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The answer to the solo versus group debate is Leroy Jenkins.
Ihmotepp
Member Posts: 14,495
Most know who Leroy Jenkins is, some don't. There's a video on youtube, where Leroy single handedly gets a raid party wiped, while constantly yelling his name over Vent (Leroy Jenkins).
It's quite hilarious, and there are a variety of reactions from his raid party. Some are furious, some are confused, some find it funny.
Why did Leroy do it? Well, it looks like he got bored while everyone was debating on exactly how to attack the mobs, but I'm not sure exactly why he did it.
For me, this is the only thing that makes an MMORPG interesting enough to play. The fact that you do not know what your fellow players are going to do at any given moment in time.
Some people can play WoW to the level cap solo. For me, I find that as interesting as counting sand at the beach. It's just mashing buttons, over and over again. You know what all the Mobs will do, and tehy will always do it the same way. Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggggggggggggggggg!
But you don't know what people will do, or when they will do it.
Now, Leroy is able to wreck everyone's game, because it's a raid. Raids require more than one person. That's right, it's "forced grouping".
What if you have no "forced grouping"? Then pulling a Leroy Jenkins is not possible. You never need to group, so you never need to worry about what other players will do.
And for some people that is wonderful, because wondering what other people will do is just awful for them. For me, that's the only thing that makes the game playable.
So if you understand that, you can see how there is no way to make the game interesting for me, and at the same time fun for solo players.
I want the game to encourage you to group so much, you will take the chance of a Leroy Jenkins. And if you want to completely avoid a Leroy Jenkins, you won't want to play the game, because the incentive to group is just to much to ignore to the point that solo play is painfully slow.
Because if you could easily avoid a Leroy Jenkins, wouldn't you? But if you cannot, then the game gets interesting.
Of course you can still avoid Leroy Jenkins by only grouping with friends and family, or joining a guild. But that's just as much of a boring pain in the ass as playing solo IMO, so it all comes out even.
Comments
tl;dr version:
PUGs are the pinnacle of group play.
Then build your own tiny niche mmo and don't quit your day job, because you won't be making any money.
-Letting Derek Smart work on your game is like letting Osama bin Laden work in the White House. Something will burn.-
-And on the 8th day, man created God.-
I rememeber playing with a hunter one time that would use "spread shot" or "scatter shot" whatever it was called to pull multiple mobs. Crazy stuff but it really was a lot of fun. I got to be good friends with him. Never a dull moment.
I don't know that soloing is always going to be slower than grouping.
If you get 1/4 the Exp for a kill while grouped, then you have to kill 4 critters to equal the experience of a solo kill. In that case the question is, can you kill those four faster in a group than you could the one on your own? Also, does the exp decrease based on number of members in the party, if so how fast do you have to kill multiple critters to equal the exp you'd gain killing one solo?
Yes survivability increases in a group, with the exception of having a Leroy Jenkins or as I recently experienced multiple players pulling their own mobs. But is it always faster, I don't know the answer to that. I can tell you that instances with tougher mobs is by far faster in a group, but I don't know if that actually makes leveling itself faster.
The Leroy Jenkins video was one of the reasons I never subbed to WoW. Not that I might end up on a team with a guy like that, but that I might actually get on a team with one of them other jackholes. You do this, you do that, after that you do this and two seconds later, and it better be two seconds on the dot, you do such and such. Four hours of calculation for a 15 minute fight. Screw that. If that's how you play a game you're doing it wrong. It made me see that WoW endgame isn't fun, it's practice to be a fucking accountant.
Or the hell of it.
Zerg's are the pinnacle of group play.
Want to make it so everybody would want to group make it so the exp for a kill is not shared but each get the whole amount as if he did solo the monster, grouping you would level 4x faster. People would love to group and take the risk of the Jenkins.
Did not like the whole planning and debating. Those times are the times I accidentely get closer to a mob or two.
