SWTOR

[Cadaverine]

In defense of Stab's theory, you could replace people in WoW with bots that said hello, and thanks, at the start and end of instances, and called you a dumbass noob in the BGs, and people would be none the wiser.   

There might be other people involved in the bg/instance, but there's little to no interaction unless you go out of your way to be talkative.   And since there is no incentive to do so, people don't.  There is no reason to socialize with anyone outside of your guild, and no incentive to do otherwise.

People might have whined about having to sit around in EC Tunnel auctioning their stuff back in EQ, but it least it gave you a reason to talk to other people.  In EQ, I actually talked to people, and made friends and so on, because the game basically forced me to do so.  And while I may have bitched about it at the time, and I certainly like the AH, and mail, and the ability to do my own thing without having to wait on others, it really has made WoW into a single player game if you chose to play it as such, raiding notwithstanding.

[Malakili]

In defense of Stab's theory, you could replace people in WoW with bots that said hello, and thanks, at the start and end of instances, and called you a dumbass noob in the BGs, and people would be none the wiser.   

There might be other people involved in the bg/instance, but there's little to no interaction unless you go out of your way to be talkative.   And since there is no incentive to do so, people don't.  There is no reason to socialize with anyone outside of your guild, and no incentive to do otherwise.

People might have whined about having to sit around in EC Tunnel auctioning their stuff back in EQ, but it least it gave you a reason to talk to other people.  In EQ, I actually talked to people, and made friends and so on, because the game basically forced me to do so.  And while I may have bitched about it at the time, and I certainly like the AH, and mail, and the ability to do my own thing without having to wait on others, it really has made WoW into a single player game if you chose to play it as such, raiding notwithstanding.

This is pretty much my experience too.  Truth be told, I probably have more pure fun playing WoW, but I remember other MMOs more fondly than I remember WoW, which is totally backwards, but odd.  Probably because I am remembering WoW gameplay, and I am remembering other MMO friends.

[Fordel]

No, all that stuff is still alive and well in WoW, it's just all in retard speak now. The selling, the grouping, the waiting, the 'community' all there. All those guys spamming trade chat with ANAL [Backstab]? They all know each other, have their own cliques, ninja's, assholes etc. It's alive and well and HUGE, much bigger then any of the original communities, it's just alien to the most of us.


I'm sure the original 'old guys' in EQ or whatever thought we were fucking crazy too, bitching about how MUD's had a much tighter community to them or whatnot. 

[UnSub]

Don't you just love going to a football game and being the only person in the stands?

When I play team sports, everyone else may as well just be robots who are programmed to give me the ball.

And when we lose, it is completely their fault. Stupid AI.

[Stabs]

Well there will still be other people around in SWTOR, you will still call people retards and make Anal [jokes] while soloing your solo quests in your instanced solo mission.

I simply object to the statement SWTOR can't work because it's a sub-based single player game.

It's very like WoW's levelling game in terms of the player experience with relation to other players.

[Spiff]

People keep referring to WoW (as one must when discussing any MMO I s'pose  ), but when I'm 'fantasising' what SWOR might be I tend to think of LoTRO tbh.
Fact it's the only MMO I play atm might have something to do with it, but almost everything I hear about it makes me think LoTRO 2.0 in space; a lot of emphasis on how casual it'll be, using story/IP and world-design as the main selling points ...

The focus on solo-play with the occasional option to /wave to other players seems to have worked out ok for Turbine anyway.
Looking at their ever-growing emphasis on skirmishes (however ill-implemented they might be imo) and smaller instances seems they believe there's an audience for casual/solo-play.

From what little I've seen; SWOR has a bigger IP and a bigger budget.
How could they fail? 

[Ollie]

I think Cadaverine, Malakili and Fordel are all aptly describing how change affects social venues, such as MMOGs. As with any social space, their conventions evolve with time. The games themselves change, people come and go, and communities find new ways to define their social identities. New players embrace the prevalent social conventions of their time, and use them as a basis of comparison for anything that comes after, often leading to the "Nostalgic Grumpy Old Geezer" syndrome that Fordel describes.

