Revisiting Risk vs Reward

[Sky]

Since I've been in EQ2, I've been bumping up against my old gripe, the group-only content wall. I've been thinking about loot, as well, in particular how loot is so much better for raid groups than just about everything else in the game. And how most people are cool with that because the mobs are so tough. The risk and whatnot.

But this is where I've been given pause...is it a riskier style of gameplay? I put forth this notion: soloing is the riskiest form of gameplay. Rewarding raid groups is simply rewarding forced social interactions. In my experience, a decent raid group is far from risky, they are quite safe and boring. You do your job, if you get whacked, there is a priest there to raise you from the dead, enchanters to mez problems, tanks to shield, wizards to nuke, scouts to scout, etc.

Solo you have to circumvent all of this and figure out how to handle this content on your own, with the full penalty brunt if you fail.

This is from a (blah) goodbye post from the EQ2 boards, and sums up part of my viewpoint:

my other complaint was that their is absolutely no end game content outside of raiding, so if you are not in a raiding guild there is nothing to do.  this is especially frusterating considering how easy raids are, and the dramatic imbalance between raid loot and other loot.  it takes about 15 minutes to kill lockjaw with about 18 people or less.  he will drop items that are far and away MUCH better than anything you can get anywhere else.  the best item you can get from questing with out raids is the ring of fate, and it took me about 10 to 15 hours to get mine, not counting the time spent on all the faction quests.  lockjaws loot is much better than the ring of fate, and it takes about 1.2 man hours to get it. any multi mob raid instance blows this math that much further out of the water, 5 master chests or more in gates, versus the 2 hours it takes about 22 to clear it.  i should never have had to kill the godking to get my staff of anuk.  i did, and i liked the staffs new graphics and the effect was definately a step in the right direction for caster gear.  but that was a long long quest and i was pretty mad when i found out i needed a raid to finish it after all the time i had spent getting to the end.

It is ok to have raid gear be very good, even the best in some cases.  but there should always be a way to quest or work in some other way to get gear at least as good

And that's my experience with EQ, only because I haven't been in the raid crowd in EQ2, but I was in EQ. In EQ, we'd tag big raid mobs left and right, we had it down to a science and it was frankly rather boring and pedestrian. Raiding became a chore of sifting through tons of great loot, with little risk at all. Soloing was a string of misadventures for paltry loot, but it was also more dynamic and fun, as I could go where I wanted when I wanted, without the time pressures of a group.

Maybe this is tangential to Haemmy's idea of rewarding socialization, I don't know. Just airing some thoughts from a primarily solo player. I don't mind being social in these games, in fact...the game I was most social in was one without grouping at all: UO.

There's got to be a better way. Rewarding the people who have the time and commitment to play the raid game is nice. Making everyone else second-class citizens is bad game design. And it's got nothing at all to do with risk.

[angry.bob]

I completely agree with everything you said, including the quote. Especially about UO being the most social of any MMO to date. The infinite possibilities it gave you completely took the pressure off. If you wanted to Snoop people at Brit bank or stand around the X-roads like Hank Hill and wait for sheep to come by it didn't matter. And aside from a sting to your pride, it didn't matter if you died over and over again. Hell, that was the entire point of The Bobs after all.

And that's why Raph will always be the best, despite all the other shit he's done that I hate. I wish I could find that picture where I photoshopped his face onto Wikket. Dammit. blah, blah, blah.

[HaemishM]

I have a concept in my head about soloing that will eventually go on the front page when I can make time to write it.

But you are right, oftentimes solo play is a whole helluva lot more risky than group play and the rewards are generally shit. And of course raiding is forever etched in my mind as a "fun and challenging the first time or two, rote memorization skills that are boring as fuck after that."

I haven't run into the grouping wall yet in EQ2. Maybe it's because there seems to be so much damn content that I'm often outleveling the quests I've been doing just by doing the quests that are most efficient to do (in the same zone, etc.). That's a helluva change from the beta.

[Venkman]

Good question Sky. You won't be surprised by the length of my reply :)

I put forth this notion: soloing is the riskiest form of gameplay. Rewarding raid groups is simply rewarding forced social interactions

I see it in reverse. For reference, I consider "Risk" to be Time.

