I don't miss groups when some guy(happen in clans but also random groups) who start with know it all and demand this and demand that but when you actuall go raid he's the one who screw it up hehe.
If people just have fun and not so fix as if its work or dont go afk/leave or screw it up im all for grouping.
Its for me being longtime now ive party raid with nice people who do it for fun and dont screw it up in stupid way.
I specially dont like the partys and raids if its so importend for most getting those precious items.
Thats why i love FFA pvp games its about fight other players having fun instead go to work become richer getting precious items.
One of my best experience in grouping was Asheron's call 2
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77 CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now)) MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB PSU:Corsair AX1200i OS:Windows 10 64bit
Ummm RIFT had grouping, and it was like grouping with bots most time. No one spoke no one socialized. Even in the large RIFT events, which was a system I originally thought wow this could be fun.. I found that no one hardly spoke. They joined up without so much as a hello and after the event was over they left without a goodbye. Occasionally 1 or 2 people might actuallly speak with each other. Or you might get someone trying to shout out commands that half the people involved ignored anyway.
This is actually one of the things I fear might happen in GW2. I will Keep my fingers crossed on that.
I think all the Automated UIs that are coming about play a huge factor in people not socializing. I am sure you will get people come here and start ranting about people use voice client and are talking but they are talking with their friends.,. Well in a game where you have people you are actually supposedly working with.. Speaking to those people instead of treating them like bots goes a long way.
If people want a group friendly game I highly recommend checking out Vanguard. Im not playing it myself but apparently it is about to F2P and is now getting some much needed dev support again. The game was based and built with grouping in mind. That doesnt mean there are solo areas and quests. It just means the most rewarding aspects of the game come from the huge open world dungeons that are group oriented. Its also a game where PUGging is not considered a bad thing. But some people do regularly and made alot of friends doing it. Something most post WOW game players seem to hate to do.
It'll definitely happen in GW2.
But in GW2, as in every game with convenient grouping, you can also be social yourself and form actual relationships with players yourself. These things never happened automatically, with or without auto-grouping features, so don't expect socialization to magically happen. But as with any relationship anywhere, if you put effort into making friendships happen in games then they're going to happen.
Meanwhile when my real friends are offline and it's 3am, I'm not utterly barred from having a fun teamplay experience (which is what I love most about MMORPGs,) because I can queue up and find a group while doing something reasonably fun (certainly more fun than AFKing in the capital.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
The problem is when people who only have half an hour or an hour to play are forced to spend half of that time looking for a group before they can do anything. If a game is only really playable by people who can set aside chunks of hours at a time every single time they play, then that's a very small potential customer base. Far too many games assumed that players would magically find a group, without putting any real thought into how players would find a group--or in some cases, actively trying to make it harder for players to find a group.
Instead, what you need to do is to take a good grouping system like that of Spiral Knights, and then put it into a real MMORPG rather than a somewhat, kinda, not really an MMORPG like Spiral Knights. And then you can require grouping without breaking the game.
The solution for those people? Play Diablo or WoW.
Why do you think Diablo and WOW are so popular? Of course they do.
Now if developers think that is a big piece of the market, the design choices are obvious. Do not require players to adhere to your schedule, be flexible for them.
Diablo and WoW are popular for the same reason Final Fantasy is popular....fanboys.
Both Blizzard and SquareEnix can easily survive no matter how craptastic a game they release purely on the guarantee that the fanboys (even just counting the ones from Korea and Japan alone respectively) will continue to buy into it. Recently WoW has been losing steam in the west, but in the east its still going strong. They dont have to make good decisions because there are enough people out there that will consider anything and everything they do to be gold no matter what.
Sometimes I am not sure certain people understand what certain other people mean by grouping.
The grouping Quizzical describes is the exact OPPOSITE of the grouping that I and many others want.
Also, in most games you solo at the start and group up at the very end. In TTS its practically the opposite of that. And soloing is only possible through the use of consumables like poison and potions and traps and enchantments and such. That's the dream. And even then to do anything real you have to group, at best you can group as crafters and enchanters and then a player can do things alone because of that prep.
