MMO social politics

[chinslim]

An MMO's group is set at X size.  Your guild/social circle of X+N players want to be in 'the group'.  Some players will be left out or intentionally excluded.  It's like dodgeball and high school, and you get to hear grown men whine(especially if you're using voice chat).  

How do you deal with the headaches of grouping?

[Alkiera]

In EQ, we typically formed 2 groups if possible, hunting in nearby areas so we could chat.  Or we formed a raid party so we could split exp.

Really, this is one of the issues of current MMO 'party' systems.  Inevitably, whatever game-supported group size X is, you have X+1 or more people online at the same time.  And barring that, you've already filled up the group with random people when someone you know logs on.  It's a pain.

Really, there should be a way to manage such things better.  Allowing for larger groups helps, I admittedly never had that problem in CoH with their groups of eight...  I was astonished as anyone else that WoW only allowed 5.

Alkiera

[SirBruce]

Don't group with friends?

Don't become friends with whiners?

Bruce

[HaemishM]

I feel your pain. In my days of EQ guild leadership, this was probably 60-70% of the complaints I had to listen to. "I can never get a group!" or "No one wants to group with me!" What they really mean is "I can't get in the group with the popular crowd" because there's always someone outgoing in the guild who everyone wants to group with, who manages to find the best hunting spots and always has an optimal group.

Of course, I was a horrible person if I suggested that the whiner start their own group. Inevitably, they'd be one of 4 or 5 people, all of whom couldn't find a group, yet tried soloing instead. Of course, with games like EQ, the biggest problem was that if you didn't have one of the holy trinity of classes, it didn't matter how many groups you could make, you'd either die, or the people would whine because they couldn't take things higher than their level, and thus their experience wouldn't be as good.

Fuck forced grouping, rigid class roles and level-restricted grouping mechanics. They aren't the cause of this problem, but they sure contribute.

[shiznitz]

If a game drops exp, it can allow for unlimited grouping. The former stems from having to balance things for the latter.

Consider EQ2. Every level, all of a class' skills get a higher cap and some of the class' skills immediately get bumped to that cap and yet others have to be raised through use, specifically slashing, piercing, crushing, ranged, etc. What is the point of arbitrarily having some auto-max and others not? I cannot answer that. However, what if the game had ZERO exp all that mattered was your skill level?

The game mechanics would not have to change at all, yet people could group with any and everyone.  Skills would only increase if you fought creatures appropriate to your skills, i.e. creatures you could learn from.

Why group then?
1. Defeat more difficult encounters that you could alone.
2. Maybe give "learning" bonuses when grouped.
3. Maybe have a skill available to all (e.g. Tactics) that improves everyone in the group by a set degree.

EQ2 makes me work certain skills up manually. Why not expand that to all the skills? Why would this change the gameplay at all? People already farm grays for quests so it wouldn't encourage that beyond what we have now. All the gear in EQ2 is actually skill level dependent, not level dependent. The two just advance hand in hand so it seems that way.

Yes, this is back to "UO did it best!" worship, but damnit, I had lots of fun as a 7x GM killing hordes of orcs for hours on end solo then getting 5-10 people and hunting dragons/ogre lords/wyverns whatever.

[chinslim]

Don't become friends with whiners?

The thing with all social networks is, people you don't like come attached to people you do like.

[SirBruce]

Don't become friends with whiners?

The thing with all social networks is, people you don't like come attached to people you do like.

Well I don't see why it bothers him to tell him he can't be in the group, then.  If he's annoying him in chat, he can always put him on ignore.

Bruce

[Trippy]

If a game drops exp, it can allow for unlimited grouping. The former stems from having to balance things for the latter.

Experience doesn't really have anything to do with it. If the designers wanted to they could allow "unlimited" group sizes (ignoring UI limitations) and just keep dividing the experience up, though eventually you'll reach some group size where the experience per kill is 0. The problem is that non-raid dungeon content is designed for a specific group size. If you allow groups larger than that then the content becomes too easy. If you switch to a pure "usage" model (a la UO) you still have the same problem where too many people in the group makes it too easy to go through dungeon content.

[WindupAtheist]

As the new resident UO fanboy, I just have to say... HA HA!  A party in UO tops out at ten, and I've only ever seen that limit come into play during guild functions.  Then again, with no XP to fret over, it's just a chat system and shared looting rights anyway.

Really, you guys who play EverQuest...  Why?  I mean, is the combat challenging and compelling?  Are you just about graphics?  What do you actually do in the game?  How often is it actually fun, and how often do you merely have that weird little "I'm slightly more powerful!" feeling of advancement?

I don't play my game to advance, or have some sense of accomplishment.  I play it to relax, basically.  Here's what I did tonight:

*  Mentioned that I left WoW to come back to UO, and had a conversation with several random Skara Brae banksitters about what makes an MMOG good.

