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This week's WildStar Wednesday features a behind the scenes look at the social systems that will ship with the game. Designer Victoria Dollbaum gives her unique perspective on the hows and whys the team utilized when considering how to create the systems that encourage player interaction.
Social systems are entirely opt-in, that's important for you to know. My intent is to provide systems that you want to participate in, and that you're sufficiently rewarded for choosing to participate. There are those of you out there that are so fundamentally against systems such as housing. It's a common player worry that these systems can take away from the development time of other features such as combat or content. Let me ease your worries in that I am strictly a Social Designer, so all of my love and attention goes into providing you guilds and housing and other crucial social features without interrupting the development of all those other features that are essential to you.
Read the full article on the WildStar site.
Comments
No fun movie? *is sad*
Will read full article after dinner. Love to learn how they'd 'opt-in' a social system...
While I do like the incentives described in that article I still can't help wishing for some more informations before being excited in any way. There are people that seriously claim GW2 would encourage being social with what I strongly disagree. So before I will read more about those other systems beside the housing I'll consider that article as hollow claims that have yet to be proven with substantial data.
Still I personally am glad that a woman is in charge of that stuff and I wish her the best of luck with it.
I guess I've never understood the drive to grant incentives for being social. Players either are social or they aren't. Some people just want to do their own thing within the framework of a persistant world while others feel the need to chat with everyone and won't take two steps without some form of group. Dangling juicy rewards for socializing feels to me like your mom making you play with the neighbor kids. In the end, the developer that does this risks alienating the person who is doesn't want to be part of a herd.
I've been interested in Wildstar since it was announced, but the fact that they have someone who describes themselves as "an avid MMO player and guild master" leaves me a little cold. At my age, I don't want or need someone encouraging me to "make new friends". We're not all middle-schoolers. To my mind, relationships should be organic, not something that has to be encouraged and incentivized.
Yes, I know they're claiming that you can play solo if you want, but the undertext seems to suggest that being in a guild is SO much better! Ugh!
"Soloists and those who prefer small groups should never have to feel like they''re the ones getting the proverbial table scraps, as it were." - Scott Hartsman, Senior Producer, Everquest II
"People love groups. Its a fallacy that people want to play solo all the time." - Scott Hartsman, Executive Producer, Rift
Wildstar moves up another notch on my watchlist...
Nice to see a game being built with socialization as one of the integral parts of the game. MMO's have neglected this greatly in recent years, with guild functionality often being added "sometime after launch", and in many cases that "sometime" was after 50% of the initial players had already left.
However, I think one of the major reasons why socialization has all but vanished from recent MMO's is that most people don't expect to play the game for very long, so why bother to make friends ? Either those new friends or you will probably be gone in 4 to 6 weeks. In a modern MMO, you only really "need" a guild if you want to raid. Virtually everything else can be done solo all the way to level-cap, and level-cap is only a month or so of gameplay on average.
It would be nice if Wildstar can keep players engaged for longer than the "standard 2 months", else all those socialization incentives will largely be ignored.
social realms are extremely important. however, it's all worthless if it doesn't bring any type of muscle or benefit to the core game.
Having a Player House is fine.
Having a Player House that you and a few friends can turn into a popular shopping mall for adventures is fantastic.
im looking forward to playing this mmo next year
EQ2 fan sites
This.
i didnt see any "Social Systems Detailed".
I dont like the art style of this game, but i can live with that if i like some "key" features of the game like "social system".
This part does sound promising. One thing though... I thought WildStar would be a fixed-faction MMO, but reading this it almost feels like a FFA PvP MMO like L2 and EVE...
And this is such a contradiction on the earlier social system statement... Though I do get the drift what place housing will take in WildStar.
I'm really starting to become extremely curious about how WildStar will look when it's released...
"Social Systems Detailed"???
All she said was that it is important to her and she cant wait to tell us about it in the future......
I'm interested simply for the fact that she was a former FFXI Linkshell leader.
That in of itself was a full time job.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Yeah not much really detailed in the article. Just a marketing thing I guess.
I agree though that with proper attention, you can foster more socialization in a game by design. Drawing from my own real life experience, I tend to be goal driven and rather quiet generally, until you put me in a situation like work where socializing is extremely integral to my job. Then I'm very social.
Guild Wars 2's 50 minutes game play video:
http://n4g.com/news/592585/guild-wars-2-50-minutes-of-pure-gameplay
Everything We Know about GW2:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/287180/page/1