• Soloing is only risky at first. Once you understand the system though, it's the easiest, the most predictable, the most controllable. Failure means only your own time lost, and in newer games, that's not all that much. At worst, someone loses 60 minutes in these newer games, and that includes time to run and time to reaccrue whatever money was spent to repair and/or replace goods.
• Meanwhile, the forced social interactions of a large-scale raid group are the least predictable elements in these games, even if you only ever raid with the exact same people. Failure here is a collective time loss an order of magnitude beyond the soloer. 40 people getting wiped until a dungeon reset is upwards of 40 hours of time lost. While this is still only 60 minutes per person, if the same people lose 60 minutes with 39 of their buddies often enough, they're looking for new buddies.
  
  • This gets into a subset of this interaction: The Social Ladder.
  • For endgame raiding, even guilds eventually integrate some modified form of DKP, even if it's not called DKP. It's based on need. 40 people (or 60) who consistently raid weekly are spending individually probably 8 hours, including meeting up, buffing, and the actual raiding. There's only so often an individual person is going to dedicated 8 hours a week to just mucking around with buddies with no thought of their own achievement. 8 hours doesn't sound like much by itself. But it's a lot of time when you consider Raiding is typically done in content already long since memorized. There's got be a compulsion to go there.
    
  • The compulsion is the chance at a reward. Random rolling only balances out over the hundreds of iterations. It can't be expected that the same 40 people are always going to be raiding together. And it certainly can't be expected they'll do so hundreds of times. It happens I'm sure, but it's so rare as to be unmeasurable. Yet without those hundreds of iterations, random rolling never gets balanced. If someone wins 12 pieces and someone else hasn't won one, that someone else is moving on. Hence, the many iterations of DKP. DKP is effectively a debit account build up over Time (attendance and active participation). Even Zero-sum comes with guild specific rules (no rolling on first-time attendance, reserved items, etc). That Social Ladder is not something people jump into lightly, half because of them and half because the group they want to be a part of may not have any openings. So getting into that Ladder is a subset of the risk of large-scale forced interaction.

Now, the problem here is that Raiding is intrinsically "free". As long as the encounter works, it's a series of automated gates and faucets requiring some maintenance, but certainly not on the order of new content. It's basically easier to give Raiding as an endgame because it requires less oversight in real time.

A logical extension is soloable Raiding, which already happens. But it's not for the same rewards as group Raids because group Raids are much more risky (imho), and therefore yield much greater rewards.

A corrollary extension also exists, the idea of rewarding socioeconomic elements. Raiding requires support. That support comes from the economy. Raiding is a sink for the elements that get created for it. Consumables are used more in Raiding and PvP than anywhere else in the game. Equipment is repaired more. And Raiding is a sink because it also traditionally yields the least amount of elements back into the system, much less the economy. Basically, Raiding and PvP are the top of the food chain in a sense (imho).

There are many alternatives to the endgame though. Most that have been tried though are much more abstract. What was SWG's "endgame"? There were actually quite a few, making each individual one less "special" because they all were. Same with Eve after a fashion. All of the endgames in titles such as these require duplicative (at least) effort. A Master Armorsmith from old SWG required as much work to develop that entire chain as a Master Bounty Hunter, and this doesn't even take into account those who invented their own roles (energy and resource providers, hunters, Bands, etc.). That's complexity far beyond having people level up to a point where they repeat the same content in a complex social arrangement for their chance to pull the one-armed bandit.

So there's much more room to grow there.

At the same time, the question of persistence needs to be asked. Why have people play forever? Oh, I know the easy answer is more monthly fee and all, but the average time span of an account is already far under a year, maybe even under six months at this point. Real companies with real budgets don't assume they have a player forever because it's just not that way.

So is it better to lose most of the players before they get to the endgame (EQ1)? Is it better to let many of them get there and realize they can't be there, while many others try to be (WoW)? Is it better not provide a clearly defined endgame and let them figure out how long they want to play and grow (SWG, Eve, ATiTD, etc)? Or is is better to create a linear narrative RPG experience that effectively has an end, with some way to "evolve" a character into replaying the game from a different point of view or within a new timeline of the same lore (not really ever done, though discussed in vaporous stuff like Dawn)?

I don't know. But I do know the genre currently exists on mostly one of those models, had tried one two others, and no serious player has really looked yet at the last one.

I haven't run into the grouping wall yet in EQ2. Maybe it's because there seems to be so much damn content that I'm often outleveling the quests I've been doing just by doing the quests that are most efficient to do (in the same zone, etc.). That's a helluva change from the beta.

At 18 I really haven't yet either. I think it starts slowing down in the late 20s though. At least, that's what I read into Sky's post.