*  Met a friend and continued an RP storyline that's been meandering along, on and off, for over a year.

*  Ran around a little while killing liches for their necromancy reagents.  I also made a point of healing myself by using spirit speak on the bodies, so I could gain in that skill a little.

*  Placed a housing plot out in the woods, markedly larger than the one I used to have.  Sat around chatting in party while I designed my house, which I was able to make a bit more complex than the old one, thanks to the added room.

BUT OMG TEH GRAPHICS ARE SUXOR!!1!  I'd better go buy a "real" MMOG and sit around grinding for the next ding...

[shiznitz]

If a game drops exp, it can allow for unlimited grouping. The former stems from having to balance things for the latter.

Experience doesn't really have anything to do with it. If the designers wanted to they could allow "unlimited" group sizes (ignoring UI limitations) and just keep dividing the experience up, though eventually you'll reach some group size where the experience per kill is 0. The problem is that non-raid dungeon content is designed for a specific group size. If you allow groups larger than that then the content becomes too easy. If you switch to a pure "usage" model (a la UO) you still have the same problem where too many people in the group makes it too easy to go through dungeon content.

You are trapped in treadmill thinking. "Easy" content done right can still be fun, e.g. my previous example of slaughtering orcs by the bucketful in UO. The whole easy vs hard content debate is a result of having to balance level progression rates. If level 1 mobs gave even 1 exp to level 20 players, those players would find a way to mass slaughter in 100% safety.

Another reason that exp systems "grey out" mobs a certain number of levels below a player is to avoid powerlevelling schemes. This whole concern goes out the window without exp. If a 7x GM mage wants to babysit a 1x GM warrior at the orc fort, let him. It hurts no one.

There are ways to make content hard for large groups outside of a levelling system - limit the size of the battlefield, limit the size of the "hit box" on a mob, give the mob interesting AE attacks that make zerging impractial, etc. Hell, let people zerg if they want. Zerging can be fun because it gives an epic feel.

One thing I have forgotten to take into account is the HP escalation issue.  Levelling = growing hit points over time. That is another of the HUGE problems with balancing content. A return to a fixed hp system would alleviate a lot of that. If the top players have 200hps and top monsters hit for 50-70 and have 2,000hps, teamwork (or pathfinding/kiting exploits) will be necessary.

EQ2 uses skill points for gear-useability determination. The signs are there. The design mindset just has to shift more in that direction.

[Trippy]

If a game drops exp, it can allow for unlimited grouping. The former stems from having to balance things for the latter.

Experience doesn't really have anything to do with it. If the designers wanted to they could allow "unlimited" group sizes (ignoring UI limitations) and just keep dividing the experience up, though eventually you'll reach some group size where the experience per kill is 0. The problem is that non-raid dungeon content is designed for a specific group size. If you allow groups larger than that then the content becomes too easy. If you switch to a pure "usage" model (a la UO) you still have the same problem where too many people in the group makes it too easy to go through dungeon content.

You are trapped in treadmill thinking. "Easy" content done right can still be fun, e.g. my previous example of slaughtering orcs by the bucketful in UO. The whole easy vs hard content debate is a result of having to balance level progression rates. If level 1 mobs gave even 1 exp to level 20 players, those players would find a way to mass slaughter in 100% safety.

Another reason that exp systems "grey out" mobs a certain number of levels below a player is to avoid powerlevelling schemes. This whole concern goes out the window without exp. If a 7x GM mage wants to babysit a 1x GM warrior at the orc fort, let him. It hurts no one.

You seem to be equating certain game design decisions with some inherent property of a particular character advancement system when in fact they are totally separate issues. There's no commandment in level-based experience systems that says "thou must not get experience from low level mobs", at least as far as I'm aware. Conversely there's no commandment in skill-based advancement systems that says "thou must be able to gain weapon skill by hitting training dummies ad nauseum" -- that's a decision a game designer made. Similarly there's no commandment in level-based experience systems that says "thou must not be able to powerlevel other players" -- again that's a decision some game designer made.

One thing I have forgotten to take into account is the HP escalation issue.  Levelling = growing hit points over time. That is another of the HUGE problems with balancing content. A return to a fixed hp system would alleviate a lot of that. If the top players have 200hps and top monsters hit for 50-70 and have 2,000hps, teamwork (or pathfinding/kiting exploits) will be necessary.

I agree that HP escalation can be an issue which is one of the reasons why I preferred RuneQuest over AD&D back in the day -- I never did understand why a high level character in AD&D took less relative damage (as a percentage of total HPs) from a fall or from walking through fire than a low level character. However, leveling != necessarily mean growing HPs over time. That's a tradition started by D&D and copied by other systems that use a similar experience point based leveling system. You could just as easily create an experience-based leveling system that didn't raise HPs over time.