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My Solution to the pugging Problem
Bigbadwlf
Member UncommonPosts: 117
So I was watching a video on "The Future of MMOs" Panel, and a problem I would love to see finally resolved in the future of MMOs is the Pug Experience. In a genre that prides itself on player interactions, my experiences with pugs have ranged from bad to neutral at best. I know a lot of people would agree with me that making the pug experience fun would bring a lot of people back into MMOs, so here are my suggestions:
1.) Force Specializations
It's obvious that people have play styles they enjoy and those they do not enjoy. So designing classes that fills unique roles in a group makes sense. But what makes playing with others exciting for me, is grouping with a person who isn't a copy of me, yet actually compliments my play style. Let's say I'm a DPS class that deals lots of damage but has poor mobility. If I found a player that's better at controlling the mobs, or supporting than me, that makes me want to talk to interact with them more.
2.) Class only quests
What if you are the type of person that's more into rogue stealth-type characters? Wouldn't it be more exciting to get a quest to steal x loot without having KILL ANYTHING? How is a player supposed to learn how to be a good rogue if they are constantly given quests to jump into a group of enemies and stab them in the face? This is why people hate Kill X, collect Y quests. Not only do you not learn anything, but these brain dead missions creates endlessly bad pug experiences where people who can't tank, heal, and/or CC end up being grouped together.
3.) No more random loot
If a tank does a good job at holding aggro and mitigating a ton of damage, why does the game keep rewarding him with useless cloth drops? Not only does it make sense to reward players with equipment they can actually use, but it encourages them to master their craft, making them even more valuable to the community. Fixing the loot issue not only rewards players for actually doing their job well, it prevents a lot of in-fighting right after the group worked together to finally down that big boss. Social opportunity lost.
4.) Content that Scales depending on group composition
So you want to test out your new tanking build you say? "Not in my Pug [explicative]!" Pugs should not be a place where people figure out how to play their roles. That's what quests should be for. And the reverse should be true of content. If you are with are playing with your friends, and there's only two people that have interrupts, a dungeon boss shouldn't require more than 2 interrupts to defeat him. Dungeon content needs to meet players halfway. Make the group size flexible enough to not require any single role, but once the group is set, force each player to do their job well in order to progress.
I think MMOs that adhere to these 4 principles would greatly enhance the pug experience for myself, and foster a strong, yet-interdependent community. A community I would happily pay $$$ amount of money to be a part of. What do you guys think?
1.) Force Specializations
It's obvious that people have play styles they enjoy and those they do not enjoy. So designing classes that fills unique roles in a group makes sense. But what makes playing with others exciting for me, is grouping with a person who isn't a copy of me, yet actually compliments my play style. Let's say I'm a DPS class that deals lots of damage but has poor mobility. If I found a player that's better at controlling the mobs, or supporting than me, that makes me want to talk to interact with them more.
2.) Class only quests
What if you are the type of person that's more into rogue stealth-type characters? Wouldn't it be more exciting to get a quest to steal x loot without having KILL ANYTHING? How is a player supposed to learn how to be a good rogue if they are constantly given quests to jump into a group of enemies and stab them in the face? This is why people hate Kill X, collect Y quests. Not only do you not learn anything, but these brain dead missions creates endlessly bad pug experiences where people who can't tank, heal, and/or CC end up being grouped together.
3.) No more random loot
If a tank does a good job at holding aggro and mitigating a ton of damage, why does the game keep rewarding him with useless cloth drops? Not only does it make sense to reward players with equipment they can actually use, but it encourages them to master their craft, making them even more valuable to the community. Fixing the loot issue not only rewards players for actually doing their job well, it prevents a lot of in-fighting right after the group worked together to finally down that big boss. Social opportunity lost.
4.) Content that Scales depending on group composition
So you want to test out your new tanking build you say? "Not in my Pug [explicative]!" Pugs should not be a place where people figure out how to play their roles. That's what quests should be for. And the reverse should be true of content. If you are with are playing with your friends, and there's only two people that have interrupts, a dungeon boss shouldn't require more than 2 interrupts to defeat him. Dungeon content needs to meet players halfway. Make the group size flexible enough to not require any single role, but once the group is set, force each player to do their job well in order to progress.
