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Why are mmo's so bipolar?
ragz45
Member UncommonPosts: 810
Most modern mmo's do everything they can to encourage solo leveling to max level, and then once you're maxed out, the only thing to do is group content. I don't understand this bi-polar approach to game design.
If you want your game to appeal to group & social type players, make it that way all the way through. If you want it to appeal to soloist... make it the same all the way through. Don't make your game one thing for the first 60 hours, and then flip it on it's head.
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I don't know what game you are playing, but many games offer solo and group content.
Don't blame the developer for a player choosing to solo.
Many of you raising hell if a developer forced grouping in an MMO.
There is never going to be a sweet spot no matter how well a MMO is balanced. For some of you it will never be good enough.
Actually I prefer to group and socialize rather than solo. So you have me pegged wrong. I'm also not complaining about there not being a sweet spot between solo & group. What I am saying is decide what you want to do as a developer, and stick to it.
If you want to make a solo oriented game, do it, and do it well. If you want your MMO to be focused on grouping and socialization, do it. But Dev's need to stop this crap of trying to offer something in their game for each camp of player. It only ends up being a piss poor mish mash of the two.
Completely agree with OP
It's not really all that crazy, not when I think about the why of it anyway. Main forms of character progression are something devs avoid placing behind barriers such as grouping, it allows everyone the ability to progress at their own pace. Secondary advancement is typically more group oriented because it takes place after the level plateau has been reached, at that point you're at the same level as those who may have made it before you, and you will no longer leave others behind once they reach that point (it's essentially a meeting place). Now if these games didn't need a form of progression, this wouldn't be the case, but that is one of the main points in the design (starting at nothing and building to something). IF they were purely action games soloing probably wouldn't be given much focus at all (MOBas)...
TL'DR, if they made all content like late game content, it would block progression for those unable to keep up or those unable to devote the same amount of time.
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Poor Mish Mashed of the two?
What games are these?
Please give us examples.
Agreed with all of the above.
Doesn't WOW kind of fit the bill of an MMO where you solo to max, and then you can keep on soloing at end game? I mean, I don't really feel like I'm interacting much with other players when I queue up for dungeons, battlegrounds, or LFR. Granted the best PVE gear requires a group but you can still progress without so much as typing hi to another person.
That's probably why WOW is such a popular game - you can solo and progress and do so in bite-sized increments.
LOL @OP,that is what i have been saying for a long time.You play solo all game than are suppose to be really good at grouping?Not happening.It just proves the developer is really bad at designing games,just thought of a couple concepts and went with it.I see this in all game designs,it's like i have an idea ,let's make a game.
You can even look at the StarCitizen game.How could he possibly have designed a game a round a 70 million dollar budget not knowing he would have anymore than 20 million?The answer is he could not,so it ends up being a sloppy design with ideas tossed in along the way.
A game has to be well designed from day 1 and be designed for a decent amount of longevity.I am not saying it just because i like the game,but FFXI was that game,it's design still holds fast even 12 years later.They have however created ways to solo now as well but that only happened over the last 4 years to accommodate less low level grouping which makes sense,most players are all at higher levels where they do group.However for 8 years it was all about grouping the entire game,a TRUE MMO.ALSO you could go anywhere to level,lots of CHOICE,you did not follow around yellow markers because there weren't any.
When i enter a game now and see that game trying to force me to vee-line directly for a npc with a marker over it's head,i immediately log out and rate the game a no brainer 2/10.
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I agree with both of you.
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They do?
That's not my experience. pretty much every quest in these games is a solo quest. Not only is it a solo quest but adding even one more person makes the quest laughably easy.
Lord of the Rings is like this, WOW, from my experience to the 30's is like this, Aion is like this, Solo Quests in SWToR are like this though there are separate group quests, Archlord II is like this ...
There are a few games where bringing along a buddy is beneficial such as Tera (though all the quests can easily be soloed except for specific group quests) and from my limited experience in Age of Conan there are areas where the quests can be soloed but because of adds, a group of two can help.
I don't really see that as supporting group content.
Oh, rift was like this. Except for the rifts themselves.
Same with ESO except for specific instances and their version of rifts.
So yeah I could group in those games but why? it's really not necessary and makes the content faster than fast. Unless that's the reason. I like a little challenge at least.
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Does it need to be necessary to be desirable? I almost always play with my wife and/or Roommate when I play MMORPGS, grouping with them and doing quests in TOR is a lot more fun to me than playing alone, same with ESO. I really don't see what makes most of these quests solo only affairs, especially TOR, as the group conversation set up is quite fun to take part in. Yet even in ESO aside from certain personal quest lines, most of them are presented in a way that allows for others to be with you.
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The problem comes from there not being anything worth doing solo at all at the level cap. Most people do NOT want to group/raid ALL THE TIME. Some of the time sure, all of the time not so much. At a lower level there are usually decent world drops and rare drops that are usable, even if you group as well. At the cap, typically all you can do solo is farm for coin or faction. If you occasionally group, even the poor group drops will be better than anything you will ever get solo.
Playing solo should present rare drops that are as good as good group drops and extremely rare drops that hit the beginning of raid drops. We aren't talking common, but there should always be a chance however small that you can solo monsters and get something useful. When it reaches the point where you can absolutely get nothing that will improve you from any solo encounter then there really is no reason at all to do so.
The other option is to have some item that has an X% chance(diminishing returns on using it multiple times on an item) to improve an item by a small amount. If something like that dropped off solo monsters then even raiders would have some reason to fight said monsters, even if those items also dropped off other monsters.
I disagree about "most mmos do everything they can to encourage solo leveling to max" - most MMOs actually support grouping for the same content.
What is happening is that *players* are picking soloing over grouping - no reason why you can't group and do the same content.
i think players are the bipolar ones - not games - because players follow the path of least resistance naturally - which is "solo til you can't solo anymore"
It's obvious why, you don't want to trust your progression to randoms when you could trust it to just yourself with no downsides for doing so.
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I would say that PvP is treated in the same fashion. A lot of MMO's have some arbitrary level for when BG's begin much like group content instances. Although with BG's your ability to gain gear and EXP is usually inferior to regular PvE questing or instancing. I always found it odd that BG's feel more like E sports tacked on at the last second and in a way as to rely on a completely different aspect of the game to fuel it. Imagine it in reverse. In order to PvE you must farm other players for gear in order to be able to solo PvE or complete an instance.
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