Originally posted by 0effort<div may-blank-within"="">A small post I wrote a few hours ago,Since post-WoW-era there has been an increasing feeling that modern MMOrpgs are catering more to the solo experience...
If Furcadia, Asheron's Call, SWG, UO, EVE, Planet Entropia, There, Second Life and Toontown never existed then I'd say your rant had some basis in reality. However...
Did any of these release recently?
Of course not. They were all before WOW and all both supported and encouraged solo play.
In no way did SWG encourage solo play. That is probably the most ignorant statement about the game that I have ever heard. Everything from the crafting to the class training system required interdependence among players. In order to heal wounds, you needed either a doctor or an entertainer. There has never been an MMO that needed such complete community involvement.
You didn't need to be in a group to dance on that stage. You didn't need to be tethered to two other specific classes to create your house/museum. As for 'social', you didn't need to speak to that dancer nor the dancer speak to you in order to heal.
Your inability to differentiate between grouping and socialization isn't ignorance on my part. Sorry you got emotional over a comment about your video game.
^ this
As a crafter in swg all the gathers I dealt with offered things to my vendor. I never needed to talk to them once we had made our deal. In fact I could spend all day working alone at my factories never talking to anyone because everything was sold by vendor in my shop. I talked to people because I wanted to and it was often by tells or they would come and just sit in my house while I worked chatting.
Combat was never forced grouping. Once you had the money to waste on comp armor you could solo rancor nests with no skill levels at all. Sure it chewed threw your armor doing it but you could. Grouping was never forced or required in swg you did it because you wanted to.
I don't think 'the antisocial' is a today thing. In fact, I think the 'antisocial' was well on its way long before today, and that today's 'solo play' is just a natural extension of the 'forced grouping' of yore. Now since this is a complicated subject, I'm going to break down my post into several parts. Sorry for the long post, but I hope it is a good read, and a fair read.
When did it change?
I think it changed in 2005 with Star Wars Galaxies. It changed when an entertainer--the class that was designed to be the 'social class' who entertained weary combat players--earned an award on Bria for being 'the most helpful player'.
The dancer/musician, named Briha, had dozens of players crowd around her for all hours, watching her dances and listening to her music, dispensing buffs to everyone who wanted them. And so when the GM was issuing awards, this player earned one.
There was only one problem, however. Briha's player never actually 'played' Briha. Briha was an automated script that was AFK.
Now the reason Briha was a turning point isn't because the player got an award. It was the reaction afterword. When real playing entertainers became insulted at the event, they were shouted down by the vast majority of players who thought the bot deserved the award. That's when things changed, from my perspective.
When a scripted, AFK macro gets to become 'most helpful player', and be applauded for it, we can't say we appreciate social play anymore.
Bots, bots of all kinds, started to invade SWG like locusts. You soon had doctor bots, sampler bots and crafter bots. You had bots whose sole purpose was to roll around on the floor so novice medics could heal them to get XP. And you had loot bots, who would sit at a spawn point and loot high value targets AFK. It was then--only when the achiever/combat demographic started to become affected by bots--did the developers want to clamp down on bots.
Support classes like entertainers had a glimmer of hope that they would ban buffbots...but they were mistaken. Soon afterword, SOE changed its own TOS making buffbots a protected class, the interference of which could lead a player to get banned for harassment, while lootbots could be ticketed as exploiters. This was, to me, a paradigm shift. But what was the paradigm that was shifting?
_______________________________
Why did it change?
Even in SWG, the game described by one poster above as a most social game that made characters interdependent, we didn't really have much use for sociability. In fact, the interdependence only made us more antisocial, not less. And you can also see that the games which require the most interdependence (vanilla, 40-man WoW; EVE) are also the most antisocial, most hostile games. They also are the games with the most botting.
Why is this so?
1) Interdependence is too risky a variable to leave to strangers.
Well, interdependence and forced grouping is a double-edged sword. It makes you rely on other people to make your game better, but it also gives other people the power to really mess up your game. And so, we shouldn't be surprised when players don't take chances on strangers, and huddle around guild tags for our social circles; you get them on TeamSpeak and get to know them IRL before you allow them into your enjoyment. Those that don't aren't worth our time. But can we say this is promoting social play? Or is it, rather, being picky...paranoid picky...about what is in the larger scheme of things silly things to be paranoid about?
Why didn't this happen earlier in the Belle Epoque of EQ and UO?
2) Characters are Irrelevant, Only toons matter.
Back in the early days, when this genre was new, we didn't have things like Teamspeak, Vent, forums, or even a lot of the hype you'd find in gaming. We saw the worlds as things we had to not only enjoy, but to maintain. We also roleplayed more, and it was easy to do, because what you were behind the screen wasn't easily transmittable to other people playing the game. Who you were was what you portrayed. And so, portraying someone interesting to see and interesting to game with became part of playing the game.
But this wasn't an attitude that was harbored by other gaming cultures, like the FPS LAN culture that started to play the genre in the early 2000s. They gamed with people they knew, and they had an intuitive understanding that games weren't about subjective criteria like roleplay, but were only about objective results: kills/losses, quantifiable gear quality.
Also, the 'veil of ignorance' (borrowed from John Rawls) became lifted over time. People saw that the girl who played the prostitute was a middle-aged man. People saw that the wise elder was some silly kid who listened to Limp Bizkit. And, therefore, nobody really had any reason to care about the characters they see portrayed. They wanted to know--perhaps even needed to know--the player who played the character.
When we disenchant the 'character' (a work of fiction) into a 'toon' (a vehicle for a real person to consume content), there's really no incentive to group with interesting characters or well roleplayed characters. None of that stuff has any consequence for anything, but it can cause your group to wipe if the toon has no tank or DPS. And so, is it any wonder why your results-oriented, goal-oriented players have no reason to either create or give any thought to interesting characters or roleplayed characters?
Because any talk about the 'antisocial' atmosphere has to ask itself a serious question: what is all that interesting about the things you see and the things that get typed in local? Why is that something worth preserving? Because the whole Briha incident in SWG taught me that players these days really don't care about that stuff. When push comes to shove, all that matters are combat efficiency and quantifiable rewards....and if this sounds like a serious, business-minded mindset, you are probably right.
Now if things like roleplay ability and sharing a fiction are no longer important, what is important? Efficiency, knowledge of the combat mechanics, adoption of professional norms (TeamSpeak and Vent use), and discipline with regard to time (showing up to do content, not leaving early, etc.). In other words, the same things you are judged on in the workplace are the same things you are judged on in the game space.
And so, we start to see guilds and groups start to treat their time in the games like a corporation would treat its time: as a machine designed to achieve prosperity in an efficient manner. And so, we start to vet our members like any good HR department, holding interviews, demanding quantifiable measures of competence, and getting to know the person who is pressing the keys and moving the mouse...maybe via a TeamSpeak interview or a Skype interview.
Because nobody--least of all the guilds--are interested in getting to know the work of fiction in spatial--they want to get to know the real person , but this implies a certain level of desire on the part of real person to be known in that way by a bunch of strangers. Some revel in it, but others are not interested for being exposed like that for the sake of some raid.
But even the interactions themselves are, as one would predict, too instrumental and too reflective of the worst aspects of life outside in 'meatspace'. Guild politics are, predictably, just as bad--if not worse--than office politics. People start to see how the buddy in real life gets more consideration than the buddy who was met online. People start to see how the girl gets privileges because she's a girl playing with a bunch of guys. People start to criticize X for not "pulling his weight" while they make excuses for Y. People start to resent the guy who takes off because of family stuff while others accept it...that sort of thing.
The famous guilds are the ones who are the most ruthless in terms of their HR: they will vet, expose, and have no qualms of cutting you if you don't tow the line. Then again, the combat engine in WoW doesn't care if you are jerks or not; it only cares about whether your 10 or 40 players are efficient. When the only thing that WoW cares about is how good your guild does in the combat engine, you tend to make decisions based on stats, rather than personality.
But you have to see that a large number--a significant number--see that kind of social experience counterproductive, a source of great frustration and really unnecessary. They don't want their free time to be an exercise in HR, performance reviews, nepotism and favoritism...they get that enough in their real lives. With the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Skype and so on in the late 2000s and early 2010s, people are saying "to heck with this....if I'm going to be online with someone, why do I need this stupidity of guild politics, loots and raids?"
_______________________________________________
Conclusion: Alone Together? or Alone, but Together?
I'm using Sherry Turkle's title to offer two possibilities as to where social will go. Frankly, I don't see today's "solo-centric" MMO as much of a problem...instead, I see it as the natural progression of "group centric" and "interdependent" games which started to resemble a more anti-social, negative experience than a positive one.
Yes, today we are alone, isolated, but are we? We still have spatial, and we still group, but we group not because we have to, but because we want to.
Frankly, I haven't had this much fun playing multiplayer games since the fall of City of Heroes...and I have one thing to thank for it: LFG and LFR.
LFG and LFR gives me the opportunity to just play, without having to be vetted by some guild-HR department who is squeamish. LFG and LFR gives me the opportunity to make friends who I would have never met. LFG and LFR gives me the opportunity to demonstrate my skill, without having to somehow convince somebody who sits in judgment of me. And LFG and LFR helps me to help others achieve their goals, characters I wouldn't meet without LFG and LFR.