[Yegolev]

Man, double-depth bullets.  I will just hold the envelope against my giant red turban and ... you disagree with Sky.  Mmmm, that's good prognostication!   

I agree with Sky, particularly within the EQ frame of reference.  Using WoW as the current bar, it's likely I would not live long enough to gain all of the uber gear through solo play, so while the risk of failure in WoW isn't such as what is found in EQ there certainly is a big penalty for solo play in addition to the shitacular rewards compared to raiding.

[Hoax]

There is no such thing has hard in Diku's; if it truly is hard nobody will attempt it because the risk/reward ratio is no good.  If everything was hard then the forums would erupt in bloodshed and whaaambulance threads and the Dev's would Nerf the content's difficulty.

Yes when there are 40 people involved 1-10 of the dps classes can be asleep and it will not matter.  But if you fall asleep while solo'ing you will die.  That is about the extent of "difficulty" you'll ever see in PvE.

That isn't to say that I am against Diku's making more effort to give multiple paths to ub3r lewt greatness (raiding, long soloable quest chains, reputation grinds, random world drops, rare small group spawns, whatever) but I think your argument looses a great deal of credibility if you try to base it on the idea that any PvE content actually qualifies as difficult.


*fixt the comma situation, not that anyone read this anyways*

[kaid]

Eq2 does deffinatly have some raid bias at the high levels but they are adding in content left and right for soloers groupers and raiders. That and the fact that the biggest raid in eq2 is 24 people and in general most raids in eq2 are tiny compared to just about any other game makes doing them pretty painless.

Even my tiny little guild can do a good chunk of the raiding stuff if we ever get the bug that we want to. Most of the time we just solo or small group things.

I think the eq2 loot balance though is of a type to get you good stuff for how you play. If you play mainly solo or in small groups than the gear you get will be very good for doing that. Will it be equal to a raiders equipment no but then it does not need to be for the content you are accessing.

Loot differenaces in eq2 are FAR less of an issue as they are in WoW or old school eq1. Its a bit more now than it was but its still pretty meager.

Just be glad there are actually things to do solo and small grouping in eq2. In there likely won't be an expansion out for two years after it was released and the majority of content they are adding is FOURTY man raid instances.


kaid

[Furiously]

I'll agree with Darniaq mostly. Ultimately it's about time investment. But that is a stupid, stupid, stupid reason to give better loot to a subset of your players.

Premise: Additional challenge of getting a large group together to work together should reward people for being maschochistic.

Issue: You have effectively closed this content to a likely majority of your userbase.

Solution?: Encounters that scale in accordance to the number of people present with the minimum # being a single party? With the amount of loot dropping being in accordance with the number of people present.

I want to play with my FRIENDS. Not with my friends and 30 other asshats. If I can join 30 asshats and have 3x greater chance of foozle of doom dropping or running an instance with my friends and having a lesser chance, I'll take the lesser chance. I see nothing epic about 40 people attacking a dragon. Six people taking on a dragon now. That is Epic.

[Kail]

For reference, I consider "Risk" to be Time.

I think that's going to be a sticking point for some people.  Yes, if you replace "risk" with "time" then there is more "risk" involved in organizing and executing a raid.  But personally, I'd define risk as something more along the lines of your chance of failure.  If you head out to some really dangerous zone, it's still a risky thing to do even if you don't loose a lot of time there.  And by that definition, soloing is a lot riskier, in my experience.  That's the entire reason raid groups exist: because soloing a raid dungeon would be virtually impossible to complete, not because it would take longer.

You could make the argument that raid content is more difficult and therefore more risky, but that seems to be beside the point.  Raid content is more difficult than solo content, raid content can only be accessed by raids, therefore raiding is more difficult than soloing.  But that's not inherent to the nature of raiding vs. soloing, it's because raid content is inaccessible to soloers.  Put a raid group and a soloer in the same content and the raid group has far, far less risk.  It just happens that most of the high-level content is so difficult that the whole idea of "risk vs. reward" is basically ignored; the "easiest" way to beat raid content is still (by design) fairly difficult, so the choice is out of the players hands.

[Furiously]

The "easiest" way to beat raid content is still (by design) fairly difficult, so the choice is out of the players hands.

Not really - it's about how much X/reward the player is willing to accept.

I've been on 70 man dragon raids and 15 person dragon raids in EQ1.  I had a lot more fun on the 15 person one. I quit going on the 50+ man ones.

