See that's wrong. Republicans contend that getting rid of taxes and government regulations will create more investment/spending; creating jobs. They don't actually think the environment people are in does not impact their behavior.
On this thread however, I'm seeing a lot of this. Talking around the fact that the environment of solo favored content impacts the way people behave. It causes me to wonder what is really going on here.
Probably that people just like to solo. So rather than acknowledging the impact, they pretend there isn't any.
If soloing is the best, ill do it but I usually end up quitting sooner than later.
If grouping is the best, ill do it and solo when I can't find a group. I will usually play much longer.
I hope EQN is at least 75% group 25% solo. If people want to solo, let them play Druids, Necromancers, Magicians or Shamans. The rest of us will play cooperative classes.
Originally posted by Theocritus Yes you can group in those games but its kinda like having 5 people to screw in a light bulb......
ding ding, this is the problem, outside of raiding and dungeons it becomes counter productive to group up, I don't belive grouping should be forced, It should however be strongly encouraged.
The message is clear. Grouping needs to be encouraged. It takes more time and effort. It has more risk and dangers. It needs to be superior method of progressing in the game. Gear should be better / more frequent. Exp / skill gains should be quicker, etc.
But soloing should be there for those who want it.
A healthy medium between solo content availability and group content viability.
I thought EQN was a sandbox?
Do you think EVE developers encourage grouping through loot and XP or do they encourage it differently?
It makes me wonder if EQN will get turned into WOW during beta if even the supporters are treating it like another themepark.
I hope you're not directing this comment at me.
What does "Sandbox" have anything to do with solo vs group content? EQN is a sandbox, but there still needs to be content that can be done by people who don't have time to get a group, or simply don't want one, without discouraging group content.
That has nothing to do with themepark vs sandbox. That's just common sense. Something many people seem to lack.
So the OP feels the community and uses a group to do all the solo content?I highly doubt that.
I play these games i know,i have almost NEVER seen groups doing solo content,it is 95% or higher soloing or duoing.
Also there is an even bigger factor/problem,if the game designs it for you to solo,why would you need or even waste time wanting a community involved with soloing?It was designed to solo,that means the challenge is to solo,not to go in 10 levels higher and with a group to dumb down all content.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
if you need a game to promote mechanics that FORCE people to group with you ... you are the problem. I have run with groups constantly in EQ2, WoW, Guild Wars 2, Rift and countless other "solo MMORPGs".
see thats the beauty of MMORPGs right now, people have options, they can either solo or they can group IF THEY WANT. recently in guild wars 2 my guild took 2 groups and started over, just running from event to event leveling up some new players from another guild game. it was amazing and fun but if someone wanted to go and do their own thing they could by themselves.
forced grouping to do anything in a game is bad game design, sorry but someone has to say it. sure there should be some content that can only be done as a group however designing the whole game NOW around the concept of "you must group or get left behind" is destined to fail.
so to all those out there saying they can't find groups or the community feeling and games need to force grouping. its most likely YOUR attitude that's keeping people from interacting and grouping with you.
It is nott really that. You had to play MMOs in the late 90s to really understand it, back then MMOs were a small niche type of game played by a rather close community. Now there are loads of different kinds of people from different places and that kinda makes it impossible to get a community as tight as it once was.
But grouping should be rewarded, not forced. You could really solo most older games even if you died a lot and had to play really well, the difference now is that they actually reward you to solo.
Running a dungeon used to give you gear that mattered as you leveled up and you leveled a lot faster and got more rewards for group with others. Now running soloquests is usually fastest and that is kinda sad.
Options is indeed great but you should still reward co-operation and socializing.
But the worst thing now is that players can solo the 90% of the game that is before endgame, besides the dungeons. Then they suddenly have to learn to play in group with max level characters in the hard endgame. That usually go horrible wrong and many players quit because they can't really play the endgame content. I think that is one of the biggest reasons so many people jump around MMOs so quickly now.