Some may say that these mechanics stifle sociability...but I would simply respond by saying, "how is begging a guild to take you more sociable?", or "how is succumbing to peer pressure by adopting voice chat more sociable?" or "how is being judged on the basis of your hardcore commitment to min/maxing sociable?" If hardcores resent the lack of sociability, we have to at least admit that the sociability wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
But we do, I think, need some sort of mechanic--some kind of matchmaker--to get us all interacting with each other again. That's why I think LFG and LFR is the wave of the future. Heck, it happens in reality with things like Match.com...why is it so bad when it comes to games?
/EndRant.
__________________________ "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
I don't think 'the antisocial' is a today thing. In fact, I think the 'antisocial' was well on its way long before today, and that today's 'solo play' is just a natural extension of the 'forced grouping' of yore. Now since this is a complicated subject, I'm going to break down my post into several parts. Sorry for the long post, but I hope it is a good read, and a fair read.
When did it change?
I think it changed in 2005 with Star Wars Galaxies. It changed when an entertainer--the class that was designed to be the 'social class' who entertained weary combat players--earned an award on Bria for being 'the most helpful player'.
The dancer/musician, named Briha, had dozens of players crowd around her for all hours, watching her dances and listening to her music, dispensing buffs to everyone who wanted them. And so when the GM was issuing awards, this player earned one.
There was only one problem, however. Briha's player never actually 'played' Briha. Briha was an automated script that was AFK.
Now the reason Briha was a turning point isn't because the player got an award. It was the reaction afterword, when real playing entertainers became insulted at the event, and shouted down by the vast majority of players who thought the bot deserved the award. That's when things changed, from my perspective.
Bots, bots of all kinds, started to invade SWG like locusts. You soon had doctor bots, sampler bots and crafter bots. You had bots whose sole purpose was to roll around on the floor so novice medics could heal them to get XP. And you had loot bots, who would sit at a spawn point and loot high value targets AFK. It was then--only when the achiever/combat demographic started to become affected by bots--did the developers want to clamp down on bots.
Support classed like entertainers had a glimmer of hope that they would ban buffbots...but they were mistaken. Soon afterword, SOE changed its own TOS making buffbots a protected class, the interference of which could lead a player to get banned for harassment, while lootbots could be ticketed as exploiters. This was, to me, a paradigm shift. But what was the paradigm that was shifting?
_______________________________
Why did it change?
Even in SWG, the game described by one poster above as a most social game that made characters interdependent, we didn't really have much use for sociability. In fact, the interdependence only made us more antisocial, not less. And you can also see that the games which require the most interdependence (vanilla, 40-man WoW; EVE) are also the most antisocial, most hostile games. They also are the games with the most botting.
Why is this so?
1) Interdependence is too risky a variable to leave to strangers.
Well, interdependence and forced grouping is a double-edged sword. It makes you rely on other people to make your game better, but it also gives other people the power to really mess up your game. And so, we shouldn't be surprised when players don't take chances on strangers, and huddle around guild tags for your social circle; you get them on TeamSpeak and get to know them IRL before you allow them into your enjoyment.
Why didn't this happen earlier in the Belle Epoque of EQ and UO?
2) Characters are Irrelevant, Only toons matter.
Back in the early days, when this genre was new, we didn't have things like Teamspeak, Vent, forums, or even a lot of the hype you'd find in gaming. We saw the worlds as things we had to not only enjoy, but to maintain. We also roleplayed more, and it was easy to do, because what you were behind the screen wasn't easily transmittable to other people playing the game. Who you were was what you portrayed. And so, portraying someone interesting to see and interesting to game with became part of playing the game.
But this wasn't an attitude that was harbored by other gaming cultures, like the FPS LAN culture that started to play the genre in the early 2000s. They gamed with people they knew, and they had an intuitive understanding that games weren't about subjective criteria like roleplay, but were only about objective results: kills/losses, quantifiable gear quality.
Also, the 'veil of ignorance' (borrowed from John Rawls) became lifted over time. People saw that the girl who played the prostitute was a middle-aged man. People saw that the wise elder was some silly kid who listened to Limp Bizkit. And, therefore, nobody really had any reason to care about the characters they see portrayed. They wanted to know--perhaps even needed to know--the player who played the character.
When we disenchant the 'character' (a work of fiction) into a 'toon' (a vehicle for a real person to consume content), there's really no incentive to group with interesting characters or well roleplayed characters. None of that stuff has any consequence for anything, but it can cause your group to wipe if the toon has no tank or DPS. And so, is it any wonder why your results-oriented, goal-oriented players have no reason to either create or give any thought to interesting characters or roleplayed characters?
Because any talk about the 'antisocial' atmosphere has to ask itself a serious question: what is all that interesting about the things you see and the things that get typed in local? Why is that something worth preserving? Because the whole Briha incident in SWG taught me that players these days really don't care about that stuff. When push comes to shove, all that matters are combat efficiency and quantifiable rewards....and if this sounds like a serious, business-minded mindset, you are probably right.
Now if things like roleplay ability and sharing a fiction are no longer important, what is important? Efficiency, knowledge of the combat mechanics, adoption of professional norms (TeamSpeak and Vent use), and discipline with regard to time (showing up to do content, not leaving early, etc.). In other words, the same things you are judged on in the workplace are the same things you are judged on in the game space.
And so, we start to see guilds and groups start to treat their time in the games like a corporation would treat its time: as a machine designed to achieve prosperity in an efficient manner. And so, we start to vet our members like any good HR department, holding interviews, demanding quantifiable measures of competence, and getting to know the person who is pressing the keys and moving the mouse...maybe via a TeamSpeak interview or a Skype interview.
Because nobody--least of all the guilds--are interested in getting to know the work of fiction in spatial--they want to get to know the real person , but this implies a certain level of desire on the part of real person to be known in that way by a bunch of strangers. Some revel in it, but others are not interested for being exposed like that for the sake of some raid.
But even the interactions themselves are, as one would predict, too instrumental and too reflective of the worst aspects of life outside in 'meatspace'. Guild politics are, predictably, just as bad--if not worse--than office politics. People start to see how the buddy in real life gets more consideration than the buddy who was met online. People start to see how the girl gets privileges because she's a girl playing with a bunch of guys. People start to criticize X for not "pulling his weight" while they make excuses for Y. People start to resent the guy who takes off because of family stuff while others accept it...that sort of thing.
The famous guilds are the ones who are the most ruthless in terms of their HR: they will vet, expose, and have no qualms of cutting you if you don't tow the line. Then again, the combat engine in WoW doesn't care if you are jerks or not; it only cares about whether your 10 or 40 players are efficient. When the only thing that WoW cares about is how good your guild does in the combat engine, you tend to make decisions based on stats, rather than personality.
But you have to see that a large number--a significant number--see that kind of social experience counterproductive, a source of great frustration and really unnecessary. They don't want their free time to be an exercise in HR, performance reviews, nepotism and favoritism...they get that enough in their real lives. With the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Skype and so on in the late 2000s and early 2010s, people are saying "to heck with this....if I'm going to be online with someone, why do I need this stupidity of guild politics, loots and raids?"
_______________________________________________
Conclusion: Alone Together? or Alone, but Together?
I'm using Sherry Turkle's title to offer two possibilities as to where social will go. Frankly, I don't see today's "solo-centric" MMO as much of a problem...instead, I see it as the natural progression of "group centric" and "interdependent" games which started to resemble a more anti-social, negative experience than a positive one.
Yes, today we are alone, isolated, but are we? We still have spatial, and we still group, but we group not because we have to, but because we want to.
Frankly, I haven't had this much fun playing multiplayer games since the fall of City of Heroes...and I have one thing to thank for it: LFG and LFR.
LFG and LFR gives me the opportunity to just play, without having to be vetted by some guild-HR department who is squeamish. LFG and LFR gives me the opportunity to make friends who I would have never met. LFG and LFR gives me the opportunity to demonstrate my skill, without having to somehow convince somebody who sits in judgment of me. And LFG and LFR helps me to help others achieve their goals, characters I wouldn't meet without LFG and LFR.
Some may say that these mechanics stifle sociability...but I would simply respond by saying, "how is begging a guild to take you more sociable?", or "how is succumbing to peer pressure by adopting voice chat more sociable?" or "how is being judged on the basis of your hardcore commitment to min/maxing sociable?" If hardcores resent the lack of sociability, we have to at least admit that the sociability wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
But we do, I think, need some sort of mechanic--some kind of matchmaker--to get us all interacting with each other again. That's why I think LFG and LFR is the wave of the future. Heck, it happens in reality with things like Match.com...why is it so bad when it comes to games?
/EndRant.
Props to you on a great post Beatnik. You raised so many points of interest that I agreed with and felt compelled to respond to but they were too many. I'd be here all day typing if I tried. The part I found most interesting is the difference by which different gamers view their avatars. To some of us they are a vehicle by which we immerse ourselves and interact in a virtual world. To others they are simply an object, tool, or mechanism by which to achieve an end result within a gaming platform. Very interesting read indeed.
Originally posted by 0effort<div may-blank-within"="">A small post I wrote a few hours ago,Since post-WoW-era there has been an increasing feeling that modern MMOrpgs are catering more to the solo experience...
If Furcadia, Asheron's Call, SWG, UO, EVE, Planet Entropia, There, Second Life and Toontown never existed then I'd say your rant had some basis in reality. However...
