Forcing group content on casuals, a habit of MMO Devs

Ralphie2449

MMOrpgs might have MMO in their genre but that doesnt stop people from treating the game as an online rpg with a friend or two, if anything over the years we see more people play the game with a very solo mindset.

And with the existence of solo que systems for completing group content it means you can treat the other players as npcs who are there to help you complete the dungeon and get the loot you are hoping for, they are there for your convenience, not because you want to meet new people or make friends, they are means to an end. That is why I am including solo que group content as part of the solo playstyle, I am not referring to people who never touch anykind of group content.

People have been memeing frequently over the lack of social interactions in group content with people never talking or at best throwing a "hi" and never speaking again, that is the majority of the solo que experience which often dominates in numbers.

So if we can clearly see more and more people enjoying mmorpgs with a solo mindset why are many players and even some devs unable to accept that evolution and instead try to force group content?

I keep reading many posts and even developer articles on mmorpgs about how they are going to bring back the social nature and how their game is all about the community and that oldstyle rpg feeling where you need each other to survive! etc etc, and all that makes me wonder why do they keep trying to force that outdated model when clearly you have a huge amount of players who dont care about the social part of mmorpgs and just enjoy the online gameplay and nature of them.

I can only imagine many of those had a lot of great experiences back at the early stages of mmorpgs and are now desperate to get them back, but this isnt 2004 anymore, the entire community is nothing like it was back then and that includes the mmorpg playerbase, this isnt just because servers arent a small village like community or solo que, more and more people enjoy gaming these days and the numbers are only increasing, meaning it was inevitable we would reach such a point where you are surrounded by strangers, often strangers who have their own goals and dont give a damn about your or your life.

Yet again and again you see developers trying to force people into group content, because they have decided that group content is the be all end all of mmorpgs even when the amounts of solo focused players keeps rising.
Why so focused on getting people to play your group content when you could just create solo/solo que content that more people would experience and enjoy than the minority of high end pvers/pvpers.

Devs often spend so much time in creating raids that a big part of the playerbase doesnt touch, why not create a solo play version of said raids in order to make the content accessible to all and also suddenly have a form of challenging solo content. If anything a raid that only has one player is far easier to tune and thus can be far harder than the group version, yet many would still treat the group version as "special" even though it would be the lower difficulty version.

Why have you decided that any form of solo content is meant to be a joke with 0 difficulty and the only difficult content in an mmorpg should be group content?

Specifically high end organized group content which is something only a minority touches and experiences since most players just want to login, que and have fun and get a reward for their time. Instead of dealing with organized schedules, people and certain obnoxious tryhard types, the social wall is the main reason they dont bother with your well designed high end group content so why not start designing content with those people in mind?

I ll speak for myself, I enjoy mmorpgs, specifically I enjoy many parts of them, I enjoy crafting and farming mats, I enjoy the occasional brainless grinding required for a goal, I enjoy unique cool events, I enjoy high dungeons and raids as well as casual pvp but at the core, I enjoy power progression and all those are a means to achieve that.

I care little about the social aspect, I like the online aspect because I get to kill actual people instead of dumb computer scripts or because my time is always rewarded with something I will have until the servers are shut down, I ve gone through countless guilds over the years and even though there were many times it was incredibly fun, they often die, disband, implode etc and you are back to square one of having to restart this annoying, tiring social process.

I often keep seeing this divide between casual and hardcore blowing up, the devs decide that all the cool power rewards will be behind high end group content since they decide group content is the only content allowed to be difficulte, and casual content rewards will be inferior even if it requires possibly weeks of grinding simply because they decided it should lack difficulty simply by the nature that it is solo. I am also getting the feeling some see casuals as people who just farm mounts and outfits and dont care about power progression at all which is so very wrong.

So the question is, why are some devs and people having such a hard time recognizing that the modern mmorpg players are not the same as years ago yet insist on focusing on social, community and group aspects while the numbers of people who care little about those increases?

Why is mmorpg design seem to be stuck in the past instead of embracing the future?