Just two quick examples that completely deflate the OPs theory. Of course, your experience may differ but I doubt it.
Played Tera last year. As I leveled up, I attempted to explore the map and complete as many quests and dungeons as possible. Every area I visited, I would hang out by the quest hubs to try to recruit other players to group with, especially for the harder quests. Other than 1 or 2 friends I convinced to play with me, I never had a player respond to my group requests at any time. Never. I ended up randomly inviting players every day, at which point I would, without fail, end up following them around to simulate the feeling of grouping. They'd finish a quest and, whether my quest was completed or not, they would end up running off to solo the next quests without any concern for other party members. Within a few minutes, every member of the party would be in a different place on the map soloing their quests with no regard to other group members. Every day, it was the same thing. Had I not started the game with two friends from another game, I'd have never made it as far as I did.
Fast forward a few weeks, I'm in a level 40ish dungeon and I finally was in my first group that actually spoke to each other. It was an argument over whether a certain player really needed items they were rolling on, or whether they should roll greed. That conversation degraded into a flame war where one of the players ninja logged. I quit a day or two later.
This year I played NW2. Same deal. In the few weeks I played the game, I could never find a real group that conversed or formulated a strategy for anything. Because the vast majority of the content could be completed independently, players just rushed around at full speed in order to reach max level. I ended up joining groups with their insta-grouping system, and never at any time would anyone actually talk. Just like in WoW, grouping was only a means to an end and never required players to actually coordinate. There was never any real challenge, everything was zerged, and there was never enough downtime to so much as talk about the weather.
Both games were completely void of any sense of community, and it wasn't for lack of trying. Every game I play I like to meet people, but when the content is that easy, the vast majority of players are only passing through with no need or desire to stop and truly work together.
The only game I actually played that actually did naturally encourage player communication through the use of player created cities, interdependent crafting, and challenging dungeons was Age of Wushu. Unfortunately, after playing the game for a while and reaching max level, I realized the PvE content was horrible, the group and guild content was superficial and meaningless, and the combat system was all dps and lacked the balance of a game with distinct roles. That said, I still only played the game as long as I did because it had an intelligent system that encouraged that sense of community lacking in 99% of modern MMOs.
The reason no one wanted to group with you to do quests was because Tera consisted of mainly solo quests. There would be a handful of group quests now and then, but they were optional, and generally didn't net enough exp or produced a decent enough reward to bother doing them.
Dungeons were few and far between, and once you calculated the amount of time and effort it took to set up the dungeon group and complete it, you could easily have gotten more exp from solo questing.
So the problem, is as many of us have already been saying. Group content rewards need to be superior to solo content rewards, in every regard, exp, skill gains, loot, etc. They take more time, more effort, more coordination, and having solo content progress you faster is a combination for disaster.
The loot was also a disaster. Most dungeons would only drop 1 (or zero) good quality items per run. There are a dozen item slots per character, and a whole group to split it between. That's just retarded. Meanwhile the soloers are getting the same blue drops from solo questing and open world solo mobs.
If you had doubled or tripled the exp on Tera's group content dungeons, and then made it so each group member got 1 solid piece of gear per run, you would have seen people swarming to do group content (while still having a great amount of solo content for people who didn't want to group in the first place)
The message is clear. When you have a game with solo content that produces faster exp and equal gear quality, you get a recipe for your experience in Tera. You could have take the same exact game, double or tripled the group exp, and greatly improved dungeon rare drops, and you would have had a drastically different experience.
The problem wasn't that there was so much solo content, the problem was that the group content was made useless by how pathetic their rewards were.
Comments
See that's wrong. Republicans contend that getting rid of taxes and government regulations will create more investment/spending; creating jobs. They don't actually think the environment people are in does not impact their behavior.
On this thread however, I'm seeing a lot of this. Talking around the fact that the environment of solo favored content impacts the way people behave. It causes me to wonder what is really going on here.
Probably that people just like to solo. So rather than acknowledging the impact, they pretend there isn't any.
