How would you re-socialize MMOs?

- Reintroduce global servers. Small, regional servers were a horrible idea for the formation of communities.
- Slow down the pace of the game, so you can chat again by typing instead of having to press a button every global cooldown.

DiddleySquat_sl said:

- Reintroduce global servers. Small, regional servers were a horrible idea for the formation of communities.
- Slow down the pace of the game, so you can chat again by typing instead of having to press a button every global cooldown.

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Then when you miss a DPS/Healing CD because of chatting, you get booted for shit DPS/letting someone die or they tell you to STFU ;P

DiddleySquat_sl said:

- Reintroduce global servers. Small, regional servers were a horrible idea for the formation of communities.
- Slow down the pace of the game, so you can chat again by typing instead of having to press a button every global cooldown.

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In order to create communities, you really want smaller servers. The more often you see the same person, the more often you recognize a name, the bigger sense of community you will have. You don't even have to interact with people, but just recognizing those names on a daily basis goes a long way. The more anonymous, the more random, you interject into that time you are playing, the more foreign you will feel.

The vast majority of people play online games without ever going to forums, websites, reddit or whatever. They just come home and log into a game, so any community building that happens, has to happen in game. Unless you can train the vast majority of players to live the game on their mobile phones, on the web, and then at home in game, you really need to focus on bringing people together. This means that larger communities won't really form for the vast majority of people since global servers have to rely on out-of-game resources to form pools of people.

To your second point, that's just personal preference really. If you want a slower pace game, that's your prerogative. I know from personal experience that I chat all day playing these games in mumble/skype. I have no desire to go back to the day where all I do is type into a chat box while playing.

Draegan_sl said:

In order to create communities, you really want smaller servers. The more often you see the same person, the more often you recognize a name, the bigger sense of community you will have. You don't even have to interact with people, but just recognizing those names on a daily basis goes a long way. The more anonymous, the more random, you interject into that time you are playing, the more foreign you will feel.

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Right on the money here!

Draegan_sl said:

To your second point, that's just personal preference really. If you want a slower pace game, that's your prerogative. I know from personal experience that I chat all day playing these games in mumble/skype. I have no desire to go back to the day where all I do is type into a chat box while playing.

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I see your point, but.......its an MMO? If your only talking to the same 6-12 players every day how in the world do you meet anyone? To each his own I guess.

Draegan_sl said:

In order to create communities, you really want smaller servers. The more often you see the same person, the more often you recognize a name, the bigger sense of community you will have. You don't even have to interact with people, but just recognizing those names on a daily basis goes a long way. The more anonymous, the more random, you interject into that time you are playing, the more foreign you will feel.

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I think what he means is dont make seperate NA, EU and Asian server boundaries that cannot be crossed, and moreso dont flag servers for specific regions/nationalities/languages. I have to say I did prefer that setup back in EQ. Our guild was a mix of EU and NA people that had a fairly wide raid window at times because of that, and you could still find groups at odd times. That whole argument falls apart when faced with cross-server raiding and dungeon finders though, so it's only applicable to a game that leaves those features out in attempt to recreate a different community.

Merlin_sl said:

I see your point, but.......its an MMO? If your only talking to the same 6-12 players every day how in the world do you meet anyone? To each his own I guess.

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I play these games with friends or in a guild. I'm usually in some kind of guild with 10-50 people in it to talk to. I don't play these games in a vacuum alone. That's not to say I ignore the chat box, but I don't engage anyone in any kind of prolonged conversation for the most part.

Mr Creed_sl said:

I think what he means is dont make seperate NA, EU and Asian server boundaries that cannot be crossed, and moreso dont flag servers for specific regions/nationalities/languages. I have to say I did prefer that setup back in EQ. Our guild was a mix of EU and NA people that had a fairly wide raid window at times because of that, and you could still find groups at odd times. That whole argument falls apart when faced with cross-server raiding and dungeon finders though, so it's only applicable to a game that leaves those features out in attempt to recreate a different community.

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Most games these days don't put up artificial barriers. So if you're in the EU you can play on NA servers. You just have to deal with higher latency. Just ask Pyros.

Draegan_sl said:

I play these games with friends or in a guild. I'm usually in some kind of guild with 10-50 people in it to talk to. I don't play these games in a vacuum alone. That's not to say I ignore the chat box, but I don't engage anyone in any kind of prolonged conversation for the most part.

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Proof positive. You had taken your individual values of progression (and the concepts there of) and applied them across the board. It doesn't actually reflect reality, only the reality that you have imposed upon yourself. This, right here, is the reason why "socializing" is dead in modern mmos. We are dicks, and can only tolerate dicks of appropriate dickness in our sphere of influence.

I'm not sure that is really proof positive to your concept.

Basically it is "age bias" on our parts. Much like people in their 30s/40s will think music/media/etc that teenagers or what not is shit, they also don't associate much with that crowd, creating social disconnects.