Did any of these release recently?
Of course not. They were all before WOW and all both supported and encouraged solo play.
In no way did SWG encourage solo play. That is probably the most ignorant statement about the game that I have ever heard. Everything from the crafting to the class training system required interdependence among players. In order to heal wounds, you needed either a doctor or an entertainer. There has never been an MMO that needed such complete community involvement.
You didn't need to be in a group to dance on that stage. You didn't need to be tethered to two other specific classes to create your house/museum. As for 'social', you didn't need to speak to that dancer nor the dancer speak to you in order to heal.
Your inability to differentiate between grouping and socialization isn't ignorance on my part. Sorry you got emotional over a comment about your video game.
Where did I say anything about socialization? I was replying directly to your statement . TRY READING WHAT YOU POSTED. I highlighted it for you in case you have issues differentiating between what you said and what you wrote in your reply . In no way did it encourage SOLO PLAY. You needed dancers and medics because wounds did not magically go away. You did not solo a whole lot without buffs from medics and crafted weapons. Smugglers couldn't slice without tools from a crafter. Most crafting professions were dependent on others for some pieces or parts. The economy was completely interdependent. SWG was a game that required other players to accomplish much of anything. You are right, you didn't need to group, but you certainly needed the service of others.
James T. Kirk: All she's got isn't good enough! What else ya got?
Originally posted by 0effort <div may-blank-within"="">
A small post I wrote a few hours ago,
Since post-WoW-era there has been an increasing feeling that modern MMOrpgs are catering more to the solo experience, the solo attitude, and the solo indulgence. From Guild Wars 2 to Final Fantasy XIV, the player is barely pushed to interact with his server nor with his community. Everything is achievable and attainable by "soloing" your way through without making friends and acquaintances. "Who needs them?" when you have a system that randomly selects you with others for every single obstacle that you encounter and the forthcoming one. "Who needs them?" when with enough patience and balls of steel, randoms again can help you to meet your aims and goals in game.
Duty Finders, MegaServers, you name it.
We have lost the sense of community and the identity of a server. People barely even talk in groups anymore. Public chat is generally quite unless it is a PVPvE-oriented MMOrpg where e-peen flows eternally, friendly trolling is non-stopable, and teasing can be as good or as bad as you want it to be. Players get stuck. Players get stuck in old content for days, weeks and months being randomized with other strangers that don't know the fights as well and everybody seems so hopeless and ignorant, so lost. And you have to sign in 24/7 and pray that a blessing group comes on on Party Finder or Automated Player Finder, wasting hours, suns and moons for it to start no matter what you type "EXP/First timers". Like this feeling of guarantee fail with strangers from across all servers, this inner feeling of defeatism while the rest, the ones who were playing that MMOrpg since day one are light years ahead of you. In every attempt, in every wipe, one player leaves and then the rest follow, rage and drama and bitterness dominating the interaction between players. The experience of being hopeless at its finest performance.
What happened to the social aspects of MMOrpgs where everybody knew each other, out-geared people who would come forward to your call for help, many players would sit with you, teach you, train you and make you understand the fight or the pattern of extremely challenging content and guide you through it all successfully. The repeatable grind to ensure you have the right set of gear before moving to the next challenge. Now all is left is a dust from speedrunning. We used to have so many true, sincere and unique memories of our server, good, bad and ugly ones. Fierce enemies but also respected friends. We would interact with our whole server, add players on our list, interact with them on the daily basis, have them as real friends, had a bond with them.
Everything has become a "read a guide" or "watch youtube" and "just find people" and "get on with it". We add people just so we can whisper them every once in a blue moon about helping us with a content because no one else will.
Such a sad, mad and antisocial world inside a Massive Online Multiplayer Role Playing game.
So thanks once again to Developers who catered to us.
That's so weird because I am sure I remember playing Asheron's Call for 6 years before WoW and another 5 years on and off post quitting WoW. I suppose when I first got into MMO gaming back in 1999 with Asheron's Call was really a figment of my imagination. So many false dreams.
Oh wait, I am correct. Asheron's Call catered to the solo player and it is considered one of the grandfathers of the genre.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
This all boils down to the players. It isn't the fault of developers that games seem so "antisocial"... That is all on the heads of the players. Of course each game I play, at least for me, seems to have lots of people that are willing to help, to group, and so on...
Go figure.
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
Originally posted by 0effort<div may-blank-within"="">A small post I wrote a few hours ago,Since post-WoW-era there has been an increasing feeling that modern MMOrpgs are catering more to the solo experience...
If Furcadia, Asheron's Call, SWG, UO, EVE, Planet Entropia, There, Second Life and Toontown never existed then I'd say your rant had some basis in reality. However...
Did any of these release recently?
Of course not. They were all before WOW and all both supported and encouraged solo play.
In no way did SWG encourage solo play. That is probably the most ignorant statement about the game that I have ever heard. Everything from the crafting to the class training system required interdependence among players. In order to heal wounds, you needed either a doctor or an entertainer. There has never been an MMO that needed such complete community involvement.
You didn't need to be in a group to dance on that stage. You didn't need to be tethered to two other specific classes to create your house/museum. As for 'social', you didn't need to speak to that dancer nor the dancer speak to you in order to heal.
Your inability to differentiate between grouping and socialization isn't ignorance on my part. Sorry you got emotional over a comment about your video game.
Where did I say anything about socialization? I was replying directly to your statement . TRY READING WHAT YOU POSTED. I highlighted it for you in case you have issues differentiating between what you said and what you wrote in your reply . In no way did it encourage SOLO PLAY. You needed dancers and medics because wounds did not magically go away. You did not solo a whole lot without buffs from medics and crafted weapons. Smugglers couldn't slice without tools from a crafter. Most crafting professions were dependent on others for some pieces or parts. The economy was completely interdependent. SWG was a game that required other players to accomplish much of anything. You are right, you didn't need to group, but you certainly needed the service of others.
Which begs the question you replied about 1 game in his list where is your defense of the others?
I am sorry to break this to you and all your forced grouping compatriots but grouping and anti-social behaviors i.e. solo experiences has always been a part of the genre. And always will because developers understand that people, especially gamers are an anti-social beast or at the very least contain many types of gamers of which the soloer is apart.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
Back in the early days, when this genre was new, we didn't have things like Teamspeak, Vent, forums, or even a lot of the hype you'd find in gaming. We saw the worlds as things we had to not only enjoy, but to maintain. We also roleplayed more, and it was easy to do, because what you were behind the screen wasn't easily transmittable to other people playing the game. Who you were was what you portrayed. And so, portraying someone interesting to see and interesting to game with became part of playing the game.
But this wasn't an attitude that was harbored by other gaming cultures, like the FPS LAN culture that started to play the genre in the early 2000s. They gamed with people they knew, and they had an intuitive understanding that games weren't about subjective criteria like roleplay, but were only about objective results: kills/losses, quantifiable gear quality.
Also, the 'veil of ignorance' (borrowed from John Rawls) became lifted over time. People saw that the girl who played the prostitute was a middle-aged man. People saw that the wise elder was some silly kid who listened to Limp Bizkit. And, therefore, nobody really had any reason to care about the characters they see portrayed. They wanted to know--perhaps even needed to know--the player who played the character.
When we disenchant the 'character' (a work of fiction) into a 'toon' (a vehicle for a real person to consume content), there's really no incentive to group with interesting characters or well roleplayed characters. None of that stuff has any consequence for anything, but it can cause your group to wipe if the toon has no tank or DPS. And so, is it any wonder why your results-oriented, goal-oriented players have no reason to either create or give any thought to interesting characters or roleplayed characters?
Excellent post. Your thoughts really deserve wider exposure than just on this forum. This portion is particularly interesting to me. Do you think a game could deliberately socially engineer a return to the older character-focused attitudes with certain mechanics or do you think that this change is basically a done deal now no matter what devs do?
Originally posted by 0effort<div may-blank-within"="">A small post I wrote a few hours ago,Since post-WoW-era there has been an increasing feeling that modern MMOrpgs are catering more to the solo experience...
If Furcadia, Asheron's Call, SWG, UO, EVE, Planet Entropia, There, Second Life and Toontown never existed then I'd say your rant had some basis in reality. However...
Did any of these release recently?
Of course not. They were all before WOW and all both supported and encouraged solo play.
In no way did SWG encourage solo play. That is probably the most ignorant statement about the game that I have ever heard. Everything from the crafting to the class training system required interdependence among players. In order to heal wounds, you needed either a doctor or an entertainer. There has never been an MMO that needed such complete community involvement.
You didn't need to be in a group to dance on that stage. You didn't need to be tethered to two other specific classes to create your house/museum. As for 'social', you didn't need to speak to that dancer nor the dancer speak to you in order to heal.
Your inability to differentiate between grouping and socialization isn't ignorance on my part. Sorry you got emotional over a comment about your video game.
Where did I say anything about socialization? I was replying directly to your statement . TRY READING WHAT YOU POSTED. I highlighted it for you in case you have issues differentiating between what you said and what you wrote in your reply . In no way did it encourage SOLO PLAY. You needed dancers and medics because wounds did not magically go away. You did not solo a whole lot without buffs from medics and crafted weapons. Smugglers couldn't slice without tools from a crafter. Most crafting professions were dependent on others for some pieces or parts. The economy was completely interdependent. SWG was a game that required other players to accomplish much of anything. You are right, you didn't need to group, but you certainly needed the service of others.
