Rewarding socializing and grouping is a great idea. Why? Because its harder. Doing harder things should yield a better reward than taking the easy route.
Our definitions of 'social' are a little different, then.
I'm not concerned with the small, singular journey of one player or small group to the level cap in a game. To call group leveling 'social' is an extreme overstatement, to me.
I'm talking 'social' as in server-wide communities, events that tie in entire guilds with each other, creating a positive mentality with respectable ideals that encourages other players to do the same to the new players, 'passing it forward'. Leaving the community in a better shape than it was when we took root.
It's larger than just the leveling experience. It's about making an event where everyone worth mentioning on a server shows up and loves every moment of it, coming together (or going against each other if we are talking more PvP-heavy games) in camraderie or rivarly.
That's social. That's developing a sense of community. Some people like to say that they want a social game. We make it.
That's so sad. You have to do all that work. When I played A Tale In The Desert we had an acro party or a dig going literally every day. Often more than one. We organized a sheep gathering and breeding fair and we had 10 players together for a solid 3-12 hours farming wood for charcoal to get a new tech. We didn't have to "organize" events. The whole game was events. Signing off on sculptures and hand puzzles the Riverland Public Works Guild, I was in like 10 guilds simultaneously.
Public Works set up special work stations all over the region to get newbies free access to resources crafting tools and machines and we did all the local techs and funded people's compounds and guild halls.
I had a storehouse of thousands of public mats like slate and grass and mud next to the region spawn to get instant compounds, dozens of public kilns and so forth.
You know about the homestead act? We basically had that with mats and stuff like starter sheep herds. That's what we did all day. And it matters because the way techs are set up the good of the community is the good of the individual. Sure you can't run a dig for medium stones all on your own but who cares because there were 2-3 digs every day and acro parties to get your acrobat skills for strength bonuses and a sculpture district where we each went to sign off.
If you saw another person you had never met you did acro, signed off on titles, any oustanding petitiions and so forth and maybe traded carrots for onions or w/e so we all had access to all seeds. And no one whined about how it was sucking up their free play time to acro with you.
You can yak all you want about your WoW guild but unless only 5% of players in the entire playerbase are likely to bitch at you because you ask for some sort of assistance your community is nothing compared to social sandbox communities.
Originally posted by Ausare Just about every guild i have been in in many gsmes are aways talking and helping each other.
Kind of like every game were you have the ability to build internal communities.
People always make this comment in these sorts of threads, neglecting the fact that socializing is more then just what you do in a guild.
Like the guy obive this poster stated, in essence if you give the players the ability to avoid it most of them will. MMO's do a very good job of that now.
Developers have taken casual to mean that players need the game to be easy and quick to progress through, when casual only means that you don't play for long periods of time every day. Even casual players enjoy a challenge, and most MMO's are completely removing that aspect of the game, at least in the leveling process, and that in turn leads to people not needing to use the social aspects of the game.
It's pretty normal, even for social people, to do those things on their own that can be done on their own. This is how they make MMO's anymore. Most peopel though, I believe, need an incentive to socialize; that usually means putting emphasis on community building within the game, and giving people a reason to actually interact with each other.
If you get people interacting with one another, they'll inevitably start to socialize more. This is kind of the bedrock for Mortal online and the guys making it. Get peope interacting, something many developers seem to be moving away from. The dynamic event stuff that's become popular sinse WAR, is kind of becoming the bane of social gameplay. They don't actually encourage people to "play together", but to instead "play around each other". Every game I've played that uses this sort of a system, has had the exact same result, lots of people simply playing around one another but no one actually playing together.
So, no and yes. It starts with the developers who insist on making online MULTIPLAYER games as single player friendly as possible, and that leads to players doing less socializing because they don't need to.
PS: What the poster above me wrote as well. Exactly same thing applies to EVE. Corps interact, it's not corps only interacting with it's own members. The server is a community as a whole, and peoples actions tend to have impact in the larger social enviroment; as little or as much as they wish it to. Guilds mean very little in the overall social structure of most MMO's because they're self confined groups that have no reason to interact with other guilds, and the members of guilds have no reason to interact outside of their guild. Guilds don't spur social interaction in most MMO's, they secgregate it.