I think MMOs that adhere to these 4 principles would greatly enhance the pug experience for myself, and foster a strong, yet-interdependent community. A community I would happily pay $$$ amount of money to be a part of. What do you guys think?
Comments
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Get rid of Cross realm PUGGING tools. Problem solved. I use the Party Finder tool on FFXIV which allows people to join groups for which they want to join. So if I say I am a noob at said instance with my wife healing and we are going to take it slow. People who are cool with running noobs and dont mind taking things slow will join my group. Not Ass Holes who will do nothing but troll me. With any Cross Realm automated LFG tool you get this crap and is the CORE reason why MMOS suck today. The tool does nothing other than throw random people together and does not take into account of the group wants the same thing or will be dick heads to each other. Thats why tools like this should have never been introduced into MMO and anyone who wants these type of tools should play games like D3 where you can jump in and out of games going on. One of the core Pillars of MMOs is Social/community and you cannot build that with a toxic environment. Yes you will always have your Ass holes, however before LFD/G tools they would all be well known on your server and likely end up in a guild with other Ass holes. So they stuck to themselves. Thats why FFXIV's party finder is good.
I understand why people want the LFD/G tools to be fast for them, problem is it causes more problems than good it does. And for people who complain about their time being wasted maybe you should not be playing an MMO. Or if you want to you just want faster groups make friends and learn that another core problem with MMOs is everything needs to revolve around convenience. Sorry but MMOs cannot have fast food content because it takes too dam long to make an MMO and too much time to come out with brand new content if you rush through the content in a matter of a month. Sorry its not possible to keep up with that level of easy fast food minded players. MOBAs yes it works MMORPGs no we have 7+ years of that for proof.
The problem is PUGGING cross server where people you play with will likely never see you ever again. When you are on your own server and people will learn who you are if you really make a bad name for yourself you will get driven off your server. I know it happened to dozens of people in the Vanilla WOW TBC days. Today LFD it dont matter.
O and yes My wife and I used the Party Finder tool on FFXIV. Love it and most of our groups were put together in under 10 minutes. No Drama. No bitching because players knew what they were getting into and talked to me before hand and were ok that we just got back to the game after a year off and we were just wanting level up instance. the Cross realm DF tool does not do that. We also added some of the people from the PF tool to our friends list and have hung with them from time to time. Thats why I play MMOs not for Pugging where I will never see anyone ever again. If I wanted that I would have stayed playing the Diablo series like I did many years ago. How many friends do I have from playinf Diablo non how many from MMOs? Countless friends I made, many done playing MMOs now but still I made friends and got to know them.
1) Specialization makes pugging, or any other sort of grouping, much harder. In Guild Wars 2, for example, you can grab five people and go. But in many games, you can easily spend as much time trying to find a player of the underrepresented specialty (commonly but not always healers) as actually doing group content. Most people want to log on and play a game, not log on and wait, so that leads many people to avoid grouping entirely. Which makes getting a group even harder.
4) That would encourage players to figure out which group composition results in the easiest run and insist on that. Some classes would be completely unwanted on the basis that if they let you join, it makes the run harder--even if you're good at your class.
I self identify as a monkey.
pick-up group.
grouping with a team for encounters, who ordinarily you otherwise have little to no contact.
edit: In fps they were called "pubs", but I could never figure out if it was a miss interpolation or its own vernacular.
Got it. Thx!
I don't see how you could actually get rid of this without removing most group content and very hard monsters. The chances of someone always having a steady group is almost nil and this would cause all sorts of trouble for someone adventuring with very tough content, dungeons, etc.
Not sure how you could get rid of Pugs in their entirety.
I thought about it, and I can honestly say, I'm gonna have to give it more thought. It doesn't seem to be an easy fix.
I self identify as a monkey.
1) Most games have specializations, even GW2 has the ability for you to specialize your character. Yes, specializations can compliment each other, but they shouldn't have to fit together perfectly like tetris pieces either. Otherwise you're stuck waiting for a particular spec before you can actually have fun.
2) Class only quests are fine, but they have nothing to do with PUGs in the grand scheme of things. Actually, PUGs or even grouping in general would make class quests a tremendous pain in the ass, especially for stealth characters. I like class quests, but I'd rather them be left to be solo challenges rather than having to suffer through impatient people messing things up.
