I think the duration of content is the problem, not the lack of mechanics. For example, WOW made you grind dungeons over and over for points instead of drops. This leads to efficiency behavior. People will start grinding out dungeons as fast as possible and repeat them. Because they also only took you 15-25 minutes to complete you never had enough time to create social bonds.
I think it has more to do with the duration of events (dungeon diving) and the motivation for having them.
The longer you are together with people, the more likely you are to speak with them in some social aspect. The longer something is known to be prior to starting it, the more prone you are to accepting breaks and other downtime. But if you know you have to do 5 dungeons today to get your new shiny, you're just going to rush dungeons as fast as possible because the dungeon itself is only a means to an end.
Which is why I detest token based loot progression.
I'd agree with this, yeah. I hate token based progression, for a lot of reasons.
When you were deep in those old WOW Vanilla dungeons, time loss was as much as a motivator. Not only that a 2nd or 3rd wipe might make soemone give up and you'd have to start from scratch because it took you 20-60m to get a group, get to the dungeon and start. This fights weren't mechanically difficult in any case.
Yeah, BRD had a big penalty but I think the risk was more difficult to abate from a social perspective in comparison to EQ--but I think overall, BRD was more conducive to the whole "meeting" people than later dungeons, yes. I think, however, there are ways to design a game overall that would be even more conducive to that goal than BRD was, while actually being more accessible in terms of time, and more importantly skill, than BRD was. In EQ, fights were even easier, classes were less complex but the penalties were harder and the results of good team work were even more pronounced--for example. So explaining and moving carefully became even more important, even in a game where the actual class based difficulty was far lower (Usually).
I think it's a case where simplicity and risk abatement is a more powerful social initiator than complexity and reward accumulation. In other words, when mechanics are simple, the complexity tends to form around interactions between people, and in that case, when risk is also high? It makes people interact. I guess an example would be league of legends. It has pretty simple inputs/variables but through the meta play with others, it becomes a fairly complex game where even little mistakes can produce massive negatives (IE high risk--DOTA is even higher)--so it rewards team play and social play (Which is probably why toxicity in that game is so apparent.)
So, in terms of BRD, I think if the main goal was risk abatement (Even more so) and the main complexity comes from character interaction with each other and the world (But less individual complexity), it would have produced a game that gravitated toward even more social interaction (Rather than getting lost in mashing your own keyboard)
As for what I meant by social interaction? I pretty much want any, really heh. I know you can't watch the vid, but even a little talking changes peoples behaviors by a HUGE amount. BRD, I agree, did induce some talking--and that's good. (Heck, most guilds I knew flourished from vanilla WoW and dungeons like BRD--so yeah, it worked) But I think if you were to design a game more around the concepts above, you could induce even more strategy discussions--which I think might be helpful in a game-world where grouping is the focus.
