Massively Single-Player Gaming? 209
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the world-of-me-craft dept.
from the world-of-me-craft dept.
Massively is running an article discussing the trend in recent MMOs to enable and encourage solo play. Where the genre's early offerings, like Everquest and Ultima Online, were heavily dependent on finding other people to interact with, it's common for today's games to allow players to experience most of the content by themselves. Quoting:
"It is human nature to want to be the center of attention or at least feel like the hero on some level. It's also not too far of a stretch to call members of our species generally selfish. How can you really deliver this experience if you force your players to ask for help all the time? I think this was simply a natural progression of the genre in trying to appeal to our natural traits. ... Finally, I believe it all comes down to the mighty dollar. Audiences grew and so followed the market and competition. Suddenly, you couldn't make MMOs on the cheap anymore (though a stalwart few still try). Not only are game studios focused on appealing to the solo casual gamer to maximize earnings, they also want to build in artificial time sinks to make players stick around."
Online worlds FTW; online players suck. (Score:4, Interesting)
I want the colossal richness and depth available only through online worlds, without the horny adolescents, griefers, and other social incompetents that MMOGs seem to attract.
Give with WoW with just me and the NPCs, and I'll pay for it. Not otherwise.
Re:It's the D-Bags... (Score:5, Interesting)
I completely agree.
I remember back in the Compuserve/GEnie days, before the internet became popular. We used to have to pay $6+ per hour to connect. I would play multi-player games, read and post on forums, and there was never any serious trolling/griefing. Then along came the internet and unlimited monthly access for a flat rate. Suddenly all the MPG's I played were filled with beggars asking for free stuff, or griefers just trying to ruin the game for everyone. Massive access to forums also caused the quality of the posts to deteriorate to simple flame wars.
The effect of price on behavior was very obvious. I can think of two possibilities: Either a high price enforces "good behavior" because no one wants to waste money acting like an idiot, but people are willing to act like idiots when something is free; or as an "elitist snob" (yeah yeah, think whatever you want) I tend to favor the idea that people with more money tend to be better educated (with few exceptions) and mannered, and so an expensive, exclusive "club" will have less "trash".
Re:Solo Play Should be Offline Play (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:That's not why (Score:3, Interesting)
I was going to mention Guild Wars too, as an example of a game that is highly playable as a single player. You can be offline for a month, and it's not costing you anything, since they don't have monthly fees. The quality of the graphics is such that you can just wander around in your own time admiring the scenery, especially with the Eye Of The North expansion.
On one of the few occasions I joining a pickup mission, I ran in to an "expectation" problem. The character I used was a Monk, and what I learned is that there seems to an expectation that a Monk will sit back and cast healing spells, while the other characters can go blundering in to battle without a care. Um... not this Monk. This Monk walks softly, carries a big stick, and is usually too busy Smiting to heal anyone else. 8)
Re:Online worlds FTW; online players suck. (Score:1, Interesting)
agreed within reason.
I wish they would do like Diablo 2 and scale the difficulty to group size. If people come and go, it doesn't matter. But a group of 5 actual friends (like my situation) can experience all of the content in the game.
There are so many areas I've never seen because I don't want to group up with 20 strangers.
It's like paying for premium cable channels you never watch... oh wait. we do that too don't we?
Re:The 'casual' gamer (Score:3, Interesting)
Casual vs serious is all about how much you care. We all know film buffs for instance who take films very seriously who watch a lot of movies, but also read about them, talk about them, think about them. Then there are people who just like to see a movie from time to time. Games are the same way, it's not a hard and fast line either, there are many shades in between.
I guess there are some observations that can be made though. If you've never seen a foreign movie, you're probably not a film buff. If you've never played an imported game, you're probably not a serious gamer. If you've never seen a movie that came out before you were born, you're probably not a film buff. If you've never played a game that came out before you were born, you're probably not a serious gamer. Or you're in your late 30s. If you can't name a few directors off the top of your head, you're probably not a film buff. If you can't name a few game designers off the top of your head, you're probably not a serious gamer.
Player matching (Score:4, Interesting)
I sense a demand for a service like eHarmony, Match.com, or Chemistry.com geared toward finding compatible gamers rather than sexual mates. Put all the immersive RPGers on one shard, all the 1/2 hr a night casual grownups on another, the emo teens on a third, etc. Maybe include a function to vote misbehavers off the shard.
Re:I hate time sinks (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree, the worst thing about FFXI was the Japan inspired conformism in the player base, which spread to the non-Japanese players too eventually. "You're level foo and don't have a Hat of Foo? No group for you!" "You're playing a Hume WHM with RDM as subclass and not a Taru-Taru WHM with BLM as the kami intended? No group for you!" "You want to play your WHM as a Western style Battle Cleric because you're a Hume with a Hammer, instead of being a "Staff Chick" as the kami intended WHM to be? No group for you!"