3) WoW added personal loot to dungeons and raids in the current expansion. It's has had mixed results as it's basically a pass/fail check to whether you receive loot or not. I've gone two weeks without getting any loot only to get one piece per boss the following week. I like personal loot as it gets rid of much of the loot drama, but I would much prefer obtaining rare crafting materials via dungeons/raids to create better pieces of loot via crafting. Crafting takes such a back seat to loot systems, it's sad really.
4) Scaling content exists, but mostly in terms of specific numbers of players and not group comp. Scaling content for specific group make up would be extremely difficult given the large amount of factors that would be needed. I don't feel the technology exists to allow for that type of scaling, at least without the quantity of content taking a huge hit. Would you rather have 3 dungeons that are able to be catered to your specific group make up, or have 15 dungeons available? Repetitive content is only so fun for so long.
Finally, even if you could implement all of the changes you suggest (much of it exists in various forms already) it would have little to no impact on PUGing in general. People don't like to PUG because random people on the internet will seemingly act like juvenile pricks more often than not. Even if cross server PUGs wasn't an option, people would still act like pricks, and your blacklist would grow to the point where you could barely get anything done.
The solution to the PUGing problem is....don't PUG.
Well of course, the goal is not to get rid of pick up groups. Pugs are supposed to be a major selling point in MMOs. But with all of the new features, I feel that pugging has gotten even worse now compared to 10 years ago. That's why I think we should come up with solutions to make pugging more enjoyable, and put the multiplayer back into MMOs.
Yes, class specialization does exist, but class balance does not. I don't think any particular person's play style should be more advantageous than any other person's. Devs do a good job at making class specializations viable for a dungeon, but they often fail when it comes to balancing. Having balanced classes actually encourages more grouping and more diversity in pugs. I know it's difficult, but too often I see devs just give up entirely on trying to balance, when at least a monthly balance pass would be good enough to encourage people to play their way, and not just the OP build.
In terms of cross-server grouping, I think that's pretty much baked into the cake now. I do agree that it has turned grouping into more of a fast-food experience instead of community building experience. I don't know if they do this already, but they could just prioritize finding members from the same server, instead of grabbing the first tank or healer from a different server. If majority of the pugs are same server, then the rules for grouping etiquette should still apply.
Guild Wars 2's pug are just as bad as any other MMO's pugs in my opinion. That's why I think now is a good time to toss around ideas, so that future developers can learn from the mistakes of these other games.
About the players will always be pricks, I do agree with this statement. But I'm inclined to believe that, at least in the beginning of a new MMO's lifespan, there's just as many decent people playing as there are people with anti-social disorders. Being a loud mouth jerk in a group is obviously going to ruin the experience. But if that jerk can at least perform his role in the group, then at least that's progress. I don't expect everybody in my pug to want to be my friend, but I do think people should at the very minimum know how to play their class, so that we can get through the dungeon. Personal loot also gives these people less opportunity to be jerks.
City of Heroes was also a noteworthy exception to the PUG problem. I never had or heard of anyone having problems with pretty much any group makeup when running missions. As a matter of fact, I thought that strange combinations of archetypes made some groups very interesting.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
Again you still dont get it. 10 years ago Pugs were done however more often than not you made friends in that person. Thats how I met my wife was a pug. After our first group together we became friends and ran together ever since. For every 1 pug group I ran I ran dozens of groups with my friends. And 9/10 times in those days I only pugged one spot because if we could not find our 5th within our circle of friends that means we needed to increase that circle of friends. Instances were also coming that you could not do randomly thrown together on a whim. It maybe the content last a lot of a lot longer than then cattering to the people who think its important to get into an instance every chance they get, or the anti social people who need a tool to do everything for them. If you want that kind of style of play MBOAs or Online Mutliplayer games are more for that type of gamers not MMOs.