Did SWG require other players? Or did SWG require bots?
The problem with SWG is that the same things that created the need for other players were the same things that created the need for bots to replace players. I never saw such anger against players as I saw anger against entertainers, when they came out against buffbots. I never thought to think that such a vulnerable segment of players could be so reviled. But did it come as any surprise to anyone that whole classes of players in the cantinas and in the medbays started to get thrown under the bus for the needs of achievers and PvPers?
Yeah, I saw that whole "interdependence creates strong communities" in action in SWG...strongly against players and strongly promoting bots, more like it.
__________________________ "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
All my best friends are forced to play with me. That's how you make them in real life right ?
The option to group is there in every mmo and I always choose to take it. I never play these games alone. Maybe for once people should look at how they play the games instead of trying to blame someone else.
Player expectations are a joke. No wonder they are so unhappy.
Why can't the lazy developers create an MMO to cure cancer and make every player rich? Damn them! I miss the good old days!! Right guys??
Back in the early days, when this genre was new, we didn't have things like Teamspeak, Vent, forums, or even a lot of the hype you'd find in gaming. We saw the worlds as things we had to not only enjoy, but to maintain. We also roleplayed more, and it was easy to do, because what you were behind the screen wasn't easily transmittable to other people playing the game. Who you were was what you portrayed. And so, portraying someone interesting to see and interesting to game with became part of playing the game.
But this wasn't an attitude that was harbored by other gaming cultures, like the FPS LAN culture that started to play the genre in the early 2000s. They gamed with people they knew, and they had an intuitive understanding that games weren't about subjective criteria like roleplay, but were only about objective results: kills/losses, quantifiable gear quality.
Also, the 'veil of ignorance' (borrowed from John Rawls) became lifted over time. People saw that the girl who played the prostitute was a middle-aged man. People saw that the wise elder was some silly kid who listened to Limp Bizkit. And, therefore, nobody really had any reason to care about the characters they see portrayed. They wanted to know--perhaps even needed to know--the player who played the character.
When we disenchant the 'character' (a work of fiction) into a 'toon' (a vehicle for a real person to consume content), there's really no incentive to group with interesting characters or well roleplayed characters. None of that stuff has any consequence for anything, but it can cause your group to wipe if the toon has no tank or DPS. And so, is it any wonder why your results-oriented, goal-oriented players have no reason to either create or give any thought to interesting characters or roleplayed characters?
Excellent post. Your thoughts really deserve wider exposure than just on this forum. This portion is particularly interesting to me. Do you think a game could deliberately socially engineer a return to the older character-focused attitudes with certain mechanics or do you think that this change is basically a done deal now no matter what devs do?
I saw this older, character-focused concept in the most unlikely of places: City of Heroes, which was also (ironically) one of the most solo-centric, casual and low-stakes grouping games out there.
Why was this so?
Well, there was no penalty for grouping with the odd guy, or the guy with marginal stats. For things like the Rikti Mothership, the more, the merrier.
It was also a great platform for creativity and individual expression, due to the character generator. People could express something interesting to see, and they supplemented it by equally interesting mannerisms in spatial.
Also, encounters were so easy, and the death penalties were so low-stakes, you didn't need to treat content as "serious business." If you wipe? Big deal...just fly back or get teleported.
I think we make the mistake often times of equating "high stakes" with "high social," because we assume that the stakes create the need to be social. Nothing can be further from the truth. The stakes create the need to fall back on very close relations like family and very close friends, but it does nothing to make strangers become friends. In fact, quite the opposite. When the stakes get high, you become slow to trust and slow to take a chance on new people, especially people like those you meet in online games.
__________________________ "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
Originally posted by 0effort<div may-blank-within"="">A small post I wrote a few hours ago,Since post-WoW-era there has been an increasing feeling that modern MMOrpgs are catering more to the solo experience...
If Furcadia, Asheron's Call, SWG, UO, EVE, Planet Entropia, There, Second Life and Toontown never existed then I'd say your rant had some basis in reality. However...
Did any of these release recently?
Of course not. They were all before WOW and all both supported and encouraged solo play.
In no way did SWG encourage solo play. That is probably the most ignorant statement about the game that I have ever heard. Everything from the crafting to the class training system required interdependence among players. In order to heal wounds, you needed either a doctor or an entertainer. There has never been an MMO that needed such complete community involvement.
You didn't need to be in a group to dance on that stage. You didn't need to be tethered to two other specific classes to create your house/museum. As for 'social', you didn't need to speak to that dancer nor the dancer speak to you in order to heal. Your inability to differentiate between grouping and socialization isn't ignorance on my part. Sorry you got emotional over a comment about your video game.
Where did I say anything about socialization? I was replying directly to your statement . TRY READING WHAT YOU POSTED. I highlighted it for you in case you have issues differentiating between what you said and what you wrote in your reply . In no way did it encourage SOLO PLAY. You needed dancers and medics because wounds did not magically go away. You did not solo a whole lot without buffs from medics and crafted weapons. Smugglers couldn't slice without tools from a crafter. Most crafting professions were dependent on others for some pieces or parts. The economy was completely interdependent. SWG was a game that required other players to accomplish much of anything. You are right, you didn't need to group, but you certainly needed the service of others.
No it really didn't. Soloing means not grouping, that's it. I didn't need a group to go on missions, or to build my house. I never used medics when I ran missions. I could get the pieces I needed for crafting from vendors. I really didn't need to talk to, see or interact with another person, just their vendors. When I did it was because I wanted to not because I needed to.
SWG hugely encouraged soloing. You are right for materials I did need other players services, but I just used their vendors, the same as buying something off the auction in WoW which also encourages soloing. No real difference between an npc vendor from the and a player's vendor in the eyes of the customer. Everything I needed I just bought from a vendor.
edit - pre-cu I would even say it encouraged solo even more with the way xp in groups was split. In case you forgot the xp was split depending on did the most damage.
edit - and the point was soloing was encouraged in most/many games outside of EQ long before WoW. So the idea that someone post WoW games are more solo is only true if you ignore all the games that were not like EQ. If you look at the whole market it is false.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
I saw this older, character-focused concept in the most unlikely of places: City of Heroes, which was also (ironically) one of the most solo-centric, casual and low-stakes grouping games out there.
Why was this so?
Well, there was no penalty for grouping with the odd guy, or the guy with marginal stats. For things like the Rikti Mothership, the more, the merrier.
It was also a great platform for creativity and individual expression, due to the character generator. People could express something interesting to see, and they supplemented it by equally interesting mannerisms in spatial.
Also, encounters were so easy, and the death penalties were so low-stakes, you didn't need to treat content as "serious business." If you wipe? Big deal...just fly back or get teleported.
I think we make the mistake often times of equating "high stakes" with "high social," because we assume that the stakes create the need to be social. Nothing can be further from the truth. The stakes create the need to fall back on very close relations like family and very close friends, but it does nothing to make strangers become friends. In fact, quite the opposite. When the stakes get high, you become slow to trust and slow to take a chance on new people, especially people like those you meet in online games.
Good post and I agree.. I played CoX early on, but was too busy with multiple games to keep up with it.. Anyways.. I agree with the aspects of meeting standards for high stakes grouping.. That is why I hate games like WoW where optimal effeciency becomes the norm and expected.. Whatever happen to the days when people could just group together because you liked the company of that person, NOT because of that the characters skills bring to the battle..
This is also why I'm die hard set against restrictive group for dungeons and raids.. Yeah, I might want my wife or friend that is NOT an expert gamer to join me on a raid or dungeon run.. Yes, they may not meet standards, so bring along another person.. Is it really good social gaming when you limit your raid size to 20, telling others to get lost? It's why I liked games with soft grouping like GW2, or allow for slacking of players.. IMO, gaming is more competitive then it is social, which should not be confused as being the same..
Back in the early days, when this genre was new, we didn't have things like Teamspeak, Vent, forums, or even a lot of the hype you'd find in gaming. We saw the worlds as things we had to not only enjoy, but to maintain. We also roleplayed more, and it was easy to do, because what you were behind the screen wasn't easily transmittable to other people playing the game. Who you were was what you portrayed. And so, portraying someone interesting to see and interesting to game with became part of playing the game.
But this wasn't an attitude that was harbored by other gaming cultures, like the FPS LAN culture that started to play the genre in the early 2000s. They gamed with people they knew, and they had an intuitive understanding that games weren't about subjective criteria like roleplay, but were only about objective results: kills/losses, quantifiable gear quality.
Also, the 'veil of ignorance' (borrowed from John Rawls) became lifted over time. People saw that the girl who played the prostitute was a middle-aged man. People saw that the wise elder was some silly kid who listened to Limp Bizkit. And, therefore, nobody really had any reason to care about the characters they see portrayed. They wanted to know--perhaps even needed to know--the player who played the character.
When we disenchant the 'character' (a work of fiction) into a 'toon' (a vehicle for a real person to consume content), there's really no incentive to group with interesting characters or well roleplayed characters. None of that stuff has any consequence for anything, but it can cause your group to wipe if the toon has no tank or DPS. And so, is it any wonder why your results-oriented, goal-oriented players have no reason to either create or give any thought to interesting characters or roleplayed characters?