Amaranthar

I respect your choice of game play. 
While I am one of the posters here that want the more social design, I also enjoy soloing sometimes. 
I like the challenge in a Sandbox setting, but I agree that it's very hard to find on a regular basis in the Levelling games due to the Power Gaps. 
Except with Scaling, which I don't like either because it limits the challenge (among other things). 

You say that you enjoy Power Progression, so I want to ask...
Do you think that you can only enjoy it in a Level Based Game with those huge Power Gaps? I know that even in UO, there was "power gaming." That's always been around. But it's definitely different when the huge Power Gap gains are all the way along your path to Max. 

As far as socialness, I think it's good to think about *WHY* so many Gamers don't want to do it, and prefer soloing. 
I think the answers to that offer insight into how to build a social game. 

Edit to add:
People are, by our nature, social animals. Why that falls flat sometimes in RL is directly related to this MMO situation, but to a less often extent. In MMOs, it's full time for most gamers. 

Amaranthar

I just wanted to say another thing. 
These Level Grind games are not made for social activities in the wider game world. 
They are exclusionary, by their very nature, in general. 
It never surprised me that they turned out the way they have. 

Lost are the close nit communities of those old games, not because people don't want that, but because it was forged by the Power Gap design. 

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Ralphie2449

tzervo said:

2) being a solo player in an MMO wanting challenging content is probably not casual (whatever that term means) and probably a small demographic

Casual is indeed a complicated word, I just couldnt find another more fitting word for the title.

The thing is I dont feel challenging solo content is anti-casual, it is content that can unlike raiding, be accessed at the time of your own choosing, with no need to deal with other people and no consequences for failure, you just respawn and try again if you feel like it.

If let's say a solo option for hard mode raid was available, tuned specifically to one player and with the same mechanics for your role, that would be challenging solo content that can be accessed by anyone, so it is something people would at least try since they have nothing to lose, it would be content after all to do after you finished most of the story and grinds of the game.

What i am saying, that would be available content for people to do, content that is not available to many of those people right now due to the social grouping requirements.

Scot

Let me change that title for you:

-Discussion / Forcing solo content on team players, a habit of MMO Devs-

Ralphie the situation you are talking about does not exist. MMORPG's were once about grouping they no longer are. Let me apologise to you that MMORPG's still have MMO in the title. Time for some eye rolling I think.

You seem to understand that MMORPG's have gone down the solo route since WoW came out, well that was a continuing process which has washed out nearly all group content, one that has not yet finished. It looks like you spotted some team play in a MMO and then came on here to complain about it, hopefully you can understand why I think that's taking the proverbial.

You and your casuals won, yet you come on here to complain about the vestiges of group play, quite astonishing.

nurso

Ralphie2449 said:

What i am saying, that would be available content for people to do, content that is not available to many of those people right now due to the social grouping requirements.

Who says that the developers want all playstyles to be able to participate?

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Slapshot1188

You use the word Forcing.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

  

Rungar

Wargfoot said:

Devil's Advocate: Why would a MMORPG be solo friendly when numerous single player titles exist?

Devil's Advocate: How do you balance a game for solo friendly and group play.  Seems one group is crying too easy at the time the other group is crying too hard.

its actually quite simple to balance a game for solo and grouping. All you need is situational mitigation ( i.e mages tank and deal magic, warriors tank and deal physical, rogues don't tank at all but can evade some attacks better with situational magic/physical attacks). This makes some enemies easy and some enemies hard depending on what your suited for. 

get rid of "experience" and "healing" and have every enemy drop useful resources instead and it will literally work itself out if you went and put even a little thought into the enemy design. 

everyone can solo, but not everyone can solo all the time and different characters can solo different things. You might need those resources though so you can either get help or purchase them from someone else. 

IMO mmo designers prefer iteration to thoughtful design and that's why the genre is stagnant and dead.   



  

Sovrath

Sorry I'm going to disagree. There's no such thing as "forced grouping" if the game is a grouping game.

