When I wrote my original MMO Myths article, I expected to get some decent (and not so decent) comments. Given that I did alright in that area and pretty well with traffic, I thought I might want to cover other myths in the future. At first I didn’t have a topic but I just happened to catch a post over at MMORPG.com that set my creative side into motion. It was yet another player suggesting that soloing can be as difficult as a raid and that the rewards should be the same. Clearly I had my topic!
Myth Three – Solo content can be as difficult as multi-player content
I fully recognize that this will tie strongly in with my forced grouping myth and that I am generally bias towards group and raid support. I will, however, attempt to keep my argument based on logic and mechanics. With the disclaimer out of the way I am going to stand up and say it is a myth that solo content in MMOs can be as difficult as group and raid encounters. There are numerous points to make but I am going to take a narrow focus and look at general solo design, complexity and cooperation. It is in these key areas that I think the myth can be dispelled. Once more to ensure that we’re all clear on what I mean I would like to define solo content. I am referring to the more modern definition that tends to suggest that solo content is designed for a single player and can be completed with varying degrees of difficulty by any class.
By the very definition of solo content I feel the myth begins to unravel. Many of our newest MMOs are based on the fact that all classes can achieve progression alone when they can’t find a group. Some of these games take it so far that it is more effective to level alone than in a group. This is not another stab at the solo vs group debate. It is necessary to make the point because it shows that a solo encounter inherently must be easy enough for the weakest class to solo it. Certainly a high dps ranged class might have an easy time with a particular mob but it can also be defeated by a healer. This is key to the argument as it shows the content is generally not difficult by design. Some may disagree with me on this but if the encounter cannot be defeated solo by all classes then it is not, by definition, a solo encounter. If a cleric needs help with it, then the encounter is a duo one and in a measurable sense (the metric being players) more difficult. That alone would seem enough to rid us of the myth but we also have to look at complexity.
Generally speaking, we recognize that devices with a greater amount of working parts are more complex than those with fewer. It is far easier to fix a bicycle than it is a motorcycle. The same is true with MMOs. The more the required amount of players, the more complex an encounter can be. A single player can only do so many things at a given time. Generally that will be “fight this mob.” If you add two more players, however, the designer can give more options. One player could tank the mob, another can heal the first player and the third player must jump on appropriate colored squares to reduce the defenses of the mob in question. With the addition of even more players you can grow the complexity of the encounter. The more complex the encounter the more difficult it is. A single player does not have to be mindful of all these working parts and, more importantly, she does not have to cooperate with anyone to achieve success.
If it was easier to complete things with a team than by ourselves we would never groan about group projects in school. The truth is we all like to have the option to go it alone. Is that because we’re all anti-social? Absolutely not; it is because cooperation can be quite difficult. When we look at complexity we also have to look at cooperation. Not only are there more working parts but we also have to ensure everyone does their job together. Speaking from the standpoint of a leader it can be very difficult to get all of the cogs going in the same direction. Often times, at least when it comes to MMO raids, a single player out of sequence can destroy the experience of 23 others. That begs the question, then: how could it possibly be as hard to do something by yourself as it is for 24 people working together? The truth is it can’t be. No solo encounter will ever be as difficult as a group encounter and no group encounter will ever be as challenging as a raid. The type of difficulty is obviously different but you must look at the whole package. Sure some people in the raid only have to show up, stand at the back of the mob, and melee like normal but the entire show is quite difficult to orchestrate. Lets face it, no solo content has ever eluded an average player for multiple months.
Why then do people perpetuate this myth? I think it is just in our nature. We want to be able to achieve anything without needing others. I see many asking that they be able to receive raid loot via solo activities if they put in “more work.” To me this is outrageous. More work is always just explained away as “it takes longer.” The main issue is that one is a sure thing and the other is not. Anyone who has raided can tell you it is very volatile. You are never 100% certain you’ll defeat an encounter. If you do so you can never predict the loot. Once the loot drops you have to deal with who in the group gets it. In truth you can (and I have) go almost a year before getting the one specific item you want. Now, on the other hand, if you could just solo for two months straight for that item because that is “more work,” why would you raid? You wouldn’t because that would actually be easier. Thankfully, for the most part, no designers give group and raid rewards for soloing. In the future I hope things remain that way.
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The myth perpetuates because of the myopic tendency of people. Most of the time, most people are unwilling to assess a given situation on much more than their own activities. When you play solo, you have to be mindful of a dozen things at once, your health, your damage, your location, etc etc… When you are in a raid, the raid leader is generally the only one who has to do all this, the other players, in general, often have their tasks boiled down as simple as possible. If you are a rogue in a raid, you only need to care about where you stand and when you attack. Health? Not your job. Lots of things suddenly are not your job. So, for each individual member of a raid, raiding is simpler and therefore “easier” than solo content, despite the actual content itself being much more complex and difficult.
