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why not a 3-man grouping model?
rungard
Member Posts: 1,035
Ive played alot of mmo's and some of the best times ive had were just with a couple of friends, and i have to wonder, why is there such a stagnant push to always have 5-8 in a group when 3 people is technically far superior in every caregory.
ill explain:
1) Its easier to assemble 3 people than it is for 5-8. This cannot be disputed.
2) Large groups push for specialist classes. The larger the group the bigger requirement you need for specialists.
ill explain: If i have 6 players, every mob is tuned to 6 players. That means they can withstand damage from 6 players and additionally can dish out damage equivilent to 6 players. Thus you either have a model like wow where one player can suck up 6 players worth of damage, and classes to heal 6 players worth of damage.. or you have a model like guild wars two..which has no tanking or healing per say..but everyone has pretty much the same role and its more chaotic...
In either model, if you reduce the group to 3, the requirement for a specialist greatly decreases and the need for utility type players greatly increases ( as there are less people to do more things).
3) More content: with the max 3 man group, you could make the whole game based on the mobs being attacked by 3 players. The easier 3 man content would be soloable and duo-able, and the harder content would still probabally be soloable and duo-able for more skilled players. Thus you have much more content available for all players since you dont really have to focus as much on solo vs group content. This also introduces a natural challenge aspect to soloing and duoing without using any additional resources.
4) Teamwork is far easier with smaller groups. For the average player there will be less headaches, and with a small group things like voice chat are alot more fun.
in an age where mmo's are supposed to be soloable, i cant figure out why they wouldnt at least try to make a mmo with a smaller group size. Its superior in every way.
Comments
Because of the word MMO Massively Multiplayer Online. Granted 6 man grps is not massively either but people wnat to play an MMO not a CoOp game. SWTOR did have 2 or 4 man groups and persoanlly found it very bland and took out a lot of the MMO part of the game.
3 man groups is any more team work dependent than a 6 man, if anything 6 man would be more dependent as the encounter requires 6 players to pool hteir recources together to overcome an encounter while a 3 man group is much more solo dependent. The problem is when you look at raids, at 8-12 man content then teamwork becomes less as it is not uncommon for dead weioght being pulled there and making through the content just fine. Not so much in lower team content.
MMOs are supposed to be soloable? Why not just play Skyrim or something then.
The most fond MMO memories I have are 72 man raids in Everquest.
I completely disagree that a smaller group size is superior or requires less specialists.
Because 3 is an odd number therefore is not a suitable group model. How about a compromise and make it 2 man grouping models?
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LOTRO provides some 3 man dungeons. I also found them to be far better than the others. It's common for 3 people who know each other to play a game together 'all the time'.. it's far less common that 5-8 people do.
Because skyrim doesnt play like an mmo at all? common sense much?
makes about as much sense as saying if you want to play with just 2 people just play pong instead.
Apparently stating the truth in my sig is "trolling"
Sig typo fixed thanks to an observant stragen001.
even that makes more sense than the original statement, "in an age where mmo's are supposed to be soloable", not in my book anyways. We're just sort of stuck with it being that way.
One of my first MMO's was DAOC and it had 8 man groups, and yes, class specialization was important and prevelent.
I had hoped back then they would increase the group sizes to 10, but no luck (was rumored at one time) because the expansions had added several new classes and it was getting tough to be inclusive (DAOC had like 45 unique classes)
You shouldn' t want to be restricted to play with only your clique, if you think you do, you're doing it wrong and just don''t realize it.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Because "The larger the group the bigger requirement you need for specialists" is the opposite of what actually happens.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
What about a difficulty sliding scale based on the number of group memebers. I *think* LOTRO does something like this, I could be wrong.
why not a 1-man grouping model? sorry for being a smart ass, i just feel the opposite as you. I wish there was a 100-man grouping model, personally.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
the traditional 5 man group is also an odd number.
There can be more roles than 3, DAOC had additional roles of buffer, debuffer, speeder, crowd controller, and groups needed a mixture of tanks, healers, and the other classes.
If any class was underserved by the model it was the pure DPS'ers, Rogues and Archer classes, without strong group utilitiy skills they were considered largely undesireable, though with 8 slots groups frequently felt charitable to included one of them to be nice.
Tanks were never a problem to find in DAOC, but then tanking wasn't the Dancing with the Stars affair it is today so healers were normally the only sore spot, especially since healers could not effectively solo at all.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Agreed, the tired "it's a mmo" argument is based out of ignorance. Everyone knows that MMO's are massively multiplayer, but the acronym isn't mmorpgwfg (with forced grouping). I don't agree mmos are supposed to be soloable either, but mmos tend to try and cater to a wider audience than traditional single player games do. I also feel that mmos would do well to allow for more scaling options. Instead of having a set amount of players in a group for various instanced content, why not allow for scaling options. If the maximum group size is 6 in a game, then allow for folks to be able to choose difficulty levels from 2-6 people. If my wife and I want to duo certain dungeons and have it be challenging, what's the harm?
I find it funny how we tend to call everything a clone and howl about the sorry state of cookie cutter games and yet manage at the same time to jump at the throat of anyone actually voicing anything ressembling a new approach.
Even a 3 member grouping model would be superior to what we have seen the last couple of years......These games need to get people to play and talk together or at some point the games will just be single player.
The problem is not the maximum number allowed in a group it is the content itself. You do not need to restrict parties to have duo content -- you just need to place duo content. The problem is the current implementation of the old meme. The old meme used to be group content gave you great exp and lousy loot and raid content gave you lousy exp and great loot.