I tried and tried telling people that doing things the "optimized conformist way some crazy Japanese min-maxer had figured out" was less fun. Sure, fighting "Very Hard" enemies, with those super optimized builds would give you "perfect" XP but it just wasn't fun, and it was harder than if you fought level appropriate mobs. And if you fought level appropriate mobs, you'd actually make more money. Instead of Goblins in the Dunes, fight Quadav in the Mines. You'll rip though them so fast and they'll drop tons of stuff. And there will be less chance of a damned add or an accident killing the party.
As I said, using EQOA speak, "You're better off fighting hordes of dark blues for safer XP and more loot, than a tiny number of reds"
Re:And this is what is slowly killing the genre (Score:1, Interesting)
In contrast, I'm not a MMO fan. I love WoW because of the world and the complicated skill trees and diversity of character types and the non-linear story lines.
The worst thing for me about WoW (and the reason I don't spend $15/mo on it anymore) is the MMO aspect. I hate the fact that you can't solo dungeons at the level where the loot is beneficial. When you get to level 80, there are a ton of dungeons you still can't solo. You have to advertise for a group and wait for them to organize and wait for the tank and the dps and the healer. You have to roll for loot, which means you have to run a dungeon 5 times to get the drops you want (which ruins any concept of a storyline). Not to mention the lack of enforcement of role-playing on role-playing servers.
If they made a massively single player version of WoW, I'd never stop playing. Even better, let me control several characters at once so I can solo dungeons with a group (like Sword of the New World).
Re:The 'casual' gamer (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow's subscription costs about the same as ...
- 2 movie tickets
- half a nice restaurant meal
- 1/4th of a new game
- a very cheap/bad theater/opera ticket
- a new CD
- a new DVD
-
you can play very little WoW (6-8 hours/month), and still get more "entertainment time" for your money than you would with more traditional entertainment.
of course, you won't get the same benefits out of it.. it's pretty much a-cultural... but then again, given how bad most recent movies have been ...
I look back on my time playing WoW, and adding up everything I spent over a year and a bit, I sort of wish I had that money back. I enjoyed myself tremendously a good 60-70% of that time, and it was definitely the cheapest way to socialise daily with friends who lived 2 hours away in a big city, at a time when none of us had a lot of disposable income. Still, that "golden age" of my experience was shorter than my hope, and I definitely feel like I wasted some time that could have been better spent (and paid money to do so).
At the same time, a friend who started playing as I was winding down, ended up playing much more than I did, first string in a 6 days/week raiding guild. She loved it, and hated her 40 hour/week office job. Coming home from work and playing WoW, if you enjoy it, is actually really, really cheap. The more you play it, the cheaper it is, since you're not doing other things that cost money. After cigarettes and gas, WoW was really her only expense, so she was able to save money very quickly.
At that age, her job wasn't a career and even living in Silicon Valley a temporary thing. Raiding was what she wanted to do with her time, and she was able to work, put a lot of money in the bank, and enjoy herself in the off-time. When it was time to move back home, she made the trip in a gorgeous mint '95 BMW 850ci.
Of course, the cost of WoW goes up dramatically if your guild holds "drunken PVP weekends", but in those cases you would probably be spending the money on nice alcohol anyway.
3 solutions (Score:3, Interesting)
A: Score players by referral. Search for players using a threshold based on referrals. Just like filtering slashdot posts, filter players. Assholes quickly dissapear then
B: Scale content. Go into Molten Core solo, in a group, or a raid of 40. Just scale the content, number of drops, etc accordingly.
C: Provide players the tools needed to police their own. Griefers are the result of the player population (the masses) having no ability to deal with griefers on their own. Bounties as an in-game mechanism can go along way with dealing with griefers. Especially when there is a real penalty for dying when you have a bounty on your head.
Feature:
Bounty - A player, once per day, can place a bounty of X gold on another player. For evey Y gold placed on the target upon death the target will lose 5% of their exp and will have to wait 1 hour for every Y gold before logging back in. Each time they die Y gold is removed from the bounty pool.
Y=1000 Gold
A player has a 5,000 bounty. Upon dying the player will be booted for 5 hours and lose 25% of their exp. The next time they log in the bounty pool is now at 4,000 bounty. Upon dying the player will be booted for 4 hours and lose 20% of their current exp. An so on and so on.
This assumes 1000 gold is a decent amount of cash in your game. This mechanism would go a long way to disciplining griefers. Can be used as a tool to grief? Yep, but pretty damn expensive tool to abuse.