Originally posted by AlBQuirkyMost socialization occurs during "downtime." Games today just do not have downtime. You instantly heal after every fight and queue up for group content and go. People seldom sit and chat anymore.
How do you explain UO?
I can't. Never played UO. I take it this was an exception? Did you instantly heal after fights and queue up for group content and go? Were there LFD and LFR tools available, or something similar? I truly have no idea what UO was like. It was heavily PvP based and I never was interested in that aspect so never gave it a shot.
Extremely social game, regular community activities, player-run venues across the shards with at least one prominent one on each shard. There was no queueing and grouping only came several years later, but really wasn't used for much other than chat. There was ZERO downtime in the game. ATITD, Puzzle Pirates and several other games have extremely social environments and extensive communities that extend beyond the guild unit because the tools were there to facilitate interaction and the gameplay was more than just raping the countryside of every living thing in your path.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I agree that faster paced games and auto grouping systems have made us less directly social but I'd say that people only share 50% of the blame. I say 50% because at any one point you can either take the time to chat or not 50/50.
Going forward in MMOs I'm not sure if the combat/adventuring aspect of MMOs will slow down but specific tools and city side features may bring some socializing back. A fair amount of people saw SoEMote as useless tool and a waste of money and resources by SoE. I didnt agree with that a time and in the context of this discussion I think it's a great feature. EQ2 already has good integrated voice chat and with SoEMote they added boxes of the other players faces next to thier group nameplate to see them "talk" in real time.
There is still the same factor of the player deciding to use it. In this the OP was spot on. The game you are playing also needs to encourage communication if it's to happen on a regular basis.
Didn't bother reading the first 7 pages so I'll just chime in @ the OP:
I don't think that it's the fault of the players as much as it is the fault of the current design of games itself. As you said, games used to be tougher, and require groups to do anything. Furthermore the groups had to consist of players that KNEW their role and how to play it, with less "wiggle room" than many games seem to have now except in the toughest raids. Because players can simply jump in and out of short-term "relationships", if you will, with other players, there's less of an inclination to develop a lasting friendly relationship with that person. Not to say it doesn't happen, but it's not as important as it once was.
This is why I'm so for the creation of new iterations of the EQ/FFXI model, where groups were an absolute necessity.
Originally posted by Lorkii I can say with all honesty, I made more friends and chatted more with 1 Darkness Falls Princes raid in DAOC, then I have in all games combined since WoW. It s sad but true, only other game that comes close and was FFXI. Really miss the old school ways. Too many console gaming, go go go go go go crowd entered the genre.
Didn't bother reading the first 7 pages so I'll just chime in @ the OP:
I don't think that it's the fault of the players as much as it is the fault of the current design of games itself. As you said, games used to be tougher, and require groups to do anything. Furthermore the groups had to consist of players that KNEW their role and how to play it, with less "wiggle room" than many games seem to have now except in the toughest raids. Because players can simply jump in and out of short-term "relationships", if you will, with other players, there's less of an inclination to develop a lasting friendly relationship with that person. Not to say it doesn't happen, but it's not as important as it once was.
This is why I'm so for the creation of new iterations of the EQ/FFXI model, where groups were an absolute necessity.
This is why I kinda "blamed" it on the players in the OP, because as far as I'm concerned its the players that want the game to become easier, Hell even on this forum which probably has the most "hardcore" mmo players in one room, there are still people that cry that the games are to hard.
Everyone says its the devs fault or that game need to be harder, but when you nail them down on specifics it goes like this..
1:"you want the game harder?"
2:"yes! they are way to easy now"
1:"Ok lets make it so there is no instant travel"
2:"whoa lets not do that...its not making the game any harder, and who has 3 hours to travel to the frost lands?"
1:"ok...how about making it so you have to be forced grouped"
2:"uhmm how about no, I want to be able to get on and off in a hour or less"
1:"fine, what about a steep leveling curve?"
