I pose this question in light of my own conclusions about the majority of 'modern' MMOs, where the entire set of 'content' that one can play is fashioned to be from the perspective of a single player as opposed to multiple players. Whether we're talking about Tabula Rasa or talking about Vanguard, or Everquest 2 or even World of Warcraft. Each one of these MMOs can be effectively played solo with no need to even have the chat window open save for to bicker with others if one so chooses. This observation makes me wonder where MMO developers went wrong, by that I mean that the entire point of MMOs is the MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER aspect of the 'genre' (I use this loosely), where you're stuck with strangers and suppose to cooperate in some function to win out over extraordinary odds. Yet, this doesn't pan out like it anymore. I doubt it has anything to do with the playerbases getting older otherwise people would become total shut-ins in real life, so I'm puzzled by this development. Is it because it makes development easier for the companies? Or is it because they're trying to appeal to the largest segments of the market? I have my own ideas on it, but I rather see what you all have to say. -- Brede
I pose this question in light of my own conclusions about the majority of 'modern' MMOs, where the entire set of 'content' that one can play is fashioned to be from the perspective of a single player as opposed to multiple players. Whether we're talking about Tabula Rasa or talking about Vanguard, or Everquest 2 or even World of Warcraft. Each one of these MMOs can be effectively played solo with no need to even have the chat window open save for to bicker with others if one so chooses. This observation makes me wonder where MMO developers went wrong, by that I mean that the entire point of MMOs is the MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER aspect of the 'genre' (I use this loosely), where you're stuck with strangers and suppose to cooperate in some function to win out over extraordinary odds. Yet, this doesn't pan out like it anymore. I doubt it has anything to do with the playerbases getting older otherwise people would become total shut-ins in real life, so I'm puzzled by this development. Is it because it makes development easier for the companies? Or is it because they're trying to appeal to the largest segments of the market? I have my own ideas on it, but I rather see what you all have to say. -- Brede
Why do think they won't "wrong" just cause you can solo?
Havn't read the entire thread, but a select few posts toward the beginning and the end, but tossing my 2 cents in anyway.
From my reading the argument seems to be based on the idea that what is happening in mmo's is contradictory to semantics, or that becomes one is capable of doing tasks within the "Massive" game world alone, one is not interacting with the players within the game world online, thus making it more of a single player experience. But by all means, picking apart the word multiplayer one would end up with multiple players. There is nothing within the terms dictating the idea that one must interact with others, only that others exist. In old school games, one also had the option of disassociating themselves from the rest of the players on their particular server only the gameplay style of say, everquest, led to the idea that it would be better to take on something as a party. There are many situations in eq that i ended up doing things on my own successfully without interacting with another player. Does this make that experience a, "singleplayer," one? Nobody was prevented from coming into the area, and i was well aware of the possibility that somebody would come into the area and compete with me. That they didn't made the task -easier- for me.
In the modern mmo nothing stops you from partying with others or playing with others. Its your choice. Just seek out others who share this desire and things will work out. Its not always been easy, it never has been. Part of being in a party is trusting other people to do things in a way that benefits the whole party, and some people (point and case, a friend of mine who picked up ffxi and was reluctant when i told him the easiest way to level was to find a pick up group) have difficulties on the trust part.
The simple view I hold is that things are never made more difficult by making the primary mode of leveling through parties, but that it simply shifts partying from one hand to another. On one hand you have to have faith and knowledge in your own abilities, on the other you need to have faith in somebody elses and how it functions with your own.
Originally posted by EMortalOne Why do think they won't "wrong" just cause you can solo?
If you bothered to read the other posts I made earlier on, you'd notice that I am a soloer myself, but that I think the exclusive catering to the soloer makes MMOs into singleplayer games that are not really worth the money. Mass Effect is a singleplayer game, but it far outshines anything that any MMO offers in regards of content. Then there are the whole slew of God Games out there (Sims, Spore (soon), and etc) that give a player far more complex reactions than kill Nth X-thing.