I think one major thing that limits socialization in current MMOs is widely available performance metrics and relatively tightly tuned encounters. Back in the day of EQ and early WoW most guilds, even fairly serious raid guilds, were happy to invite people without considering their usefulness first. If friends or family started playing you invited them to your guild without a second thought. These days there's a lot more consideration given to if a specific class is needed and if the player can hack it for the kind of raids the guild is aiming for (even outside of the bleeding edge raid guilds). Many guilds have become more like sports teams than traditional MMO guilds.

At the end of the day what is missing is encounters that have enough complexity for interaction to be required to kill them. When its all a snoozefest, it becomes chatting about sports or some other off topic thing while hitting 3 buttons... Heaven Forbid challenge returns where we have to on the fly discuss what we are doing and how to approach it .... eeek !

actually thought RIFT in beta was very good in that aspect... many mobs / pulls were tough and required folks to work together.

Raid complexity is at an all time high right now. One could say its too complex at the high end.

Draegan_sl said:

Raid complexity is at an all time high right now. One could say its too complex at the high end.

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Exactly, good luck ever getting my girlfriend through Titan hard mode in ffxiv, not even going to be worth attempting, not that she's a bad person, and would be just fine as one of 72 in the days of EQ, but yea, wow's dual system of pleasing casual timmies with face roll content with completely random single-serving friends, along with bleeding edge encounters that challenge the top 5% (ie: people like myself, or anyone else that has ever done gladiator-like skill difficulty or top of diamond league, etc stuff) just doesn't work) designed to be done only in small groups with extremely specific class composition requirements....

Is pretty much the worst thing for socialization since hitler.

The number one killer is instancing. Easy progression, virtually no consequences of a bad attitude (just put out those deeps) and unlimited chances at wealth and you have a very unrealistic, anti-social concept.

I despise "button rotation" games like WoW and most other MMO's. I'm not convinced it's a major factor though.

Transportation / Exploration is a huge factor. Humans love to explore and getting to new places is a big deal. Today's games trivialize the hell out of it and I think that has a huge impact on how players interact from the challenges they take on to the social factors. If you can just get anywhere in the world without some hint of social graces then it's a huge socialization opportunity that is missed.

One of the coolest "social" moments was when I was a noob in late 1999 in EQ. I was in permafrost and the idea of a "end game" was completely foreign to me. Next thing I know, all these shiny and colorful players run past me. Just seeing a Vox Raid setup was amazing as a low level and I got to reap some of the rewards, met some amazing players too. EQ sometimes mixed content together for highs and lows in the same zone, something you don't see much of anymore.

Some people mentioned risk. Couldn't agree more. There must be risk, real risk and not some BS like restarting the instance with another team of vagabonds 5 minutes after you all died. Playing in a fantasy world MMO should have challenges, obviously. It should also have great risks that can be taken by those who are willing to subside their fears and go after the reward of said risks. Today's MMO's the risk is virtually zero because even if you all die, at worst you spend 30 minutes reorganizing with a new team. Fear tends to bring people together since two are stronger than one. Without this fear (and opportunity/challenge) to overcome it, no MMO will ever get my attention again. High end raid zones shoudl all be like Veeshan's peak, go in and can't get out easily and if you die, you better have a good recovery plan or you lose all your gear.

Today's gen isn't ready for great games anymore

The number one killer is instancing. Easy progression, virtually no consequences of a bad attitude (just put out those deeps) and unlimited chances at wealth and you have a very unrealistic, anti-social concept.

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Contested spawns led to far more anti-social behaviors, if one was to use the actual definition of the term (training, griefing, exploits, etc). Being a dick != social.

Draegan_sl said:

In order to create communities, you really want smaller servers. The more often you see the same person, the more often you recognize a name, the bigger sense of community you will have. You don't even have to interact with people, but just recognizing those names on a daily basis goes a long way. The more anonymous, the more random, you interject into that time you are playing, the more foreign you will feel.

The vast majority of people play online games without ever going to forums, websites, reddit or whatever. They just come home and log into a game, so any community building that happens, has to happen in game. Unless you can train the vast majority of players to live the game on their mobile phones, on the web, and then at home in game, you really need to focus on bringing people together. This means that larger communities won't really form for the vast majority of people since global servers have to rely on out-of-game resources to form pools of people.

To your second point, that's just personal preference really. If you want a slower pace game, that's your prerogative. I know from personal experience that I chat all day playing these games in mumble/skype. I have no desire to go back to the day where all I do is type into a chat box while playing.

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1) In EQ I played in a so called European guild (conveniently called 'Europa') but we had a good mix of North and South American, European, Mid and Far East players. It worked well, but the segregation of US/EU/AS servers introduced by WoWkilledthat concept. I still don't understand why that model was adopted in the MMO sector.
Because of the slightly higher ping when you have an ocean between you and the server? It's an MMO, not a FPS game. 50ms extra ping is totally irrelevant.
Because of the language barriers? Maybe that was 'solved' for US server since they didn't have to interact with foreigners anymore (except random Mexicans). But EU servers still are a very mixed bag of cultures and languages, and Aussie players are put on Asian servers, so same "problem" for them. I put problem in quotes because it's not a problem at all. You interact with people you can talk to, the fact that there is a faction on the same server that you can not talk to does not diminish your opportunity to find people you can communicate and play with.