[tazelbain]

I will reiterate that real principle is "Suffering is a Virtue" not "Risk vs Reward."  So while the soloist may die more often, she isn't wasting as much time organizing, coordinating and is rebounding more quick after a wipe.  If you could get the same equipment else where no one would do raid beyond a few times to experience the content.

I like auto-balancing game mechanics.  An auto-balance mechanic that I think would work here is: when a top-tier item drops in a raid instance, a copy of it added to the loot table of a random top-tier non-raid instance.  And when it drops there, its removed from the loot table.  So half of all top tier items while come from raids, and half will come from non-raids(you could play with the ratio).  If people want guaranteed items, they have to do the raids.  If they can't or won't do raids they do normal instances and hope they get lucky.  So people decide for themselves which better for them and in total it would auto-balance so that both groups were suffering the same amount.

Or you could make a game not built on suffering, but I think thats too much to ask a game which is an EQ derivative.

[Toast]

A central question here is, "How do you generate challenge/difficulty?" The system of challenge and reward is set up the way it is because developers have not figured out how to create challenge for soloers or small groups. They rely on the old standby:  crank up the number of players required. Without meaningful challenge, there can be no reward.

In mmog's, challenge is generated by requiring a certain number of players and mix of players spells/abilities. The player's task then, is not one of gaming skill but of human resources (finding the right number and type of players to defeat encounters). Game designers know how to do this, and they lean on this mechanism as the "end game" and the only real source of nice loot. Successful raiding guilds evolve very complex organizational systems to manage through this challenge/pain. It looks effortless, but only because of the efficiency they have built.

What designers are clueless about is how to balance challenging encounters for solo players. Combat mechanics are so simplistic that they are no help in testing a soloer's skill. There's no twitch/reflex element to challenge the skillful. In the end, you generally can either kill the monster solo, or you can't (thanks /con system).

In the eyes of the designers, why should a soloer be richly rewarded for accomplishing something that is basically predetermined and hardcoded into the game? Big freaking deal, Mr. Level 40, you soloed Goobnar. Goobnar is programmed to be soloable by a level 40.

It would be great if mob/encounter AI was programmed such that soloers encountered genuine challenge. Then, developers could offer up rewards. I don't think this is even possible with the queue based combat mechanics we are stuck with.

[Lantyssa]

Darniaq, you have some good points, but I am not sure I agree with your assessment of the "time" lost.

To get a fair comparison we need 40 raiders and 40 solo players.  We cannot take a single instance, either.  40 raiders might have an occassional wipe, but they might become a well-oiled machine that significantly reduces expenses.  With 40 solo players you will have the good and the bad which will average out.

When considering equal amounts of players over a large span of gameplay, who has more time invested?  Who has more risk?  (I do not know the answer.)  I suspect they would be roughly balanced.  If they are, then there should not be a difference in rewards.  The raid may see more rewards, but individually they would be obtained at a rate similar to a solo player.

[Venkman]

Yes, if you replace "risk" with "time" then there is more "risk" involved in organizing and executing a raid.  But personally, I'd define risk as something more along the lines of your chance of failure.

Darniaq, you have some good points, but I am not sure I agree with your assessment of the "time" lost.

I should have qualified that. "Risk" to me, in this genre, is "The potential of incremental and cumulative Time lost". This used to be just XP and/or equipment lost. It's become more about lost potential now, in my opinion. For example, if it takes your Raid two hours to clear through to Baron Geddon (including taking Garr et al), then enough wipes and their resultant downtime for regens and buffs will reset the whole place (minus Bosses) requiring whatever time you had less with a lot more in addition.

The chance of failure on a Raid depends obviously on the Raid encounter. But it also depends on at least some critical mass of the participants doing their job. That is a lot to ask for. Call it 20 people doing full work, 10 doing some, 5 doing less, and 5 AFK. 20 people have to be on the ball for most encounters, including boss which can stretch into 5 to 8 minutes. That's a lot of focus. It often works. It often does not.

Soloing? Nowhere near that, especially in WoW. There's a few types of soloing:

• Soloing to learn your class. You'll die. A lot. This does not mean soloing is hard, just that you aren't trained enough yet in what your class can do (or, in an older game, you picked a class not built for good soloing).
• Soloing in the mid and late game. You won't die as often. You know your class and the game. You don't try and solo three Elite ^^^ dubya nub nub mobs. You know what's soloable, what's chanceable. You'll take your chances and learn from those. Better games offer better escape mechanisms and you know how to use them.
• Endgame soloing. You're either doing this to farm for sales, farm for goods to support raiding, working faction to unlock other goodies, or clearing out quests. Where's the risk here? You're still not taking on stuff above your level, but by this point, your above most of the game. If it can be soloed at 50/60/70, you can solo it.