2:"yeah no thanks, GW5 and SWTORMOROGO are coming out in a few months...so I'd like to be done with it by then"
And it goes on and on, my point is.. I really think its the players fault we have the current mmo situation. And like I said in my OP I feel its because everyone is in a rush now, no one wants a 30 second cooldown after a fight.. its go go go! and even with the WAY faster action MMO's that are out now, there are still people shouting for the live action call of duty stuff.
Anyways this is all IMO..
P.S. on a side note, one term or phrase i've seen more and more as of late, and happen to agree with. "we have to many gamers in the wrong genre"
which I do beleive is the biggest problem with MMO's and why I dislike WoW, I think WoW's a decent game, but the fans it brought into the genre I do not care for at all.
And yes I would LOVE to see another FFXI -ish mmo.
In that sense you are absolutely correct. Dev's are clearly responding to audience demand or at the very least what they percieve as audience demand. If they didn't think something would be popular, they wouldn't do it.
I think the core issue here is that you really have very different audiences for MMO's with very different and conflicting desires in what they want in a game and what they consider fun.
The problem is that pretty much all the Dev's or at least the ones with significant resources are chasing after just one particular segment of that audience (which doesn't place a high value on socialization), one that they percieve to be the largest (and probably, in fact is, at least of those currently playing MMO's).
That creates a problem for both us players and for the Dev's. For the players, it leaves those of us who really don't match that target audience segment floundering, without many game options to chose from. For the Dev's it creates a problem because even if that particular audience segment is the largest, it's not actualy large enough to sustain all the games that are aimed at capturing it. So they end up fighting each other for the same customers and alot of them fail or underperform because there is too much competition for that finite pool of players.
The other issue is that Dev's will sometimes try to reach out to satisfy too wide an audience with too many different divergent and conflicting preferences in a single product in order to maximize that games audience. They end up making complicated, compromise mechanisms that don't work very well...and ultimately don't satisfy anyone well.
There are plenty of us who do place a high value on socialization and the design mechanisms that support it. However right now our voice isn't weighing very heavly with Developers because they still percieve thier most proffitable path is to chase after the audience that doesn't. Hopefully some will start to percieve that there are simply too many mice trying to chase after the same piece of cheese and peel away from the pack to look for different target audiences. I think we may actualy be starting to see that now.
In that sense you are absolutely correct. Dev's are clearly responding to audience demand or at the very least what they percieve as audience demand. If they didn't think something would be popular, they wouldn't do it.
I think the core issue here is that you really have very different audiences for MMO's with very different and conflicting desires in what they want in a game and what they consider fun.
The problem is that pretty much all the Dev's or at least the ones with significant resources are chasing after just one particular segment of that audience (which doesn't place a high value on socialization), one that they percieve to be the largest (and probably, in fact is, at least of those currently playing MMO's).
That creates a problem for both us players and for the Dev's. For the players, it leaves those of us who really don't match that target audience segment floundering, without many game options to chose from. For the Dev's it creates a problem because even if that particular audience segment is the largest, it's not actualy large enough to sustain all the games that are aimed at capturing it. So they end up fighting each other for the same customers and alot of them fail or underperform because there is too much competition for that finite pool of players.
The other issue is that Dev's will sometimes try to reach out to satisfy too wide an audience with too many different divergent and conflicting preferences in a single product in order to maximize that games audience. They end up making complicated, compromise mechanisms that don't work very well...and ultimately don't satisfy anyone well.
There are plenty of us who do place a high value on socialization and the design mechanisms that support it. However right now our voice isn't weighing very heavly with Developers because they still percieve thier most proffitable path is to chase after the audience that doesn't. Hopefully some will start to percieve that there are simply too many mice trying to chase after the same piece of cheese and peel away from the pack to look for different target audiences. I think we may actualy be starting to see that now.
