear that everyone will be dicks. You and I both recognize these folks and don't think like them. I don't think our experience should be developed around their lack of respect for others.
I simply stay away from guilds that maintain that kind of mentality. There are plenty of guilds to be found full of players like you and I. Despite these inevitable asshats, I still think encouraging interaction and grouping in an MMO is the way to go. Play into the genres inherent strengths. Avoid or diminish the genres inherent weaknesses.
That's the point though...combat grouping /discourages/ interaction.
A combat group is like a football team or a platoon or a ballet company. It is a bunch of individuals that are made into one unit by virtue of specialization, training, and suppressing their individuality. But if you look closely, none of the components who make up these "teams" really has to "interact" with each other in a human sense. In American football, you don't have to know that the tackle is a good fisherman. You just have to know he'll block the linebacker on the second count. There is no room for individual expression here. And so you'll find the coach punishes players who do their own thing, or the choreographer punishes girls who talk at the barre, or the lieutenant punishes the enlisted man who goofs off.
Combat groups create /unified action/, or all the parts working towards a whole. But they do not produce /interaction/, or all the parts behaving as they are in front of everyone else. And so, what you find in games designed around combat groups as the fundamental unit of organization is an inevitable reduction of subjects to mere stats.
Combat groups discourage interaction, because they make things like class, stats, gear and immersion breakers (like voice chat, apps, and game guides) more important than roleplay prowess or friendliness.
They also discourage interaction because what do you do with the eleventh person when the group has a limit of ten?
This isn't so much about guilds. Guilds are a separate problem, but I'd have to say that forced grouping only encourages the kind of bureaucratic efficiency that gives rise to what we might call 'dicks'. But can we even blame the dicks any more than we can blame the coach or the choreographer or the lieutenant? They are trying to put together winning teams in a game that is organized as a kind of team sport by design. That's what we get when we take the "group" as the fundamental unit of balance and the fundamental form of social interaction.
I can't speak for everyone's experience with team sports (mind you, I've never platyed professionally), but I've never had a coach that encouraged animosity between players in any way. In fact, every coach I've ever had encouraged camaraderie between his players, and certainly didn't tolerate disrespect. Players that treated others as if they were garbage were generally made example of. And, as it turns out, the camaraderie became one of the best experiences of playing.
The game was fun, winning was great, but the memories made with friends whom you've a shared experience with were what lasts in my mind. I have few memories of gridiron glory, but many of locker room jokes and Saturday night celebrations of a win. To take the analogy further, the team could be considered the guild, while the starters could be considered your "combat group." Even then, camaraderie and respect wasn't limited to the combat group. Everyone was on the same team, whether they did so as a member of the practice squad or as a starter on the field. At most, there was generally less respect for those players that weren't upperclassmen, but that was a seniority thing that was simply earned through going through it yourself before you had become upperclassmen.
If you read my previous posts, you'll see that I've never advocated forced grouping. Just grouping as the most efficient and primary content experience unit in the game. I would prefer it to be experiences in open world content; raiding and instanced dungeons are nice the first time through, but they inevitably become silent grinds as the entire player base learns where the danger lies and there's no need for communication among team members. It's the same experience, over and over. EDIT- Sorry about the awful formatting, my phone doesn't work well with the forum.
1) Of course it is subject. All judgment of entertainment is subjective. However, I am going by the reaction of the market, and behavior of MOST players that chatting is a weakness and not desirable to MANY. May be not to you, but certainly it is to me, and i am glad i don't have to chat in many new games.
2) No incentive to know anyone is a direct consequences of the preferences (of many) that they are in the game to play, not to make friends. And yes, MMOs are just games to me, i have fun my way .... if chatting is not fun, why would i tolerate it when i have full control of what entertainment product i use?
3) Yes there are ways .. but why bother when most are not interested? you can increase retention by upping the skinner box, making interesting content, or just rotate out players (there are so many of them in the world). Encouraging social is not the only way to make money.
In fact, LoL is pretty toxic socially and it makes a lot of money ... so I doubt devs need to encourage people chatting and making friends online to earn a buck.
Decent answers, thank you:)
1) No, not all "judgements" on entertainment are subjective. There are critical reviews for many forms of entertainment. Game reviews are kinda a grey area though. I have no idea how you pretend to actually know most players find ability to chat a weakness. If you only take into account general chat, you might find some consensus that it's full of vitriol in a huge number of games, but I find your claim a bit hard to swallow for all private, guild, trade and party channels.