But I do think that in addition to the "normal" evolution of MMOG communities, there has been a curious change in the last couple of years, brought on by games such as WAR, AoC and the latest batch of Cryptic titles. These are MMOGs that for one reason or another, either due to a lacking social toolset or overtly solo-oriented mechanics, don't encourage social groups or communities in the traditional sense.

It will be interesting to see what SW:TOR's take on community turns out to be. Specifically, how will gameplay mechanics reward grouping so that people actually take the time to socialize. As Spiff said, the latest dev blog was a typical mission statement in all its vague glory, and launch is far enough that Bioware can still get away with murder if need be.

[Koyasha]

Here's an interesting thought.  WoW was a lot less soloable early on.  You could solo, sure, but you were more encouraged to group back then than you are now, and groups took longer and talked more.  Dungeons were long enough that you'd converse with your group a little, not just do the entire run in almost complete silence, then part ways and never see each other again.

Perhaps the community was built during that phase, and as the game changed into what it is today, it remained and its conventions passed on to people who never even experienced it, slowly evolving over time, but passing on from that initial stage.  It it possible that some rough, pioneer days are extremely valuable in building and creating a community that will then be passed down as time goes on?

[Malakili]

Here's an interesting thought.  WoW was a lot less soloable early on.  You could solo, sure, but you were more encouraged to group back then than you are now, and groups took longer and talked more.  Dungeons were long enough that you'd converse with your group a little, not just do the entire run in almost complete silence, then part ways and never see each other again.

Perhaps the community was built during that phase, and as the game changed into what it is today, it remained and its conventions passed on to people who never even experienced it, slowly evolving over time, but passing on from that initial stage.  It it possible that some rough, pioneer days are extremely valuable in building and creating a community that will then be passed down as time goes on?

What "community" are you referring to exactly?  Not being snarky, I mean seriously what community was "built during that phase"

[Shrike]

I think he's trying to say guilds were more tight knit in vanilla. They had to be. Trying to organize and hold 40 man raids together weren't easy. We ran a 3-6 guild alliance (depending on time period) and keeping this thing on the tracks wasn't easy. The very core founders were real life family and friends. That helped (though I recall a personal feud with our original raid leader's little brother).

I could bring up EQ and the 72man raid limits (which we hit in PoP). The guild was very close (feuds and all) and very motivated. I simply don't see this in our WoW guild(s) much anymore. Ours has the same core (most have moved on, but some remain) more or less and it still is a friends/familly atmosphere. It's also a lot more casual that it was. It has to be. All of us are older with more time restrictions. Mine hasn't changed as much as some, but I was older to begin with. Also, I have a peculariar schedule that changes seasonally.

Community tends to form around adversity. EQ was all about adversity. WoW not so much, and even less now than in '04.

[Malakili]

I think he's trying to say guilds were more tight knit in vanilla. They had to be. Trying to organize and hold 40 man raids together weren't easy. We ran a 3-6 guild alliance (depending on time period) and keeping this thing on the tracks wasn't easy. The very core founders were real life family and friends. That helped (though I recall a personal feud with our original raid leader's little brother).

I could bring up EQ and the 72man raid limits (which we hit in PoP). The guild was very close (feuds and all) and very motivated. I simply don't see this in our WoW guild(s) much anymore. Ours has the same core (most have moved on, but some remain) more or less and it still is a friends/familly atmosphere. It's also a lot more casual that it was. It has to be. All of us are older with more time restrictions. Mine hasn't changed as much as some, but I was older to begin with. Also, I have a peculariar schedule that changes seasonally.

Community tends to form around adversity. EQ was all about adversity. WoW not so much, and even less now than in '04.

Ah.  Well, the raiding guild that I was a part of (that was, and remains, a top guild on the server) actually started as a group of friends.  When they got to UBRS they didn't have enough people to run it consistently, so they would find people to run it with them, they became friends, and so forth.  Samething when with 40man raids, though then they had to open it up to recruitment more in earnest.  They've always had the position that you recruit people though, not players, and if you aren't a good enough person that you are going to be able to self police yourself on douche baggery, then you aren't let in even if you are the best player they've ever seen.   That kind of mentality actually led to a better raiding environment too because you had a group of players that legitimately liked to play the game together instead of just a bunch of loosely associated jag offs looking for loot.