Not some stupid scaling content bullshit. I understand why GW2 has to scale content although I would prefer they didn't but they get points for at least trying to be interesting.
Well then, what is the grouping that you want, if it's the exact opposite of needing to be in a group for all content?
While Spiral Knights will scale down to a party size of 1, there's no reason why you couldn't take the same system and set some floor that it will not scale below. You could, for example, make content scale with anywhere from 3-6 players. If you have fewer than four players, then you have to do everything at 3-man difficulty--which could be essentially impossible to solo. (Well, in a lot of MMORPGs it would be essentially impossible; Spiral Knights has a sufficiently heavy dependence on player skill that a very good player could solo most or all content that is scaled to 3-man difficulty.)
Note that in Spiral Knights, if you don't want to PUG, you don't have to. If you want to group exclusively with guildies and friends, you can uncheck the open group box, and the PUG system will never randomly throw anyone into your group. A lot of players don't ever PUG. Personally, I found the PUG system to be a good way to meet new people, pick out the ones that are good, and add them to your friends list, so that you'll have other good players to group with in the future.
Popping all over the fucking world with no concern for geography, plus cross server this and cross server that. Is bad.
Grouping is where you go around doing things and you meet people and then you work together. Or you meet in town or something and say hey wanna group sometime. And where actually being near something is a requirement to group. And no content scaling... And no people popping in and out of group every 5 seconds.
I play casual games, and I am fine with them, but I want games without all those casual friendly features to play too.
Without any sort of fast travel, grouping at all is very difficult, and grouping with friends or guildies basically impossible. So it sounds like what you really want is the games from the bad old days when the basic rules were:
1) You must get a group (in order to do content), and
2) You cannot get a group (because you can't find enough people that the game mechanics will allow you to group with).
I hope you can at least understand why a large majority of players do not like that style of gameplay.
They tend not to require every other player to be forced to group in order to enjoy grouping.
I mean if you want to criticize ToR's lack of a dungeon finder feature, that's fair. But certainly in RIFT grouping was frequent and convenient and if you were healer/tank you could do it like WOW and purely group your way to max level.
Rift just has a serious lack of group content. Just 1-2 dungeons per level bracket, that you will need to grind at max level anyway. And there really snt any incentive to run them, because the gear is outleveled so fast anyway, and Rift is a very easy game to level in to begin with. I think theres even less incentive to group in Rift than there is in SWTOR.
Without any sort of fast travel, grouping at all is very difficult, and grouping with friends or guildies basically impossible. So it sounds like what you really want is the games from the bad old days when the basic rules were:
1) You must get a group (in order to do content), and
2) You cannot get a group (because you can't find enough people that the game mechanics will allow you to group with).
I hope you can at least understand why a large majority of players do not like that style of gameplay.
That is bullshit if the game is designed properly.
I don't want to go back to EQ or UO or w/e. I want to improve on them in a different way than pugging tools. Why can't you find enough people to group with? Because of poor game design. WoW fixed the symptoms instead of the disease and that is stupid.
Without any sort of fast travel, grouping at all is very difficult, and grouping with friends or guildies basically impossible. So it sounds like what you really want is the games from the bad old days when the basic rules were:
1) You must get a group (in order to do content), and
2) You cannot get a group (because you can't find enough people that the game mechanics will allow you to group with).
I hope you can at least understand why a large majority of players do not like that style of gameplay.
Did you actually ever play in those days? Finding a group was never that hard unless you just didn't try. Did you try?
Those games thrived because (surprise) there are a lot of people who enjoy that style of gameplay! What I don't understand is why people like you, who obviously don't enjoy that style of gameplay, seem to think that every single game out there HAS to conform to your preferences.
The only excuse I ever hear is "xxx is popular! There's more money in xxx!" You know what, though? FPS' are crazy popular, but people still continue to make platformers, racing games, RPGs, and what have you. So theme parks are popular. Why, then, is it so inconceivable for sand boxes, sand parks, and games that actually consider dying a bad thing to exist? Why can both styles not be available to those who would choose either one?