Excellent post. Your thoughts really deserve wider exposure than just on this forum. This portion is particularly interesting to me. Do you think a game could deliberately socially engineer a return to the older character-focused attitudes with certain mechanics or do you think that this change is basically a done deal now no matter what devs do?
I saw this older, character-focused concept in the most unlikely of places: City of Heroes, which was also (ironically) one of the most solo-centric, casual and low-stakes grouping games out there.
Why was this so?
Well, there was no penalty for grouping with the odd guy, or the guy with marginal stats. For things like the Rikti Mothership, the more, the merrier.
It was also a great platform for creativity and individual expression, due to the character generator. People could express something interesting to see, and they supplemented it by equally interesting mannerisms in spatial.
Also, encounters were so easy, and the death penalties were so low-stakes, you didn't need to treat content as "serious business." If you wipe? Big deal...just fly back or get teleported.
I think we make the mistake often times of equating "high stakes" with "high social," because we assume that the stakes create the need to be social. Nothing can be further from the truth. The stakes create the need to fall back on very close relations like family and very close friends, but it does nothing to make strangers become friends. In fact, quite the opposite. When the stakes get high, you become slow to trust and slow to take a chance on new people, especially people like those you meet in online games.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember CoH to have had a very unforgiving death penalty. As I remember it, players experienced significant XP loss after death in that game. You could even loose a level if the XP loss in a death exceeded the XP gained in the current level. Perhaps things changed in later updates of the games, but that's how I remember CoH.
P.S - I was a level 50 Martial Artist. They were, arguably, the hardest profession to level at the time.
They had an xp debt system where half your xp earned would go for the debt. I don't recall being able to lose a level though. I didn't lose a level or hear of it anyway.
edit- now that I think about it I don't think your could lose a level. When you died you didn't lose xp. You just had a debt where again half your xp would pay it off. So even if you just made a level and died, you had debt but still half your xp would go to your current level. So I don't think you could lose a level, just not gain xp as fast. Did that rambling make any sense?
edit - maybe debt isn't the right word. You lost half of all the xp you would normally earn till a certain amount was paid up, I'll put it that way.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
No it really didn't. Soloing means not grouping, that's it. I didn't need a group to go on missions, or to build my house. I never used medics when I ran missions. I could get the pieces I needed for crafting from vendors. I really didn't need to talk to, see or interact with another person, just their vendors. When I did it was because I wanted to not because I needed to.
SWG hugely encouraged soloing. You are right for materials I did need other players services, but I just used their vendors, the same as buying something off the auction in WoW which also encourages soloing. No real difference between an npc vendor from the and a player's vendor in the eyes of the customer. Everything I needed I just bought from a vendor.
edit - pre-cu I would even say it encouraged solo even more with the way xp in groups was split. In case you forgot the xp was split depending on did the most damage.
Sure does bring back some good memories and sad ones as well.. I think SWG allowed for both soloing and grouping equally.. However, I do think the rewards for being social in the game was awesome.. I started on day 1 when SWG launch (yes, I was lucky) and quickly met people in the Cantina.. I maintained to fool around as a musician, and dabbled in some combat.. It wasn't long that I saw the same faces again and again while I buffed them playing a tune..
Within months I joined their guild as their Master Musician and guild officer.. I had gotten to know most of the strangers over time and we all contributed to the Guild Hall, it's construction and future city.. However, the combat mechanics, the lack of Jedi took it's toll and people started leaving the game for greener pastures.. I was one of the last officers to leave the game, closed up the Guild Hall and said good bye..
What could of been, and what was still burns my butt.. DAMN YOU SOE for being just that stupid.. Ha Ha..
Back in the early days, when this genre was new, we didn't have things like Teamspeak, Vent, forums, or even a lot of the hype you'd find in gaming. We saw the worlds as things we had to not only enjoy, but to maintain. We also roleplayed more, and it was easy to do, because what you were behind the screen wasn't easily transmittable to other people playing the game. Who you were was what you portrayed. And so, portraying someone interesting to see and interesting to game with became part of playing the game.
But this wasn't an attitude that was harbored by other gaming cultures, like the FPS LAN culture that started to play the genre in the early 2000s. They gamed with people they knew, and they had an intuitive understanding that games weren't about subjective criteria like roleplay, but were only about objective results: kills/losses, quantifiable gear quality.
Also, the 'veil of ignorance' (borrowed from John Rawls) became lifted over time. People saw that the girl who played the prostitute was a middle-aged man. People saw that the wise elder was some silly kid who listened to Limp Bizkit. And, therefore, nobody really had any reason to care about the characters they see portrayed. They wanted to know--perhaps even needed to know--the player who played the character.
When we disenchant the 'character' (a work of fiction) into a 'toon' (a vehicle for a real person to consume content), there's really no incentive to group with interesting characters or well roleplayed characters. None of that stuff has any consequence for anything, but it can cause your group to wipe if the toon has no tank or DPS. And so, is it any wonder why your results-oriented, goal-oriented players have no reason to either create or give any thought to interesting characters or roleplayed characters?
Excellent post. Your thoughts really deserve wider exposure than just on this forum. This portion is particularly interesting to me. Do you think a game could deliberately socially engineer a return to the older character-focused attitudes with certain mechanics or do you think that this change is basically a done deal now no matter what devs do?
I saw this older, character-focused concept in the most unlikely of places: City of Heroes, which was also (ironically) one of the most solo-centric, casual and low-stakes grouping games out there.
Why was this so?
Well, there was no penalty for grouping with the odd guy, or the guy with marginal stats. For things like the Rikti Mothership, the more, the merrier.
It was also a great platform for creativity and individual expression, due to the character generator. People could express something interesting to see, and they supplemented it by equally interesting mannerisms in spatial.
Also, encounters were so easy, and the death penalties were so low-stakes, you didn't need to treat content as "serious business." If you wipe? Big deal...just fly back or get teleported.
I think we make the mistake often times of equating "high stakes" with "high social," because we assume that the stakes create the need to be social. Nothing can be further from the truth. The stakes create the need to fall back on very close relations like family and very close friends, but it does nothing to make strangers become friends. In fact, quite the opposite. When the stakes get high, you become slow to trust and slow to take a chance on new people, especially people like those you meet in online games.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember CoH to have had a very unforgiving death penalty. As I remember it, players experienced significant XP loss after death in that game. You could even loose a level if the XP loss in a death exceeded the XP gained in the current level. Perhaps things changed in later updates of the games, but that's how I remember CoH.
P.S - I was a level 50 Martial Artist. They were, arguably, the hardest profession to level at the time.
I don't know about XP loss, but they did have something called XP debt that had to be repayed before you'd gain experience at the normal rate. If you had debt, 50% of your XP would go to repaying the debt, and 50% would go towards your XP bar.
I didn't think XP debt was all that severe, but opinions can vary.
__________________________ "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
That's right it was called a debt. That's where I'm getting confused, it didn't affect or cause you to lose any xp your already earned, it just halved the amount you would earn going forward till it was paid off.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
Back in the early days, when this genre was new, we didn't have things like Teamspeak, Vent, forums, or even a lot of the hype you'd find in gaming. We saw the worlds as things we had to not only enjoy, but to maintain. We also roleplayed more, and it was easy to do, because what you were behind the screen wasn't easily transmittable to other people playing the game. Who you were was what you portrayed. And so, portraying someone interesting to see and interesting to game with became part of playing the game.
But this wasn't an attitude that was harbored by other gaming cultures, like the FPS LAN culture that started to play the genre in the early 2000s. They gamed with people they knew, and they had an intuitive understanding that games weren't about subjective criteria like roleplay, but were only about objective results: kills/losses, quantifiable gear quality.
Also, the 'veil of ignorance' (borrowed from John Rawls) became lifted over time. People saw that the girl who played the prostitute was a middle-aged man. People saw that the wise elder was some silly kid who listened to Limp Bizkit. And, therefore, nobody really had any reason to care about the characters they see portrayed. They wanted to know--perhaps even needed to know--the player who played the character.
When we disenchant the 'character' (a work of fiction) into a 'toon' (a vehicle for a real person to consume content), there's really no incentive to group with interesting characters or well roleplayed characters. None of that stuff has any consequence for anything, but it can cause your group to wipe if the toon has no tank or DPS. And so, is it any wonder why your results-oriented, goal-oriented players have no reason to either create or give any thought to interesting characters or roleplayed characters?
Excellent post. Your thoughts really deserve wider exposure than just on this forum. This portion is particularly interesting to me. Do you think a game could deliberately socially engineer a return to the older character-focused attitudes with certain mechanics or do you think that this change is basically a done deal now no matter what devs do?
I saw this older, character-focused concept in the most unlikely of places: City of Heroes, which was also (ironically) one of the most solo-centric, casual and low-stakes grouping games out there.
Why was this so?
Well, there was no penalty for grouping with the odd guy, or the guy with marginal stats. For things like the Rikti Mothership, the more, the merrier.
It was also a great platform for creativity and individual expression, due to the character generator. People could express something interesting to see, and they supplemented it by equally interesting mannerisms in spatial.
Also, encounters were so easy, and the death penalties were so low-stakes, you didn't need to treat content as "serious business." If you wipe? Big deal...just fly back or get teleported.
