MMO Antiquities – Grouping

One of the joys of being an early adopter is that once something has gone mainstream you get to shake a stick and say, “Things weren’t always like this! You’re spoiled! Back in my day…” Why do this, you might ask? I like to think of it as a way to help developers remember the past. Newer isn’t always better! As such, I’ve decided to do some MMO Antiquities articles about the way things used to be!

I’ve said this probably 100 times and I’ll do so again: There were MMOs before World of Warcraft. I’ve actually shocked people by saying it before. Many folks are simply unaware that things existed prior to it. They’re even more shocked to learn that most of what WoW does isn’t new. Today I want to focus on an element I see key to the MMO genre: grouping.

In the dark ages of MMOs we played a game called EverQuest. It, more or less, set the tone of almost everything to follow. One of the biggest complaints about the early game is that you would often spend hours waiting to get into a group to grind experience. I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying “well Ferrel, why didn’t you just go solo?” The answer is simple, because you couldn’t. Only a few classes could solo for experience and most (at least in the early days) weren’t efficient at it. To gain exp and gear you had to get together with others and work as a team.

Obviously I would never advocate going back to “waiting lists” for groups. Modern MMOs, however, cater far too much to solo players. It is excessive. Not only can you solo from level one to max it is frequently the most efficient way to do it! In my opinion this is terrible for a couple of reasons.

The first is simple, the games are called MMOs. For those of you that don’t know that means Massively Multiplayer Online. Multiplayer, to me, means playing together to achieve an objective. It does not mean “I can easily chat while I play by myself.”

Going beyond that, once you reach the top of these games, you’re generally expected to cooperate! This might mean for a dungeon, a raid or for large scale PvP. You take players who’ve never grouped and now they must suddenly work together! Many fail miserably at this.

This type of design also trains everyone to be “me” oriented. Look at the turn around of players in guilds in World of Warcraft. If you don’t like something or how you’re being treated you can take off for another guild immediately. The fluidity there is insane. Compare that to EQ1 where I was in the same guild for years and you get my point.

Finally solo content is largely boring in my eyes. I love Warhammer Online but it trips me out every time I single pull one NPC from a group of 20 and slaughter him while all his friends smile and wait their turn. Solo design is just too easy.

We need to return to an older system. A system where you can solo as any class (obviously some will be better at it than others) but you don’t always want to. Solo needs to mean “I’m making experience but it isn’t great.” If you’re going to pull together a group of five or six and cooperate than you need to be rewarded. You should always get more experience per hour, superior loot and have a greater deal of encounter complexity in a group.

I’m sorry that these days nobody wants to cooperate or be bothered with groups. It is a shame that developers have been bullied into the notion that “if they’re dependent upon anyone else they won’t do this content.” I’m willing to bet that a game like this would do well. It might not be World of Warcaft, but it could turn a profit. Heck, if AoC is still making money, anyone can!