Rift just has a serious lack of group content. Just 1-2 dungeons per level bracket, that you will need to grind at max level anyway. And there really snt any incentive to run them, because the gear is outleveled so fast anyway, and Rift is a very easy game to level in to begin with. I think theres even less incentive to group in Rift than there is in SWTOR
Well that's a fair criticism, although honestly I found the rewards pretty excellent in RIFT's dungeons.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Without any sort of fast travel, grouping at all is very difficult, and grouping with friends or guildies basically impossible. So it sounds like what you really want is the games from the bad old days when the basic rules were:
1) You must get a group (in order to do content), and
2) You cannot get a group (because you can't find enough people that the game mechanics will allow you to group with).
I hope you can at least understand why a large majority of players do not like that style of gameplay.
That is bullshit if the game is designed properly.
I don't want to go back to EQ or UO or w/e. I want to improve on them in a different way than pugging tools. Why can't you find enough people to group with? Because of poor game design. WoW fixed the symptoms instead of the disease and that is stupid.
Except that WoW fixed neither the symptom nor the disease, even if you want to distinguish between the two.
Spiral Knights has a grouping system that works very well. Guild Wars has one that works pretty well. And that's all that I can think of for games that make it practical to log on and get a suitable group quickly. I've heard that City of Heroes has a grouping system that works well, but haven't played it myself. And after that, I'm not even aware of any MMORPGs that even have a reputation for making it easy to get a group for PVE content. The reason for the move toward soloing is because most games haven't figured out how to make it practical for players to get a group.
If you've got some great ideas for how to make it easy to get a group, then I'd like to hear it. Just making it so that players have to get a group to do anything doesn't magically make it practical to actually find a group. Many games have tried that, and without putting mechanics in place to make it easy to actually find a group, it's invariably a complete fiasco from a game design perspective, and usually also a commercial disaster.
Without any sort of fast travel, grouping at all is very difficult, and grouping with friends or guildies basically impossible. So it sounds like what you really want is the games from the bad old days when the basic rules were:
1) You must get a group (in order to do content), and
2) You cannot get a group (because you can't find enough people that the game mechanics will allow you to group with).
I hope you can at least understand why a large majority of players do not like that style of gameplay.
With friends and guildies, it is hard without fast travelling, that is true.
But in the old days there was nothing like that and I still grouped with friends and guildies, even though I had to PUG more back then.
If the game is grouped focused you will find groups. Fast travelling however and for that matter no trinity, helps to make things simpler.
The thing that really makes grouping hard is the focus and better rewards of soloing that have come the last few years. Why group until you max out when it is faster and easier to solo? And soloing all the way up turns many players pretty useless in groups.
I don´t think it is that the majority don´t like that gameplay, just that they will play the simplest and fastest way.
It's not that people dislike being in groups. It's that people dislike having to spend half of their time trying to assemble a group, waiting for people to get to the site of the group content, trying to replace someone who left the group, and other such things that aren't fun.
That's why I say the solution is to make it easier to get a group. Go ahead and require a group, but make it so that you reliably can get one for the content you want within a few minutes.
Without any sort of fast travel, grouping at all is very difficult, and grouping with friends or guildies basically impossible. So it sounds like what you really want is the games from the bad old days when the basic rules were:
1) You must get a group (in order to do content), and
2) You cannot get a group (because you can't find enough people that the game mechanics will allow you to group with).
I hope you can at least understand why a large majority of players do not like that style of gameplay.
That is bullshit if the game is designed properly.
I don't want to go back to EQ or UO or w/e. I want to improve on them in a different way than pugging tools. Why can't you find enough people to group with? Because of poor game design. WoW fixed the symptoms instead of the disease and that is stupid.
Except that WoW fixed neither the symptom nor the disease, even if you want to distinguish between the two.
Spiral Knights has a grouping system that works very well. Guild Wars has one that works pretty well. And that's all that I can think of for games that make it practical to log on and get a suitable group quickly. I've heard that City of Heroes has a grouping system that works well, but haven't played it myself. And after that, I'm not even aware of any MMORPGs that even have a reputation for making it easy to get a group for PVE content. The reason for the move toward soloing is because most games haven't figured out how to make it practical for players to get a group.