I guess my experience might be exceptional in this case, so I can't really comment omain on how communities in guilds are for the most part.   It would almost be interesting to go back and join a guild with an alt just to see what it would be like, though I suspect it might have bad results.

[Draegan]

No, all that stuff is still alive and well in WoW, it's just all in retard speak now. The selling, the grouping, the waiting, the 'community' all there. All those guys spamming trade chat with ANAL [Backstab]? They all know each other, have their own cliques, ninja's, assholes etc. It's alive and well and HUGE, much bigger then any of the original communities, it's just alien to the most of us.


I'm sure the original 'old guys' in EQ or whatever thought we were fucking crazy too, bitching about how MUD's had a much tighter community to them or whatnot. 

MUDs did have a tighter community, thank you very much.

[Ollie]

Shrike makes a fine point about vanilla WoW and EQ. Adversity promotes social ties, and the game system design of a given MMOG has a huge role in dictating how punitive the experience is to the solo player, and how grouping and thus social interaction is encouraged. Most modern MMOGs require much less time-intensive participation, which gives rise to a wholly different mode of social interaction than before. Hence, among other things, evolving communities.

But before I get sidetracked, I want to briefly touch on a few things in Koyasha's post. When talking about social interaction, it's good to keep in mind that a community is something that is always in a state of flux; it is constantly evolving and reinventing itself. We all participate in the same social reality in a given cultural context, but we each have our individual interpretation of it. There is no "original community" in any of the MMOGs we've played, only our interpretation of a specific time in a social space.

Community is not a monolith. Usually when people refer to a halcyon and static community, they are indulging in a Jean-François Lyotard-inspired grand narrative in an attempt to legitimize their current values and norms. It's an origin myth that reinforces normative group identity.

But Koyasha also makes an interesting point: sometimes social conventions carry over even when the game itself no longer promotes or even requires certain behavior. Think of Cryptic's ChampO, for instance, a game so solo-oriented that grouping is almost detrimental. There is no gameplay reason to promote formal group identity (i.e. guilds), yet people join them because they always have.

[Koyasha]

What "community" are you referring to exactly?  Not being snarky, I mean seriously what community was "built during that phase"

Essentially, laying down the way we interacted with each other ongoing into the future, and so on.  The things that people do now, that seem entirely second-nature to them, are the evolution of what people originally did in the early days.  I suspect that anything people do now can be loosely traced back to then, which can probably be traced even further back to EQ and so on.  But imagine if WoW in the early days were like it is now, where all the instances are pathetically easy, where you rarely need to communicate with your fellow player in instances, and you get your instance groups by clicking a dungeon finder and bam, you're there.  I'm willing to go out on a limb and say a lot of the "stickiness" wouldn't have developed if the game had been like that.  Mostly because of how much WoW expanded the audience, to the point where players of old games like EQ were a drop in the bucket, and if the new players hadn't had to interact, they wouldn't have picked anything up from those that came before.

Due to the person who tried to hijack my account, I got to play recently, first time I've played since they added the dungeon finder.  That did not feel like a multiplayer experience to me.  I got on my level 80 death knight and tanked an instance - Halls of Stone, it turned out to be.  I think I spoke three times.  I made a general grumble during the Brann event because some of my hotkeys were screwed up, I made a comment about not having played in a while, and I congratulated someone on a drop for their alt.  On the Utgarde Keep run I did with my level 72 warlock, I do believe the only word I spoke was "Ready."  In both instances, the rest of the group was similarly quiet.

There's still enough interaction for people to feel sticky since they have friends and acquaintances on their server, but imagine if the game had launched with this system in place, and with instances as easy as they are now, so that any marginally competent group can clear any content they want?  What would ever have led anyone to get to know each other?  Without that initial phase of adversity, as Shrike says, we'd have very little social game in WoW today.

I'm kind of worried that SWTOR may be 'too soloable' in this case.  Hopefully their system will encourage people enough to form communities that it won't be a problem.

