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. :)

Hrm… if we can find a way to bring back that ‘MUD Magic’….

Interestingly, you’ve just described every (not that it’s a huge list) Asian F2P MMO I’ve ever played… maybe they’re onto something after all? :p~

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A proximity-based auto-grouping system *can* work, with checks and balances, but it will also mean *finally* moving beyond the Kill Ten Rats quests we all love oh so much. I suspect that if the most awesome MMO *ever* came out but didn’t have KTR quests, it would fail. As much as we claim to hate them, as much as we claim to hate grind, as much as we claim to want change… I doubt we really do.

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Rep systems have their own inherent problems, as has been noted. Xbox Live, for example, has a rating/rep system that works but I can only leave all kinds of negative comments about a player, while the only positive action I can take is to give that player a ‘preferred’ rating. In the XBL group I’m a member of, we’ve had several people get their ratings trashed in ‘public’ games where groups of kids ganged up with negative comments, and there is no recourse to take. Ratings are all fine and good, but needs to be taken to the next step and have some system of proof of guilt or innocence or some recourse when the “ratings griefers” arrive. And they will arrive, you can count on it.

as for PuGs: in CoX, I’ve found myself making insane amounts of progress in a single day compared to solo play.. if I can bring myself to risk the hassels of: bad players who either don’t know their AT (yet or still.. depends on the level of the group) or badly need a respec and serious advice, leeroy-types and AFK leechers, etc; between mission down times where 3 out of 6 people have to go to wentworths, an origin shop, the supergroup base, or the trainer; group recruiting downtimes; and, probably the most frustrating to me, I’m forced away from the group because of my own RL issues.
Best group I’ve ever been in was about 6 players, with 2 replacments made over the course of about 4 hours, staying in Talos Island, racking up nothing but radio missions. I managed to go from 25 to 28 in those few hours, finally having to leave to go make dinner for the family. in contrast, I’ve played about 8 hours solo since then on that particular character and only made about 20~25% of the xp needed for 29, so the rewards are there.

on the other hand, I’ve spent an hour a day or so for a week on Protector trying to get a group together to do the Terra Volta respec trial, only once finding a group large enough to start the TF, with almost half of the members then dropping on the second mission because “it’s too hard” and “we’re just wasting time”. i’ve also had days of spending a half hour or more teamed with 3 other players, all unwilling to just get a mission and get to playing because “we need a “. I’m not saying get rid of them outright, but if it really is requiring all three and you can’t make due with hybrid types like the debuffer, the ranger or the pet class, then it’s going to be hard to make the game group friendly no matter what you do.

I’ve focused on CoX PuGs, since that’s what I’ve been playing most recently, but I’ve had all the same types of crap go down in a wide variety of games, with the “OMG we have no healer *player(s) drop(s)*”-issue being the most common thread to tie games together.

on to forced grouping: the worst single experience was in a game that had 10 instances of a 15-man raid-type quest start every other hour at 2 minute intervals.. the problem came when you see how they managed entry to these raids.. first come, first served.. now, the game only had 4 classes to start with, being healer, tank, mage and archer.. and on at least 3 occasions before I moved on to the next game, I found myself in raids totally lacking either the tank or the healer, which essentially meant an automatic fail.. there was literally no possible way to finish the raid successfully without at least one tank AND one healer, even tho the raids offered each player 3 on-the-spot respawns before you get booted. can you say “WTF devs?”

and lastly, some way of rating players: well.. that sounds good, but I also imagine it as leading to the next wave of greifing.. spamming negatives at a person just to leave them unable to get a group and play the game in a rewarding manner.. seeing as I’ve played games where whole guilds of greifers have managed to form, just to have either aid against repercussion or to implement wide-scale asshattery, I can see getting hit with their 20~40 bad reviews a day being a fresh new hell, and making it tied to an account leaving you in the crapper when you roll an alt to escape it.. the greifers aren’t playing to have fun and make progress.. they’re playing to stop you from doing so, and making a new account to ditch a “warning: this player is a jackass” tag would be nothing to many in the games where the client is a free download and no CD key is required.