When it comes down to a LFG tool look for people on your server first, no sorry FFXIV Party Finder is 100% better than any automated tool in existence. Why? Because the tool people can contact me as Party leader and make sure that yes I am doing a slow run and kill everything and I will not be a jerk because someone is a nub. Put that in an Automated tool and you have queues that are hours long because its to complex AND people cannot talk to you before hand. FFXIV Party Finder tool should replace all LFG tools because it promotes social interaction and honestly outside a few select groups which have hardcore restrictions the groups forum together very fast. Also more often than not people add each other to friends list or linkshells to stay i content. Thats better than todays tools which are crap.
It's some peoples only option, so your statement really adds nothing but to aggravate the OP. As for the OP, the suggestions don't really have too much relevance to alleviating negative player interactions for sustained PuG grouping which I think is your main concern, isn't it?
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Soft grouping like GW2 is a step in the right direction to stop people from hating seeing other people coming along but it has its consequences too: meaningful interaction in crowds. Maybe it's not the right step but an indication that systems need to be better at breaking the ice and then fostering a bond. In cases of overcrowding (zerging) in GW2 meaningful social interaction does not occur.
In the WoD beta a Blizzard developer argued that monster tagging encouraged social interaction as opposed to asocial interaction you see in GW2. I thoroughly tested this argument in a recent Vanilla private server launch and in the WoD launch and what was apparent was that people were forced into groups because of overcrowding, not because they wanted to play with these people but because the other option put them at an impossibility of ever completing a quest due to mob tagging. There is no choice here.
The result of this argument is that players are rallying against inherent design flaws with WoW's questing design philosophy, which in effect does end up getting them to group but this circumstance only ever happens when there is mass overcrowding and only on the ultimatum of stop questing or group. Outside of overcrowding there is heated animosity (due to soloing incentives) that continues to escalate and that does not stop till massive overcrowding occurs which stops soloing completely.
However in GW2 socializing occurred naturally when groups weren't too big when there was some waiting between dynamic events because the environment does not suffer from escalating animosity and so players harbor no grudges or prejudices against each other. So on the flip side when there wasn't overcrowding GW2 sparked the social interaction that only happens in WoW when there is overcrowding. Now just to get it to happen in both cases...
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What is a constant here is that people socialize when they have 'their group' of about 5-10 people or so, this seems to be an ideal amount of people for people to speak freely without getting drowned out by nonsense and not too few to feel like they're on the spot. If this hypothesis is true then all that really needs to be done is to make grouping beneficial outside of overcrowding in Blizzards paradigm of design philosophy which only requires:
- Higher exp efficiency/gains in player formed groups
- Kill collect items are shared among all party members per drop
- Quest hand ins net additional exp for party members (so even if you have to back track finished quests you still net exp from group kills and party member hand ins allowing people to be more patient)
You want mob tagging still but you want people to be in a group before this and you want them to form that group themselves. An individual against a crowd feels unfair, but a group against a crowd feels like a challenge and the majority of people like challenges, the team work this can generate is phenomenal for social interaction. WoW's combat system can't scale an individuals skill to match the difficulty as it relies on mitigation instead of avoidance of damage so forced grouping for elites will always stay in WoW's paradigm of tab targeting, however in games like Tera a solo player could very well solo boss monsters if they had the salt for it because of shift from mitigation to avoidance and so moving forward with combat systems this would no longer be a problem scaling intense difficulty for solo players.
In theory this allows soloing to be largely left untouched with a greater emphasis on positive incentives to group while at the same time giving positive incentives to help out others who are behind your questing progress, instilling the same environment for meaningful group interaction outside of extreme cases of overcrowding. The side effects are that questing will be extensively more efficient in groups and so people will level significantly faster and may feel it necessary to group to stay ahead, whether or not the leveling curve is adjusted for this is another discussion, all that I will say on it is Blizzards design always lets people get an edge over others when they're clever enough to exploit it, which I think is always a great design decision for rewarding the players intuition.
In conclusion I feel soloing needs to be viable but at the same time grouping in an MMO of all game genres needs to give an edge to grouping with positive incentives to provide social interactions to make PuGing a more natural and routine activity, in effect making positive social interaction a routine activity. Nurturing its infancy from a process that rewards players for working together from level 1 to level cap, end game and beyond.
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The lack of real community is the PUG problem.
Back in Vanilla WOW you have to find people on your server and go to the instance. If someone was being a nub or a jerk, it would be let to the server to know and people wouldn't group with said person.