The only advantage that MMOs have over singleplayer games is the fact that they can be persistent for thousands of objective persons, which these persons can manipulate that persistence together or alone to produce unintended (but not game breaking) results. Here's the catch: no MMO to date has fully realized it. You might be thinking, who gives a flying flip I just want my phat lewtz or whatever, but many folks that have been either playing MMOs or building them (MUDs in particular) are beginning to realize (along with some mathematicians and economists) that that this underlying feature of persistence provides not only a new way to play, but also a new way to learn, and possibly a new way to consider human nature. In all aspects, MMOs are trivial save for the persistence feature. If any developer would take the time to consider that feature in light of the massively multiplayer portion of it, then their games may take a different life on their own, giving tools to players to interact with each other and their environment (see, those pixels and bits are an environment. More specifically a set.) in ways that they may not readably predict nor really would want to predict.
In the end, solo play is the cheap (and weak minded) developer's way out just as much as the forced grouping (btw, I never asserted forced grouping, every one else did, so I find it amusing people try to assume that I did when the thread is a log of who posted what and it seems no one takes the time to look... tsk tsk.), and it leads to the complete bastardization of the MMO 'genre.'
Originally posted by nomadian Out of curiosity, having never played muds but knowing mmos were heavily influenced by them; were they or could they be played solo?
Yes, we used a method for clients called multiplay, where you could login with three or four characters which were specialized in a certain class, usually three was just what you needed (tank, healer, thief/rogue (for traps and locks)), but a fourth was good when you had a mob with insane hp (mage is great at this...). Another method was to multiclass, but this itself was not very solo friendly, at least on the way up to max level, because you'd take an experience point penalty overall in your levels (basically, a Mage versus a duo-classed Mage/Fighter would level easier by far, and a Mage/Fighter would level easier than a Mage/Fighter/Cleric just as an example). Largely, most of the content was solo-able outside of these two methods, but only if you had your head on straight (meaning you used your class's skills to their fullest) and were willing to take dying well once in a while (mage classes especially had to deal with this in early levels usually). All in all, MUDs by their design were never solo-friendly and very few ever catered to it. But there was no forced grouping, just no botting (which was often discouraged with an admin's ban hammer) and/or really being a goof and not watching the screen.
UsualSuspect "MMO's have been and should be focused primarily on multiplayer action." As others have said - Why do you feel YOU can dictate what an MMO should or shouldn't be?
I'm not dictating, the name 'MMO' is dictating what the game should be. Massively Multiplayer. Like, lets say you went out and bought Crysis because its a single player game, then you got home and found out that to progress in it you had to have 5 other people playing too. How would you feel about that? You paid for a single player game focused on multiplayer.
Same thing with MMO's. I buy an MMO because its a multiplayer game, yet when I get them home I find out that most of the game is spent in single player mode. Why have I not got the right to be annoyed about that? I just bought EQ2 with all its expansions expecting a great multiplayer experience, but I've seen very few other players and after 30 levels I still haven't been offered a group or had anyone accept to be in mine. I've been told most people now just solo play right up to Level 80. Why is it sold as a multiplayer game? I want my money back!
Just as a side note on EQ2, in the release of EQ2 it was much grouping but now grouping almost doesnt exist any longer, this game has changed so much in this regard, at the relaese of the Kunark expansion(latest), I quit in disgust to the total dominace of these solo quest series...SOE destroyed a perfectly alright game by introducing to much solo stuff..
The idea that we all wan't to solo is dominating the minds of almost ALL big MMO companies..and I DO NOT like it..It creates empty barren worlds with lot's of zombies that you CAN'T even KILL, due to it beiing a PVE server..
I think more games need to get rid of the artificial grouping limits. There should be downsides to being in too large of a group (more vunerable to AoE, less loot/XP). 40 man raids means semi-casual players are forced to bring 40 people else they believe the task to be impossible (hardcore players are a notable exception, but...), casual players could wait outside the instance until 60 people are gathered and jump right in. Or perhaps talk to a group already in the process and join that way.