Never thought I'd see Leeroy used to make a constructive argument.
That said I fully agree. But quite frankly, there's something that has always bothered me with WoW's Raid Party. Even if you are in a group, it still felt like you were solo'ing. All the mods/add-ons, macros, etc. It felt like playing solo with scripted NPC teammates. The constant need to calculate everything, etc....it really didn't felt like I was part of a group of players. That's just me though.But I get what you are saying. And you are perfectly right when you say that we will never see a game that caters to both Forced Groupers and Solo'ers at the same time. It's just really impossible to mix the 2 of them and sadly the market prefers to cater to Solo'ers.
I never understood why many solo'ers always say "Well there's a grouping option in my MMO (even though you can solo from lvl 1 to max) so stop complaining that grouping died and just group!" It feels like while we "Groupers" seems to understand Solo'ers, despite wanting more Group-based/Forced-grouping MMOs, many Solo'ers seems clueless about the purpose of Grouping and I just can't seem to put my finger on "why". Is it because they entered the MMO market "too late"?
Sure some players now have less time to spare for gaming as they used to, which is perfectly understandable, but they still remember "the good ol'days". It's not the case for the later Generation though, they're used to Solo-friendly MMOs and most likely haven't tried more "group-based MMOs". Though I guess you'd need to know why I'm saying stuff like this and the best exemple I can think of would be Tobold's blog as he currently visits EVE. It does give a general feeling of where I'm coming from with this. If you guys have time to read a few of his posts on EVE, you'll get the general idea.
Leeroy didn't do it. The video was staged by a guild. Never happened.
.
That said, some of the most boring heroic runs I've been in were guild runs where everyone does everything right and everyone is geared to the teeth.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
this, not sure how anyone could take it as real
.
It probably depends on the availability of mobs. If mobs are too sparse, and you mostly regenerate your mana/hp/whatever between one mob and another, you'll be better doing solo than being in a party you don't really need. If the flux of mobs is continuous, you'd better be in a party and do what you do best (heal, tank, dps...) to optimize party's combat capabilities.
Thus the answer to the question "do you spend more time by fighting or searching for mobs?" will roughly answer your own question as well (provided you actually *can* beat mobs or groups of mobs solo, if you can't, then it's obvious)...
Thats the reason why I never even reached level 50 in WoW, the boring quests.
And then you have the people who get avatar after avatar to the max level and I just can't do it and I tried for over a year trying different classes, races and servers.
I would go back to WoW if it just weren't for those boring quests but I guess that I'm a minority.
All those memories will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
Good story! Now I even hate 'forced grouping' even more. Every 'group-fanatic' should have a Leroy with them.
You find soloing meaningless, I find the constant nagging about who should get what in a group, more meaningless. Whats make it even worse, is the whole concept of 'you are a warrior so you can not get in cause we already have one' even worse. It ruins any realistism & immersion for me. Forced grouping is the least realistic feature of any MMO. Forced grouping is as far I can get from being a HERO in my MMO's. I see 'group fanatics' as little un-independent sissy-boys, who need to gang up to even stand a chance in pvp. Pfff... wimps.
Why bring this topic up again? Forced grouping is an obsolete old fashioned and DEAD MMO mechanic. It will not be ressurected. Accept it and move on. Your life will be ALOT more enjoyable the day you do.
Have a nice day.
Make us care MORE about our faction & world pvp!
back in the good ol SWG days Naff groups were quite fun and worked well (that was before the buffwars.... in memmory at least).
but it should imo be nether... if you see a player, any class any race etc. it should be beneficial to work with him instead of ignoring him and hoping that he goes away. i play an MMO becouse of all the other people that are playing it (not only reason but one of many) but i dont want to spend every spare second i have to grind something just so that i can group with other people.
thats why i always felt old SWG was a great game i could always group up when i felt like it. but i had a goal completly diffrent from the next player in the group. or when i felt like it i kept on doing chasing my goal on my own.
and tbh i think the "gear hunt" is simply a flawed feature that is dividing the community.
but thats my 2 krónur (cents)!