[Malakili]

What "community" are you referring to exactly?  Not being snarky, I mean seriously what community was "built during that phase"

Essentially, laying down the way we interacted with each other ongoing into the future, and so on.  The things that people do now, that seem entirely second-nature to them, are the evolution of what people originally did in the early days.  But imagine if WoW in the early days were like it is now, where all the instances are pathetically easy, where you rarely need to communicate with your fellow player in instances, and you get your instance groups by clicking a dungeon finder and bam, you're there.  I'm willing to go out on a limb and say a lot of the "stickiness" wouldn't have developed if the game had been like that.

Due to the person who tried to hijack my account, I got to play recently, first time I've played since they added the dungeon finder.  That did not feel like a multiplayer experience to me.  I got on my level 80 death knight and tanked an instance - Halls of Stone, it turned out to be.  I think I spoke three times.  I made a general grumble during the Brann event because some of my hotkeys were screwed up, I made a comment about not having played in a while, and I congratulated someone on a drop for their alt.  On the Utgarde Keep run I did with my level 72 warlock, I do believe the only word I spoke was "Ready."  In both instances, the rest of the group was similarly quiet.

There's still enough interaction for people to feel sticky since they have friends and acquaintances on their server, but imagine if the game had launched with this system in place, and with instances as easy as they are now, so that any marginally competent group can clear any content they want?  What would ever have led anyone to get to know each other?  Without that initial phase of adversity, as Shrike says, we'd have very little social game in WoW today.

Ok, that makes sense.  I just wonder what the new player experience is for people who never had the old experience.

[Lantyssa]

Maybe the hardcore raiders communicated.  Those of us who weren't hardcore didn't, because we weren't good enough to enter those places.  There's a reason the pool of players went from 800k to 13 million...

Also, if you want people to talk... start talking?

[Mattemeo]

Also, if you want people to talk... start talking?

Yup. I'm a chatty cat in randoms, it helps me feel at ease with the general weirdness of cross-server grouping. If people talk back, great. If I get the silent treatment, well, it's only twenty minutes of tedium and some loot. I even have a go at French if I end up in a group full of Quebecois talkers (has happened a few times now). Though the urge to talk about the monkey being in the bathroom never goes away...

[Stabs]

I'm kind of worried that SWTOR may be 'too soloable' in this case.  Hopefully their system will encourage people enough to form communities that it won't be a problem.

I'm half-expecting non-traditional methods of communication, Facebook ideas really. Many MMOs have gone towards more player information being accessible (EQ Players, WoW Armory etc). It seems a logical next step in that trend to make that information a little more intrusive.

So rather than playing together we will play separately but get little messages:
"Ding, your friend Stabs has reached level 12!"
"Bong, your friend Stabs has collected 50 wookini!"

Most MMOs already do that within guilds already of course.

Then you can look at my achievements page in game and chat to me about it while we play. So still a social game, just not using adversity to force social ties.

In many ways the adversity system kind of sucks. Once things start going wrong people are quick to blame the other, almost as if getting your blame in first, justified or not, exonerates you.

[Ollie]

I'm half-expecting non-traditional methods of communication, Facebook ideas really.

It's more than likely that SW:TOR will ship with heavy ties to Bioware's new social site. I'm sure they're already mining their busy b-hinds off, gathering metrics on how people network with Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2.

Smart move to do a soft launch with single-player titles and prep for the big show.

[Draegan]

Dungeons in WOW are a quick series of reward pellets.  They are there for players to get a quick rewards and a chance at loot.  After you spend the 20-30 minutes in them you move on and do it again.

As we all know, dungeons in WOW are all one straight hallway, or route that never change.  You just push your way through from trash pack to trash pack.  No need to CC or communicate with others.  There isn't adventure anymore, you can't get lost, there is no need to explore.

I miss UBRS/LBRS, BRD, Scholomance because they were pretty cool dungeons.  TBC dungeons were fucking terrible and WOTLK's dungeons are only slightly better.

If you want communication and "community" then make the content a little more difficult, or larger or whatever.

[Sky]

But imagine if WoW in the early days were like it is now, where all the instances are pathetically easy, where you rarely need to communicate with your fellow player in instances, and you get your instance groups by clicking a dungeon finder and bam, you're there.

I imagine I might have lasted longer than a couple months of being excluded from participating in dungeon content.

There isn't adventure anymore, you can't get lost, there is no need to explore.

There hasn't been since, well, internet.