I think we make the mistake often times of equating "high stakes" with "high social," because we assume that the stakes create the need to be social. Nothing can be further from the truth. The stakes create the need to fall back on very close relations like family and very close friends, but it does nothing to make strangers become friends. In fact, quite the opposite. When the stakes get high, you become slow to trust and slow to take a chance on new people, especially people like those you meet in online games.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember CoH to have had a very unforgiving death penalty. As I remember it, players experienced significant XP loss after death in that game. You could even loose a level if the XP loss in a death exceeded the XP gained in the current level. Perhaps things changed in later updates of the games, but that's how I remember CoH.
P.S - I was a level 50 Martial Artist. They were, arguably, the hardest profession to level at the time.
I don't know about XP loss, but they did have something called XP debt that had to be repayed before you'd gain experience at the normal rate. If you had debt, 50% of your XP would go to repaying the debt, and 50% would go towards your XP bar.
I didn't think XP debt was all that severe, but opinions can vary.
It wasn't that severe in early stages but as you advanced in levels in became progressively severe and time consuming. XP loss wouldn't be considered to be much of a penalty if gaining XP was as easily acquired as they are in today's games, but in those days gaining XP and leveling was such a lasting endeavor that a "congrats" after leveling really meant something. Unlike todays games, dying in CoH was a universally anger inducing experience. Thinking back it may have been XP debt as you describe it, though for some reason i remember losing levels as well. or de-leveling as it was commonly referred. I may be confusing that with another game though.
Originally posted by 0effort<div may-blank-within"="">A small post I wrote a few hours ago,Since post-WoW-era there has been an increasing feeling that modern MMOrpgs are catering more to the solo experience...
If Furcadia, Asheron's Call, SWG, UO, EVE, Planet Entropia, There, Second Life and Toontown never existed then I'd say your rant had some basis in reality. However...
Did any of these release recently?
Of course not. They were all before WOW and all both supported and encouraged solo play.
In no way did SWG encourage solo play. That is probably the most ignorant statement about the game that I have ever heard. Everything from the crafting to the class training system required interdependence among players. In order to heal wounds, you needed either a doctor or an entertainer. There has never been an MMO that needed such complete community involvement.
You didn't need to be in a group to dance on that stage. You didn't need to be tethered to two other specific classes to create your house/museum. As for 'social', you didn't need to speak to that dancer nor the dancer speak to you in order to heal.
Your inability to differentiate between grouping and socialization isn't ignorance on my part. Sorry you got emotional over a comment about your video game.
Where did I say anything about socialization? I was replying directly to your statement . TRY READING WHAT YOU POSTED. I highlighted it for you in case you have issues differentiating between what you said and what you wrote in your reply . In no way did it encourage SOLO PLAY. You needed dancers and medics because wounds did not magically go away. You did not solo a whole lot without buffs from medics and crafted weapons. Smugglers couldn't slice without tools from a crafter. Most crafting professions were dependent on others for some pieces or parts. The economy was completely interdependent. SWG was a game that required other players to accomplish much of anything. You are right, you didn't need to group, but you certainly needed the service of others.
Which begs the question you replied about 1 game in his list where is your defense of the others?
I am sorry to break this to you and all your forced grouping compatriots but grouping and anti-social behaviors i.e. solo experiences has always been a part of the genre. And always will because developers understand that people, especially gamers are an anti-social beast or at the very least contain many types of gamers of which the soloer is apart.
Who is talking about forced grouping. I certainly didn't. I was talking about an interdependent economy. Gamers are anti-social? Really? Nice logical fallacy. Try not to make hasty generalizations in your arguments. Sure, people who like to solo are a part of any community. You could do that in SWG. You just needed the assistance or services of others before you went traipsing about. To me, it was the best of both worlds. I actually prefer it to the raid-centric community in most MMO's.
James T. Kirk: All she's got isn't good enough! What else ya got?
Back in the early days, when this genre was new, we didn't have things like Teamspeak, Vent, forums, or even a lot of the hype you'd find in gaming. We saw the worlds as things we had to not only enjoy, but to maintain. We also roleplayed more, and it was easy to do, because what you were behind the screen wasn't easily transmittable to other people playing the game. Who you were was what you portrayed. And so, portraying someone interesting to see and interesting to game with became part of playing the game.
But this wasn't an attitude that was harbored by other gaming cultures, like the FPS LAN culture that started to play the genre in the early 2000s. They gamed with people they knew, and they had an intuitive understanding that games weren't about subjective criteria like roleplay, but were only about objective results: kills/losses, quantifiable gear quality.
Also, the 'veil of ignorance' (borrowed from John Rawls) became lifted over time. People saw that the girl who played the prostitute was a middle-aged man. People saw that the wise elder was some silly kid who listened to Limp Bizkit. And, therefore, nobody really had any reason to care about the characters they see portrayed. They wanted to know--perhaps even needed to know--the player who played the character.
When we disenchant the 'character' (a work of fiction) into a 'toon' (a vehicle for a real person to consume content), there's really no incentive to group with interesting characters or well roleplayed characters. None of that stuff has any consequence for anything, but it can cause your group to wipe if the toon has no tank or DPS. And so, is it any wonder why your results-oriented, goal-oriented players have no reason to either create or give any thought to interesting characters or roleplayed characters?
Excellent post. Your thoughts really deserve wider exposure than just on this forum. This portion is particularly interesting to me. Do you think a game could deliberately socially engineer a return to the older character-focused attitudes with certain mechanics or do you think that this change is basically a done deal now no matter what devs do?
I saw this older, character-focused concept in the most unlikely of places: City of Heroes, which was also (ironically) one of the most solo-centric, casual and low-stakes grouping games out there.
Why was this so?
Well, there was no penalty for grouping with the odd guy, or the guy with marginal stats. For things like the Rikti Mothership, the more, the merrier.
It was also a great platform for creativity and individual expression, due to the character generator. People could express something interesting to see, and they supplemented it by equally interesting mannerisms in spatial.
Also, encounters were so easy, and the death penalties were so low-stakes, you didn't need to treat content as "serious business." If you wipe? Big deal...just fly back or get teleported.
I think we make the mistake often times of equating "high stakes" with "high social," because we assume that the stakes create the need to be social. Nothing can be further from the truth. The stakes create the need to fall back on very close relations like family and very close friends, but it does nothing to make strangers become friends. In fact, quite the opposite. When the stakes get high, you become slow to trust and slow to take a chance on new people, especially people like those you meet in online games.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember CoH to have had a very unforgiving death penalty. As I remember it, players experienced significant XP loss after death in that game. You could even loose a level if the XP loss in a death exceeded the XP gained in the current level. Perhaps things changed in later updates of the games, but that's how I remember CoH.
P.S - I was a level 50 Martial Artist. They were, arguably, the hardest profession to level at the time.
I don't know about XP loss, but they did have something called XP debt that had to be repayed before you'd gain experience at the normal rate. If you had debt, 50% of your XP would go to repaying the debt, and 50% would go towards your XP bar.
I didn't think XP debt was all that severe, but opinions can vary.
I got to the debt cap once, after a pretty spectacular series of failures. It was a mil or a mil and half, iirc. I was bemoaning it in a group, and a helpful player told me that I just needed to exempler down for awhile to boost the debt relief. An hour or two later, I was nearly caught up.
Very nice main post, btw. Should be an article, as it rings true. I know that our main super teams were quite social. If you were a player with a good sense of humor in chat, it didn't matter how competant you were in game, we'd carry you.
It was my advantage/disadvantage to have CoH be my first MMO.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
Games are very much faster these days. Everything has stopped being how it was when we had to regen our hp before a fight now we can move from mob to mob and even in dungeons the game play is very fast things speed along and if you take your time your group members will get irritated.
Things have changed a lot from the days of Everquest. I cannot say whether it is an improvement but it is drastically different. We all have to adapt and find fun where we can. Living in the past and taking about the glory days will not bring them back. Try to talk to people even when you might fear a rebuff .Get more thick skinned and play with strangers but you might need a flame retardant suit for WoW groups though.
In reality, these systems are designed so that you will -or must by reason of the game's mechanics- train every available skill the game has to offer. This is merely a poorly concealed way of keeping players paying and playing for as long as possible.
The end result is predictable; high-level characters that are "experts" in everything. You don't need help from anyone because you can do it all.
A classless system is diametrically opposed to community building, thus players feel lonely and alienated. A player that feels alone in a crowded world (truth be told, which is almost everybody) won't stay in that world long.
False. A redundant system is diametrically opposed to community building. A classless system is only redundant if it encourages generalization, rather than specialization.
Keep that in mind - specialization is the key to dependence. That can be achieved with a dedicated class system or with a build-based classless system. Both work and achieve the same goal and both have their merits when they succeed at doing so.
Comments
^ this
As a crafter in swg all the gathers I dealt with offered things to my vendor. I never needed to talk to them once we had made our deal. In fact I could spend all day working alone at my factories never talking to anyone because everything was sold by vendor in my shop. I talked to people because I wanted to and it was often by tells or they would come and just sit in my house while I worked chatting.
Combat was never forced grouping. Once you had the money to waste on comp armor you could solo rancor nests with no skill levels at all. Sure it chewed threw your armor doing it but you could. Grouping was never forced or required in swg you did it because you wanted to.
I don't think 'the antisocial' is a today thing. In fact, I think the 'antisocial' was well on its way long before today, and that today's 'solo play' is just a natural extension of the 'forced grouping' of yore. Now since this is a complicated subject, I'm going to break down my post into several parts. Sorry for the long post, but I hope it is a good read, and a fair read.
