U give me grp plz? I need this mob.
July 29, 2008 by Morninglark
Dear Game Designers,
Please fix the current issues, with grouping in MMORPG’s.
It used to be, that grouping was something we naturally did. It was difficult to be in a world, wandering around getting jumped by orcs. We would form groups, and hunt together for the day.
Now, games are designed to guide us through the content, and level. People will come up and ask for a group because they need a certain kill, for a particular quest. They join, we kill the mob, and they leave.
There is no community being built. There is no real grouping. You are just forming a momentary alliance, to kill some NPC. Rob, at MMOcrunch recently expounded that many games have become like standalone RPG’s with chat rooms.
Once you get off the island however… nothing changes. Age of Conan is an MMORPG where you can pretty much make it to Level 80 without ever grouping. Now, pardon me for this next outlandish thought… but isn’t grouping one of the key reasons we wanted to play MMORPGs instead of RPGs in the first place? I thought it was!
One of the comments, from Ryan, had some very insightful thoughts:
I love soloing. I love grouping sometimes too. What I like to see is encouraged grouping, not forced grouping or discouraged grouping.
World of Warcraft actively discourages grouping during normal play by making it less efficient than soloing. That’s dumb.
Dungeons & Dragons essentially forced grouping, and I hate that even more than discouraging grouping.
Something in-between is what I like. EverQuest II did an okay job of encouraging grouping by making it more efficient to do so.
I think there’s a happy place for “encouraged grouping” that hasn’t been introduced in any MMO I’ve played to this point, which would include absolute solo viability but increased reward for being social.
I would like to see a game that does not have a leash on the players. One that doesn’t have the ‘newbie island’ and tutorial that lasts until end game. (right now all the games have NPC’s and quests, that pretty much tell you to move on to the next area.) LOTRO included.
I want to get in, have a tutorial that teaches me the controls and basics of combat. Perhaps a solo instance for just level 1-3. Then just dump me in the world. Have a few quests to let me get some tattered armor and a rusty weapon, but for the love of god…don’t tell me where to go next. Let me wander the world looking for things to do. If I get in trouble, maybe I will think to ask others for help! (there are other players in an MMO to ask..right?)
Try to make the quests more group friendly. If you give me a quest to kill 10 of something, then I will go near the somethings, ask for a group, kill 10 and leave. (then of course I have to go back to town to get another quest to kill 10 somethingelse)
If the quests were more creative, perhaps the players could stay grouped for longer than 10 minutes. Community could be built, and I wouldn’t have to keep running back to town to get another dumb quest.
Encourage grouping, by giving a NOTICIBLE bonus in loot or experience. A persistant world may exist for a long time, and even have many players, but it will not flourish if the players do not have to depend on each other.
When I play WoW, I play it like I am playing Diablo2 with an auction house. I could just as easily play WoW as a single player version, and be content. I like to solo. I don’t want games to remove that option. But I would like the group dynamic to be better. I don’t like that half the grouping, for low-levels in WoW, involve older players just running people through Stockades. Players paying higher levels to run them through instances is NOT GROUPING!
Another problem is players joining a game later than friends did, and not being able to group. I liked the idea that EQ2 had for mentoring down. I would like to see games expand on the idea. Maybe mentoring up? EQ has added the monster missions, so players of different levels can group together. (But I like to group with my own character.) I don’t want to drop what I am doing to go get shrouds, just because a younger friend logged on.
Certainly the designers need to start addressing the current state of grouping in MMORPG’s. The early games like EQ, and DAOC seemed to build more community. They were more group friendly.
There has to be a way to make games solo friendly, and still keep the incentive to group.
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Despite how some people have perceived my piece at MMOCrunch, I enjoy solo-ing, too. I just think the trend is going too far towards solo-ing. Your comment, “There has to be a way to make games solo friendly, and still keep the incentive to group…” is spot-on.
[...] seems to be a hot topic for quite a few of us in the blogosphere. Many people disagree with me vehemently and think that MMOGs don’t have much point without [...]
I lay the blame squarely on the quest-directed gameplay of MMO’s like WoW. Once thought to be a revolutionary idea, it’s now mostly responsible for the reason why people don’t stay with their groups or even bother to group. Often times I hear people asking for groups in WoW only to be cajoled by other players in general chat that say: “You can easily solo that, what’s wrong with you?!?”
Maybe that person wanted to just enjoy the company of another player. Sadly, anyone who admits to that is some kind of freak or pariah who ends up being marginalized by other players who have no appreciation of grouping.
People by nature are creatures of self-interest. This was noted by famous economist Adam Smith. The butcher sells meat not to benefit the community but because he wants to make a profit and take care of himself and his family.
In EverQuest, you needed to have good social skills and good player/class skills in order to be desired by a group. Without groups in EverQuest you could not advance your character. Therefore grouping became a necessary mechanic. Then something strange happened. We realized that we enjoyed being in the company of other players and so the MMO community was born. A sense of community is the glue and stickiness that keeps a player subscribing long after they have become bored of the content and gameplay.
Contrast this with WoW, where you do not need a group to advance your character. Therefore the importance of grouping and the skills associated with getting groups such as good social skills and being a good player are no longer important or needed. Solo all the way to the level cap!
It is no wonder why grouping is all but dead. It’s also no wonder why players who reach the level cap are dazed and confused when they realize that in order to progress further they have to suddenly learn to play their class in a group and demonstrate some social graces like learning to talk to people respectfully. This is the point at which WoW becomes a real MMO and where Blizzard has admitted that the real game starts.
The truth is for all of the success of WoW there has been a terrible price to pay. We now have a generation of players who are socially inept and poor players all because Blizzard decided to dumb down the gameplay and reduced the need for group interdependency. Why? It’s all about money of course.
It’s the very same logic as to why there is so much garbage on prime time TV each night. Occasionally you find the diamonds in the rough with good TV shows but they are the exception.
What is even more tragic is that the new players to MMO’s have no idea of what they are missing and what things used to be like. For them, WoW is how a MMO should be. At least MMO veterans like myself and Morninglark have some sense of perspective.
[...] there have been some good discussions in the blogosphere lamenting the erosion of one of the key facets of MMO’s: grouping. I made a few comments on some of those sites [...]
I don’t have as much experience as the rest of you do regarding different games, but I did play EQ and EQ2.
The friends I made from grouping in EQ I still have today, and appreciate the hell out of the fact that they consider me a friend as well. It felt more to me like a bunch of friends sitting in the same room, all playing the same game. We shared stories, good and bad, history, and just about anything else under the sun, and life was good. And when nobody was on or there wasn’t any room anywhere, I just played two accounts by myself (Velketor still owes me rent), but I still had the conversation, the interaction of my guildmates, so life was still good.
Sitting in a group of friends doing nothing but grinding points was still fun to me, just to hang out. Call it silly, but thinking back on those all night dungeon crawls through Chardok or City of Mist, still makes me tingle just a bit.
Played EQ2 for a much shorter time, and the solo part of it was fun, but very repetitive, with the “get quest, go kill, go back get another quest” part. And the joining a group for one kill was absolutely annoying. Since I’m a bigtime tradeskiller (used to be anyway), the harvesting in EQ2 was fun for me, searching and racing for that single ore node way off in the distance. But as far as grouping, there wasn’t much of a need for it, so it got boring after making 9 characters, and maxxing out 9 tradeskills.
Maybe by the time I can get back to playing games, something will have been created, something that combines a lot of the elements that built the communities of old, but still has enough creativity to be called it’s own, and be interesting to all players, of all ages, with enough content and goals to support every type of player out there.