Sorry for typos... dyslexic and just too damn lazy to proof read every post for 30 min
(yes i am aware of spell check but it does not help that much
Great post, OP.
PEOPLE are what make MMORPGs unexpected, fun. (We all know it was staged, but that isn't what's being argued- it's the acting out, the result of what went down).
Solo'ing is hanging out with 1's and 0's exclusively. Die enough times in the face of an obstacle and you can establish a pattern. Other people bring the unexpected, the unknown, the spontaneous to bear.
Sometimes those factors yield great gameplay. Other times they yield griefing. As *every* business manager knows, however: no RISK, no REWARD. You must be willing to risk interaction with others if you want truly satisfying, rewarding, gameplay.
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc.
We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be.
So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away.
- MMO_Doubter
Actually, Leroy is real, at least in spirit. Can't tell you how many times I was a in a group and someone did something unpredictable or stupid (sometimes I was that person) and killed the group or raid.
Once i was in an Onyxia raid waiting to make our assault on her (and waiting and waiting for some damn reason) and I fell asleep. Woke up to find myself at her feet, the raid leader screaming "what the hell are you doing?" and of course, the raid wiped.
The thing is, we were able to laugh at such follies and not get all strung out over the situaltion, such is not the case these days it seems for many players.
Back when I played DAOC our guild leader and primary puller occasionally screwed up and over-pulled. (mostly due to not knowing when npc's in camps would respawn) This resulted in frantic battles the usually resulted in some folks dying, but more often than not, we avoided wipes and managed to keep going without wiping. (unless of course an enemy attacked in mid fight, then it got really frantic.
Those were some of the most interesting times in a game for me, never dull (like most WOW raids that were on auto pilot), we laughed a lot, made fun of the puller and gave him grief, and overall had some of the best social interaction I've seen in a game since then.
Final point, when MMO's are reduced to total predictability, they get totally boring really quick, and not even a group can save that.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
every group fanatic should be forced to play the old MMO where you spam looking for group for 2 hours just so you can level grind on mobs. There is a reason games like WoW made it more solo friendly because you could waste hours actually doing nothing in game. Is there any fan of forced grouping that actually did the 2 hour LFG spam?
I played EQ1 and FFXI, so I've done my share of waiting for a group. I'd rather wait for 5 hours for a group and play in it for 1 hour, than solo quest for 6 hours. Any day of the week.
With games like these, you build your own reputation. So at first, you might wait 2 hours for a group. Get a guild, make friends on the server, that time will be cut down to minutes as you build your rep as a great player. Unless of course you suck, then you deserve to wait.
and this is the reason so many of us got sucked into MMO's... not becouse we start out wanting to become the best guy in the game rather becouse we have meet fun people to play with
Sorry for typos... dyslexic and just too damn lazy to proof read every post for 30 min
(yes i am aware of spell check but it does not help that much
The Way to deal with the problem is having the group interaction without the 5 hour wait. Everyone doesn't have the 6 hours to play the game. People should be able to do things in game when they log on. Waiting is not gameplay, A solution should be found that doesn't involve waiting. Warhammer and guild wars 2 public quest system have the right Idea. Games should encourage natural grouping without the player realizing it. Which is better than the usual forced grouping while waiting 2 hours for a group. one thing MMO developers have been trying to fix is the time commitment needed for an MMO.
I played Warhammer. The "public quests" sound good on paper, but in actuality are boring as watching paint dry. You run around like a bunch of chickens with your heads cut off, and no cooperation is required whatsoever. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!
you can't get past "forced grouping", as the example in the OP shows. Why is it "forced"? Because it's necessary to make progress in an acceptable way. The second, the micro second, you take that away, the entire "grouping" experience changes.
If it's not "forced" why would I spend 3 seconds with an asshat? I'd just solo right? And so would you, and so would everyone on the server, and there you are, back to a solo game like WoW.