I agree with everything here. I think the main fault of the devs is casting too wide a net. Everyone wants to be WoW, and nobody wants to be EQ. This is why they need niche MMO games more than generalized cookie cutters. It's simply impossible to release a new MMO and hope to top the scale, magnitute and overall success of WoW. (Or perhaps not impossible, but at the least improbable.) How many "WoW-killers" have we seen rise and fall within a matter of months? Most of which are now free to play, by the way. SWTOR is a great example of how HUGE budgets and professional devs don't make as much of a difference as the audience you're appealing to. There is a very large "hardcore" gamer base whose needs aren't being met. It seems the typical response by devs is to simply "add more stuff to do at the end".
I've always personally thought the journey was more important than the endgame, even though I'm what most would consider a hardcore player. Because of this, I usually end up doing at least one go around of all the endgame content, then creating tons of alts (which is the only reason I lasted through 6 months of TOR). It's just not fun to me doing the same content over and over for predetermined rewards. I much prefer games that require grouping and specified battle tactics to the generic MMO model we have now, which is basically designed to propel you to endgame so you can repeat content. On the other hand, these games are great for people with limited time or that prefer playing solo for the most part. The problem is we have too many of column B and not enough of column A.
Didn't bother reading the first 7 pages so I'll just chime in @ the OP:
I don't think that it's the fault of the players as much as it is the fault of the current design of games itself. As you said, games used to be tougher, and require groups to do anything. Furthermore the groups had to consist of players that KNEW their role and how to play it, with less "wiggle room" than many games seem to have now except in the toughest raids. Because players can simply jump in and out of short-term "relationships", if you will, with other players, there's less of an inclination to develop a lasting friendly relationship with that person. Not to say it doesn't happen, but it's not as important as it once was.
This is why I'm so for the creation of new iterations of the EQ/FFXI model, where groups were an absolute necessity.
This is why I kinda "blamed" it on the players in the OP, because as far as I'm concerned its the players that want the game to become easier, Hell even on this forum which probably has the most "hardcore" mmo players in one room, there are still people that cry that the games are to hard.
Everyone says its the devs fault or that game need to be harder, but when you nail them down on specifics it goes like this..
1:"you want the game harder?"
2:"yes! they are way to easy now"
1:"Ok lets make it so there is no instant travel"
2:"whoa lets not do that...its not making the game any harder, and who has 3 hours to travel to the frost lands?"
1:"ok...how about making it so you have to be forced grouped"
2:"uhmm how about no, I want to be able to get on and off in a hour or less"
1:"fine, what about a steep leveling curve?"
2:"yeah no thanks, GW5 and SWTORMOROGO are coming out in a few months...so I'd like to be done with it by then"
And it goes on and on, my point is.. I really think its the players fault we have the current mmo situation. And like I said in my OP I feel its because everyone is in a rush now, no one wants a 30 second cooldown after a fight.. its go go go! and even with the WAY faster action MMO's that are out now, there are still people shouting for the live action call of duty stuff.
Anyways this is all IMO..
P.S. on a side note, one term or phrase i've seen more and more as of late, and happen to agree with. "we have to many gamers in the wrong genre"
which I do beleive is the biggest problem with MMO's and why I dislike WoW, I think WoW's a decent game, but the fans it brought into the genre I do not care for at all.
And yes I would LOVE to see another FFXI -ish mmo.
I agree completely with you as well. I'm hoping the new FFXIV patch will be amazing. Been waiting forever for it... It's supposed to still be a lot more solo friendly than FFXI (what isn't) but I figure it's worth a shot.
If it sucks, I'm considering going back to FFXI actually.
Didn't bother reading the first 7 pages so I'll just chime in @ the OP:
I don't think that it's the fault of the players as much as it is the fault of the current design of games itself. As you said, games used to be tougher, and require groups to do anything. Furthermore the groups had to consist of players that KNEW their role and how to play it, with less "wiggle room" than many games seem to have now except in the toughest raids. Because players can simply jump in and out of short-term "relationships", if you will, with other players, there's less of an inclination to develop a lasting friendly relationship with that person. Not to say it doesn't happen, but it's not as important as it once was.
This is why I'm so for the creation of new iterations of the EQ/FFXI model, where groups were an absolute necessity.