When did it change?
I think it changed in 2005 with Star Wars Galaxies. It changed when an entertainer--the class that was designed to be the 'social class' who entertained weary combat players--earned an award on Bria for being 'the most helpful player'.
The dancer/musician, named Briha, had dozens of players crowd around her for all hours, watching her dances and listening to her music, dispensing buffs to everyone who wanted them. And so when the GM was issuing awards, this player earned one.
There was only one problem, however. Briha's player never actually 'played' Briha. Briha was an automated script that was AFK.
Now the reason Briha was a turning point isn't because the player got an award. It was the reaction afterword. When real playing entertainers became insulted at the event, they were shouted down by the vast majority of players who thought the bot deserved the award. That's when things changed, from my perspective.
When a scripted, AFK macro gets to become 'most helpful player', and be applauded for it, we can't say we appreciate social play anymore.
Bots, bots of all kinds, started to invade SWG like locusts. You soon had doctor bots, sampler bots and crafter bots. You had bots whose sole purpose was to roll around on the floor so novice medics could heal them to get XP. And you had loot bots, who would sit at a spawn point and loot high value targets AFK. It was then--only when the achiever/combat demographic started to become affected by bots--did the developers want to clamp down on bots.
Support classes like entertainers had a glimmer of hope that they would ban buffbots...but they were mistaken. Soon afterword, SOE changed its own TOS making buffbots a protected class, the interference of which could lead a player to get banned for harassment, while lootbots could be ticketed as exploiters. This was, to me, a paradigm shift. But what was the paradigm that was shifting?
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Why did it change?
Even in SWG, the game described by one poster above as a most social game that made characters interdependent, we didn't really have much use for sociability. In fact, the interdependence only made us more antisocial, not less. And you can also see that the games which require the most interdependence (vanilla, 40-man WoW; EVE) are also the most antisocial, most hostile games. They also are the games with the most botting.
Why is this so?
1) Interdependence is too risky a variable to leave to strangers.
Well, interdependence and forced grouping is a double-edged sword. It makes you rely on other people to make your game better, but it also gives other people the power to really mess up your game. And so, we shouldn't be surprised when players don't take chances on strangers, and huddle around guild tags for our social circles; you get them on TeamSpeak and get to know them IRL before you allow them into your enjoyment. Those that don't aren't worth our time. But can we say this is promoting social play? Or is it, rather, being picky...paranoid picky...about what is in the larger scheme of things silly things to be paranoid about?
Why didn't this happen earlier in the Belle Epoque of EQ and UO?
2) Characters are Irrelevant, Only toons matter.
Back in the early days, when this genre was new, we didn't have things like Teamspeak, Vent, forums, or even a lot of the hype you'd find in gaming. We saw the worlds as things we had to not only enjoy, but to maintain. We also roleplayed more, and it was easy to do, because what you were behind the screen wasn't easily transmittable to other people playing the game. Who you were was what you portrayed. And so, portraying someone interesting to see and interesting to game with became part of playing the game.
But this wasn't an attitude that was harbored by other gaming cultures, like the FPS LAN culture that started to play the genre in the early 2000s. They gamed with people they knew, and they had an intuitive understanding that games weren't about subjective criteria like roleplay, but were only about objective results: kills/losses, quantifiable gear quality.
Also, the 'veil of ignorance' (borrowed from John Rawls) became lifted over time. People saw that the girl who played the prostitute was a middle-aged man. People saw that the wise elder was some silly kid who listened to Limp Bizkit. And, therefore, nobody really had any reason to care about the characters they see portrayed. They wanted to know--perhaps even needed to know--the player who played the character.
When we disenchant the 'character' (a work of fiction) into a 'toon' (a vehicle for a real person to consume content), there's really no incentive to group with interesting characters or well roleplayed characters. None of that stuff has any consequence for anything, but it can cause your group to wipe if the toon has no tank or DPS. And so, is it any wonder why your results-oriented, goal-oriented players have no reason to either create or give any thought to interesting characters or roleplayed characters?
Because any talk about the 'antisocial' atmosphere has to ask itself a serious question: what is all that interesting about the things you see and the things that get typed in local? Why is that something worth preserving? Because the whole Briha incident in SWG taught me that players these days really don't care about that stuff. When push comes to shove, all that matters are combat efficiency and quantifiable rewards....and if this sounds like a serious, business-minded mindset, you are probably right.
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Guilds as Firms and Groups as an Exercise in HR
Now if things like roleplay ability and sharing a fiction are no longer important, what is important? Efficiency, knowledge of the combat mechanics, adoption of professional norms (TeamSpeak and Vent use), and discipline with regard to time (showing up to do content, not leaving early, etc.). In other words, the same things you are judged on in the workplace are the same things you are judged on in the game space.
And so, we start to see guilds and groups start to treat their time in the games like a corporation would treat its time: as a machine designed to achieve prosperity in an efficient manner. And so, we start to vet our members like any good HR department, holding interviews, demanding quantifiable measures of competence, and getting to know the person who is pressing the keys and moving the mouse...maybe via a TeamSpeak interview or a Skype interview.
Because nobody--least of all the guilds--are interested in getting to know the work of fiction in spatial--they want to get to know the real person , but this implies a certain level of desire on the part of real person to be known in that way by a bunch of strangers. Some revel in it, but others are not interested for being exposed like that for the sake of some raid.
But even the interactions themselves are, as one would predict, too instrumental and too reflective of the worst aspects of life outside in 'meatspace'. Guild politics are, predictably, just as bad--if not worse--than office politics. People start to see how the buddy in real life gets more consideration than the buddy who was met online. People start to see how the girl gets privileges because she's a girl playing with a bunch of guys. People start to criticize X for not "pulling his weight" while they make excuses for Y. People start to resent the guy who takes off because of family stuff while others accept it...that sort of thing.
The famous guilds are the ones who are the most ruthless in terms of their HR: they will vet, expose, and have no qualms of cutting you if you don't tow the line. Then again, the combat engine in WoW doesn't care if you are jerks or not; it only cares about whether your 10 or 40 players are efficient. When the only thing that WoW cares about is how good your guild does in the combat engine, you tend to make decisions based on stats, rather than personality.
But you have to see that a large number--a significant number--see that kind of social experience counterproductive, a source of great frustration and really unnecessary. They don't want their free time to be an exercise in HR, performance reviews, nepotism and favoritism...they get that enough in their real lives. With the rise of Facebook, Twitter, Skype and so on in the late 2000s and early 2010s, people are saying "to heck with this....if I'm going to be online with someone, why do I need this stupidity of guild politics, loots and raids?"
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Conclusion: Alone Together? or Alone, but Together?
I'm using Sherry Turkle's title to offer two possibilities as to where social will go. Frankly, I don't see today's "solo-centric" MMO as much of a problem...instead, I see it as the natural progression of "group centric" and "interdependent" games which started to resemble a more anti-social, negative experience than a positive one.
Yes, today we are alone, isolated, but are we? We still have spatial, and we still group, but we group not because we have to, but because we want to.
Frankly, I haven't had this much fun playing multiplayer games since the fall of City of Heroes...and I have one thing to thank for it: LFG and LFR.
LFG and LFR gives me the opportunity to just play, without having to be vetted by some guild-HR department who is squeamish. LFG and LFR gives me the opportunity to make friends who I would have never met. LFG and LFR gives me the opportunity to demonstrate my skill, without having to somehow convince somebody who sits in judgment of me. And LFG and LFR helps me to help others achieve their goals, characters I wouldn't meet without LFG and LFR.
Some may say that these mechanics stifle sociability...but I would simply respond by saying, "how is begging a guild to take you more sociable?", or "how is succumbing to peer pressure by adopting voice chat more sociable?" or "how is being judged on the basis of your hardcore commitment to min/maxing sociable?" If hardcores resent the lack of sociability, we have to at least admit that the sociability wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
But we do, I think, need some sort of mechanic--some kind of matchmaker--to get us all interacting with each other again. That's why I think LFG and LFR is the wave of the future. Heck, it happens in reality with things like Match.com...why is it so bad when it comes to games?
/EndRant.
__________________________
"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
Props to you on a great post Beatnik. You raised so many points of interest that I agreed with and felt compelled to respond to but they were too many. I'd be here all day typing if I tried. The part I found most interesting is the difference by which different gamers view their avatars. To some of us they are a vehicle by which we immerse ourselves and interact in a virtual world. To others they are simply an object, tool, or mechanism by which to achieve an end result within a gaming platform. Very interesting read indeed.
Where did I say anything about socialization? I was replying directly to your statement . TRY READING WHAT YOU POSTED. I highlighted it for you in case you have issues differentiating between what you said and what you wrote in your reply
. In no way did it encourage SOLO PLAY. You needed dancers and medics because wounds did not magically go away. You did not solo a whole lot without buffs from medics and crafted weapons. Smugglers couldn't slice without tools from a crafter. Most crafting professions were dependent on others for some pieces or parts. The economy was completely interdependent. SWG was a game that required other players to accomplish much of anything. You are right, you didn't need to group, but you certainly needed the service of others.
James T. Kirk: All she's got isn't good enough! What else ya got?