Every person who thinks solo is or can be more difficult than group or raid content should spend time leading groups and raids. It will change their minds.
I bet you could create a solo quest with a raid quality reward, but it better be darn hard. There was a hunter quest like this in vanilla WoW, it was very long chain with a good reward at the end that only hunters could do. If there are too many things like this though it breaks the game unless.. somehow.. you make it harder to get items solo than in a group or raid, but still not impossible
@Jason And I have spent lots and lots of years leading groups and raids so yes you are right about logistics but I still think someone could create a chain quest (tedious) and difficult enough to make it suitably more bothersome than raiding that people could solo or group or raid and they would still do all three activities.
While I don’t actually disagree with you, some of your arguments don’t hold water.
It is easier to change the oil or fix a flat on a motorcycle than it is to repack the axle bearings on a bicycle. So saying “it is easier to fix a bicycle than a motorcyle” isn’t always true.
It is much more difficult to build a house alone than it is with a group. So co-operation does not always make things harder.
And when you compare solo content to raid content, you’re not talking in terms of individuals.
Comparing soloing a difficult quest with leading a large raid is very much different from comparing a difficult solo quest to being the guy who stands “at the back of the mob, and melee like normal”.
Again, I don’t really disagree with your conclusion, but I think your arguments need some refinement.
@Theorist
I think you’re shooting a little too far in the literal. I was just using generalizations. There will be some repairs on a bike that are easier than some repairs on a motorcycle. That doesn’t invalidate the analogy though. In general, motorcycles require a lot more maintenance and are difficult to repair. You don’t have to worry about changing the oil on a bike at all, for instance. The same repairs on a bike (like that axle( would be even more difficult on the motorcycle.
The house example is fair but really when you say “difficult” you’re making the “time” argument. Solo players try to equate “more time required” to difficulty and it just isn’t. Can one person build a house alone? If they have the skills they can. It would take them longer than if there were two people. That isn’t difficulty. That is time required. If you make the argument that the single person can’t have all the skills necessary then it is basically saying someone is trying to solo a raid ^_~.
Much like Jason said, a single raider would perceive the task as easier because they only have one thing to focus on. The comparison was not so much to the specific roles on the raid but a generality on the raid itself. Roles aside, no matter what, a raid is more difficult to do as a whole than anything a solo player can experience.
Building a house solo isn’t a matter of time. Look at raising a wall. Someone had to hold it up while someone else nails the footboards to the flooring. It needs more hands than a single person has. So it isn’t just a matter of taking more time.
“Much like Jason said, a single raider would perceive the task as easier because they only have one thing to focus on.”
That’s kind of my point. Loot goes to an individual. If that individual happens to be one of the people filling a really routine role in the raid, then they may have had an easier time of things than a solo player facing a very difficult quest chain.
Leading a raid, even a pretty straightforward raid, is always going to be more challenging than any solo content; that I totally agree with.
But if person A shows up for a raid twice a week and watches TV while he dutifully follows orders and gets his loot, I think he has worked less hard than your described soloist who had to work alone for 3 months, making all his own decisions and having no one to fall back on when things went bad.
So I don’t think there’s an absolute answer to this question, unless raid leaders get loot from a different table than raid grunts get theirs from. Since that isn’t realistic, we have to stick with the ‘raid gear is better than gear a solo player can earn’ system, at least for now. Because the raid leaders deserve better gear, even if the raid grunts might not.
@Theorist
I understand your point but to relate it back to my article a minute lets look at the difficulty per member. Even though it is perhaps easier for the individual in the raid to do their job than solo the complexity makes it impossible for them to achieve the result on their own.
My point is that the sum of all the parts of a raid is more difficult than anything you can come up with that a single player to do. Even if the player is not making choices for themselves the whole encounter is more difficult. A raid cannot be sliced out in parts.
@Thallian : Of course, if you tailor a quest line for a class as opposed to everyone, you could make it quite challenging for that class. Certainly not more complex than a raid, but certainly challenging enough that it would warrant a piece of quality loot. As I see it, it could easily be so difficult that only the best solo players should be able to do it.
Then again, with a fully decked out raider, things tend to become quite a bit easier in the solo department. You might just end up with a more or less free piece of loot for the successful raiders.
I’ve soloed some pretty decent stuff in my time, but it never compared to the complexities of running a raid.
@MMO theorist : When it comes to raid grunts, I feel the term is a misnomer. There’s a reason successful raid guilds are selective.