If you've got some great ideas for how to make it easy to get a group, then I'd like to hear it. Just making it so that players have to get a group to do anything doesn't magically make it practical to actually find a group. Many games have tried that, and without putting mechanics in place to make it easy to actually find a group, it's invariably a complete fiasco from a game design perspective, and usually also a commercial disaster.
W/e. The example is irrelevant. WoW TRIED to fix the symptoms, and solo wise it succeeded. You can use spiral knights and an example for easy group grabbing tools if you want.
In any case if you want casuals with 30 minutes to play, its true that you are basically fucked. But if you want to focus on people with 2-36 hours to kill you can still get 75%+ on the combat. Although combat focus is not huge in my opinion, should be 50% tops as opposed to 90% in most games.
As I've explained many times, the amount of awesome you can get from anything, not just games, is limited by how much time you have. And I am focused on awesome. So I can't afford to ruin the awesome to let people without the necessary time investment play. There are dozens of MMOs for people with only 0-90 minutes to burn. Time for another EvE. But better. And not in space.
So then you are advocating making it both so that you have to get a group, and also so that it's very hard to get a group.
If your target audience is a subset of people who have 2+ hours to set aside every single time they want to play, then that's an awfully small audience. And that's before you lose a bunch of people because they don't like various other mechanics in your game.
To answer what someone said earlier in the thread, I don't object to the existence of games that cater to narrow niches like that, even if it's not for me. But I find it difficult to believe that there are very many people who want a requirement of long blocks of play time as their main feature. Even among most of the people who do like that, you'll end up finding that most don't like your choices on theme park versus sandbox, leveling curve speed, crafting importance, loot sources, or the myriad other reasons that players decide to like or dislike a game.
I'm not necessarily against only spending 50% of your game time in combat. In Uncharted Waters Online, I probably spend less than 5% of my time in combat. But it really depends on what the other 50% is. If it's trying to find a group, then that's not going to be a fun game.
So then you are advocating making it both so that you have to get a group, and also so that it's very hard to get a group.
A great deal of people who play MMO are probably introverts (me included). Honestly learning how to talk to people is a great life skill to have & having to actually interact with people is good practice. Hard as in difficult to do and hard as in overcoming shyness to interact with other human beings are completely different things
What life skills are kids today learning in an MMO... Seriously.....
So then you are advocating making it both so that you have to get a group, and also so that it's very hard to get a group.
If your target audience is a subset of people who have 2+ hours to set aside every single time they want to play, then that's an awfully small audience. And that's before you lose a bunch of people because they don't like various other mechanics in your game.
To answer what someone said earlier in the thread, I don't object to the existence of games that cater to narrow niches like that, even if it's not for me. But I find it difficult to believe that there are very many people who want a requirement of long blocks of play time as their main feature. Even among most of the people who do like that, you'll end up finding that most don't like your choices on theme park versus sandbox, leveling curve speed, crafting importance, loot sources, or the myriad other reasons that players decide to like or dislike a game.
I'm not necessarily against only spending 50% of your game time in combat. In Uncharted Waters Online, I probably spend less than 5% of my time in combat. But it really depends on what the other 50% is. If it's trying to find a group, then that's not going to be a fun game.
If you are waiting for a group to build up you do what we did in ATITD other stuff. Do some crafting, pass out some items, work on a plan, scry for any imminent danger, work on the city, maybe do some time in the intercity tunnels, chillax while you spend some time meditating to charge up mana batteries. So you had to kill some time and talk with people for 15 minutes. Suck it up. There is a direct correlation between the amount of time you have to play and the amount of awesome you can participate in. Even in the most casual free to play games dungeons and raids take time, some more than others.
You just CAN'T do the BEST crazy awesome stuff in 30 minutes blocks. Its impossible.