It's about experience. These are still knowledge-based games. Newer ones allow chance-taking, but ultimately, why someone is soloing is linked directly to their chance of dying. If someone takes a lot of chances, or isn't trained in their option set yet, or isn't paying attention, then yea, they'll die. But this isn't because the game is difficult. It's just a learning opportunity.

Soloing allows the player to either control every variable, or eventually learn to. Mob wandering patterns, respawn timers, social aggro, what can be CC'd, the timers to those abilities, the strategic exit points. The option set is not limited to class nor stats either. It's how you built your equipment set, your consumables, everything. Mobs are not smart. They are not thinking AI. They are not (yet?) programmed to evolve. Once you figure out the pattern to defeat them, it will work every time. And you'll know to recheck the pattern from line items in the patch notes. Finally, even if a mob takes a long time to die, it's not hard. It just takes longer to continue the pattern. It does raise the chance for other elements to wander by, but this is why there's pull points and safe areas and you probably know these by then.

Raiding has some of this, but the individual player is tied to dozens of others. They do not control their own exit points. They do not control the entire breadth of options collectively available to the Raid. They do not control the Real Life elements of the dozens of other people all over the world. They do not control the technical infrastructure that co-locates their avatars into the same virtual space. They do not control the collective decision making and therefore do not control what mistakes will lead to panic versus those which can be recovered from. It mostly eventually works through time, a lot of practice, strong leadership and open-minded followers. But some variables like RL and tech are not perfectly resolved ever.

Properly equipped with knowledge of one's option set and the world, soloing is safer (by virtue of its intrinsic predictability) than Group Raiding by a lot.

In my opinion :)

[Margalis]

Hard is not the same as "annoying" or "a pain in the ass." 99% of what is "hard" in MMORPGs is not really hard at all.

More games should copy FFXI. It has a lot of different end-game activities.

HNM battles (Hyper notorious monster) - Monsters that spawn in the game world, non-instanced battles.

BCNM - (Burning circle notorious monsters) - battles with a set group size limit and level cap, these are instanced.

Merit Party XP parties - Merit points are the points you get after you hit max level that let you tweak some attributes.

Dynamis - Areas for alliances (more than one group working together)

Limbus - I don't even know what this is!

ENM battles - Empty notorious monster battles, I don't know what these are either.

Ballista - PvP

COP missions - Expansion pack missions.

---

There are linkshells for every type of these endgame activities. Dynamis linkshells, Ballista linkshells, HNM linkshells, etc. There are literally 7 or more different things you can do at end-game. If you only have a couple friends you can hunt HNMs and do BCNMs. If you want to take part in huge battles you can do Dynamis. The PvP has a level cap at 60 (max level 75) so you can do PvP without doing anything else. And you can change to any job in the game at any time, which is like re-rolling a character but you don't have to redo missions, re-buy maps, get to keep the same name, etc.

It's really pretty cool when you think about it. There are pros and cons to each endgame activity, there isn't any accepted one thing to do at end game.

[Glazius]

So it's only in a team that a player can feel "challenge", because it's the only place that contains elements he can't control, those elements being his teammates?

Without writing a credible AI, there is no way the solo experience can be challenging?

--GF

[HRose]

I think we are back at the point we were around Christmas:
1- I want story and immersion back in the genre (and believable worlds, NPCs and exploration. Moving away from game-y, artificial solutions)
2- I want the monadatory progess in the game (and story) soloable or accessible in small groups (3-4 players). Then opening up the content for bigger groups but that isn't mandatory for the power progression.

The two are strictly tied.

[Ironwood]

Just to answer the original post, Sky, this is something I said on another thread.  My five man in BRD was far more rewarding both in terms of loot and sheer fucking pride/enjoyment, than my 15 man in UBRS.  I get the screaming heebs when considering a 40 man in MC.  No thanks.

[Zane0]

I think there *can* be challenging solo encounters, but more often than not, the more challenging they get, the more restricted they become.  Some classes are supporters moreso than others; some are great at soloing while others only just get by.  "Challenging solo encounters" that apply to the entire playerbase would have to be a conscious decision at ground one, and even then, it might interfere with group dynamics later down the road.