I find this theme of forced grouping/communication rather humorous. Obviously few people want to group or talk to each other, or it wouldn't need to be forced upon them. Make larger and more difficult dungeons? How about stop playing achiever-driven drivel and go play sandbox games? In UO or Eve, community and communication is basically the entire game.

No, let's force people who just want to blow off some steam playing a casual game to play the way you want to play. When I shop at walmart, I often lash together six carts and make people shop with me, and I talk incessantly the entire time.

[Sheepherder]

 

[Ollie]

I find this theme of forced grouping/communication rather humorous.

Not as much forced as incentivized - a carrot beats stick kind of a deal.

I bet that when SW:TOR turns out to be a totally linear Diku with a heavy focus on casual solo play, nobody on these boars will bat an eyelash. We're just gabbing about the different ways Bioware could throw the socializers a bone without penalizing other playstyles. You know, create a game environment that supports various viable playstyles and offers meaningful progression for achievers, socializers, killers and explorers alike.

I could almost type that with a straight face. The pie in the sky distracted me for a second.

When I shop at walmart, I often lash together six carts and make people shop with me, and I talk incessantly the entire time.

You'd LOVE mommy dearest. You two could duo Walmart.

[SnakeCharmer]

lots of waaah waaah i miss being stabbed in the dick during EQ

But imagine if WoW in the early days were like it is now, where all the instances are pathetically easy

more qq'ing and whining about community (or lack thereof)

Curious...

How long have you played WoW and how many/what mods do you use?

[Draegan]

There isn't adventure anymore, you can't get lost, there is no need to explore.

There hasn't been since, well, internet.

I find this theme of forced grouping/communication rather humorous. Obviously few people want to group or talk to each other, or it wouldn't need to be forced upon them. Make larger and more difficult dungeons? How about stop playing achiever-driven drivel and go play sandbox games? In UO or Eve, community and communication is basically the entire game.

No, let's force people who just want to blow off some steam playing a casual game to play the way you want to play. When I shop at walmart, I often lash together six carts and make people shop with me, and I talk incessantly the entire time.

 
You're a funny guy.

[Ratman_tf]

I guess my experience might be exceptional in this case, so I can't really comment omain on how communities in guilds are for the most part.   It would almost be interesting to go back and join a guild with an alt just to see what it would be like, though I suspect it might have bad results.

In my own limited experience, I led a small UO guild, a medium sized DAOC guild, and participated in a smallish SWG guild. All were ok, but were just loose groups, with no really strong goals or cohesion. All were made from within the game.

After a lot of disillusioned soloing, I joined my WoW guild, which is based on a message board community. The external community helps tremendously in keeping the douchebag factor low, and spirits high. The raiding is what we do a few times a week. (And not all of the guild raids.)

It's a much more relaxed and productive environment than a guild that exists just for the sake of the game. IMO anyway.

[Goreschach]

I find this theme of forced grouping/communication rather humorous. Obviously few people want to group or talk to each other, or it wouldn't need to be forced upon them. Make larger and more difficult dungeons? How about stop playing achiever-driven drivel and go play sandbox games? In UO or Eve, community and communication is basically the entire game.

No, let's force people who just want to blow off some steam playing a casual game to play the way you want to play. When I shop at walmart, I often lash together six carts and make people shop with me, and I talk incessantly the entire time.

While what you say is valid, if some casual players just want to blow off some steam, they can do that just as effectively in a single player game. My main beef with this game isn't just that empirical MMO evidence suggests this thing will end in epic fail, but that they're wasting millions on what could have been a perfectly awesome KOTOR 3. KOTOR 2 was ruined because the game got cut short and shoved out the door. Now they've decided to throw absurd time and money on a non-sequel because of bandwagon.

[Kovacs]

I find this theme of forced grouping/communication rather humorous. Obviously few people want to group or talk to each other, or it wouldn't need to be forced upon them. Make larger and more difficult dungeons? How about stop playing achiever-driven drivel and go play sandbox games? In UO or Eve, community and communication is basically the entire game.

No, let's force people who just want to blow off some steam playing a casual game to play the way you want to play. When I shop at walmart, I often lash together six carts and make people shop with me, and I talk incessantly the entire time.

While what you say is valid..

No it isn't.  Straw man much?