That's so weird because I am sure I remember playing Asheron's Call for 6 years before WoW and another 5 years on and off post quitting WoW. I suppose when I first got into MMO gaming back in 1999 with Asheron's Call was really a figment of my imagination. So many false dreams.
Oh wait, I am correct. Asheron's Call catered to the solo player and it is considered one of the grandfathers of the genre.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
This all boils down to the players. It isn't the fault of developers that games seem so "antisocial"... That is all on the heads of the players. Of course each game I play, at least for me, seems to have lots of people that are willing to help, to group, and so on...
Go figure.
That Guild Wars 2 login screen knocked up my wife. Must be the second coming!
Which begs the question you replied about 1 game in his list where is your defense of the others?
I am sorry to break this to you and all your forced grouping compatriots but grouping and anti-social behaviors i.e. solo experiences has always been a part of the genre. And always will because developers understand that people, especially gamers are an anti-social beast or at the very least contain many types of gamers of which the soloer is apart.
Sandbox means open world, non-linear gaming PERIOD!
Subscription Gaming, especially MMO gaming is a Cash grab bigger then the most P2W cash shop!
Bring Back Exploration and lengthy progression times. RPG's have always been about the Journey not the destination!!!
Excellent post. Your thoughts really deserve wider exposure than just on this forum. This portion is particularly interesting to me. Do you think a game could deliberately socially engineer a return to the older character-focused attitudes with certain mechanics or do you think that this change is basically a done deal now no matter what devs do?
Did SWG require other players? Or did SWG require bots?
The problem with SWG is that the same things that created the need for other players were the same things that created the need for bots to replace players. I never saw such anger against players as I saw anger against entertainers, when they came out against buffbots. I never thought to think that such a vulnerable segment of players could be so reviled. But did it come as any surprise to anyone that whole classes of players in the cantinas and in the medbays started to get thrown under the bus for the needs of achievers and PvPers?
Yeah, I saw that whole "interdependence creates strong communities" in action in SWG...strongly against players and strongly promoting bots, more like it.
__________________________
"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
Player expectations are a joke. No wonder they are so unhappy.
Why can't the lazy developers create an MMO to cure cancer and make every player rich? Damn them! I miss the good old days!! Right guys??
I saw this older, character-focused concept in the most unlikely of places: City of Heroes, which was also (ironically) one of the most solo-centric, casual and low-stakes grouping games out there.
Why was this so?
Well, there was no penalty for grouping with the odd guy, or the guy with marginal stats. For things like the Rikti Mothership, the more, the merrier.
It was also a great platform for creativity and individual expression, due to the character generator. People could express something interesting to see, and they supplemented it by equally interesting mannerisms in spatial.
Also, encounters were so easy, and the death penalties were so low-stakes, you didn't need to treat content as "serious business." If you wipe? Big deal...just fly back or get teleported.
I think we make the mistake often times of equating "high stakes" with "high social," because we assume that the stakes create the need to be social. Nothing can be further from the truth. The stakes create the need to fall back on very close relations like family and very close friends, but it does nothing to make strangers become friends. In fact, quite the opposite. When the stakes get high, you become slow to trust and slow to take a chance on new people, especially people like those you meet in online games.
__________________________
"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
No it really didn't. Soloing means not grouping, that's it. I didn't need a group to go on missions, or to build my house. I never used medics when I ran missions. I could get the pieces I needed for crafting from vendors. I really didn't need to talk to, see or interact with another person, just their vendors. When I did it was because I wanted to not because I needed to.
SWG hugely encouraged soloing. You are right for materials I did need other players services, but I just used their vendors, the same as buying something off the auction in WoW which also encourages soloing. No real difference between an npc vendor from the and a player's vendor in the eyes of the customer. Everything I needed I just bought from a vendor.
edit - pre-cu I would even say it encouraged solo even more with the way xp in groups was split. In case you forgot the xp was split depending on did the most damage.
edit - and the point was soloing was encouraged in most/many games outside of EQ long before WoW. So the idea that someone post WoW games are more solo is only true if you ignore all the games that were not like EQ. If you look at the whole market it is false.
Everything revolves around guilds these days. You socialize in your guild, you tackle content with your guild, etc.
Devs want you in a guild because people who are in guilds are a lot less likely to quit the game.
Servers haven't mattered for a long time. In a way, servers were just a big guild.
http://gnomophobia.com
Good post and I agree.. I played CoX early on, but was too busy with multiple games to keep up with it.. Anyways.. I agree with the aspects of meeting standards for high stakes grouping.. That is why I hate games like WoW where optimal effeciency becomes the norm and expected.. Whatever happen to the days when people could just group together because you liked the company of that person, NOT because of that the characters skills bring to the battle..
This is also why I'm die hard set against restrictive group for dungeons and raids.. Yeah, I might want my wife or friend that is NOT an expert gamer to join me on a raid or dungeon run.. Yes, they may not meet standards, so bring along another person.. Is it really good social gaming when you limit your raid size to 20, telling others to get lost? It's why I liked games with soft grouping like GW2, or allow for slacking of players.. IMO, gaming is more competitive then it is social, which should not be confused as being the same..
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember CoH to have had a very unforgiving death penalty. As I remember it, players experienced significant XP loss after death in that game. You could even loose a level if the XP loss in a death exceeded the XP gained in the current level. Perhaps things changed in later updates of the games, but that's how I remember CoH.
P.S - I was a level 50 Martial Artist. They were, arguably, the hardest profession to level at the time.
They had an xp debt system where half your xp earned would go for the debt. I don't recall being able to lose a level though. I didn't lose a level or hear of it anyway.
edit- now that I think about it I don't think your could lose a level. When you died you didn't lose xp. You just had a debt where again half your xp would pay it off. So even if you just made a level and died, you had debt but still half your xp would go to your current level. So I don't think you could lose a level, just not gain xp as fast. Did that rambling make any sense?
edit - maybe debt isn't the right word. You lost half of all the xp you would normally earn till a certain amount was paid up, I'll put it that way.
Sure does bring back some good memories and sad ones as well.. I think SWG allowed for both soloing and grouping equally.. However, I do think the rewards for being social in the game was awesome.. I started on day 1 when SWG launch (yes, I was lucky) and quickly met people in the Cantina.. I maintained to fool around as a musician, and dabbled in some combat.. It wasn't long that I saw the same faces again and again while I buffed them playing a tune..
Within months I joined their guild as their Master Musician and guild officer.. I had gotten to know most of the strangers over time and we all contributed to the Guild Hall, it's construction and future city.. However, the combat mechanics, the lack of Jedi took it's toll and people started leaving the game for greener pastures.. I was one of the last officers to leave the game, closed up the Guild Hall and said good bye..
What could of been, and what was still burns my butt.. DAMN YOU SOE for being just that stupid.. Ha Ha..
I don't know about XP loss, but they did have something called XP debt that had to be repayed before you'd gain experience at the normal rate. If you had debt, 50% of your XP would go to repaying the debt, and 50% would go towards your XP bar.
I didn't think XP debt was all that severe, but opinions can vary.
__________________________
"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
That's right it was called a debt. That's where I'm getting confused, it didn't affect or cause you to lose any xp your already earned, it just halved the amount you would earn going forward till it was paid off.
It wasn't that severe in early stages but as you advanced in levels in became progressively severe and time consuming. XP loss wouldn't be considered to be much of a penalty if gaining XP was as easily acquired as they are in today's games, but in those days gaining XP and leveling was such a lasting endeavor that a "congrats" after leveling really meant something. Unlike todays games, dying in CoH was a universally anger inducing experience. Thinking back it may have been XP debt as you describe it, though for some reason i remember losing levels as well. or de-leveling as it was commonly referred. I may be confusing that with another game though.
Who is talking about forced grouping. I certainly didn't. I was talking about an interdependent economy. Gamers are anti-social? Really? Nice logical fallacy. Try not to make hasty generalizations in your arguments. Sure, people who like to solo are a part of any community. You could do that in SWG. You just needed the assistance or services of others before you went traipsing about. To me, it was the best of both worlds. I actually prefer it to the raid-centric community in most MMO's.
James T. Kirk: All she's got isn't good enough! What else ya got?
I got to the debt cap once, after a pretty spectacular series of failures. It was a mil or a mil and half, iirc. I was bemoaning it in a group, and a helpful player told me that I just needed to exempler down for awhile to boost the debt relief. An hour or two later, I was nearly caught up.
Very nice main post, btw. Should be an article, as it rings true. I know that our main super teams were quite social. If you were a player with a good sense of humor in chat, it didn't matter how competant you were in game, we'd carry you.
It was my advantage/disadvantage to have CoH be my first MMO.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
Games are very much faster these days. Everything has stopped being how it was when we had to regen our hp before a fight now we can move from mob to mob and even in dungeons the game play is very fast things speed along and if you take your time your group members will get irritated.
Things have changed a lot from the days of Everquest. I cannot say whether it is an improvement but it is drastically different. We all have to adapt and find fun where we can. Living in the past and taking about the glory days will not bring them back. Try to talk to people even when you might fear a rebuff .Get more thick skinned and play with strangers but you might need a flame retardant suit for WoW groups though.
False. A redundant system is diametrically opposed to community building. A classless system is only redundant if it encourages generalization, rather than specialization.
Keep that in mind - specialization is the key to dependence. That can be achieved with a dedicated class system or with a build-based classless system. Both work and achieve the same goal and both have their merits when they succeed at doing so.