I approve of Blizzard's ideas with BWL.  They have made several fights hardcoded or otherwise unpredictable to the point where deaths are a certainty.  Fighting Vaelestraz on a good day will kill a third of your raid.  I like this philosophy more than the all-or-nothing-take-down-10-mobs-to-45%-three-times-in-a-row-or-the-entire-raid-dies sort of thing that EQ seemed to have been in least some cases.

[Wasted]

I can certainly see Sky's point, and I pretty much do agree with it.  My ideal game would be a lot more solo friendly with the social aspects concerned with much more than combat mechanics.

That being said though, perhaps there needs to be another change in viewpoint about loot too though.  If you are primarily going to solo do you even need the uber raid loot to play in your style?  While it certainly would help in a small way by making you more efficient, it isnt actually a pre-requisite for any solo encounter tht it can only be achieved with the best loot in the game, and to some extent it can be said as well that the greater risk would come from deliberately under equiping (though I know that is a bit of a cheeky thing to suggest).

The main reason for having the top end loot, at least in my opinion, is social.  You want to be the most efficient you can be at your class in order to have standing with your peers, and be able to compete with others in your class for limited raid/group positions.

[Azazel]

Replying to Sky's original post - I'm not sure when you left EQ, or what level you were raiding at, but when they had the fear of god put into them by the piece of steaming shit that was Gates of Discord with WoW right around the corner, and then released the candyland that was Omens of War you had items dropping with regularity off of 6-man named mobs that put a lot of mid-upper tier PoP god loot to shame. Of course part of that is mudflation and old vs new content, but the high end raiders were wearing some of that shit in preference to their raid loot (especially jewelry slots - remember Fiercely Hooked Claw?)

One other thing that I maintain, with a touch of sadness and no mean amount of irony, is that EQ1 of all fucking games has the most casual-friendly progression content available to max-level non-raiders and duoers out of quite a lot of these games, WoW included.

[Furiously]

I thought the splitpaw champion arena and the Trails of Harclave were both brilliant solo encounters. (Harclave the first time you did it.) Once you figured it was all about agro management it became a lot easier.

As for eq1 casual friendly - I think the reward system in their instance game was a great idea. The instances just got way too boring.

[schild]

First time I did Harclave I was super tired. Failed.

Second time? Heh, went invis, killed the giant mushroom king guy, went invis, jumped up on the ledge, killed the king, got the quest reward and stone - all why a couple guys were beating on me. I was healing faster than they could damage me (with the bosses dead I was at least). It was good stuff. Why aggro manage when you can press the "I win" invis button? ^_^;

Harclave's really was awesome though.

Edit: Anyway, my point was just on the base topic of risk vs reward. One of the big failures is balancing classes agianst eachother instead of against the content. Classes shouldn't be equal when stacked against eachother, but they all should be able to go into any combat situation (within reason) and when approaching it correctly, not have the fear of death scratching their neck. If there's 7 classes, they should all approach any given situation differently. Basically, risk vs. reward means nothing in the big scheme of things if one class has an easy time while another can't even do the same tasks. The majority of players will simply flock to the easier class. I'll admit it, I used to play rogues in games because I knew they took the least amount of EXP to level up. 

[Venkman]

I think it's partially "ease", but I also think people flock to certain classes because their role is defined and clear.

That's one of the many things WoW got right: less choices but all relevant means it's easier to decide. Too many classes is too confusing for one, and always means one class does similar things better than others.

This is also the classic reason behind Class-based systems over skill-combination-based ones too. More people from a role than those who want to completely figure out their own it seems.

[Jade Falcon]

Since I've been in EQ2, I've been bumping up against my old gripe, the group-only content wall. I've been thinking about loot, as well, in particular how loot is so much better for raid groups than just about everything else in the game. And how most people are cool with that because the mobs are so tough. The risk and whatnot.

I run into this a lot myself.I just don't have the time or desire to spend on raids,so a lot of endgame content is unavailable to me.

That being said,why not customize loot drops for the playstyle.People already change out armour/weapons for what they plan for the evening so have solo or small group quests that give great loot that has no effect on raid type encounters and for the big raids have their loot only effect raid type encounters? Have two separate Dev teams working on each type of content which then wouldn't have to worry about how each others new raid/encounter will effect each others quests.

Solo types wouldn't pine as much for items that don't effect their playstyle and raiders get all the phat lewt they can dream of.Just not sure where you'd fit in PvP gear in all this.