That's like playing football and complaining about force tackling or joining a volleyball league and complaining you can't just play 1 v 1.

And yes I've mostly soloed in mmorpg's. In Lineage 2, my first mmorpg, I would solo most of the time. Sometimes it was difficult but I'd make due. when I had issues or could get a duo or larger group I would. If I couldn't then I'd just do content that I could tackle.

But I did my due diligence, learned that mmorpg's were grouping games and went in know what I was in for.

Does that mean mmorpg's shouldn't have solo content? No. But there's no forced anything. The game is the game. It has what it has and players either play the game or find another game.

There's no reason that every game needs to cater to EVERY person or playstyle.

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ConstantineMerus

Wargfoot said:

Sovrath said:

Sorry I'm going to disagree. There's no such thing as "forced grouping" if the game is a grouping game.

It is an argument that carries over from PvP.
You have people logging into PvP games and anytime they get attacked it is "forced PvP".

Stop forcing your opinions on me. 

Rungar

there is a certain level of insanity considering mmo's main function is generally not supported by the players. 

I think the reason why has as much to do with the games design as it has to do with player behavior. They aren's compelling or dynamic enough for players to consider investment in other players unless absolutely necessary. 

for instance show me one mmo that has npc guilds players can join that have all the benefits of player guilds but much less drama and cliquieness of the player versions.  

doesnt exist. 

similarly they design the games with a role in mind which is meant to promote interdependence but only achieves dependence since most players dont like to play pure support classes like tanks and healers. Most players want to play a damage dealer. 

its a bad design but its repeated over and over and over. Sometimes you have to change the design. 

Sovrath

Rungar said:

there is a certain level of insanity considering mmo's main function is generally not supported by the players. 

I think the reason why has as much to do with the games design as it has to do with player behavior. They aren's compelling or dynamic enough for players to consider investment in other players unless absolutely necessary. 

for instance show me one mmo that has npc guilds players can join that have all the benefits of player guilds but much less drama and cliquieness of the player versions.  

doesnt exist. 

similarly they design the games with a role in mind which is meant to promote interdependence but only achieves dependence since most players dont like to play pure support classes like tanks and healers. Most players want to play a damage dealer. 

its a bad design but its repeated over and over and over. Sometimes you have to change the design. 

I think it's because it's not clear what an mmorpg, or any mmorpg, is.

These games, at least when i started, were touted as virtual worlds.

However, for the most part, they really aren't. Especially as game developers tried to add more story related content like solo role playing games. Suddenly there is all this story which is best experienced solo.

At least with how they are usually set up.

So there is confusion. Are these games that have some multiplayer or are they multiplayer games?

Are they role playing games with a story that needs to be experienced solo? Are they really supposed to be worlds?

If they are worlds then some stuff is going to be solo and some stuff grouped and you get to experience all of it if you want or only some of it.

I think because mmorpg's have tried to cater to such a broad group of people that each group expects to have their needs met in the must fleshed out way possible. 

Which really isn't possible.

Rungar

its very possible but not with the D&D/Everquest design.  

cameltosis

Ralphie2449 said:

<snip>

People have been memeing frequently over the lack of social interactions in group content with people never talking or at best throwing a "hi" and never speaking again, that is the majority of the solo que experience which often dominates in numbers.

So if we can clearly see more and more people enjoying mmorpgs with a solo mindset why are many players and even some devs unable to accept that evolution and instead try to force group content?

<snip>

So the question is, why are some devs and people having such a hard time recognizing that the modern mmorpg players are not the same as years ago yet insist on focusing on social, community and group aspects while the numbers of people who care little about those increases?

Why is mmorpg design seem to be stuck in the past instead of embracing the future?

I liked your post, and this is a good subject to discuss, even if it is a bit of a dead horse around here.

However, there are a whole bunch of assumptions throughout your post that I disagree with, so I'll try to be brief.