2) I disagree with the player name recognition as a trigger to form a community. There is a name recognition aspect, but it's on a guild name level. When I'm in game at a hub, I'll initially start recognizing guild names, not player names. Having a server with a population of 100K players or 1 million players (factor 10 difference) barely has any influence on getting familiar with guild names.

On getting familiar with individuals, that happens when you get into a pick up group and remember a guy because he was a good, cool or just funny player. So you add him to your friends list. From then on, it does not matter at all how huge your server is, you can always find your new buddy in an instant. The larger your server, the bigger the pool of cool guys is, while finding them is not affected. Big server > small server.

3) I don't like voice chat as a primary means of communication in an MMO. Part of that is me: I'm just a bit too introvert to start talking to strangers. Part of that is the language barrier: while my English is decent - as I'm hoping to show here - speaking it is a bit more of a challenge and I'm not a 100% comfortable with it, certainly when I'm supposed to be having fun and relax. Also keep in mind that I'm stuck on a Euro server and thus voice chat would be a mix of 'English' with cockney, scottish, welsh, irish, french, spanish, german, russian, greek, italian, ... (need I go on?) accents,IFmy companions are even a bit fluent in spoken English.
So let's keep chat to that chat box, can we? For one, it provides just enough distance for me to feel comfortable with interacting with strangers, and second it forces people to focus on communicating the bare necessities in a concise manner. Spelling and grammar can even be flawed, because people have a chat log and a few moments to decipher it. On voice chat, you have no log and less time.

4) Game pace is crucial factor in being able to communicate with random players passing by. In EQ when you were camping a spot with your group, you could /say to nearby people or /shout to the zone. Good for practical info (/say group full?) or zone banter (/shout Grabbit > Fitz).
Nowadays everyone is an EQ Bard.

5) Instancing: definitely a huge factor in the killing off of MMO communities, but others have already explained it plus I need to go lunch.

Speaking of guild names, I think this relatively new development of only putting guild initials in a player's displayed guild tag is dumb. FFXIV is like this, GW2 also I believe. Put the whole damn thing up there, jeez. It's like giving yourself a nickname, foolish, that shit gets given to you by someone else. Or at least a toggle where if all the guild names are cluttering up your screen in a hub, pvp, raid, etc, you can switch to view full guild names, initials, or none.

Wolfshead_sl said:

The problem is that these days with the ubiquity of "multi-player" video games most people aren't naturally drawn to a MMORPG primarily to socialize. Most come for the adventure first. What ends up happening is that socialization and camaraderie that results from adventuring ends up being far more important and lasting in the long run. Social relationships within MMOs are the glue that help to retain subscribers as well.

Another problem is that because of the success of World of Warcraft MMORPGs have travelled on an absurd tangent of achievement centric design to the exclusion of pretty much all else. Back in the old days, there was an inherent appreciation for Richard Bartle'sideathat virtual worlds and MUDs were a balanced composite ofadventurers, explorers, socializersandkillers. WoW destroyed that relationship which is why the MMO industry is in the sad predicament it is today.

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It's a consequence of the theme park game standard, promoted by Blizzard. When your path from "zero to hero" (cit.) is already planned before you even install the game, all you have left to do is achieve something when following it. There is a bit of exploration here and there, some small room for adventure too, but most of these activities do not reward "appropriately" and I use this term ironically: if you would place all the end game gear for exploring and discovering stuff, maybe even doing jumping puzzles and leave raids with cloth caps and cosmetic rainbow unicorns as drops, I don't think the vast majority of the playerbase would touch a raid with a 10 ft pole.

I have to add that I'm also older than your average MMO player, considering that I'm 40. Not talking about casual / hardcore here, just saying that the way younger people talk, think, communicate just doesn't click with me anymore past the basic interactions and common courtesy. I like more RP servers, not because of the faggotry or the creepy people (most are just normal guys that enjoy roleplaying) at least some people there try to communicate, even if behind a set of unwritten rules, and enhance the other players experience, instead of making it miserable and/or frustrating.

So if I play SWtoR, where the lore has a predominant effect on the game community and join a RP guild, I know I'll likely find people that are not just heading towards loot/progression at a frenetic pace, but also some that just enjoy their gaming time without chasing a carrot over and over. Worth doing? I don't know, I have mixed experiences, I guess it just depends on the people one can find.

Draegan_sl said:

Raid complexity is at an all time high right now. One could say its too complex at the high end.

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How so ? Are there raids in existence that require CC ? Different weapon/damage types ? or is it just more RIFT Gimmick style raiding ? Only raids I have done in the last year have been VG and DDO raids so I have no idea myself.

Perhaps there is a game out there I am missing ?