[SnakeCharmer]

I think an interesting survey to MMO players would be the following:
1)  How many people do you have in game would you consider close friends?  (people you would put on admin to your house or bank)  These are the people that you trust not to ninja loot the mob, that you would want to help you obtain the Sword of God or whatever...
2)  How many people do you typically do things with (non-highend raid content / mobs) i.e. - how many people are in your social core?  These are you "combat" friends, not including social type professions/classes (crafters, other)

I had about 4-6 people that I trusted with both admin to my houses and login information for my toons in SW:G.   These were my closest friends, the people I would say to "So what are we doing today" or "Who needs help with what", or we would just do stuff to do it, despite we had done it 100 times before.

Ideally, in my naive view of MMO's, I would prefer to see all but about 10-20 percent of the absolute high end mobs / raids / dungeons / quests require about 6 people max.  IMHO, its one of the few things that SOE got right with the CU was the limiting of group sizes to 8 (despite it being a hindrance in PvP), and designing its high end content/difficulty around an 8 person group.  What this allowed was that a solo player COULD take on the high end content, but it was a time sink to do so.  It was possible, albiet not the most efficient way to do it, and it was challenging.  But the end reward was the same for the solo player, as it was the grouped raid party.  It doesnt force interaction.  In SW:G a solo player *can* take on the HK quest, but it takes about 80-90 minutes to do so.  BUT, the classes that could do it were fairly limited (spy, jedi, medic), the others really had no chance. 

[Venkman]

The more the genre moves towards solo, the less it's a separate genre. What's the point of a persistent world if there isn't some compulsion to group?

I think the genre needs to improve it's group-creation tools rather than even further reduce the need to do so altogether. Mentoring both up and down, teleporting as a default ability, quicker content that can be repeated for a long-term cumulative investment, the sort of thing Guild Wars is doing, but done in a game with more persistent world content to still allow the random encounters between real people.

I'll probably get flamed for that. Bring it on! 

[Tmon]

...I think the genre needs to improve it's group-creation tools rather than even further reduce the need to do so altogether. Mentoring both up and down, teleporting as a default ability, quicker content that can be repeated for a long-term cumulative investment, the sort of thing Guild Wars is doing, but done in a game with more persistent world content to still allow the random encounters between real people.

I'll probably get flamed for that. Bring it on! 

I think before improved grouping tools these games really need to find a way for people to communicate with each other.  Typing is a huge barrier to communication.

[Kail]

The more the genre moves towards solo, the less it's a separate genre. What's the point of a persistent world if there isn't some compulsion to group?

Two things:

1- Massively multiplayer games are not a genre, as has been pointed out here before.  The fact that these games are "massively multiplayer" is often of secondary importance to the fact that these games are large, relatively open RPGs.  If Blizzard gave me an option to play WoW offline, they'd never hear a word of complaint from me about their shitty servers again.  But they don't; if I want to play their game or anything else even remotely like it, I have to do so online.  So asking "what's the point of it being a persistent world" is not going to elicit a lot of sympathy from me.  Clearly the point of a persistent world is for a company to bilk me out of $15/month.

2- If I find grouping with people fun, I shouldn't require incentive to do so; I should just do it because I enjoy it.  There are a number of reasons that rewarding people for this kind of thing is a bad idea.  Say we're playing a game that forces grouping.  If I don't like grouping, this causes  problems, obviously, because I'm being asked to do something I don't like.  But if I do like grouping, you also get problems, such as the fact that over time, I'll start to run into the Overjustification effect, where I attribute my behavior to external sources rather than to internal motivations (an already massive problem in MMORPGs) and eventually a lot of people will find the game less fun than they did going in.  It's a lose/lose situation.

[Paelos]

I think it's pretty consistent across the board that nobody in MMOG's really likes grouping to accomplish tasks that would otherwise be impossible solo. They especially don't like it that in certain games you have to group with a ton of people to get the best stuff.

In my mind, grouping shouldn't be a necessity at all. I think everyone from the soloer to the large scale group should have a shot at the big score, but I think time should play a factor. I believe that the best solution to the problem would be to make encounters scalable based on the amount of people involved.

In the example of WoW, it would be to scale the monster levels in higher instances appropriately based on if you were alone, or if you had 40 people. You could also scale the drop rates as well based on the difficulty. Ideally, I would love to choose difficulty in an instance. Say anywhere from Super-easy (solo), Easy (five man), Hard (ten man), Very Hard (twenty man), and Insane (40 man). If you gave the people the option going into the instances, the scaling is easy. Just adjust the drop rates, spawns, and levels accordingly. However, DON'T regulate certain drops to the higher levels. Just make them easier to attain with more people. That way all sized guilds and groups could game at their own pace, for uber rewards, and the ubers could get them way before everybody else still.