This is why I kinda "blamed" it on the players in the OP, because as far as I'm concerned its the players that want the game to become easier, Hell even on this forum which probably has the most "hardcore" mmo players in one room, there are still people that cry that the games are to hard.
Everyone says its the devs fault or that game need to be harder, but when you nail them down on specifics it goes like this..
1:"you want the game harder?"
2:"yes! they are way to easy now"
1:"Ok lets make it so there is no instant travel"
2:"whoa lets not do that...its not making the game any harder, and who has 3 hours to travel to the frost lands?"
1:"ok...how about making it so you have to be forced grouped"
2:"uhmm how about no, I want to be able to get on and off in a hour or less"
1:"fine, what about a steep leveling curve?"
2:"yeah no thanks, GW5 and SWTORMOROGO are coming out in a few months...so I'd like to be done with it by then"
And it goes on and on, my point is.. I really think its the players fault we have the current mmo situation. And like I said in my OP I feel its because everyone is in a rush now, no one wants a 30 second cooldown after a fight.. its go go go! and even with the WAY faster action MMO's that are out now, there are still people shouting for the live action call of duty stuff.
Anyways this is all IMO..
P.S. on a side note, one term or phrase i've seen more and more as of late, and happen to agree with. "we have to many gamers in the wrong genre"
which I do beleive is the biggest problem with MMO's and why I dislike WoW, I think WoW's a decent game, but the fans it brought into the genre I do not care for at all.
And yes I would LOVE to see another FFXI -ish mmo.
Great OP and again very well put in quote above.
In red: I've been saying this for a long time now and in less than polite manner ( imo they don't deserve it) . Yup, I'm sick of these people.
I agree also, but only to a point. I don't think it's the wrong genre per say for these players, simply the wrong games (or rather the games are being made to cater mainly to these people instead of the hardcores that started the industry). There was a debate about this in another thread but I'm of the opinion that devs should make two types of MMORPGs... Teddy bear "easy mode" MMORPGs, and the harder, time-intensive, group-required variety that the classic MMO'ers remember fondly and keep crying out for.
Comments
That's so sad. You have to do all that work. When I played A Tale In The Desert we had an acro party or a dig going literally every day. Often more than one. We organized a sheep gathering and breeding fair and we had 10 players together for a solid 3-12 hours farming wood for charcoal to get a new tech. We didn't have to "organize" events. The whole game was events. Signing off on sculptures and hand puzzles the Riverland Public Works Guild, I was in like 10 guilds simultaneously.
Public Works set up special work stations all over the region to get newbies free access to resources crafting tools and machines and we did all the local techs and funded people's compounds and guild halls.
I had a storehouse of thousands of public mats like slate and grass and mud next to the region spawn to get instant compounds, dozens of public kilns and so forth.
You know about the homestead act? We basically had that with mats and stuff like starter sheep herds. That's what we did all day. And it matters because the way techs are set up the good of the community is the good of the individual. Sure you can't run a dig for medium stones all on your own but who cares because there were 2-3 digs every day and acro parties to get your acrobat skills for strength bonuses and a sculpture district where we each went to sign off.
If you saw another person you had never met you did acro, signed off on titles, any oustanding petitiions and so forth and maybe traded carrots for onions or w/e so we all had access to all seeds. And no one whined about how it was sucking up their free play time to acro with you.
You can yak all you want about your WoW guild but unless only 5% of players in the entire playerbase are likely to bitch at you because you ask for some sort of assistance your community is nothing compared to social sandbox communities.
Kind of like every game were you have the ability to build internal communities.
People always make this comment in these sorts of threads, neglecting the fact that socializing is more then just what you do in a guild.
Like the guy obive this poster stated, in essence if you give the players the ability to avoid it most of them will. MMO's do a very good job of that now.
Developers have taken casual to mean that players need the game to be easy and quick to progress through, when casual only means that you don't play for long periods of time every day. Even casual players enjoy a challenge, and most MMO's are completely removing that aspect of the game, at least in the leveling process, and that in turn leads to people not needing to use the social aspects of the game.