Now with random pugging no one knows who anyone is so the new system is very flawed. Make things easy and this is what happens, bad PUGS.
Something Awful this way comes.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
Bah ... Pugs and Pug owners.
F-ing strange bunch.
You stay sassy!
Something Awful this way comes.
It's not the games fault if you don't enjoy group content because you are playing in PUGs. Game designers can't fix this for you. LFG tools and so on don't help.
Join a guild, get familiar with them or play with friends. Then start group content with them.
In any challenging group content you are up to a lot of trouble with a PUG. And easy group content is just boring. But can still be fun with guild mates/friends.
I agree with you. In fact do I prefer to recruit new players to my guild instead of veterans, it is far easier to teach the ropes to a new player and get him or her to fit in our playstyle than to take someone who have good gear but might be used to doing things differently.
I also agree with Quizz earlier, the more set rules of specializing different roles the harder it is to find the right player and there will always be a few classes that can't find a PUG since there is no demand for them.
Group dynamics is important and people should be forced to work together to overcome hard opponents but all classes should be able to work in a group equally good. They shouldn't be mirrors but they need to bring something of equal value and no class should be a must.
Each class must be able to duo up with any other class and be as effective as any other duo in the game.
And yes, classical trinity (well, it ain't so classical anymore anyways) is not really good for this. Tank, healer and DPS are not that great balanced against eachothers and the more or less rule that a group must have a tank, a healer and 3 DPS to be good makes finding groups really hard.
And it is honestly hard enough to find groups in modern MMOs anyways, most players seems to solo and I am pretty tired of waiting 2 hours for a tank. And I also want to be able to gather any 5 guildmembers and run something with them.
I'm not sure that "community" solution helped all that often in vanilla WOW. Definitely had more ninja-looters in vanilla than problem groupmates in post-LFD WOW. Not by a lot, but more problem players.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Sorry Axehilt no we had more problem players in LFD WOW by a long shot. I refuse to use any Automated tool because the drama that it brings. I can count on 1 hand the time I had to deal with Ninja looters in Vanilla WOW and that was very early on. After people knew the problem players on my realm people no longer had issues again. I was an officer of 2 different 40 man raiding guilds and I kept in touch with over 50 guilds on my server to keep players like this out of our guild as well as others. Sorry but Ninja looters were not a big problem as we have ass hats today because of LFD.
You straight up didn't play vanilla WoW. Tired of people either 200% downplaying the issues vanilla WoW had that WoW goes through today or outright not even acknowledging them.
Ninja looting was just as rampant back then if not more so as it is before WoW made personal loot a thing. Actually, it was MORE SO a problem back then for sure because you had fucking hunters stealing loot for rogues even though they were supposed to be using mail armor and not leather, but they would ninja leather pieces anyway.
Not to mention the fight over weapons. You had rogues, hunters, warriors, fucking sometimes even paladins cause why the hell not fighting over the same weapons because the hunters wanted the meagre stat sticks that they didn't even really use. And don't even get me started on the hell hunters would raise when a rogue/warrior would roll on a bow and act like they just committed the most heinous act in existence.
Seriously gtfo if you're gonna continue to act like loot drama/ninjaing wasn't fucking rampart in vanilla WoW. You clearly never played back then so your opinion is already invalid.
No it was not. The only one time we had it happen to us in my 2 40 man raiding guild the ML stool all the stuff off the Rag on our first kill and left. Guess what Blizzard ban the guy for 2 weeks and we got our gear back. The only other times I know of Ninja looters were in other guilds. WHY? Because we had a network of guilds who kept in contact with one another. Sorry Bro but LFD is worse than your over dramatization of Ninja looting. LFD killed MMOS Ninja looting never did it just made people be smarter about the people you let in. O and BTW one of the Ninja looters was so well known on our server he had to transfer off it because no one would take him in a raid. His name DemonDruidz. The guy got run off the server. It happened, but LFD groups are the bane of MMOs.
You still never played vanilla WoW. Either that your're practicing being an ostritch with sticking your head in the sand. And its funny how you're acting like PUGs are only run for raids. 90% of PUGs are for dungeon runs.