2) That is what the genre has believed for 20 years now. There is no reason at all for every dev to follow that logic, because of 3) retention rate. As in ability to keep players in the long run. It's very dependent on how they feel committed to the game. The more numerous and diverse social ties they have, the more likely they are to keep playing, when they face reasons to dislike the game or otherwise get bored of some aspects of it.
Interesting content is quite expensive and won't last that long assuming you mean in the way of WoW: disposable content. Upping the Skinner's box does help. There should still be ways for that. Rotating players while not caring for retention rate will literally lead to very low income unless significant money is spent on advertising. A huge brand such as Blizzard helps too. Putting the game on life support and making a new one is typical these days and I'd argue it's one of the causes for bad player behavior. If the dev's didn't care in the past, why should they themselves care now? There is always something the players carry over from their previous mmo's.
Of course making a right game at the right time will earn a lot. WoW was such. So was LoL. Those are not realistic goals for any dev, but simply strokes of luck. The market is huge and these things are never as black and white as they seem in the forums, but I would argue there is quite some demand for a new game with stronger social dependencies/incentives. I do admit they might seem a bit more risky for many investors though. Depends on the nature of the dependencies and incentives.. making one is certainly harder than following the formula and making some adjustments.
1) No, not all "judgements" on entertainment are subjective. There are critical reviews for many forms of entertainment. Game reviews are kinda a grey area though. I have no idea how you pretend to actually know most players find ability to chat a weakness. If you only take into account general chat, you might find some consensus that it's full of vitriol in a huge number of games, but I find your claim a bit hard to swallow for all private, guild, trade and party channels.
That is simple. Most players don't chat when given the opportunity (i.e chat box is there all the time). So i conclude they don't like chatting that much. Plus, in term of chat, what does a game has as advantage over a chat-room? None.
2) That is what the genre has believed for 20 years now. There is no reason at all for every dev to follow that logic, because of 3) retention rate. As in ability to keep players in the long run. It's very dependent on how they feel committed to the game. The more numerous and diverse social ties they have, the more likely they are to keep playing, when they face reasons to dislike the game or otherwise get bored of some aspects of it.
Of course there is. Money. Retention is not as important as making more money. Given the genre is growing in terms of revenue, there is no reason why devs should not follow the path.
LoL,, WoT, D3 are all huge money makes ... and all the big money makers don't focus on chatting and social stuff.
Of course making a right game at the right time will earn a lot. WoW was such. So was LoL. Those are not realistic goals for any dev, but simply strokes of luck. The market is huge and these things are never as black and white as they seem in the forums, but I would argue there is quite some demand for a new game with stronger social dependencies/incentives. I do admit they might seem a bit more risky for many investors though. Depends on the nature of the dependencies and incentives.. making one is certainly harder than following the formula and making some adjustments.
Not realistic? WoW, WoT, LoL, Diablo, GW2, ... even TOR made $200M+ in 2013. There are tons of money makers even if some of the games have a lot of hate.
Also, look at other games. It does not take a genius to figure out that there is a market for scripted content (Dishonored, Dead Space, Halo ....) all sells millions. It is no surprise that MMO devs take some of those features and try to get a piece of the market.
Comments
Create reasons for players to get and give support to other players (especially the same group of players repeatedly), and watch as a player's value for others increases. Once his value for others increases, it is highly likely to follow that he no longer treats others like garbage.
As Katt Williams so elegantly put it before acting as if he were hit in the back of the head while walking away, "You can walk into the club and yell, 'f*** everybody in the club!' You cannot then turn around and walk outta the club."
People tend to be more polite if they have a need to fit in or receive support. That need is selfish, but that selfishness is used in a positive way. Take that need away, people devalue people, and asshats are bred.
With that said, it will never be 100% one way or another. There will always be those who give respect and are polite, just as there will always be those who are total dicks. An environment of cooperation just swings those players who aren't deadset on acting either way towards the positive end of the spectrum.
No .. not many themepark MMOs .. because traditional type MMOs are overstaying their welcome.
But combat games? Take a look at all the new online games ... almost everyone is combat centric: Heart of the Storm, Destiny, Titanfall, even Hearthstone is a card combat game. The difference between these new games and MMO is that they are even MORE focused on combat. The problem with MMOs is that they are NOT focused enough.
NOw, you may ask, how about games like Watch Dogs? I will say hacking (and to some extent stealth) is just another form of combat.
Good point.