It's pretty normal, even for social people, to do those things on their own that can be done on their own. This is how they make MMO's anymore. Most peopel though, I believe, need an incentive to socialize; that usually means putting emphasis on community building within the game, and giving people a reason to actually interact with each other.
If you get people interacting with one another, they'll inevitably start to socialize more. This is kind of the bedrock for Mortal online and the guys making it. Get peope interacting, something many developers seem to be moving away from. The dynamic event stuff that's become popular sinse WAR, is kind of becoming the bane of social gameplay. They don't actually encourage people to "play together", but to instead "play around each other". Every game I've played that uses this sort of a system, has had the exact same result, lots of people simply playing around one another but no one actually playing together.
So, no and yes. It starts with the developers who insist on making online MULTIPLAYER games as single player friendly as possible, and that leads to players doing less socializing because they don't need to.
PS: What the poster above me wrote as well. Exactly same thing applies to EVE. Corps interact, it's not corps only interacting with it's own members. The server is a community as a whole, and peoples actions tend to have impact in the larger social enviroment; as little or as much as they wish it to. Guilds mean very little in the overall social structure of most MMO's because they're self confined groups that have no reason to interact with other guilds, and the members of guilds have no reason to interact outside of their guild. Guilds don't spur social interaction in most MMO's, they secgregate it.
Extremely social game, regular community activities, player-run venues across the shards with at least one prominent one on each shard. There was no queueing and grouping only came several years later, but really wasn't used for much other than chat. There was ZERO downtime in the game. ATITD, Puzzle Pirates and several other games have extremely social environments and extensive communities that extend beyond the guild unit because the tools were there to facilitate interaction and the gameplay was more than just raping the countryside of every living thing in your path.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Going forward in MMOs I'm not sure if the combat/adventuring aspect of MMOs will slow down but specific tools and city side features may bring some socializing back. A fair amount of people saw SoEMote as useless tool and a waste of money and resources by SoE. I didnt agree with that a time and in the context of this discussion I think it's a great feature. EQ2 already has good integrated voice chat and with SoEMote they added boxes of the other players faces next to thier group nameplate to see them "talk" in real time.
There is still the same factor of the player deciding to use it. In this the OP was spot on. The game you are playing also needs to encourage communication if it's to happen on a regular basis.
Didn't bother reading the first 7 pages so I'll just chime in @ the OP:
I don't think that it's the fault of the players as much as it is the fault of the current design of games itself. As you said, games used to be tougher, and require groups to do anything. Furthermore the groups had to consist of players that KNEW their role and how to play it, with less "wiggle room" than many games seem to have now except in the toughest raids. Because players can simply jump in and out of short-term "relationships", if you will, with other players, there's less of an inclination to develop a lasting friendly relationship with that person. Not to say it doesn't happen, but it's not as important as it once was.
This is why I'm so for the creation of new iterations of the EQ/FFXI model, where groups were an absolute necessity.
original daoc (pre TOA) was awesome wasnt it?
This is why I kinda "blamed" it on the players in the OP, because as far as I'm concerned its the players that want the game to become easier, Hell even on this forum which probably has the most "hardcore" mmo players in one room, there are still people that cry that the games are to hard.
Everyone says its the devs fault or that game need to be harder, but when you nail them down on specifics it goes like this..
1:"you want the game harder?"
2:"yes! they are way to easy now"
1:"Ok lets make it so there is no instant travel"
2:"whoa lets not do that...its not making the game any harder, and who has 3 hours to travel to the frost lands?"
1:"ok...how about making it so you have to be forced grouped"
2:"uhmm how about no, I want to be able to get on and off in a hour or less"
1:"fine, what about a steep leveling curve?"
2:"yeah no thanks, GW5 and SWTORMOROGO are coming out in a few months...so I'd like to be done with it by then"
And it goes on and on, my point is.. I really think its the players fault we have the current mmo situation. And like I said in my OP I feel its because everyone is in a rush now, no one wants a 30 second cooldown after a fight.. its go go go! and even with the WAY faster action MMO's that are out now, there are still people shouting for the live action call of duty stuff.