How can you not see that this is the situation, and still make up this utter bullshit about having a game that does "both". You're always, always, always, describing a solo game when you say that. Let's do both = shut up and let me play a solo game. Fine, GO PLAY WOW!
If it's not "forced" how much effort will you put in, to get along with other players? I'd say the average would be ZERO! And that's your grouping experience, ZERO effort. The micro second some effort is required, group over, kthx bye!
What fun is that? For me, none. You are at that point, playing a solo game, with little bars of other players added to your GUI, nothing more.
But the previous posts bring up another important point. RAIDING SUCKS!
This is why WoW does not work for me. Because WoW does indeed have forced grouping, but it's not really forced grouping, it's forced RAIDING!
Adn the raid is not nearly as fun, because of all the calculations like in the Leeroy Jenkins example, as simply grouping.
I'm a fan of grouping and find it immensely more enjoyable than soloing any day. However, your argument here isn't one I'd would hang a pro-grouping position on - the prospect that someone in the group might get bored and decide to wipe the entire raid, possibly wasting hours of people's time to do so.
Not cool.
I do agree it's cool to meet other people and chat with them over the course of a couple hours or so. The process of getting a group of random people and seeing how they fine-tune their playstyle to the rest of the group until it's running like a well-oiled machine is always fun for me. You learn a lot about them, enjoy some good laughs, some close-calls, maybe even some deaths.. But in the end, it's always fun.
Last night I was in a group in Vanguard doing a chain of quests and it was a blast. Hanging out with cool people, chatting away while laying waste to swarms of mobs, dying several times due to really bad situations we got ourselves into but ultimately achieving our goal in the end. It was a good night.
It *can* be entertaining to a degree, on hindsight mostly, when someone in the group does something random. Even the most frustrating situation seems funny down the road when the words "Remember when" precedes it. However, when it's for an individual's own entertainment at the expense of the group they're part of... well... again... not cool. This is why PUGs get a bad reputation with and are avoided by so many; the random asshat who sometimes slips in and screws it up. Though the majority of the time (in my experience) they go fine, there will be those times when you get "that person" in the group who is determined to screw things up in any way possible.
I'd rather leave the unpredictability to the encounters a group faces, rather than who the group faces them with.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
I'm still confused as to what you really want out of a MMORPG Ihmotepp.
1. I mean, on the one hand you hate solo content. So let's remove questing (at least in the WoW / LotRo / Aion / AoC etc. kind)
2. You also hate raiding, so let's remove any raid content. Maximum party/group size is a single party. 4-6 players.
3. You want there to be special strategy and skills for groups, like group skill chains or abilities etc.
4. You don't seem to like instancing as it takes away from the "open world" aspect. So no instances.
5. You also don't like guilds or playing with friends, as that is "just as boring of a pain in the ass as solo."
So what you are left with.... is FFXI without the raiding and the last few solo-friendly patches/expansions.
Or EQ1 without the raiding or newbie areas.
Or SWG pre-NGE but without the story-quest PoI's and mission terminals.
So in your "ideal" game -
You'd grind mobs in the open world either out in the wilds or in non-instanced dungeons with a party of strangers. No mobs would require more then a single group to kill. All mobs would require groups and group skills to kill. There would be no quests or quest rewards for anything other then maybe killing certain named mobs as part of a mob grinding group.
Crafting and gathering would be important to the economy, but because you can't stand solo content all resource locations require multiple players to harvest, and for every crafting recipe you need more players then just yourself to do the work and complete it, you couldn't even make a part of the object solo.
So it'd be like the Union or State worker's MMORPG.
Oh, and you'd have no friends list or guild support. And in order to make sure you don't actually get to know any of the random people you play with in PUGs you are periodically and randomly switched to different servers.
Once the guy started rattling off success percentages to the n'th decimal, I'd think the spoof would be obvious.