1) Social Interaction is not the same as Forced Grouping

Devs wishing to bring back a sense of community and social interaction is not the same thing as forced grouping. Grouping teaches teamwork, not social skills. A desire to build a game that has a good community is not about grouping. From a business point of view, it is about retention. A good community increases retention.

2) This is the Massively Multiplayer genre, if you aren't designing your game around that feature, then you're doing it wrong.

The entire point of this genre is to be able to play with 100s of other players. It's the unique selling point. So, if you aren't going to make use of that feature, why bother making an MMO in the first place? Just make a normal multiplayer game or single player game and save yourself the trouble. I'm not saying that the multiplayer should be forced, but it should be highly encouraged as well as being way more accessible than it currently is.

3) Single Player mechanics aren't good in a Multiplayer environment

Most massively multiplayer RPGs are designed around single player mechanics. That shouldn't be surprising, you make what you know and we all know how single player RPGs work. However, many single player mechanics are harmful in a multiplayer environment.

So, we shouldn't be surprised that most MMOs have trended towards being basically single player games. I do not blame the community, nor do I think the community has really changed all that much. I just think that all we are offered is basically a single player experience. Blame WoW and the themepark trend.

4) It is impossible to measure a potential market

You keep on saying that the genre and the market has evolved into a single-player-with-friends mindset. I disagree. I think the market as a whole is exactly the same as it has always been, humans really don't evolve all that quickly. I don't think we're any less social, or any dumber, than we were 15 years ago. Smart phones may have killed our youth's attention spans and social skills, but to me that makes it more important that MMORPGs become more social.

So, I firmly believe that more social mmos with more of a group focus could find a decent market.

But how do you measure a potential market?

There has never been a AAA sandbox MMORPG. Ever. (*caveat: by a western studio. i dont know if the east ever made one). That makes it impossible to say whether building a sandbox is a good idea or not. It makes investors nervous, so they won't invest. So, we end up with todays situation, where you make assumptions about the market being solo-focused, when the reality is that there are only solo games so we don't know how group games would work.

At the end of the day, I keep coming back to this idea: with the MMO market stagnating, this is the perfect time to be experimenting again.

Whether a group-focused game would work well, or a sandbox, or more sci-fi themes, we wont know until they are tried. If you build a group-focused game on single player mechanics, well, we know that won't work because we've seen those games fail. But if you built a group-focused game built around group-focused mechanics? We've seen that work very well indeed in other genres, so I have a hunch the first MMORPG to do it will probably be very successful.

Iselin

There is nothing about MMORPGs that requires group content. They are nothing more than shared virtual environments where you can see other players in the world... that's it.

Neither exclusively soloing them nor exclusively grouping in them is "doing it wrong."

You do have a bunch of people who by virtue of sharing the same virtual space could group up and do things they couldn't do by themselves so you might as well create some of that content. But you also have people logging in at odd hours when their friends are not on so if you're smart, you also create something they can do by themselves. The trick is not to be too obviously biased with awesome rewards for one type of game play and token shit for the other type.

As to raid-level solo content, the OP obviously hasn't played ESO because they did just that back in 2015. When they added Orsinium, part of that DLC was the Maelstrom Arena which is a multi stage solo raid with normal and veteran difficulties. They added a second one, Vateshra Hollows back in 2020. Neither of those is easy even in normal difficulty. Even WOW saw that as a good thing which is why they added Torghast to Shadowlands.

As to forcing anything on anyone. That's a silly thing to say and what people usually mean by that is that there are some specific rewards in different types of content that they can't have because they don't like or do that type of content.

ESO has a huge world with only one zone reserved for PvP-only, Cyrodiil. People who don't PvP have been whining for years about being "forced out" of seeing Cyrodiil. Some PVPers also whine because some of the gear they crave can only be gotten from PvE dungeons.

What MMORPGs should have is lots of meaningful content that caters to a variety of different play styles. But even when they do that, there will always be whining about content you don't like and won't do. If you bite the bullet and do it because you really, really want the rewards from that content, why they "forced you to do it."