This might also be relevant – Kendricke’s “A Raid Leaders Manifesto”
http://clockworkgamer.com/2009/07/08/my-raiding-manifesto/
I agree with pretty much everything he says, except for perhaps the fact that he seems to retain people who are prone to making the same mistake twice. I tend to become a mean SoB when that happens
Even solo stuff is a bit more interesting duo’ing. Buuncha and I duo’d a bunch of quests in Angmar/Ram Duath last night in LOTRO, got a ton of experience and nice rewards and we pretty much plowed through the content faster than if he and I had done those quests Solo.
Once again, excellent article Ferrel. I’m loving these myth write ups.
I agree with Ferrel.
I loathe the new MMO’s that have solo as the easiest and most effective way to play.
I was a bard in EQ. I solo’ed. It was a developed skill. I solo’ed hundred of mobs at a time. It was a developed skill. I charm burned Gorenaire. It was a developed skill.
There is nothing in any of the new games that is solo tough. Yet people whine if they are forced to group. I say Shut the (bleep) up, and go play Hello Kitty Online.
Forced group is the only true way to play a MMO. Raids and group content is the true medium for MMO’s. This solo crap is nothing more then the American mentality creeping into the genre.
American mindset and the design a game for the lowest common denominator is asinine. Political Correctness in society is the same thing that is happening to our games.
Stop dumbing down games for the masses.
One of the issues with tailoring content so specific to a class you create a lot of things that cannot be experienced by anyone else. That is a pretty rough way to ensure content coverage.
@Korrow
Passionate and inflammatory. You make some good points that I’m certain others would disagree with but it is an interesting commentary on the market as a whole. I love your point about soloing requiring skill in EQ1.
“Forced group is the only true way to play a MMO. Raids and group content is the true medium for MMO’s. This solo crap is nothing more then the American mentality creeping into the genre. ”
Translated loosely as: “I am right and you are wrong”.
Anyway, as Ferrel knows I’m more on the solo side of things but I want to discuss the article anyway.
First of all I want to say I mostly agree with Ferrel. More people does equal more complexity and more complexity equals more difficult. No argument here.
My argument would rather comes from the limited options in difficulty MMOs offer us right now. Think about it for a second. Right now the only way the developers have found to make something more difficult are the following:
-more HP on mob
-more damage on mob
-more resilient mob (resistances and all).
The earliest MMOs had a lot of this but it is disapearing fast. More HP often equal longer fight and fighting for an hour or 2 the same boss is not fun. More damage is only a strain on healers and resilience goes with more HP.
So the devs found the next best way. Complexify the encounter!So now we have to stand in colored spots, do a dance, etc… there’s ways to do that with a solo encounter but with many people problem solved!!! The more people the more difficult it is so we’re done right? I want to point out that technique can be used on single solo encounter. Why not force solo players to stay out of the fire too.
Anway, I call the dev slackers!(exagerating here). The next step to increase difficulty both solo and group difficulty is to unscript the encounter and make them adaptable. Right now playing an mmo is like dancing, once you learn the dance it’s pretty much over. Mobs do the same routines with a few variations.
Make the mobs truly versatile. Like the progams running chess games. Sure it’s harder to program and develop but the result is something that could truly be customised to the difficulty you want. Agaisnt a ranged dps, it can cast a spell to reduce range damage, or throw them stuff to make them keep moving. Agaisnt a caster it could try to break healing spells and so on… and it works both in groups and solo.
Yes, more people will always make things harder but it doesn’t have to be the only way and it should not be. A lot of people myself included think that our play time should not be decided by how many people are online. In the post WoW world no right thinking developper will make a game that doesn’t support solo play. If you want to add difficulty you go to think outside the box of adding people for difficulty.
@Gereld
I do agree with a lot of what you’re saying. That complexification (I’m adding to your new word because I liked it) is really the proliferation of gimmicks. Most gimmick fights are impossible if you don’t know it but easy mode if you do. We’ve added DDR to our MMOs. I consider that bad as well.
That was certainly a level of complexity I was talking about. I also want to note that we still have the issue of dealing with other human beings. All the legs have to move in the right direction, even if the fight doesn’t have a gimmick, or we cannot win.
Great post though! I’d love to see a reactive MMO.
I love this site just happen to find it, and read this topic and want to add my bit.
I agree for most part with Ferrel, as a former past guild leader as one of the officers, raiding is a big logistic and control is very important for success, Now I am here in Baghdad and find myself not able to raid and had to step down as one of the officers from not being able to keep up so I became a solo player not by choice and semi retired my main which is a warrior, and started a monk and beginning my new chapter in Everquest. I have been with EQ since the very being, now that I solo for the most part I would think on soling quest where folks like myself who can not raid due to different time zone or location or job be able to still be to obtain gear equal to raid gear through harder quest made for soloist.