Regardless of whether not TTS ever gets made, its allows you to do things you can't do in any other game. The closest would be Wurm or EvE. And its not even beyond the technology. My only limitation is money and time. Current tech can support TTS style gameplay, its just a matter of writing the code. I think that there is a market among hardcores for the kind of stuff you can do with 2-8 hours a day to play.
Back in the day people dreamed of many real time day long sieges with thousands of players and destructible environments. I don't see why that dream has to die because casuals crashed the market.
After the first time you take down a dragon with the focused fire of a dozen ballistas, where the projectile stays in the dragon so you can see it and the dragon falls out of the sky, I think you have a good chance to be hooked.
I miss the good ole days of EQ. When grouping was both more fun and more rewarding than soloing. I wish there was a modern game that had the same dynamic.
You should play WOW. It has the same dynamics WITHOUT all the pain.
Grouping for dungeons is more rewarding than solo-quest. You level faster and you get blue items.
And you don't have all the down-side of EQ .. slow progression, no instance/a lot of camping, grinding very boring single mob (fighting in an instance with varying bosses is a lot more fun).
well he said same dynamics .
But if he is to follow the WoW dynamics he might as well play all the clones that came after it since they are basically same mechanism like wow just with better graphics .So go rift or SWTOR its exactly wow clones but younger.
But for the old EQ excitement i too am waiting for such a game ,the closest you can get is vanguard .
stand like a piece of dead wood next to 100 similar dead wood(might as well be motionless npc there)
dungeon entry comes up
enter dungeon you done like 100 times
move thru instance same as you did 100 times with 3 guys you never met or will likely never meet again ,who say one word thru out at best and ready to quit minute you wipe so better not
come out after killing boss now for the 101 time
then press lfd queue and wait again.
This is the legacy of wow to us sadly.One good thing at least swtor refused to do was introduce this feature and forced you to actually have a friend's list and talk to people.
OMG people have to talk to each other in a online multiplayer ROLEPLAYING game - the horror!
If you are waiting for a group to build up you do what we did in ATITD other stuff. Do some crafting, pass out some items, work on a plan, scry for any imminent danger, work on the city, maybe do some time in the intercity tunnels, chillax while you spend some time meditating to charge up mana batteries. So you had to kill some time and talk with people for 15 minutes. Suck it up. There is a direct correlation between the amount of time you have to play and the amount of awesome you can participate in. Even in the most casual free to play games dungeons and raids take time, some more than others.
You say that as though you've never tried to organize a group. Ignoring how the group forms to focus on other stuff only works if you have the sort of PUG auto-grouping tools that you reject. If you have to form a group manually, then focusing on other stuff means the group will never fill up. You have to spend the time spamming people to try to find people willing to join, and that makes it rather hard to do other stuff at the same time.
And no, there isn't a correlation between longer play sessions and more awesomeness (e.g., 10 minutes), at least if you exclude very short play times. Or at least not a positive correlation. Game developers who can't figure out how to make it possible to do anything interesting in a half hour play session are simply bad at game design. I don't think I've ever seen anything cool that you can do in 2 hour play sessions that can't be done in half hour play sessions. Even for the cool things I've seen that did take more than half an hour, it's not hard to imagine how they could have been redesigned to fit half-hour play sessions.
Admittedly, at some point, trying to shorten the time requirements does get ridiculous. There's no need to try to make it so that everything can be done in a half hour session. But a good game does make it so that more than a few things can be done in half hour sessions for the times when that's all you've got, and doesn't often ask you to set aside 2+ hours.
Besides, if the awesomeness takes two hours to start, then by the time it arrives, I'm sick of playing and looking for an excuse to log off, and won't find it awesome or even kinda nifty.
I miss the good ole days of EQ. When grouping was both more fun and more rewarding than soloing. I wish there was a modern game that had the same dynamic.
You should play WOW. It has the same dynamics WITHOUT all the pain.
No, it has the bad parts of EQ (The singular gear grinding game design) without any of the social elements. There's no reason or incentive to socialize or group in WoW.
Honestly, when i did the Dungeon finder in WoW i didnt call people by their names, why would i go though the effort. i called them by their class, most didnt like it but who cares you were rarely on my server anyhow.