As for solo content? Solo content is good, but the important part to making an MMO good is dynamic content. So if, say, people aren't doing enough of a collective effort to protect a particular town from monster raids, they can't just randomly kill monsters and collect loot. So while the activity may be primarily solo, they still have to work collectively for mutual gain, only in a less rigid "we're pounding on the same monster together" role.
Thank you for starting this thread as it touches on many of the reasons why I recently quit WoW after 3 years of playing it.
I never played UO or Everquest and came to WoW from a FPS background (Quake 1 and Enemy Territory and now Enemy Territory: Quake Wars). I find that theres more group work required and more multiplayer content in most modern FPS games than mmog's currently. If you want solo content go play Oblivion.
Having said that I firmly believe the levelling process should be solo/questing (with a good storyline) with the option for group play that rewards grouping and doing instances during the levelling process but you aren't forced to do it. It seems most people in this thread are focusing on the levelling aspect exclusively. The major flaw in forcing people to group during the levelling process is that once a game/expansion has been out for awhile the amount of new players is much fewer. While people levelling alts does make up for this somewhat, it is just harder to find groups the longer the game or the latest expansion has been out. When I took the first on my lvl 60 characters to lvl 70 in the Burning Crusade it was incredibly easy to find groups for anything because the expansion had just been released and the whole server population was at the same level. Now when I decided to level my other lvl 60 character to 70 4 months later it was much harder to find groups so I mostly solo'ed my way to lvl 70.
It is just not mmog's being turned into glorified single player games with a monthly subscription, all aspects of WoW are being/have been miniaturised. PvP in wow is less massive than your average Battlefield server. 2 v 2 arena is by far the most common form of PvP in WoW even though when Burning Crusade and ranked arenas were released Blizzard originally clearly intended 5 v 5 arena to be the centrepiece but organising 4 other people and working on team work and strategies was too hard for all these players who have such an action packed, rock'n'roll lifestyle that anything requires any time or effort is just too hard. It is just easier to get 1 other person and do 2 v 2 arena than getting 5 players. 2 v 2 is a lot more simple and easier to organise than 5 v 5. And lets not forget that PvP will be the major selling point of expanding mmorpg's to new players. PvP is the future of mmorpg's. Warhammer is heavily marketed to the PvP type.
WoW PvP has been instanced focused for the last 3 years now. The original Battleground system in WoW has been further handicapped by forcing people who group up and enter the Battleground as a group to only playing against other organised groups. As a result people wishing to play with their friends/guildies/ now have incredibly long queue wait times while those who single queue, who don't work together or have a strategy to win, get instant queues. There is no motivation, incentive or benefit in grouping up and working out a strategy to win these instanced battlegrounds anymore. Not only that, all those players who are too lazy (sorry, everyone who plays WoW now has a jet set, high flying corporate lifestyle and are too busy to put more than 5 mins a month into the game) to find groups claim that grouping up and working together is a team is cheating.
And there you have the epitome of how mmog's have changed and developlers have succumb to the solo player whingers that grouping up and working together is now viewed as cheating in WoW PvP.
Its just not PvP and levelling that has been turned into solo play. WoW would make up for its easy levelling process by having a lot more developed and mature end-game content. There were issues with making levelling so easy and then raising the bar by a huge margin for raiding (hello the ubiquitous badly player night elf hunter failing miserably in groups/raiding). But patch after patch in WoW has made end game raiding more trivial and less important. It is obvious that PvE raid content is on the way out. In a year or two large scale raiding will be a thing of the past in mmorpg's or at the very best a very minor aspect of the game. I think later expansions of WoW will have you solo'ing all the "end-game" bosses. Warcraft 3 will end up being more massive than WoW.
I don't think grouping can ever coexist with soloing unless there used in differently in content.
