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Its been awhile
cybertrucker
Member UncommonPosts: 1,117
I havent posted anything on this site in quite awhile. I have actually, not only taken a break from posting on this site, but from MMOs all together. Untill recently the last game i logged into was back around chrismas. That was Aion.
I do currently have an active account in RIFT.. which a friend gave to me in order to get me to try it. I made level 20 after a few nights of toying around with it, and thought hmm this could be a pretty fun game, The necromancer, warlock, Cholomancer i was toying with was a fun class overall. The class development was great. The story was decent. The more advanced Public questiong (rifts) were implemented nicely especially with the invasions.
However something seemed to be missing. Why dont people talk to one another? I have been finding more and more that with each passing game. The players in these massive online worlds are becoming less and less sociable. Why is this? With the ability of people to self invite themselves into groups for public questing areas and such you would think you would find more people talking and getting to know one another. However more often than not you have people hit and run grouping, many times without so much as a hello or a goodbye. You can run through the game for hours without seeing anyone saying anything in general chat channels. Yet you see scores of people running around. All on the solo hunt i suppose.
Even guild structure in games is changing, heading towards the whole more casual friendly build. Mega raids were trimmed down to 20 man or 24/18 man (depending on the game), then down to 10man raids to make the game more accessible (IE casual friendly). Now the new trend that looks to be up and coming is hit and run Public Group content. Why even have to form a raid at all if you can just allow people to autojoin do the content and leave. Apparently large guids are on the out, and really you are seeing less and less large guilds in games these days. Sure there are still a few.. but I think most of you will agree that there just arent as many.
Maybe its time to change the terminology to
Solo Oriented Multi-User Online Roleplaying Game.
SOMORG
Comments
This might be what you're looking for:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dynamic_events_system
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Wvw
While GW2 does look nice and appealing. I have a feeling, that in the end it will breed even mroe hit and run grouping... When alot of these systems are first introduced like PQs they look like great ways to bring people together.
However something is missing that came with older games, and that is coordination and true largescale teamwork. They keep making the games more and more casual in an effort to speed up gameplay to make it more "fun". However in the same process they are creating less social environments. In RIFT many times now I have come into a RIFT area and felt like I might as well be running around with computer generated NPCs.
Sure sometimes you come across people that actually talk and want to have fun. But more often than not. That seems these days not to be the case. You go into EVENT area (as GW2 will be calling them), you might even try and be social saying hello to the other players, sometimes you dont even get a reply. This is becoming more common in every game.
Honestly right now I am looking to the future GW2 I have high hopes for. Everquest Next as well. I am hoping that the Social Aspect might one day be returned to the games.
Vanguard... Early WOW, Everquest 1 and 2... Those are games that promoted Organized events and Organized teamwork. Something that seems lacking ... I will say Aion does offer this as well. At least in the higher end of the game if you can get that high.
I know exactly how you feel. This article explains a little bit what we're feeling, but I personally think that there are a great many reasons why being non-social in social games is becoming a great trend.
http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/05/17/the-soapbox-the-selfish-gamer/
Firstly, game design is a big problem. Rift, as you mentioned is taking a good step forward in that getting groups together is easier than ever. And putting multiple people in the same spot, people are bound to talk to each other. Whenever anyone jumps in my public group, I take the opportunity to say hi and ask how they are doing. And I am ALWAYS met with friendly responses.
But I believe that a large part of this mentality stems from a prolonged age of internet elitism. We are only just entering a new internet age where almost the entire population has access to the internet. This makes the internet a forum of endless competing ideologies. And people who have grown up without exposure to all these different types of people are immidiately afraid to deal with other people because they could be someone who is not nice to deal with.
And to a large degree they may be right. In conversation we are a very reactionary species. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but if you understand that, it's really easy to expect how people will act. And most of us, when on the internet, enter every discussion with apprehension. And if that apprehension is visible, we are met with expected reactions.
I do my best to constantly enter conversations with people in a friendly manner, because in seeing that I am friendly, open, and understanding, other players tend to react in the same way. If I don't say anything, they won't. If I am commanding, they meet that with, "Gee, why does this douche think he can tell me what to do?". Although, if I am polite, helpful, and accomodating, when I ask someone if they can do something, they often do not have a problem making the sacrifice.