If soloing is the best, ill do it but I usually end up quitting sooner than later.
If grouping is the best, ill do it and solo when I can't find a group. I will usually play much longer.
I hope EQN is at least 75% group 25% solo. If people want to solo, let them play Druids, Necromancers, Magicians or Shamans. The rest of us will play cooperative classes.
I hope you're not directing this comment at me.
What does "Sandbox" have anything to do with solo vs group content? EQN is a sandbox, but there still needs to be content that can be done by people who don't have time to get a group, or simply don't want one, without discouraging group content.
That has nothing to do with themepark vs sandbox. That's just common sense. Something many people seem to lack.
Legends of Kesmai, UO, EQ, AO, DAoC, AC, SB, RO, SWG, EVE, EQ2, CoH, GW, VG:SOH, WAR, Aion, DF, CO, MO, DN, Tera, SWTOR, RO2, DP, GW2, PS2, BnS, NW, FF:XIV, ESO, EQ:NL
So the OP feels the community and uses a group to do all the solo content?I highly doubt that.
I play these games i know,i have almost NEVER seen groups doing solo content,it is 95% or higher soloing or duoing.
Also there is an even bigger factor/problem,if the game designs it for you to solo,why would you need or even waste time wanting a community involved with soloing?It was designed to solo,that means the challenge is to solo,not to go in 10 levels higher and with a group to dumb down all content.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
It is nott really that. You had to play MMOs in the late 90s to really understand it, back then MMOs were a small niche type of game played by a rather close community. Now there are loads of different kinds of people from different places and that kinda makes it impossible to get a community as tight as it once was.
But grouping should be rewarded, not forced. You could really solo most older games even if you died a lot and had to play really well, the difference now is that they actually reward you to solo.
Running a dungeon used to give you gear that mattered as you leveled up and you leveled a lot faster and got more rewards for group with others. Now running soloquests is usually fastest and that is kinda sad.
Options is indeed great but you should still reward co-operation and socializing.
But the worst thing now is that players can solo the 90% of the game that is before endgame, besides the dungeons. Then they suddenly have to learn to play in group with max level characters in the hard endgame. That usually go horrible wrong and many players quit because they can't really play the endgame content. I think that is one of the biggest reasons so many people jump around MMOs so quickly now.
The reason no one wanted to group with you to do quests was because Tera consisted of mainly solo quests. There would be a handful of group quests now and then, but they were optional, and generally didn't net enough exp or produced a decent enough reward to bother doing them.
Dungeons were few and far between, and once you calculated the amount of time and effort it took to set up the dungeon group and complete it, you could easily have gotten more exp from solo questing.
So the problem, is as many of us have already been saying. Group content rewards need to be superior to solo content rewards, in every regard, exp, skill gains, loot, etc. They take more time, more effort, more coordination, and having solo content progress you faster is a combination for disaster.
The loot was also a disaster. Most dungeons would only drop 1 (or zero) good quality items per run. There are a dozen item slots per character, and a whole group to split it between. That's just retarded. Meanwhile the soloers are getting the same blue drops from solo questing and open world solo mobs.
If you had doubled or tripled the exp on Tera's group content dungeons, and then made it so each group member got 1 solid piece of gear per run, you would have seen people swarming to do group content (while still having a great amount of solo content for people who didn't want to group in the first place)
The message is clear. When you have a game with solo content that produces faster exp and equal gear quality, you get a recipe for your experience in Tera. You could have take the same exact game, double or tripled the group exp, and greatly improved dungeon rare drops, and you would have had a drastically different experience.
The problem wasn't that there was so much solo content, the problem was that the group content was made useless by how pathetic their rewards were.
Legends of Kesmai, UO, EQ, AO, DAoC, AC, SB, RO, SWG, EVE, EQ2, CoH, GW, VG:SOH, WAR, Aion, DF, CO, MO, DN, Tera, SWTOR, RO2, DP, GW2, PS2, BnS, NW, FF:XIV, ESO, EQ:NL