Because i can. I'm Hopeful For Every Game, Until the Fan Boys Attack My Games. Then the Knives Come Out. Logic every gamers worst enemy.
Comments
I don't miss groups when some guy(happen in clans but also random groups) who start with know it all and demand this and demand that but when you actuall go raid he's the one who screw it up hehe.
If people just have fun and not so fix as if its work or dont go afk/leave or screw it up im all for grouping.
Its for me being longtime now ive party raid with nice people who do it for fun and dont screw it up in stupid way.
I specially dont like the partys and raids if its so importend for most getting those precious items.
Thats why i love FFA pvp games its about fight other players having fun instead go to work become richer getting precious items.
One of my best experience in grouping was Asheron's call 2
Hope to build full AMD system RYZEN/VEGA/AM4!!!
MB:Asus V De Luxe z77
CPU:Intell Icore7 3770k
GPU: AMD Fury X(waiting for BIG VEGA 10 or 11 HBM2?(bit unclear now))
MEMORY:Corsair PLAT.DDR3 1866MHZ 16GB
PSU:Corsair AX1200i
OS:Windows 10 64bit
It'll definitely happen in GW2.
But in GW2, as in every game with convenient grouping, you can also be social yourself and form actual relationships with players yourself. These things never happened automatically, with or without auto-grouping features, so don't expect socialization to magically happen. But as with any relationship anywhere, if you put effort into making friendships happen in games then they're going to happen.
Meanwhile when my real friends are offline and it's 3am, I'm not utterly barred from having a fun teamplay experience (which is what I love most about MMORPGs,) because I can queue up and find a group while doing something reasonably fun (certainly more fun than AFKing in the capital.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Diablo and WoW are popular for the same reason Final Fantasy is popular....fanboys.
Both Blizzard and SquareEnix can easily survive no matter how craptastic a game they release purely on the guarantee that the fanboys (even just counting the ones from Korea and Japan alone respectively) will continue to buy into it. Recently WoW has been losing steam in the west, but in the east its still going strong. They dont have to make good decisions because there are enough people out there that will consider anything and everything they do to be gold no matter what.
Popping all over the fucking world with no concern for geography, plus cross server this and cross server that. Is bad.
Grouping is where you go around doing things and you meet people and then you work together. Or you meet in town or something and say hey wanna group sometime. And where actually being near something is a requirement to group. And no content scaling... And no people popping in and out of group every 5 seconds.
I play casual games, and I am fine with them, but I want games without all those casual friendly features to play too.
Without any sort of fast travel, grouping at all is very difficult, and grouping with friends or guildies basically impossible. So it sounds like what you really want is the games from the bad old days when the basic rules were:
1) You must get a group (in order to do content), and
2) You cannot get a group (because you can't find enough people that the game mechanics will allow you to group with).
I hope you can at least understand why a large majority of players do not like that style of gameplay.
I think a magical world of unicorns is easier to find.
Rift just has a serious lack of group content. Just 1-2 dungeons per level bracket, that you will need to grind at max level anyway. And there really snt any incentive to run them, because the gear is outleveled so fast anyway, and Rift is a very easy game to level in to begin with. I think theres even less incentive to group in Rift than there is in SWTOR.
That is bullshit if the game is designed properly.
I don't want to go back to EQ or UO or w/e. I want to improve on them in a different way than pugging tools. Why can't you find enough people to group with? Because of poor game design. WoW fixed the symptoms instead of the disease and that is stupid.
Did you actually ever play in those days? Finding a group was never that hard unless you just didn't try. Did you try?
Those games thrived because (surprise) there are a lot of people who enjoy that style of gameplay! What I don't understand is why people like you, who obviously don't enjoy that style of gameplay, seem to think that every single game out there HAS to conform to your preferences.
The only excuse I ever hear is "xxx is popular! There's more money in xxx!" You know what, though? FPS' are crazy popular, but people still continue to make platformers, racing games, RPGs, and what have you. So theme parks are popular. Why, then, is it so inconceivable for sand boxes, sand parks, and games that actually consider dying a bad thing to exist? Why can both styles not be available to those who would choose either one?