The reason this is a problem these days, as I mentioned earlier, is because MMOs no longer cater to one sect of computer gamers. WoW openned the floodgates and brought in a huge population of players with varying backgrounds and expectations. And apparently, no one wants to be accomodating and resourceful enough to find ways to work with each other.
So as to your main concern, These games haven't changed, the community has. And if you want to be more sociable, it starts with you. Talk to people, go out of your way to help people, develop strategies that accomodate players with different interests, and it will all come back around.
MMOs played: Horizons, Auto Assault, Ryzom, EVE, WAR, WoW, EQ2, LotRO, GW, DAoC, Aion, Requiem, Atlantica, DDO, Allods, Earth Eternal, Fallen Earth, Rift
Willing to try anything new
I completely agree with the OP. However these games like Rift, I think even putting people together with the rifts, easier grouping systems, and all the need in the world to get people to talk to eachother, that they will not talk. Why? Because their right hand is on the mouse, their left hand is hovering over WASD and 12345. So much more action has been introduced that taking your hands off your mouse/movement/ability buttons you might die. Player death might be the extreme here, but without any meaningful autoattack skill spamming is going to stop any attempts of communication, regardless of how close to other players you are.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
The cholomancer is pretty sweet. I like how RIFT isn't strictly fantasy and incorporates some more modern elements like guns and summoning latinos in wife beaters.
www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cholo
Seriously though, it was like that in WAR a lot too. People didn't talk much in public groups or warfronts. It has actually made me take more initiative. I've been consistently asking after Rifts are closed if anyone needs help in the area. I've enlarged my friend list a lot through that.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
I'm not saying older gamestyles requiring grouping were necessarily better, but you HAD to talk to people, or you weren't going to accomplish anything. Games are so easy now that you can solo your way to cap level. Try doing that in a game like DAOC or EQ and it would take you years if you didn't quit from frustration first.
Times are different now, everyone wants McDonalds rather than a sit down restuarant, but people sat down at dinner and talked, now everyone grabs a cheeseburger from the drive thru and heads off down the road. Symptom of the times, unfortunately.
Man I miss the days back in DAOC where there were not maps in the game at all. I remember someone spamming in chat "need one more for group for grinding" I was still new to MMO's and had no idea what grinding was so I responded and said "hey I'll join you, how shall I proceed?" he responded "meet up in salsberry plains"
I had no idea where that was or how to get there. And seeing as there was no map, this made things more dificult. He proceeded to give me directions such as "follow the road up until you see the river turn towards the west and follow that (make sure you stay along the river and not stray, for it is night time, and the little goblins can get nasty....proceed untill you see the broken bridge, we will meet you there"
This was just awesome, I loved this style of gameplay where you relied on people for JUST DIRECTIONS and not some asshole saying "look at the map dumbass, everythings there."
We proceeded to kill these purple (to us) skeletons and making great exp and having fun, the way the mobs worked was great as well, how you absolutely needed CC or else you would wipe.
Another thing that I loved.....and this may sound weird.....was the downtime. in those days, there was no food to eat, no bandages to wrap, no potions to pop......you regained your health from just sitting on you ass and waiting. this FORCED people to make small talk and get to know eachother, plan out their next attack and so on. you never see this anymore.
_The Sauce Man
You used to have to talk to people to find out where things were. Now there are dozens of websites with walk-throughs that tell you all the secrets whenever you want them. No need to figure it out yourself, it's right there at the click of a mouse.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None
I agree, you need downtime to be social. I don't really miss contested dungeons, but at least when you were camping a spot in EQ, 5 of the 6 people were hanging out waiting for spawns while the other pulled. If you're rushing through an instance, you don't have time for much of anything except maybe a sentence while you're chasing the tank to the next group.
One of the things GW2 is doing, and I hope this helps with socialization is having events chain into one another. With a quest or rift or PQ, if it's over, people are going to scatter. With GW2, the events are the whole focus for open world advancement. If there's another event starting right here after this one, there's absolutely no incentive to leave. I'm hoping if there's at minute or two of downtime, that gives people a chance to chat before the action starts up again.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." -Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007