Listen, the whole mechanic of "grouping to do content" isn't very removed from "solo everything." Indeed, I see "solo everything" as just a natural extension of "forced grouping."
Why? Well if your game puts an arbitrary limit of "ten in a group," what are you going to do with the eleventh person? See, we've got this notion of "group" so hardwired into our understanding of MMOs, we can't even see anymore how MMOs can exist without it. And to tell you the truth, ya'll, it about killed sociability from the inside-out, when people started to take grouping too seriously in the vanilla WoW era.
When you need ten to do a dungeon, and ten only, you don't care about being social. All you care about is DPS, heals and tanking prowess. You don't treat the experience like a story unfolding. You treat it like an HR department vetting resumes...and how social is that? And so the odd guy, the roleplayer, the comic relief--all the guys who make these games interesting--get left out.
Because there really is no "social" aspect in those combat groups...not at all...besides some leader barking orders like Leroy Jenkins, or people shouting "healz plz." Is that social? It is about as social as the woman at the deli counter shouting "I need two pounds of corned beef" or the checkout line saying "that's $2.35." Who wants to put up with that, especially when we put up with it so much in our daily lives?
Look, there's a place for those kind of "team sports" in MMOs, but let's not make the mistake that an MMO isn't social if it doesn't have them. If you look at the games which don't have these fixed limits on "who can group," you'll find that they're much more sociable.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Agreed, however we can't really build an MMO around the fear that everyone will be dicks. You and I both recognize these folks and don't think like them. I don't think our experience should be developed around their lack of respect for others.
I simply stay away from guilds that maintain that kind of mentality. There are plenty of guilds to be found full of players like you and I. Despite these inevitable asshats, I still think encouraging interaction and grouping in an MMO is the way to go. Play into the genres inherent strengths. Avoid or diminish the genres inherent weaknesses.
If there are so many asshats, interaction and grouping is no longer a strength. It becomes a weakness because it diminishes the fun for the player.
The answer is to control and limit said interactions. Examples:
1) Aggro table, no more trains
2) LFD, no more boring chit-chat to get groups
3) roll your own loot (no more ninja-ing and loot drama).
... find new strength to the genre .. or change the core of the genre. No one needs to tolerate bad interactions since these are only entertainment products.
I just want to be clear: are you actually positing that interaction between players (read: multiplayer gaming) is actually a weakness in a genre of... Multiplayer gaming?
*some* interactions between players .. not all. Say pvp, or quick grouping is not a weakness.
Chatting is.
There are more than one form of interactions. Not all are strength.
Part of me wants to admit that in practise, you are correct. Sad but true. In part that's just me getting older and crumpier:) However, that's a very subjective measure and I'm very certain there are a lot of people who find joy in chatting with their friends in parties and guilds. Of course there are. For those, I'm certain it's not a weakness. It's one of the reasons to try to find like minded people in the game or play with ones that come with you.
However, therein lies the perhaps biggest difficulty. Making friends in mmorpg's is not that easy anymore at least for a vast chunk of people playing them. A bit older people very much need incentives to even say "hi". Kids on the other hand need to see consequencies for bad behaviour.
As Frenchie above outlined, player dependency in games is so low these days that there is so little incentive to actually try to get to know someone. This directly results in the bad behaviour you see in games and becomes a weakness of mmorpg's. In this light, it is ironical how you advocate more solo play and less interaction as you seem to realize the problem. Or perhaps you realize it, but happen to enjoy the situation due to your circumstances and literally have no interest in the genre beyond that?:)
There are ways to encourage interaction and making friends. I'm sure you agree that increased retention leads to increased revenue even in ftp games. But then again, have you ever seen a game die?
That's the point though...combat grouping /discourages/ interaction.
A combat group is like a football team or a platoon or a ballet company. It is a bunch of individuals that are made into one unit by virtue of specialization, training, and suppressing their individuality. But if you look closely, none of the components who make up these "teams" really has to "interact" with each other in a human sense. In American football, you don't have to know that the tackle is a good fisherman. You just have to know he'll block the linebacker on the second count. There is no room for individual expression here. And so you'll find the coach punishes players who do their own thing, or the choreographer punishes girls who talk at the barre, or the lieutenant punishes the enlisted man who goofs off.
Combat groups create /unified action/, or all the parts working towards a whole. But they do not produce /interaction/, or all the parts behaving as they are in front of everyone else. And so, what you find in games designed around combat groups as the fundamental unit of organization is an inevitable reduction of subjects to mere stats.
