A large part of multiplayer gaming is taking the good with the bad. Avoid groups, and you’re missing out on a bulk of the game as it’s intended to be played. If all you want is a single player RPG, with social interaction then save yourself the subscription fees, buy single player RPGs and fire up a copy of IRC alongside your game.

I love co-op, give me any sort of cooperative stuff and I’m there with a group of my friends (once they come online after a long commute home from work, bah reality).

What I loathe is if I’m enjoying myself soloing and someone comes along and insists that I need to group with them because I’m standing near where they need to complete a quest and they’re worried they’ll be inconvenienced a few seconds if I kill a mob or two.

Especially when they don’t take “no thanks, I’m happy solo’ing” for an answer.

I also can’t stand large guilds, where sooner or later you have to listen to someone else’s drama. Or politics. Or religion. Or which country they hate this week. Ugh these games are my downtime, I’m happily active on those subjects elsewhere but I stay away from large guilds primarily because I don’t want to group / raid / warband with someone who’s ranting about their fears of the gov’t taking away their guns. My gaming ears aren’t for your soapbox.

So it drives me nuts that the gameplay is often made for the biggest guilds to excel at. Hell, my dislike of that isn’t just about the guilds themselves, but I find zerg-anything so absolutely dull.

And finally, the game mechanics that seem designed to ensure that my friends and I cannot play together, that I must constantly find other people at the same level as me to play the game with.

/rant.

I like to solo. I like to group. I like to make my own choices for both. I love MMOs, for the overall populace, the overall community, the feeling of a living world and for the potential for co-op content I can enjoy with my friends. Amongst all of the positive aspects included, I don’t think any of them should require me to group with a bunch of strangers.

On the other hand of course I am a social player, I formed friendships in the game that transcend the game, I founded a guild that still exists after 3 years and I am still part of the leadership. So the game is a social one. I just don’t group so much and I keep having to explain to people why I solo so much why an Instance is a rare occurrence in my play style.

I must have been only one of an immense majority who couldn’t manage the time and effort to spend an hour forming up a group even before a 2 hour ordeal in some dungeon. Hence I quit after the free month. Shortly after, they started backtracking and putting in ‘solo’ content in an effort to lure back the anti-grouping cohort. Now why would they bother…unless there was tons of $$$ at stake?

People do hate dealing with bullshit from other people, and the larger the group, the more bullshit, which is why bigger carrots are often dangled in an effort to get you to put up with the crap.

I like games which make it easy to form a group and don’t punish you for being in one. CoX PUGs form with regularity because there’s rarely any bullshit – all characters are fairly easy to play, a short mission doesn’t punish an accidental mistake, and often 3-5 people knowing what they’re doing can cover for 2-3 people who don’t. And it’s easy to leave when you need to go AFK or just can’t stand what they’re doing anymore, no hard feelings, no foul.

Warhammer tries to be flexible, and I like it generally, but there are still a few stuck points here and there. One has to do with a scenario group – if you group up with your guild for one, you can’t join any other open groups/warbands for other things on and off, so you mostly end up solo questing in various lands – not everyone is on the same quest, possible rank differences, etc.

The other is just an unfortunate consequence of open grouping. Make it easy to form up a 24 man group with no real defined leader – and after a while of wandering around with no organization, about 3-5 people hit their limit at the same time and start barking orders or offering suggestions. All different. And some do it more obnoxiously than others. Abandoning group is ridiculously tempting at this point, and if enough do it, whatever you wanted the big group for can’t be achieved any longer, and so the group dissolves and dies a natural death.

This is all very well if people are well socialized as in CoX to think of group formation and dissolution as perfectly normal. I fear in WAR that it’s slowly encouraging people back into playing only with their guild and keep groups closed, because of already established MMO tropes and better vent coordination. It’s nice if a guild opens up its group to PUGs and helps move them around – but honestly, I mostly see only my own guild/alliance doing it on my server. Many others are closing elitist doors and letting everyone else sink or swim.

My daughter was born a couple months after EQ came out, and my wife works evenings quite a bit, so I always had an ear out for the kid. That, plus a million other real life intrusions, pretty much eliminated me a dungeon-crawling, raid game lifestyle. I share your feelings about not wanting to hold a group up, and wanting to maximize my play time and not have to coordinate with anyone.

Ya know, it’s funny, I’m not a fan of talking on Vent. It breaks the wall between game and life too much for my liking. But…I get impatient with typed communication when I’m in a group. It’s too slow, and I keep thinking “I could have already had this quest done, but no….we have to do the Typing Dance before we can get started killing…”. Drives me nuts :)

I do not concur with xp sharing. Early on, sure, I can kill faster than I can go through the grouping clicks. When it gets to Kill 30 Rats, the time/quest xp is probably worth more to me than what I lose from sharing.

Make sure to e-mail me when that Vermont wedding is. My sister-in-law lives in Vermont, so we would totally come.

Yeah, everything you listed describes me to a T. In fact, I wondered if WAR would be solo-friendly enough for a maverick like me. Turns out it is. Paradoxically, it is the easiest to join and leave groups as well. It’s been pure heaven for for an anti-grouper such as myself.

The only thing I’d like to add is my desire to be *very good* at soloing. “Group content”, for me, is shorthand for “I dare ya to solo it”.

Have you thought about multiboxing?
Get yerself 5 accounts and you can do even group quests without having to put up with bullshit PuG’s.

Add to that the fact that you can probably help out your guild do 10-man raid content when there isn’t enough people.

Just a thought :)

So there go most guilds (why don’t you just come out with the rest of us?) as well. I just wanna do my own damn thing and it seems like making any kind of contact with people sets my course on the path of fail. Shit, I hate grouping with my own fucking brother, because I am just so goddamn efficient, and I don’t get mad at myself for going afk.

Why don’t I go play a single player game? Because I can’t kick you and your bad friends’ asses in singleplayer games, buddy.