I would love to raid but alot of us have no choice in the matter.
Tony from Baghdad Iraq, but at less I have internet to play!!
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I think there are two fallacies here.
First there is an upper measurable limit to difficulty. It is impossible. It’s clearly possible for solo game challenges to be impossible just as it’s possible for group game challenges to be impossible. If a solo challenge can be impossible then that disproves the notion that solo can’t be as difficult than group since both types of challenge can reach the theoretical maximum.
Now that’s not just theorycraft – I have numerous games from the 80s that I abandoned halfway through because I couldn’t finish them and I’m sure there were a few which no one ever finished without hints or cheating. In fact some of the turn-based strategy games had an “impossible” setting, admittedly though in these cases it usually wasn’t quite impossible.
The next fallacy is assuming that making a solo challenge requires making it easy enough for healers to do. In a skill-based game like Darkfall or a deckbuilder game like guild wars it’s certainly possible or even normal to make challenging solo content that some approaches won’t beat since everyone can easily adopt alternate approaches. Even in WoW a healer could use a dps dual spec to beat an encounter that her healing spec was not appropriate for.
@Stabs
I can’t really say I agree with the “if I can make it impossible they are equally difficult” point. Essentially you’re saying that because there are some impossible surgeries and some impossible repairs to a toaster they are equally difficult. I think we can all agree that in general performing surgery is more challenging and difficult than fixing a toaster.
Additionally, I get your point about the solo challenge being solo-able by all classes. In your case you’re right. I am as well, however, as I clearly defined what I meant when I said solo encounter. In most of these games solo means virtually everyone can do it. Darkfall and Guild Wars are more exceptions to the rules. Are there some bad specs or lazy players who will lose? Absolutely so! That isn’t the average though.
I guess I’m too much of a maths geek. If possibility [surgery] = 0 and possibility [toaster] = 0 then possibility [surgery] = possibility [toaster].
Semantics really.
What I want to challenge is the notion that content should be open to everyone. One of the features I have most enjoyed in MMOs was the extremely rare Jedi characters in pre-CU Star Wars: Galaxies. That was soloable and extremely difficult. To get a Jedi you had to satisfy an unknown set of criteria that were tuned hard enough so that only a couple of players worldwide unlocked it before they relaxed the difficulty and started giving out hints. Part of the difficulty was that we did not actually know how the Jedi slot was unlocked. Many fanatical players got nowhere close simply because they hadn’t picked the right route.
By gating the content to most of us it made the game fascinating. The first time a Jedi went public everyone in the server scrambled to get to Coroscant to attack him, protect him or just to have a look.
These days of course they’re as ubiquitous as Death Knights and the game is the worse for it.
That’s an example of how solo content can be very very hard. Just about the entire population of what was, in its day, the most popular MMO equal with Everquest were trying for months to achieve something and no one succeeded for about 5 months. Is there any raid challenge that has taken so long to crack after going live?
Now where you talk about exceptions to the rules I’m inferring that the rule you have in mind is that a MMO must be designed around a tank healer dps paradigm. That’s not really a rule, more of a design philosophy intended to encourage group play. There are many MMOs that don’t adhere to it (Eve, Planetside) and I think several others that adopted it when they would be better off without it (Warhammer, AoC).
So I think you can have solo content that is interesting and challenging provided that it is not content intended for everyone to do including bad and lazy players so long as your game doesn’t require some players to gimp their soloing in order to be viable in groups.
@stabs
Is there any raid challenge that has taken so long to crack after going live?
Yes actually. There have been several over the years. The one that immediately springs to mind is Djinn Master’s Prison. It wasn’t defeated until a few weeks before the next expansion after it was toned down. That said, I completely understand your desire for gated content. I share that desire but, unfortunately, these days that seems to be an untenable case. Everyone wants access to everything or else they view it as a waste. I was a competitive raider for six years. I really enjoyed getting to see and do things only a few people got to do.
I’m also not sure I agree that unlocking a jedi was a solo activity. Yes, it was based on the single achievement of mastering the right random combination of professions but to do that was not just a solo affair. That isn’t the solo content I had in mind. That is something kind out there though that you could argue over for days. I loved the original jedi as well. Market forces however ended that exclusivity.
The point I want to make is a technical one really.