[Venkman]

I agree Tmon, but there's more people who don't like voicechat in this genre than those who don't like grouping. At this point, well before we have brainscans and Matrix jack-ins, our options are text which can be done anywhere (office, 3am at home while the house sleeps), or voicechat which comes with more restrictions.

1- Massively multiplayer games are not a genre, as has been pointed out here before.

And I've never agreed with that :) This is how I see it:

MMORPGs are persistent worlds with mini-game activities within them. Sometimes those activities are RPG in nature (quests, mob XP, etc). Other times, they are not (player economics, player-created/directed content, etc). To say MMORPGs are just "open RPGs" ignores the essence that is ATiTD, Eve, SL, UO, SWG, and so on. For comparison, I consider "open RPGs" to be the continuing Elder Scroll series, or the offline Final Fantasy stuff.

I think this important because it defines motivations in these games. Not all games are about growing characters for the sake of growing characters all the time. That some are, that the most popular ones are, is important to understand what makes this genre different from the regular RPG genre which, while successful in its own right, doesn't make nearly as much money as MMOGs. Narrative is a singular experience, but narrative can be partaken by many.

Companies can't just make a game and hope people group in it, or the game will be balanced for the soloer. And if they did that, then it is nothing more than an RPG that can't justify the persistent world elements at all. Here again is why I think Guild Wars had some great ideas (as does CoH). I hope it continues to be successful enough for the less creative to rip it off.

I think it's pretty consistent across the board that nobody in MMOG's really likes grouping to accomplish tasks that would otherwise be impossible solo.

We're a bunch of game jumpers here, people who get occasionally deep into an experience. But we shouldn't think we're any more indicative of the average MMO player any more than the folks who post on a game's forums are indicative of the average playerbase. There are many folks who like grouping, just with their friends, and they guide the entirety of the game experience around only grouping with them. That means rules and stuff, but with friends, rules are considered so efficient, they're assumed.

[Paelos]

I think it's pretty consistent across the board that nobody in MMOG's really likes grouping to accomplish tasks that would otherwise be impossible solo.

We're a bunch of game jumpers here, people who get occasionally deep into an experience. But we shouldn't think we're any more indicative of the average MMO player any more than the folks who post on a game's forums are indicative of the average playerbase. There are many folks who like grouping, just with their friends, and they guide the entirety of the game experience around only grouping with them. That means rules and stuff, but with friends, rules are considered so efficient, they're assumed.

And I think in the scenario of scaled instances that I envision, that would be a viable playstyle. That's what grouping should be at it's very core: a playstyle. Even the 40 man raiders can admit that dealing with 40 people you wouldn't normally ever group with can be a giant pain in the ass. They know it's necessary for the endgame loot, so they do it. I'd rather see people grouping together because it's more fun to run things with your friends.

[HaemishM]

...I think the genre needs to improve it's group-creation tools rather than even further reduce the need to do so altogether. Mentoring both up and down, teleporting as a default ability, quicker content that can be repeated for a long-term cumulative investment, the sort of thing Guild Wars is doing, but done in a game with more persistent world content to still allow the random encounters between real people.

I'll probably get flamed for that. Bring it on! 

I think before improved grouping tools these games really need to find a way for people to communicate with each other.  Typing is a huge barrier to communication.

Preach it, muthafucka. Typing is the biggest thing holding MMOG grouping back.

And MMOG players themselves.

[Furiously]

Hearing a deep booming Australian voice as the player behind the female tiny gnome...breaks immersion for me.

[Venkman]

I couldn't give a rat's ass about immersion at this point. People's text is often written as out of character as their voice or gender would be.

For me, not using voicechat is because of RL. My house isn't huge and my office has been relegated to an uninsulated basement directly below the master bedroom. I can listen in on voicechat, and have on and off for six years (it was required in SB and PS pretty much), but talking into a mic is out when I'm still wearing headphones to keep the noise pollution down. That won't change until we move, since finishing the basement is not worth it in this place.

I can benefit from TS/RW/ingame voicechat, but I can't lead with it. Which is fine, considering in a PvE game, voicechat isn't really a huge requirement (this has been argued before, for years, and my mind hasn't changed from experience). It would be better, but I haven't been on a PvE raid yet that absolutely required it.