Tag: grouping

A Group Of One

Gaming, Random Thoughts

Playing around with EverQuest again, I’m reminded how much I love First Person view for MMOs. I play Star Trek Online in “mostly First Person” because you can’t actually go all the way in, but you can get the camera right up behind the character’s shoulder and eliminate the ability to see behind yourself, and immediately the game gains ten times more immersion. I assume my fascination and love for First Person comes from my love of shooters, especially team based shooters.

However, if the world is going to continue to insist on 3rd person view (probably because retention studies show that people stick around longer when they can constantly see how awesome they look in their latest gear) and that games be playable solo (which I’m not going to get into an argument about), I’d love to see an MMO go full on Party Mode like the old SSI and other RPG games.

Bard's Tale
If you pressed 'Z' on the PC version you got an elemental to join your party.

And I’m not talking about playing one character and having AI controlled mercenaries. No, I mean the player creates and controls a party of 4 to 6 characters.

Assuming that each character would fill a role in the group, the UI really wouldn’t be much different from today. Instead of playing a single tank character who has a couple dozen abilities for tanking you’d have a character in your group who has a handful of tanking skills. Each character, as far as combat is concerned, is really just 3 to 6 abilities on hot-keys. And you could macro so that you can chain abilities from different group members to execute combo moves.

When traveling, you’d control the lead character and choose a formation for the others to follow.

The game wouldn’t be entirely solo (just solo in a way that makes sense), but you could still group up with another player. You’d join your groups together into raids. An odd advantage to this is that since each group is likely to be fully functional (having their own tanking, healing, DPS and other skills) it simplifies the raid interface by accident. Each player manages their own people and the game really only needs to maintain the players in a raid for chat and loot distribution purposes.

Suddenly a “5 man” raid is actually 20 to 30 characters. The raid events can feel more epic while keeping the people-complexity low – it’s easier to herd 5 people than 25 people. This would also allow events themselves to be more complex yet easier, in that the raid can involve fighting multiple targets or doing synchronous goals (2 or 3 players fight a boss while other players solve puzzles or do other tasks) but without needing to manage entire groups of players for each item.

The more I think about it, and if the MMO trend is going to continue in third person views, the more I like this idea. It definitely needs more thought, but I like the direction it is going very much.

Stop with the grouping already!

Random Thoughts

In MMOs, I am a strong advocate of grouping.  However, even though I often think that people who want to play a game with thousands, or millions, of other people and NOT play with them is a bit silly, I’ve never faulted a game for allowing that style of play (though I will fault them for making solo play the “best” way to play in every aspect – I’m looking at you, World of Warcraft, you and your game from level 1 to 85).  I am, at the core, all about options.

Facebook Grouping
Forced Grouping?

That would be why this makes me so mad.  Plenty of people out there use multiple social networks, and to make things easier they try to link them together so they can make one update and have it show up everywhere.  Facebook has decided that they would like to marginalize certain types of this synchronizing.  If I click that link that says “See 19 more posts from Twitter” it will expand and show me around 2 days worth of Twitter updates, completely out of their proper order in my feed.

Now, I understand, on some level, what Facebook is trying to achieve.  People who play games are often inundated with “spam” from those games and so Facebook decided it would try to clean things up by grouping updates from Applications.  Twitter is an Application.

The fault here is that there is no option to not group updates from Applications.  This is what I get, forced grouping.

There are solutions.  I can use an application like TweetDeck, which posts the same update to multiple sources directly.  But then I need to install TweetDeck everywhere, including my phone, in order to get the same functionality.  But that only solves it for my updates.  The dozens of other people I know who use the Twitter Application will continue to be grouped.  It would be better if Facebook game me the option to choose if Applications were grouped.  Better still, let me choose per Application if I want their updates grouped.

Hopefully, Facebook will get their heads out of their asses at some point and fix this.  If they don’t, it’ll just be one more reason I find myself drifting away from Facebook…

Removing Grouping – Conclusions

Gaming

At the end of this, having now gone through the five elements of what a player gets, technically, from a group structure, it appears that grouping itself needs to stay unless the games are completely redesigned.  For example, in playing Wizard 101 I have been a part of a group many times without forming an actual group because the game is built around “casual grouping”.  If a player is in combat, to join them you need only step into the combat circle.  All combat is contained within a temporary group, four slots for your side and four slots for the enemy, and when combat is done the group is dissolved.  But it is turn based card/deck played combat, and not the real-time hack and slash spell casting of the traditional Diku model.

Also, as brought up by many of the people I discussed this with, grouping does bring a social element with it, a sense of belonging and direction.  There is just something about being invited to a group and joining that group that bands people together in ways that a random collection of people doesn’t have.

Anyway, I hope you have enjoyed this exercise.