You've to be really honest with yourself and ask would you rather start a group that could take upwards of 2 hours or go solo it in half the time with the same rewards. You don't want to forget either that half the community of these games are now populated with douchebags, that can't understand simple strategy and are impatient, praise seeking, rude, and overall useless to any pleasant experience you could possibly want.
Also you really can't blame the devs for not making enough social environments, if they end up dead in now a day's mmos.(I so very miss my old fav game DarkAges with religious sermons, now all the old rp spots and talk is dead).
Well besides me floating through my own rants, grouping is dieing because of a lot of problems.
1. No one wants to team in a crappy community. (hard for devs to manage)
(nightmarish ignorant people, we need a healer because the only strategy I know is keep swinging)
2. Team prep times for recruiting and joining are insane! (hard for devs to manage)
(yay I just wasted 2 hours of my time doing nothing, 5mins. later...great now half the team is gone)
3. Soloing
( but only because of number 1 and number 2 don't happen in soloing)
4. Rewards
(yay I wasted half my day to get a rare item for some random person when I can't even pay to repair the cheap ass weapon I'm using, thank you mr. random dropper)
5. Strictness
(so I can join his team if I am x, but only if he doesn't have a-y, and if z he'll maybe pick me if it's not his friend's friend)
And the above post neatly explains exactly why communities are dying on MMO's. Its not because of any of the above reasons, although they play a minor part, its because people assume that all groups are going to be like that.
People focus on the negatives and more easily remember the negatives. So you might have had a wonderful group all day in some out of the way place, fighting in a dungeon for hours, chatting and enjoying yourself. Then someone has to leave and another person takes their place. This new person is an idiot, plain and simple, causes untold amounts of player deaths with his poor playing, sparks up arguments and eventually after about half hour the group splits.
Later that day, talking to a friend about what you did in your MMO today, you'll only tell him about the idiot that ruined your gameplay. You'll forget to mention the great day you had before he turned up. People do it all the time, and the more it happens the less people want to interact with other people for fear that it'll be a disaster.
So how about people remember the great times they've had with groups instead of always coming up with this lame argument that somehow grouping is a waste of time and effort because you'll always get some idiot who'll make it a bad experience. It's not true. I'm quite the opposite, I remember the many great times I've grouped and blot out the negatives, and I'm always looking for another great group to fight alongside with.
Washo, awesome post. I completely agree with you. This is why I have cancelled my subscription to WoW after finally hitting the level cap after 3 years of on and off playing. First of all, I solo'd probably 90% of the time to 70 which was depressing to me for a MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER online game. The times I did get groups it was only to quickly knock down one elite so we can "get back at it" and starting solo'ing quests again to get the most efficient experience.
Then, in battlegrounds, everyone complains if they are up against a premade... simply because they know they do not have the skills or the teamwork to beat them. Whenever I did premades with some of my friends we -always- obliterated the other team because one team with even half decent teamwork will always beat another team with no teamwork. However, if it's pick up group vs pick up group it just becomes a rush. In Alterac Valley, this is a rush to cap towers and attack the boss (leaving NO defense at all), in WSG this is a rush the cap the flag, then a stalemate until someone finally returns one or both of the flags, leading to a point or another stand off, and in Arathi Basin this is a rush for all the random points on the map (nevermind the fact that we need defense...). All in all, it's just a rush of mindless nonsense.
UsualSuspect, I agree with you as well, even though I may be a victim of exactly what you are talking about. People on MMORPG.com tend to have a worse look on MMORPGs as a whole, and therefore they will mainly concentrate on the bad. It is true, not every group someone finds in an MMORPG will be a good one. However, that does NOT mean every group will suck. I'd say the good FAR outweighs the bad when it comes to my experience in grouping, but that's not the part that I usually mention to my friends: I'm usually talking about the guy who didn't know how to play his class and led to wipes, or the obnoxious leader who had to follow his cookie cutter rules for every approach. Either way, I'd say the MMORPG market is tending to favor solo'ers more than the people who used to play MMORPGs back in the "old days" of EQ and the like.