I agree... out with questing back to the grind.. the grind that made MMOs fun!
Well that's a fair criticism, although honestly I found the rewards pretty excellent in RIFT's dungeons.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Except that WoW fixed neither the symptom nor the disease, even if you want to distinguish between the two.
Spiral Knights has a grouping system that works very well. Guild Wars has one that works pretty well. And that's all that I can think of for games that make it practical to log on and get a suitable group quickly. I've heard that City of Heroes has a grouping system that works well, but haven't played it myself. And after that, I'm not even aware of any MMORPGs that even have a reputation for making it easy to get a group for PVE content. The reason for the move toward soloing is because most games haven't figured out how to make it practical for players to get a group.
If you've got some great ideas for how to make it easy to get a group, then I'd like to hear it. Just making it so that players have to get a group to do anything doesn't magically make it practical to actually find a group. Many games have tried that, and without putting mechanics in place to make it easy to actually find a group, it's invariably a complete fiasco from a game design perspective, and usually also a commercial disaster.
With friends and guildies, it is hard without fast travelling, that is true.
But in the old days there was nothing like that and I still grouped with friends and guildies, even though I had to PUG more back then.
If the game is grouped focused you will find groups. Fast travelling however and for that matter no trinity, helps to make things simpler.
The thing that really makes grouping hard is the focus and better rewards of soloing that have come the last few years. Why group until you max out when it is faster and easier to solo? And soloing all the way up turns many players pretty useless in groups.
I don´t think it is that the majority don´t like that gameplay, just that they will play the simplest and fastest way.
It's not that people dislike being in groups. It's that people dislike having to spend half of their time trying to assemble a group, waiting for people to get to the site of the group content, trying to replace someone who left the group, and other such things that aren't fun.
That's why I say the solution is to make it easier to get a group. Go ahead and require a group, but make it so that you reliably can get one for the content you want within a few minutes.
W/e. The example is irrelevant. WoW TRIED to fix the symptoms, and solo wise it succeeded. You can use spiral knights and an example for easy group grabbing tools if you want.
In any case if you want casuals with 30 minutes to play, its true that you are basically fucked. But if you want to focus on people with 2-36 hours to kill you can still get 75%+ on the combat. Although combat focus is not huge in my opinion, should be 50% tops as opposed to 90% in most games.
As I've explained many times, the amount of awesome you can get from anything, not just games, is limited by how much time you have. And I am focused on awesome. So I can't afford to ruin the awesome to let people without the necessary time investment play. There are dozens of MMOs for people with only 0-90 minutes to burn. Time for another EvE. But better. And not in space.
So then you are advocating making it both so that you have to get a group, and also so that it's very hard to get a group.
If your target audience is a subset of people who have 2+ hours to set aside every single time they want to play, then that's an awfully small audience. And that's before you lose a bunch of people because they don't like various other mechanics in your game.
To answer what someone said earlier in the thread, I don't object to the existence of games that cater to narrow niches like that, even if it's not for me. But I find it difficult to believe that there are very many people who want a requirement of long blocks of play time as their main feature. Even among most of the people who do like that, you'll end up finding that most don't like your choices on theme park versus sandbox, leveling curve speed, crafting importance, loot sources, or the myriad other reasons that players decide to like or dislike a game.
I'm not necessarily against only spending 50% of your game time in combat. In Uncharted Waters Online, I probably spend less than 5% of my time in combat. But it really depends on what the other 50% is. If it's trying to find a group, then that's not going to be a fun game.
A great deal of people who play MMO are probably introverts (me included). Honestly learning how to talk to people is a great life skill to have & having to actually interact with people is good practice. Hard as in difficult to do and hard as in overcoming shyness to interact with other human beings are completely different things
What life skills are kids today learning in an MMO... Seriously.....
So many horror stories so much drama.
I like pugs, you make mistakes, work out strategies as you go and when you kill the boss its high fives and you friend the players you like.
I like casual guilds, you're in the 'B' team and just fill in where ever guildies need help.