Anyways this is all IMO..
P.S. on a side note, one term or phrase i've seen more and more as of late, and happen to agree with. "we have to many gamers in the wrong genre"
which I do beleive is the biggest problem with MMO's and why I dislike WoW, I think WoW's a decent game, but the fans it brought into the genre I do not care for at all.
And yes I would LOVE to see another FFXI -ish mmo.
Please check out my channel. I do gaming reviews, gaming related reviews & lets plays. Thanks!
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@Dewm,
In that sense you are absolutely correct. Dev's are clearly responding to audience demand or at the very least what they percieve as audience demand. If they didn't think something would be popular, they wouldn't do it.
I think the core issue here is that you really have very different audiences for MMO's with very different and conflicting desires in what they want in a game and what they consider fun.
The problem is that pretty much all the Dev's or at least the ones with significant resources are chasing after just one particular segment of that audience (which doesn't place a high value on socialization), one that they percieve to be the largest (and probably, in fact is, at least of those currently playing MMO's).
That creates a problem for both us players and for the Dev's. For the players, it leaves those of us who really don't match that target audience segment floundering, without many game options to chose from. For the Dev's it creates a problem because even if that particular audience segment is the largest, it's not actualy large enough to sustain all the games that are aimed at capturing it. So they end up fighting each other for the same customers and alot of them fail or underperform because there is too much competition for that finite pool of players.
The other issue is that Dev's will sometimes try to reach out to satisfy too wide an audience with too many different divergent and conflicting preferences in a single product in order to maximize that games audience. They end up making complicated, compromise mechanisms that don't work very well...and ultimately don't satisfy anyone well.
There are plenty of us who do place a high value on socialization and the design mechanisms that support it. However right now our voice isn't weighing very heavly with Developers because they still percieve thier most proffitable path is to chase after the audience that doesn't. Hopefully some will start to percieve that there are simply too many mice trying to chase after the same piece of cheese and peel away from the pack to look for different target audiences. I think we may actualy be starting to see that now.
I agree with everything here. I think the main fault of the devs is casting too wide a net. Everyone wants to be WoW, and nobody wants to be EQ. This is why they need niche MMO games more than generalized cookie cutters. It's simply impossible to release a new MMO and hope to top the scale, magnitute and overall success of WoW. (Or perhaps not impossible, but at the least improbable.) How many "WoW-killers" have we seen rise and fall within a matter of months? Most of which are now free to play, by the way. SWTOR is a great example of how HUGE budgets and professional devs don't make as much of a difference as the audience you're appealing to. There is a very large "hardcore" gamer base whose needs aren't being met. It seems the typical response by devs is to simply "add more stuff to do at the end".
I've always personally thought the journey was more important than the endgame, even though I'm what most would consider a hardcore player. Because of this, I usually end up doing at least one go around of all the endgame content, then creating tons of alts (which is the only reason I lasted through 6 months of TOR). It's just not fun to me doing the same content over and over for predetermined rewards. I much prefer games that require grouping and specified battle tactics to the generic MMO model we have now, which is basically designed to propel you to endgame so you can repeat content. On the other hand, these games are great for people with limited time or that prefer playing solo for the most part. The problem is we have too many of column B and not enough of column A.
I agree completely with you as well. I'm hoping the new FFXIV patch will be amazing. Been waiting forever for it... It's supposed to still be a lot more solo friendly than FFXI (what isn't) but I figure it's worth a shot.
If it sucks, I'm considering going back to FFXI actually.
I agree also, but only to a point. I don't think it's the wrong genre per say for these players, simply the wrong games (or rather the games are being made to cater mainly to these people instead of the hardcores that started the industry). There was a debate about this in another thread but I'm of the opinion that devs should make two types of MMORPGs... Teddy bear "easy mode" MMORPGs, and the harder, time-intensive, group-required variety that the classic MMO'ers remember fondly and keep crying out for.