Combat groups discourage interaction, because they make things like class, stats, gear and immersion breakers (like voice chat, apps, and game guides) more important than roleplay prowess or friendliness.
They also discourage interaction because what do you do with the eleventh person when the group has a limit of ten?
This isn't so much about guilds. Guilds are a separate problem, but I'd have to say that forced grouping only encourages the kind of bureaucratic efficiency that gives rise to what we might call 'dicks'. But can we even blame the dicks any more than we can blame the coach or the choreographer or the lieutenant? They are trying to put together winning teams in a game that is organized as a kind of team sport by design. That's what we get when we take the "group" as the fundamental unit of balance and the fundamental form of social interaction.
__________________________
"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
1) Of course it is subject. All judgment of entertainment is subjective. However, I am going by the reaction of the market, and behavior of MOST players that chatting is a weakness and not desirable to MANY. May be not to you, but certainly it is to me, and i am glad i don't have to chat in many new games.
2) No incentive to know anyone is a direct consequences of the preferences (of many) that they are in the game to play, not to make friends. And yes, MMOs are just games to me, i have fun my way .... if chatting is not fun, why would i tolerate it when i have full control of what entertainment product i use?
3) Yes there are ways .. but why bother when most are not interested? you can increase retention by upping the skinner box, making interesting content, or just rotate out players (there are so many of them in the world). Encouraging social is not the only way to make money.
In fact, LoL is pretty toxic socially and it makes a lot of money ... so I doubt devs need to encourage people chatting and making friends online to earn a buck.
I can't speak for everyone's experience with team sports (mind you, I've never platyed professionally), but I've never had a coach that encouraged animosity between players in any way. In fact, every coach I've ever had encouraged camaraderie between his players, and certainly didn't tolerate disrespect. Players that treated others as if they were garbage were generally made example of. And, as it turns out, the camaraderie became one of the best experiences of playing.
The game was fun, winning was great, but the memories made with friends whom you've a shared experience with were what lasts in my mind. I have few memories of gridiron glory, but many of locker room jokes and Saturday night celebrations of a win. To take the analogy further, the team could be considered the guild, while the starters could be considered your "combat group." Even then, camaraderie and respect wasn't limited to the combat group. Everyone was on the same team, whether they did so as a member of the practice squad or as a starter on the field. At most, there was generally less respect for those players that weren't upperclassmen, but that was a seniority thing that was simply earned through going through it yourself before you had become upperclassmen.
If you read my previous posts, you'll see that I've never advocated forced grouping. Just grouping as the most efficient and primary content experience unit in the game. I would prefer it to be experiences in open world content; raiding and instanced dungeons are nice the first time through, but they inevitably become silent grinds as the entire player base learns where the danger lies and there's no need for communication among team members. It's the same experience, over and over. EDIT- Sorry about the awful formatting, my phone doesn't work well with the forum.
Decent answers, thank you:)
1) No, not all "judgements" on entertainment are subjective. There are critical reviews for many forms of entertainment. Game reviews are kinda a grey area though. I have no idea how you pretend to actually know most players find ability to chat a weakness. If you only take into account general chat, you might find some consensus that it's full of vitriol in a huge number of games, but I find your claim a bit hard to swallow for all private, guild, trade and party channels.
2) That is what the genre has believed for 20 years now. There is no reason at all for every dev to follow that logic, because of 3) retention rate. As in ability to keep players in the long run. It's very dependent on how they feel committed to the game. The more numerous and diverse social ties they have, the more likely they are to keep playing, when they face reasons to dislike the game or otherwise get bored of some aspects of it.
Interesting content is quite expensive and won't last that long assuming you mean in the way of WoW: disposable content. Upping the Skinner's box does help. There should still be ways for that. Rotating players while not caring for retention rate will literally lead to very low income unless significant money is spent on advertising. A huge brand such as Blizzard helps too. Putting the game on life support and making a new one is typical these days and I'd argue it's one of the causes for bad player behavior. If the dev's didn't care in the past, why should they themselves care now? There is always something the players carry over from their previous mmo's.
Of course making a right game at the right time will earn a lot. WoW was such. So was LoL. Those are not realistic goals for any dev, but simply strokes of luck. The market is huge and these things are never as black and white as they seem in the forums, but I would argue there is quite some demand for a new game with stronger social dependencies/incentives. I do admit they might seem a bit more risky for many investors though. Depends on the nature of the dependencies and incentives.. making one is certainly harder than following the formula and making some adjustments.