What I didnt like was sitting in Orgrimmar vanilla wow spamming LFG for several hours while crafting then logging off without doing a single run.
If you are waiting for a group to build up you do what we did in ATITD other stuff. Do some crafting, pass out some items, work on a plan, scry for any imminent danger, work on the city, maybe do some time in the intercity tunnels, chillax while you spend some time meditating to charge up mana batteries. So you had to kill some time and talk with people for 15 minutes. Suck it up. There is a direct correlation between the amount of time you have to play and the amount of awesome you can participate in. Even in the most casual free to play games dungeons and raids take time, some more than others.
You just CAN'T do the BEST crazy awesome stuff in 30 minutes blocks. Its impossible.
Regardless of whether not TTS ever gets made, its allows you to do things you can't do in any other game. The closest would be Wurm or EvE. And its not even beyond the technology. My only limitation is money and time. Current tech can support TTS style gameplay, its just a matter of writing the code. I think that there is a market among hardcores for the kind of stuff you can do with 2-8 hours a day to play.
Back in the day people dreamed of many real time day long sieges with thousands of players and destructible environments. I don't see why that dream has to die because casuals crashed the market.
After the first time you take down a dragon with the focused fire of a dozen ballistas, where the projectile stays in the dragon so you can see it and the dragon falls out of the sky, I think you have a good chance to be hooked.
What I miss more than grouping is a good server community.
Enter a whole new realm of challenge and adventure.
well he said same dynamics .
But if he is to follow the WoW dynamics he might as well play all the clones that came after it since they are basically same mechanism like wow just with better graphics .So go rift or SWTOR its exactly wow clones but younger.
But for the old EQ excitement i too am waiting for such a game ,the closest you can get is vanguard .
seems modern day grouping is about
log in
click 1 button to join lfd queue
stand like a piece of dead wood next to 100 similar dead wood(might as well be motionless npc there)
dungeon entry comes up
enter dungeon you done like 100 times
move thru instance same as you did 100 times with 3 guys you never met or will likely never meet again ,who say one word thru out at best and ready to quit minute you wipe so better not
come out after killing boss now for the 101 time
then press lfd queue and wait again.
This is the legacy of wow to us sadly.One good thing at least swtor refused to do was introduce this feature and forced you to actually have a friend's list and talk to people.
OMG people have to talk to each other in a online multiplayer ROLEPLAYING game - the horror!
You say that as though you've never tried to organize a group. Ignoring how the group forms to focus on other stuff only works if you have the sort of PUG auto-grouping tools that you reject. If you have to form a group manually, then focusing on other stuff means the group will never fill up. You have to spend the time spamming people to try to find people willing to join, and that makes it rather hard to do other stuff at the same time.
And no, there isn't a correlation between longer play sessions and more awesomeness (e.g., 10 minutes), at least if you exclude very short play times. Or at least not a positive correlation. Game developers who can't figure out how to make it possible to do anything interesting in a half hour play session are simply bad at game design. I don't think I've ever seen anything cool that you can do in 2 hour play sessions that can't be done in half hour play sessions. Even for the cool things I've seen that did take more than half an hour, it's not hard to imagine how they could have been redesigned to fit half-hour play sessions.
Admittedly, at some point, trying to shorten the time requirements does get ridiculous. There's no need to try to make it so that everything can be done in a half hour session. But a good game does make it so that more than a few things can be done in half hour sessions for the times when that's all you've got, and doesn't often ask you to set aside 2+ hours.
Besides, if the awesomeness takes two hours to start, then by the time it arrives, I'm sick of playing and looking for an excuse to log off, and won't find it awesome or even kinda nifty.
No, it has the bad parts of EQ (The singular gear grinding game design) without any of the social elements. There's no reason or incentive to socialize or group in WoW.
Honestly, when i did the Dungeon finder in WoW i didnt call people by their names, why would i go though the effort. i called them by their class, most didnt like it but who cares you were rarely on my server anyhow.
Because i can.
I'm Hopeful For Every Game, Until the Fan Boys Attack My Games. Then the Knives Come Out.
Logic every gamers worst enemy.