Let’s discuss jumps. In WoW in the Wailing Caverns, just before Lord Serpentis there is a jump. If you miss it you fall and the party has to wait for you to run all around the dungeon so there is some social pressure not to screw up. Unobservant players new to the dungeon sometimes fail to notice there is a jump at all and so fall. Players with poor spatial sense may attempt the jump and hit too early and will fail to cross the distance needed and will fall.
But as platform games go it’s a very forgiving jump. Basically if you are running forward and hit space anywhere in the last 5 feet you will make it.
In games like Tomb Raider jumps are less forgiving. You might have to hit jump within the last one foot of distance. That’s quite precise.
Harder jumps are possible. Basically if you reduce the permissible distance so that hitting space too soon means you won’t have the jump length and waiting too long means you fall off the edge then the distance is effectively an interval of time in which you have to hit the button.
Now a designer could make that distance almost infinitely small. If the correct distance was the last nanometre then players would only have a nanosecond interval in which to activate their jump key. Even someone very good at these games would only make it one in a thousand times.
And of course as you reduce the permissable distance you increase the difficulty towards infinity.
So I hope I have proved to your satisfaction that mathematically that solo gameplay can be as hard as raid gameplay. Solo gameplay can be infinitely hard. You don’t get harder than infinitely hard. If you raid something infinitely hard having to wait for a guy to get back from a disconnect doesn’t mean it’s harder, just more tedious.
I think where you are coming from is not “can solo gameplay be equally hard?” but “should solo gameplay be equally hard?” Obviously as a raid leader you need raids to be more challenging but also more rewarding to motivate people to do them. If there were equally viable solo alternatives to raiding it could make raiding moot.
Incentive structures and content design will vary from game to game but the broad statement that soloing is easier doesn’t stand up.
To give another example Darkfall is a game about killing other players. It’s a lot harder to solo than to gank in big groups. Especially if you take on groups alone.
Solo content can be as difficult as group content.
@Stabs
I feel that you’re missing the heart of my argument but, if it is agreement you want, I will say that mathematically, and technically you’re right. Solo content can be as difficult as group content. In the actual MMO environment and including things like cooperation, you’re just never going to have as difficult a challenge solo as you will in a group or raid. Sure, you can create artificial things like making a tiny jump radius but that is essentially just looking for specifics. You could equally argue that in that case we’re not talking about difficulty either. If there is an exact spot to jump from for success than it is just tedious finding that spot. Once it is found the difficulty is over. I think we’ll just have to accept disagreement here though.
There’s also a matter of how you define difficult.
One way is to define it as average man-hours required for completion. In that sense, raids must be more difficult. Even in the trivial case of a five minute walk across a zone to complete a “raid”, that will require 20x the man-hours if there are 20 people participating than will solo content requiring exactly the same activity. This assessment of difficulty is easy to measure but not particularly meaningful when applied to the comparison we’re trying to make.
Another way is to define difficulty as the skill required for completion per player. There is no solid way to measure this, but we can gauge it subjectively without too much fuss. In raids, specialization rules the day. You have a few people who need to be highly skilled (the tanks, the raid leader), but the majority of people are pounding their DPS rotation into the ground or blasting a single target repeatedly with heals. For most of the players in a raid, they are doing less work than they would do if they were soloing and less is required of them, skill-wise, for success in the raid comparative to soloing success. I don’t think that soloing difficulty and raid difficulty are far away from one another by this measure.
A third way to judge difficulty is to compare the capabilities of monsters per player fighting the monster. Raiding would probably come out ahead in this metric, but the victory might be hollow. Adding a few hundred thousand HPs to a monster doesn’t make the monster much harder if the raid group can handle its dps and keep its healers from becoming mana-starved. The cooperative efforts of 20 players can lead to feedback loops that raise their aggregate power more than in a multiplicative fashion.
If you choose to define difficult as “whatever I think is difficult”, than we have little basis for discussion and might as well not bother.
Well we have a TON of MMOs already that are “solo friendly”. Do we have a single one that is group friendly/solo unfriendly? No. At least i don’t know of any. If somebody knows please tell me cause i am looking for such a game. Yes i am looking for a group focused massive multiplayer online game. One would thought that i am nuts at this point cause what i just wrote is like “group friendly group friendly group friendly game”. I must be nuts to be looking for such a thing anyway…
Ah btw when all the retards came out and bashed turn-based gameplay, one company (named Ankama) made a game (named Dofus) that wasn’t turn-based and it managed to reach the #2 position in number of MMO subscribers. Maybe that’s a hint to companies that one of them should come out and give us a solo unfriendly game and simply ignore the mass that is spread already to 9348223 other MMOs which are solo friendly? Thanks.
that was turn based* (dofus is turn based)