Comments
uhm well ya that is the point of MMORPG's lol
Why do think they won't "wrong" just cause you can solo?
Havn't read the entire thread, but a select few posts toward the beginning and the end, but tossing my 2 cents in anyway.
From my reading the argument seems to be based on the idea that what is happening in mmo's is contradictory to semantics, or that becomes one is capable of doing tasks within the "Massive" game world alone, one is not interacting with the players within the game world online, thus making it more of a single player experience. But by all means, picking apart the word multiplayer one would end up with multiple players. There is nothing within the terms dictating the idea that one must interact with others, only that others exist. In old school games, one also had the option of disassociating themselves from the rest of the players on their particular server only the gameplay style of say, everquest, led to the idea that it would be better to take on something as a party. There are many situations in eq that i ended up doing things on my own successfully without interacting with another player. Does this make that experience a, "singleplayer," one? Nobody was prevented from coming into the area, and i was well aware of the possibility that somebody would come into the area and compete with me. That they didn't made the task -easier- for me.
In the modern mmo nothing stops you from partying with others or playing with others. Its your choice. Just seek out others who share this desire and things will work out. Its not always been easy, it never has been. Part of being in a party is trusting other people to do things in a way that benefits the whole party, and some people (point and case, a friend of mine who picked up ffxi and was reluctant when i told him the easiest way to level was to find a pick up group) have difficulties on the trust part.
The simple view I hold is that things are never made more difficult by making the primary mode of leveling through parties, but that it simply shifts partying from one hand to another. On one hand you have to have faith and knowledge in your own abilities, on the other you need to have faith in somebody elses and how it functions with your own.
Out of curiosity, having never played muds but knowing mmos were heavily influenced by them; were they or could they be played solo?
The only advantage that MMOs have over singleplayer games is the fact that they can be persistent for thousands of objective persons, which these persons can manipulate that persistence together or alone to produce unintended (but not game breaking) results. Here's the catch: no MMO to date has fully realized it. You might be thinking, who gives a flying flip I just want my phat lewtz or whatever, but many folks that have been either playing MMOs or building them (MUDs in particular) are beginning to realize (along with some mathematicians and economists) that that this underlying feature of persistence provides not only a new way to play, but also a new way to learn, and possibly a new way to consider human nature. In all aspects, MMOs are trivial save for the persistence feature. If any developer would take the time to consider that feature in light of the massively multiplayer portion of it, then their games may take a different life on their own, giving tools to players to interact with each other and their environment (see, those pixels and bits are an environment. More specifically a set.) in ways that they may not readably predict nor really would want to predict.
In the end, solo play is the cheap (and weak minded) developer's way out just as much as the forced grouping (btw, I never asserted forced grouping, every one else did, so I find it amusing people try to assume that I did when the thread is a log of who posted what and it seems no one takes the time to look... tsk tsk.), and it leads to the complete bastardization of the MMO 'genre.'
-- Brede
-- Brede
Just as a side note on EQ2, in the release of EQ2 it was much grouping but now grouping almost doesnt exist any longer, this game has changed so much in this regard, at the relaese of the Kunark expansion(latest), I quit in disgust to the total dominace of these solo quest series...SOE destroyed a perfectly alright game by introducing to much solo stuff..
The idea that we all wan't to solo is dominating the minds of almost ALL big MMO companies..and I DO NOT like it..It creates empty barren worlds with lot's of zombies that you CAN'T even KILL, due to it beiing a PVE server..
/Junker
I think more games need to get rid of the artificial grouping limits. There should be downsides to being in too large of a group (more vunerable to AoE, less loot/XP). 40 man raids means semi-casual players are forced to bring 40 people else they believe the task to be impossible (hardcore players are a notable exception, but...), casual players could wait outside the instance until 60 people are gathered and jump right in. Or perhaps talk to a group already in the process and join that way.