This has been devolved to the group level. Now solo content gives great exp and lousy loot and group content gives mediocre exp and great loot. Nobody seems to want to give soloists any even rare chance at endgame loot (and really the only loot slot machine I remember that did was asheron's call). This dichotomy between solo and group play is what has killed small group play.
In the early days of games people actually tended to push small groups because you were mostly limited by spawn rate -- you were camping for item X and if you could manage the camp with 4 players instead of 6 then you got more loot and more exp. Same thing went for raids. If you could do that 72 person raid with 25 people then the loot was tons better person to person.
Nowadays the monsters are distinctly marked and measured to be "for groups" or "for solo" making duos and trios not able to do anything. A duo isnt good enough to manage group content and it gets penalized for exp in solo stuff in most games. Plus there really isnt a reason for it for solo content which tends to be set easy. At best trio content in modern games means doing the easiest group content which tends to also get you minimal useful loot.
What they really need to do is recognize small groups and put monsters in there meant to match them.
Actually there is another issue these days -- everything is instanced and specifically and balanced around an exact number of players and level of equipment. Time was things were NOT instanced and it was whoever could get to the mob spawn in force first.
Even so I think things should be more flexible with regard to size. IE 7 or 8 people should be able to group and try to get through 6 player content. You could reduce the drops somewhat in such a condition but since you are splitting the drops amongst more people that already kind of happens. If group size were not really set then you could have content at all sizes...
IE instance Y could be an easy instance for six players... Low tier loot. Maybe a 15% reduction if you bring 7 and a 40% reduction if you bring 8.
Insance Z could be a hard instance for four players. It might have medium tier loot and might even be about as hard as the instance above except here if you brought 6 players you would get less than half as many drops as if you brought the recommended 4.
At any rate content could target any number of players and you could have a cap higher than what anyone would want to have to do the group content -- say 10 people.
It would be nice to have the sliding scale that others in this thread have mentioned. If someone wants to run content solo, then the dungeon, raid, or instance could lower to a solo level. Likewise if 10 or 20 people want to group the content could scale up to make such content pleasing to those players.
We have the technology. It might not be ideal in all cases but it surely would please more people.
I for one do not have the time and patience any longer to run group content. I love playing MMOs but there are other priorities in my life and I have adjusted to them. I should not have to give up my favorite games because I am older, or have new responsibilies.
Developers are aware of these solo/group issues but are reluctant to bridge both player types. I applaud the efforts that ANET has put forth in GW2, while it may not be perfect or please everyone, I do hope they have carved a path through the jungle that some others will follow and maybe even expand upon.
1. You really should to restrict 2-person content to 2 people otherwise the entire point of it falls flat. If players can just exploit 2-man content with 3+ players, it completely breaks the game.
What fun is there in a game where you take a 10-man group and faceroll over a bunch of mobs designed for 2 players? There's no chance of failure and you're just going through the motions.
As for instances, they're important for avoiding the uninteresting gameplay of competing for mob spawns but they're also there to facilitate the above situation where the mob difficulty can easily be tailored to the group size.
2. In what games does group content give lousy XP nowadays? Certainly not WOW (fastest way to level.) If a MMORPG isn't balancing its solo vs. group rewards (so that grouping comes out only slightly ahead), it's missing out on a great opportunity to give players what they want (and let them choose.)
3. I do agree 2- and 3- man groups are screwed in the current setup. The ideal is something closer to CoH, where content scaled to whatever group size you had and the best rewards came in the largest groups (8) at the hardest difficulty. Which is, of course, a very logically sound way to design a game. But of course this content existed inside instances where difficulty
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
That was my immediate thought as well as soon as I read the first post. If we're going off of the obvious assumption that it's best for only 1 party member to get hit and it's best for only 1 party member to have heals, then only 1 out of 3 players can play DPS. Going away from these assumptions—like making it so that there are no tanks and everyone's supposed to dodge and roll away from attacks, or making it so that everyone has access to good heals—is more of a combat overhaul than a tweak to the preferred party size.
How about just make scalable content based on the number of players in your group? Scale the rewards as well.
City of heroes does this and it was awesome.
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Because they did the research and found that most people have the easiest time with 5 man groups?
You don't need less people to demand more from each individual player.
You just need to remove the tank.
Now everyone is responsible for defense - most likely this mean party wide buffs chains, zones of protection and more resources devoted to shut down the enemy mobs.
The downside is it can lead to situations where CC becomes irrelevant compared to damage and/or defense - making the game a sequence of small encounters where a very defensive character hold the attention for a couple of seconds while the rest of the party unleash mass AoE damage or to situations where the party has so much defense it is almost impossible to wipe and kills by spiking a single enemy every few seconds.
See GW1 - Balanced way, SF tanking/Manly spike and Discordway for representation of those 3 possible styles of play.
Currently playing: GW2
Going cardboard starter kit: Ticket to ride, Pandemic, Carcassonne, Dominion, 7 Wonders
3 man teams is not uncommon in PvP but for PvE it usually doesn´t work.
First of all do a trinity combat group almost always have 5 or 6 players, the reason for that is that you need one tank, one healer and one DPS, which leaves 2 or 3 places open depending on personal preferances and who you can get at the moment. 3 players would be almost exactly as hard to assemble as that, we all know that you either lack a tank or healer when you need another player.
4 players could work there but I personally prefer 6 like in EQ 1 & 2, the more the merrier since it kinda is the point of a mmo anyways.
It is possible in non trinity games but you usually want a bit more group dynamic anyways.
It do work excellent in Diablo styled dungeonhacks but scaling is in fact even better there.
I like 2-mans myself, especially if one is more tanky than the other but not by a huge amount.
GF and I do this often. I hadn't thought about it until I read your post, but it's really quite fun.