Utinni

What games are going back to group focused gameplay required? Only ones I've seen probably won't even launch.

kjempff

First of all, there is no such thing as "the entire mmorpg community". It is a big mess of vastly different preferances; you can't even say casuals and hardcore belongs to any specific taste. You can not make a game that please everyone, some want a single player rpg in a shared world, some want pvp, some want grouping, some want survival style, some wantfreedom, some want to follow a story. All a developer can do is make a game that they like and be aware of which brackets to stay within with that design choice, and then hope the right players will come and the wrong will understand that it is not for them.

Personally, I find games that focus on grouping as the only social element kinda narrow design. There are so many other social tecniques to use that does lock players in such a claustrophobic setup.. While still achieving to create social connections between players.

Slapshot1188

Iselin said:

What MMORPGs should have is lots of meaningful content that caters to a variety of different play styles. 

Given unlimited resources and time I would say sure, but both of those are limited today.  So do you want to be a Jack of All Trades And a Master of None?

I think the opposite is the problem.  Games today want to be all things to all people, and end up doing all that, half-assed.  You can literally see game proposals that claim to be all things to all people.

I'd rather a team be realistic about what it can do, and pick something to do well instead of a lot of shallow paths.

But there can be a place for those catch-all games as well... variety of choice is a good thing.

Kyleran

Rungar said:

for instance show me one mmo that has npc guilds players can join that have all the benefits of player guilds but much less drama and cliquieness of the player versions.  

doesnt exist. 

Well, EVE basically does have what you are asking for, NPC corps but they do have pluses and minuses compared to player run corps. 

Heck, only players in NPC corps are immune from being wardecced, a really big plus to my way of thinking.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect both options to be identical in terms of benefits, realize developers are trying to encourage people to socialize which IMO is the right thing to do from their perspective.

People who play together tend to stay together...or so the thinking goes.

Amaranthar

cameltosis said:

Ralphie2449 said:

<snip>

(snip)

However, there are a whole bunch of assumptions throughout your post that I disagree with, so I'll try to be brief.

(snip)

omg....




(I haven't read your post yet, but always do. just couldn't pass that one up, lol.)

Iselin

Slapshot1188 said:

Iselin said:

What MMORPGs should have is lots of meaningful content that caters to a variety of different play styles. 

Given unlimited resources and time I would say sure, but both of those are limited today.  

The most successful MMOs that draw large crowds year after year, and turn a good profit do just that. It's the ulltra-focused, niche ones that don't do very well at all.

Maybe studios shouldn't try to do MMOs unless they're willing and able to do the whole thing? Just a thought.

The_Korrigan

I personally have a problem to understand the incompatibility between "group" and "casual" content. You can without any doubt have casual group content, most MMOs are filled to the brim with it.

Or is it rather forcing group content on antisocial players ?

ConstantineMerus

Slapshot1188 said:

Iselin said:

What MMORPGs should have is lots of meaningful content that caters to a variety of different play styles. 

Given unlimited resources and time I would say sure, but both of those are limited today.  So do you want to be a Jack of All Trades And a Master of None?

I think the opposite is the problem.  Games today want to be all things to all people, and end up doing all that, half-assed.  You can literally see game proposals that claim to be all things to all people.

I'd rather a team be realistic about what it can do, and pick something to do well instead of a lot of shallow paths.

But there can be a place for those catch-all games as well... variety of choice is a good thing.

I agree with you here. I always tell people you have to do one thing right, then try to do that one thing better than everybody else. The reason WoW broke all records was because they did raiding better than anyone else. Even when most people couldn't get into the raids they still admired the game. It was a carrot that got millions of people excited. Besides that one feature, I believe WoW got new nothing to offer. 

Although their other modes of gaming surpassed many other games as well, because it is Blizzard and they had the money for it. But their crafting sucked compared to SWG, PvP was awful compared to DAoC, EQ and EQ2 both provide a more enjoyable leveling experience, and the game had zero economy and politics compared to EVE.

They tried to work on those features over the years but to not much success. Raiding is their driving force.