As for solo content? Solo content is good, but the important part to making an MMO good is dynamic content. So if, say, people aren't doing enough of a collective effort to protect a particular town from monster raids, they can't just randomly kill monsters and collect loot. So while the activity may be primarily solo, they still have to work collectively for mutual gain, only in a less rigid "we're pounding on the same monster together" role.
Thank you for starting this thread as it touches on many of the reasons why I recently quit WoW after 3 years of playing it.
I never played UO or Everquest and came to WoW from a FPS background (Quake 1 and Enemy Territory and now Enemy Territory: Quake Wars). I find that theres more group work required and more multiplayer content in most modern FPS games than mmog's currently. If you want solo content go play Oblivion.
Having said that I firmly believe the levelling process should be solo/questing (with a good storyline) with the option for group play that rewards grouping and doing instances during the levelling process but you aren't forced to do it. It seems most people in this thread are focusing on the levelling aspect exclusively. The major flaw in forcing people to group during the levelling process is that once a game/expansion has been out for awhile the amount of new players is much fewer. While people levelling alts does make up for this somewhat, it is just harder to find groups the longer the game or the latest expansion has been out. When I took the first on my lvl 60 characters to lvl 70 in the Burning Crusade it was incredibly easy to find groups for anything because the expansion had just been released and the whole server population was at the same level. Now when I decided to level my other lvl 60 character to 70 4 months later it was much harder to find groups so I mostly solo'ed my way to lvl 70.
It is just not mmog's being turned into glorified single player games with a monthly subscription, all aspects of WoW are being/have been miniaturised. PvP in wow is less massive than your average Battlefield server. 2 v 2 arena is by far the most common form of PvP in WoW even though when Burning Crusade and ranked arenas were released Blizzard originally clearly intended 5 v 5 arena to be the centrepiece but organising 4 other people and working on team work and strategies was too hard for all these players who have such an action packed, rock'n'roll lifestyle that anything requires any time or effort is just too hard. It is just easier to get 1 other person and do 2 v 2 arena than getting 5 players. 2 v 2 is a lot more simple and easier to organise than 5 v 5. And lets not forget that PvP will be the major selling point of expanding mmorpg's to new players. PvP is the future of mmorpg's. Warhammer is heavily marketed to the PvP type.
WoW PvP has been instanced focused for the last 3 years now. The original Battleground system in WoW has been further handicapped by forcing people who group up and enter the Battleground as a group to only playing against other organised groups. As a result people wishing to play with their friends/guildies/ now have incredibly long queue wait times while those who single queue, who don't work together or have a strategy to win, get instant queues. There is no motivation, incentive or benefit in grouping up and working out a strategy to win these instanced battlegrounds anymore. Not only that, all those players who are too lazy (sorry, everyone who plays WoW now has a jet set, high flying corporate lifestyle and are too busy to put more than 5 mins a month into the game) to find groups claim that grouping up and working together is a team is cheating.
And there you have the epitome of how mmog's have changed and developlers have succumb to the solo player whingers that grouping up and working together is now viewed as cheating in WoW PvP.
Its just not PvP and levelling that has been turned into solo play. WoW would make up for its easy levelling process by having a lot more developed and mature end-game content. There were issues with making levelling so easy and then raising the bar by a huge margin for raiding (hello the ubiquitous badly player night elf hunter failing miserably in groups/raiding). But patch after patch in WoW has made end game raiding more trivial and less important. It is obvious that PvE raid content is on the way out. In a year or two large scale raiding will be a thing of the past in mmorpg's or at the very best a very minor aspect of the game. I think later expansions of WoW will have you solo'ing all the "end-game" bosses. Warcraft 3 will end up being more massive than WoW.
I don't think grouping can ever coexist with soloing unless there used in differently in content.