[Typhon]

Actually, I think "Obviously few people want to group or talk to each other, or it wouldn't need to be forced upon them." is valid observation and pertinent to the current conversation.

Maybe you don't understand what the term "Straw man" means?

[Sky]

Straw man much?

Yeah, I've never discussed this exact topic with these folks before. My bad.

I think there is an interesting conversation in there to be had about mmo behaviour and the true nature of what mmo is and should be. These conversations are always colored by experience, which is one of f13's strengths: a lot of us know each other's experiences and biases.

[Malakili]

Actually, I think "Obviously few people want to group or talk to each other, or it wouldn't need to be forced upon them." is valid observation and pertinent to the current conversation.

The thing is people want to group sometimes.  When they feel like it, on their terms.  That means, if you have group content that comes up (whether it be through a quest chain, or just dungeons in general) when they aren't in the mood for it, its going to be "forced" grouping.  If it comes up when they do feel like it, its no big deal.  Obviously everyone has different "when they want to" frequencies, ranging from all the time to never and everywhere in between.

The risk is, if you have too much group content, people will feel like its "forced grouping" most of the time, and if you have to little group content, the game just feels empty to people that are in the mood for it often. 

The other interesting thing is that when given the choice between doing something as a group and doing something solo, which is rare but sometimes seen, people will almost always do it solo, even the people who are group junkies, simply because the overhead/logistical side of it is 0.  I guess reducing that logistical side of it to nothing with the group finder is a decent solution, but it also means communities won't form because you are rarely if ever doing content with the same people unless you already had a guild to begin with.

The issue of whether or not communities form and if it matters is another thing.  Frankly, I think it should be a main goal of the MMO developers as a business strategy.  I have 0 desire to actually play WoW again for the game, but I've such strong ties with my old guild and made what became real life friends playing the game, and now I'm actually considering going back again even though I don't like the game because its something I can do to spend time with my friends, now thats a powerful retention tactic.    However, maybe that experience is outweighed by millions of people who really do just log in to fuck around with a video game now and again

[Kovacs]

Maybe you don't understand what the term "Straw man" means?

No, let's force people who just want to blow off some steam playing a casual game to play the way you want to play. When I shop at walmart, I often lash together six carts and make people shop with me, and I talk incessantly the entire time.

No?

[Goreschach]

The risk is, if you have too much group content, people will feel like its "forced grouping" most of the time, and if you have to little group content, the game just feels empty to people that are in the mood for it often. 

The other interesting thing is that when given the choice between doing something as a group and doing something solo, which is rare but sometimes seen, people will almost always do it solo, even the people who are group junkies, simply because the overhead/logistical side of it is 0.  I guess reducing that logistical side of it to nothing with the group finder is a decent solution, but it also means communities won't form because you are rarely if ever doing content with the same people unless you already had a guild to begin with.

The problem with this is that it requires perfect balance and design. If grouping is even a bit more rewarding, people will feel forced to do it. If soloing is even a bit less complex, people will do it almost exclusively. About the only way you could accomplish both without this problem would be to have solo players and groups doing two totally different and exclusive things. At that point you've basically just made two games for two groups of people.

[Sky]

There's got to be some mechanism to allow grouping that doesn't interrupt solo questing, though?

My old idea about giving options for dungeons (popup box for solo, group, raid, or public) with decent drops for each category is something I still think would go a ways to at least mitigating some of the exclusion felt by solo-centric players. I don't mind grouping, as you say, when I feel like it, on my terms. When I have a quest book full of abandoned quest lines because it's all group/epic content and that just doesn't fit my playstyle, that kinda sucks as a customer, especially when I've done a quest chain to a cockblock.

Admittedly, I only played WoW for a few months after launch, but the vast majority of my grouping was for casual pvp. I think I may have done one dungeon, once, it's just rather boring gameplay where (even then) people are just following a recipe for least resistance, most loot. In WAR I probably grouped more than in any other mmo since EQ, thanks to the public quest system. Although that system is prone to ghost-towning from people out-levelling the content, and also from loot-centricity as people don't do things just because they're fun, it's still a good idea imo.

[Malakili]

At that point you've basically just made two games for two groups of people.

Back in the day we used to call these "single player" and "multiplayer" games.