And my understanding is GW2 is looking to enable “Auto-Grouping” for random events in Zones…

Example: Your fighting standard mobs outside a village, when that village is attacked by a Dragon. If you join the fight, you instantly get whisked away to an Instanced Quest zone to fight the Dragon with others who are available in that Instance also…and the fight will scale to your level of skill..(based on overall group levels..)

HELLO…that is EXACTLY what is needed to form some socialization…grouping, special events only available to groups, etc…
I can even imagine a countdown timer…for example…you join the fight, but no one is there yet…so a countdown begins to wait for other players…then you can send a message to a friend “I am in dire need of assistance my friend”…..
Can we say “Roleplay”? something which seems to also be missing in MMO’s of late…

Right now, all the MMO’s have become rote, and until something changes like what we see above…the group mechanic will die.

LOTRO had the right idea with special combat moves only available to groups…but, the rest of the game is a stinker…
The mentoring system in EQ2 is also the right move (as well as the awesome Guild features..how novel?…Do quests together to level up your guild, and raise your status as well)…but with so much solo content…there is not much use for it…

Well…the watch still continues for the right game that has the best balance of solo and group content..
Later

The players at Kill Ten Rata are carebears because they group in order to blog about MMOs. I, on the other hand, am hardcore because I run Nerfbat solo.

Interestingly, we’re still pretty social between KTR and NB, we just do it in an asynchronous manner. We’re starting to explore that sort of gameplay at the Nerfbat Forums right now, and I’ll likely write up a post for the site in the next week or two (http://nerfbat.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=352) about it.
The point is, social gameplay doesn’t have to mean “grouped” gameplay. Encouraging players to directly play together is great too, as long as it isn’t “forcing” players to directly play together.

“If the game is designed right, there would be no race to the end game because there would be no end game. ”

Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s true. No matter what the game is, whether it has levels, whatever, there is an end game. The end game is when players feel they’ve experienced most of what the game has to offer them. More specifically, it’s the behavior that occurs when the player has reached this stage. In a game with a finite world, players will reach this point sometime.

There are things you can do to mitigate the end game. You can routinely push the end game farther away, you can keep adding content at the end game, you can run temporary events regularly to keep players engaged in new stuff, etc. But, there’s still an end game there that you have to make sure is entertaining enough to keep players around.

Long tangent… I’ll stop typing now, I suppose.

That’s the truth.

I think that any MMO can be made more exciting by removing levels entirely. If you shift the ‘grind’ into fun activities that actually have a purpose, you make the game more interesting. There you go, solve the ‘end-game problem’, and reduce grinding at the same time.

What I’d like to see is a bidding system on high itemlevel gear. When loot drops, throw up a window and allow players to offer items for the same slot. Others bidding on the same piece of gear can select offered items which they would use. Any offered item which others would want grants a bonus on the owner’s roll equal to the difference between it and the lowest offered piece. After the roll is made, if the winner had a requested item, it is taken away and given to the winner of another automatic roll among the people who requested that item. This pattern continues until an item is passed down to someone whose gear was requested by no one. Their offering is given to the original winner to be sold, to pay for enchantments, for example.

For instance:
The Purple Sword of 80 drops. Adam has the Blue Sword of 70, Bob the Green Sword of 55, and Chris has the Green Sword of 50. Everyone throws up their weapons. Bob and Chris both bid on the Blue Sword, but Chris doesn’t like the stats on Bob’s sword, and doesn’t bid on it. Since neither Bob nor Chris is offering anything someone else wants, only Adam gets the bonus, which is 20 points. Not unfair to Bob and Chris, but significant to Andy (as it should be, since his offering is a loot class above the others). The roll is made, and Adam wins. Another roll is made (with no bonuses, due to neither participant wanting each other’s gear), and Bob wins. Adam gets the Purple Sword of 80, Bob gets Adam’s Blue Sword of 70, and Adam gets Bob’s Green Sword of 55 to sell off.

Tada! It needs a few more checks and balances, but it’s got its merits. For one, it results in a more steady stream of lesser upgrades, keeping the sense of progression while reducing the time spent in stagnation. To make things more fun, the item could remember the original owner and the last two previous owners, so the item develops a legacy, especially in guilds.

With the growth of mmo gaming we no longer play with people that have the background of Dungeons & Dragons/Champions/etc. One of the last times I grouped up in WoW someone asked what everyone was listening to at the time. When I shared that I was listing to Zeppelin, to a T they all asked huh? Who’s that. To be fair I had little to no idea what most of them were listening to as well lol.

Beyond the fact that it’s harder to find people with whom we have something in common many games, wow lotro etc are set up to pit players against one another. With the heavy focus of loot in these games the battle against the AI is only the beginning. Once you get through the encounter you often have to sit for several minutes arguing about who is more deserving of what item. “Dude, that sword is perfect for my hunter.” “Nuh-uh, my warrior needs that sword” “WTF are you talking about thats a rogue weapon if there ever was one” etc etc etc.

Now-a-days I find myself soloing more and more. Hell, I don’t even remember the last time I was really in a good guild of like minded players. I even find myself looking more and more at the gameplay of these mmo’s like single player games in general. What offers me the most entertainment bang for the buck and, unlike games like launch SWG, Ultima Online etc, I look at them more as a short term investment of my time until the next quality single player games come out.

hah you know on my priest my reward would usually to get flagged because I didn’t realize the guy I healed was flagged, and then a minute later get killed by some nelf druid. :)