You've to be really honest with yourself and ask would you rather start a group that could take upwards of 2 hours or go solo it in half the time with the same rewards. You don't want to forget either that half the community of these games are now populated with douchebags, that can't understand simple strategy and are impatient, praise seeking, rude, and overall useless to any pleasant experience you could possibly want.
Also you really can't blame the devs for not making enough social environments, if they end up dead in now a day's mmos.(I so very miss my old fav game DarkAges with religious sermons, now all the old rp spots and talk is dead).
Well besides me floating through my own rants, grouping is dieing because of a lot of problems.
1. No one wants to team in a crappy community. (hard for devs to manage)
(nightmarish ignorant people, we need a healer because the only strategy I know is keep swinging)
2. Team prep times for recruiting and joining are insane! (hard for devs to manage)
(yay I just wasted 2 hours of my time doing nothing, 5mins. later...great now half the team is gone)
3. Soloing
( but only because of number 1 and number 2 don't happen in soloing)
4. Rewards
(yay I wasted half my day to get a rare item for some random person when I can't even pay to repair the cheap ass weapon I'm using, thank you mr. random dropper)
5. Strictness
(so I can join his team if I am x, but only if he doesn't have a-y, and if z he'll maybe pick me if it's not his friend's friend)
And the above post neatly explains exactly why communities are dying on MMO's. Its not because of any of the above reasons, although they play a minor part, its because people assume that all groups are going to be like that.
People focus on the negatives and more easily remember the negatives. So you might have had a wonderful group all day in some out of the way place, fighting in a dungeon for hours, chatting and enjoying yourself. Then someone has to leave and another person takes their place. This new person is an idiot, plain and simple, causes untold amounts of player deaths with his poor playing, sparks up arguments and eventually after about half hour the group splits.
Later that day, talking to a friend about what you did in your MMO today, you'll only tell him about the idiot that ruined your gameplay. You'll forget to mention the great day you had before he turned up. People do it all the time, and the more it happens the less people want to interact with other people for fear that it'll be a disaster.
So how about people remember the great times they've had with groups instead of always coming up with this lame argument that somehow grouping is a waste of time and effort because you'll always get some idiot who'll make it a bad experience. It's not true. I'm quite the opposite, I remember the many great times I've grouped and blot out the negatives, and I'm always looking for another great group to fight alongside with.
Washo, awesome post. I completely agree with you. This is why I have cancelled my subscription to WoW after finally hitting the level cap after 3 years of on and off playing. First of all, I solo'd probably 90% of the time to 70 which was depressing to me for a MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER online game. The times I did get groups it was only to quickly knock down one elite so we can "get back at it" and starting solo'ing quests again to get the most efficient experience.
Then, in battlegrounds, everyone complains if they are up against a premade... simply because they know they do not have the skills or the teamwork to beat them. Whenever I did premades with some of my friends we -always- obliterated the other team because one team with even half decent teamwork will always beat another team with no teamwork. However, if it's pick up group vs pick up group it just becomes a rush. In Alterac Valley, this is a rush to cap towers and attack the boss (leaving NO defense at all), in WSG this is a rush the cap the flag, then a stalemate until someone finally returns one or both of the flags, leading to a point or another stand off, and in Arathi Basin this is a rush for all the random points on the map (nevermind the fact that we need defense...). All in all, it's just a rush of mindless nonsense.
UsualSuspect, I agree with you as well, even though I may be a victim of exactly what you are talking about. People on MMORPG.com tend to have a worse look on MMORPGs as a whole, and therefore they will mainly concentrate on the bad. It is true, not every group someone finds in an MMORPG will be a good one. However, that does NOT mean every group will suck. I'd say the good FAR outweighs the bad when it comes to my experience in grouping, but that's not the part that I usually mention to my friends: I'm usually talking about the guy who didn't know how to play his class and led to wipes, or the obnoxious leader who had to follow his cookie cutter rules for every approach. Either way, I'd say the MMORPG market is tending to favor solo'ers more than the people who used to play MMORPGs back in the "old days" of EQ and the like.