Encouraged Grouping

Gaming

There was an article over on Massively, and then Cuppy wrote about it, and it got me to thinking, so I figured I’d chime in…

The first thing to deal with is that games, especially MMOs, are a business just like any other.  And like every business they are very trend driven.  If one company has success with something, expect other companies to follow it, because, in their thinking, that way lies success.  You see it in movies fairly clearly.  One superhero movie does well and suddenly the market is flooded with superhero movies.  If next year a gritty noir cop film were to rake in a $60 million opening weekend, you could expect to see a few more of them the year after.  Books are another place this is obvious.  How many young adult targeted books about child/teen heroes battling evil existed prior to the success of Harry Potter?  How many after?  Bookstores practically have entire aisles of them.

EQ encouraged grouping.  I like to say encouraged rather than forced because despite what some people will tell you every single class in EQ could solo… many of them were just horrible at it.  Grouping, then, felt forced because a bunch of people who couldn’t solo effectively could overcome that and gain much better advancement by grouping together.  Because grouping was so much better than solo for the majority of classes, people say it is “forced”.  Semantics.  In any event, it worked well for EQ.  Grouping, forced or encouraged, fostered communities.  Players built friends lists and joined guilds, they frequented the same zones to be with the same people, they followed those people to new zones.  Because of this, the games that came shortly after all tried to encourage grouping.  EQ was successful, and that way lies success.

WoW came along and said people didn’t need to group.  Every class can solo, and often times they solo more effectively than grouping (because solo you don’t have to worry about stupid people invading your group and messing you up).  And it was more successful.  So, that way now lies success.  Most of the games since, and most of the ones coming down the pipe all allow for rewarding solo play.  In fact, many of these games, through experience split and bonus structures, and loot sharing actually discourages grouping.  Why split exp and loot with random strangers when you can just solo the content and keep it all yourself?  Of course, they still do encourage some grouping, in instances for groups and raids, but the game leading up to the “end game” doesn’t need, and plays more efficiently without, grouping.

This too will change.

The problem I have with this is that MMOs are not quite like other businesses.  If Nike were to decide to change the way they make shoes and I didn’t like the new shoes, I could still find the old kind, through eBay or even through Nike as they are likely to rebrand the old shoes as “classics” and keep selling them until they become unprofitable.  But when it comes to MMOs, if the new trend moves away from your game model, you only have two options: 1) change your game to follow the new trend, or 2) accept that your game might diminish, plan for that, and begin building a new game.

As I touched on in my post about quests, with EQ they chose option 1.  After the launch of WoW (and some even before, the benefit of being a running game while another game runs an open beta and media blitz) they began implementing changes in their game to capitalize on the new buzz of new success.  At this point, EQ plays more like a WoW skin draped over an EQ bone structure with a bit of reconstructive surgery.  The old EQ is lost (unless you want to play the Mac version, which I would, if I didn’t need a Mac to do it), and that is the game I want to play.

I want a game with encouraged grouping throughout, with quests you have to discover, without maps built in to the game, but no one is developing that game anymore, and even the games that were that game aren’t that game anymore.  I am a niche that is not being serviced.  When people ask what MMOs I play, that is the answer I give them.

Memory and Grouping

Gaming

Tobold, whose blog I’m reading more and more, made a couple of really interesting posts recently.

The first post is about repetition in game design. Basically, lots of MMORPG games are designed around the “fail and repeat” methodology. You fight, you lose, you try again with gathered knowledge. This can be great if you are the first, but once guides get put on the internet, chances are your guild is trying to learn the fox trot instead of inventing new dance moves.

I agree with Tobold in that games need more unique content. And by unique I don’t mean cramming a hundred developers in a room and refusing to feed them until they create a hundred unique dungeons, but instead games need a way to have content such that if you fail you can’t just repeat it, but instead it will learn from your failure or have a random set of possible design parts that combine upon spawning, if you kill all a bosses henchmen, they should have different henchmen when you return, not the same guys standing in the same places. But this isn’t something really easily done… there is a problem in that games that have tried to use randomly generated content feel randomly generated, and no one really likes RPG games that feel tossed together. They should feel like the tasks you are undertaking are important.

His second post about grouping in games details exactly one of the major issues that I have in World of Warcraft. The problem with grouping is in actually finding a group (well, not for me, I play a priest, I have half the server on ignore). So his conclusion is thus:

But even more effective would be for the developers to introduce tools that diminish the group finding time. World of Warcraft could make huge improvements in their looking for group tools. And meeting stones could be reprogrammed to work like a warlock summoning, so the first three people arriving at the dungeon could summon the two stragglers. The beauty of such changes would be that at first sight they don’t change the rewards rate at all. But by cutting down on the rewards lost to a group due to waiting, improved group finding and gathering tools would make grouping relatively more attractive to players, and lead to more positive social interaction between them. We are not a bunch of hermits preferring to play alone, it is the parameters of the game that influence our behavior and preference for soloing or grouping.

And that’s it. WoW needs a looking for group tool beyond the meeting stones, which most people won’t use anyway because they don’t want to be in queue so long that the game decides to make weird groups.