http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/4153250#4153250

"Don't design an MMO around the assumption that players are a "type" of gamer. I often hear developers discussing whether an individual is a roleplayer, or a PvP player, or a solo player. Our belief is that while you can certainly find players who exclusively fall into one category, most players dabble in everything. It is tempting to believe that because a player is playing an MMO, and because good MMOs are social games, every player must therefore like to play with other players in a group. Our experience with Guild Wars is that this is an erroneous and dangerous assumption. On any given day, a player may want to play with his guild, or he may want to play with his best friend, or he may want to play alone. The fact that he is playing in a large communal environment is not a predictor of how he wants to play. We should be striving to make games that let you play how you want to play right now, and offer you the flexibility to progress with any combination of players you like.

Don't underestimate the importance of solo play! Sometimes your friends aren't online, sometimes you want to kill 30 minutes while everyone groups together, and sometimes you just don't want to go to committee on every damn decision. The quality of the solo play experience is just as important to the success of an MMO as the quality of the multiplayer experience. A few months before the release of Guild Wars we added computer-controlled henchmen to the game as a way to pad out your party when your friends weren't around. Later we enhanced this feature and introduced computer-controlled Heroes, which gave you control over their actions and more fully supported the notion of playing the game entirely on your own. While it may seem counterintuitive to add features that support the solo play experience into an MMO, we believe that Guild Warswould not have been as successful had we not added these features."

http://www.guildwars.com/events/tradeshows/gc2007/gcspeech.php

Good read.  What I am expressing however is group play vs solo play.  I do see your point and I understand people want to play solo sometimes however...  If a game can be achieved solo, it could mean the game is easier.

I can see why developers are making games more user friendly.  It doesn't limit the player base into something they do not want.  However, this discussion is solo vs. group.  We aren't here to compare games, just the point of view of the two.  If developers make the MMO more solo friendly, it allows players a sense of achievement for leveling up quickly.  This design might be good for the players who don't have a lot of extra time on their hands, but what about other players?  Players that love to group are having harder times getting the thrill out of group play.  I find it far more enjoyable when I know I have to group to get anywhere in the game.  It shows real achievment and character through the hard times of grouping and grinding.

It's a real shame really.  Most MMO's are now making every game solo friendly until of course end game raiding.  By the time the player solo's his/her way to the end game, they have no real experience on grouping, and therefore aren't as good as a player that has been grouping from the start.  Personally, the best way to go for both parties to be happy would be to force group play and to allow certain specs/classes/jobs/skill to solo.  The group playerbase would be happy to group to level and the solo level playerbase can enjoy easy mode. 

Why do people honestly play MMO's now if they are fully soloable?  It's easy, it's usually great graphics, and they can feel superior at becoming a high level. 

At the end of the day it really is up to each individual.  This debate can go on forever.  It's a matter of personal choice and expectations.  Both have pros and cons, the final answer is up to.... ...  Ya, him.

i think its ok for an mmo to have the option of solo playing. However, an mmo is all about community. If i want to solo play 24/7 ill stick with a single player game and have more fun.

I don't think any MMO should be possible to solo in all the time. Some content that you can do solo is ok, but a majority of it should definately be small and large group play. I even think some content really should require MASSIVE amount of people, not just ~30. It's supposed to be Massively Multiplayer after all.

But ofc, alot of MMOs comes filled with solo content, because most of the players can't be arsed to talk to others and just want to do their own thing all the time. So thats where the money is.

Originally posted by romanator0

http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/4153250#4153250

 

"Don't design an MMO around the assumption that players are a "type" of gamer. I often hear developers discussing whether an individual is a roleplayer, or a PvP player, or a solo player. Our belief is that while you can certainly find players who exclusively fall into one category, most players dabble in everything. It is tempting to believe that because a player is playing an MMO, and because good MMOs are social games, every player must therefore like to play with other players in a group. Our experience with Guild Wars is that this is an erroneous and dangerous assumption. On any given day, a player may want to play with his guild, or he may want to play with his best friend, or he may want to play alone. The fact that he is playing in a large communal environment is not a predictor of how he wants to play. We should be striving to make games that let you play how you want to play right now, and offer you the flexibility to progress with any combination of players you like.

Don't underestimate the importance of solo play! Sometimes your friends aren't online, sometimes you want to kill 30 minutes while everyone groups together, and sometimes you just don't want to go to committee on every damn decision. The quality of the solo play experience is just as important to the success of an MMO as the quality of the multiplayer experience. A few months before the release of Guild Wars we added computer-controlled henchmen to the game as a way to pad out your party when your friends weren't around. Later we enhanced this feature and introduced computer-controlled Heroes, which gave you control over their actions and more fully supported the notion of playing the game entirely on your own. While it may seem counterintuitive to add features that support the solo play experience into an MMO, we believe that Guild Warswould not have been as successful had we not added these features."

http://www.guildwars.com/events/tradeshows/gc2007/gcspeech.php

I just wanted to tell you that I learned absolutely nothing after reading those two paragraphs of company PR babble. 

Originally posted by SuperXero89

I just wanted to tell you that I learned absolutely nothing after reading those two paragraphs of company PR babble. 

Considering what you consider that article, I highly doubt that you would learn anything. :P

The most important part of any MMORPG period, hands down, is that the community plays together and has a great time. While this may or may not include heavy grouping at all times is one discussion, but groups will always be a part of an MMORPG otherwise your just playing morrowind on a shared server. The more developers can make grouping fun and rewarding the better this genre will get.

/end of thread.

Originally posted by Xoshua

Actually soloing ruined the genre for me and hundreads of thousands of others. 

Hundreds of thousands of others?  That's why there are now MILLIONS of people playing MMOs?  They're laughing all the way to the bank.

I think you seriously, seriously overestimate your claim.

note: mostly focused on GW1.

Many MMO's these days seems to be more focused on the solo experience and just use the other players as a backdrop to enhance the individual gamer's experience. When this  solo-fication(?) happened Guild Wars with the introduction of heroes and LFG UI I am sure that ArenaNet thought they did the players a favour but in my view the game got a lot more quiet and died a little.

No more shouting for party members to fill up your eight-party team. A team that at times would be horrible and make you angry but you also got the really good groups that would continue for hours on end with an amazing experiecne as a result. This unpredictability is part of what makes a game interesting I think. Now this factor is gone and so is much of the unpredictability of the experience.

I agree that there has to be solo content as well or instant satisfaction areas like battlegrounds that you can spawn into go get a quick game-fix, but for an MMO I do not think that sould not be the main focus.

Gamers are humans too and thereby lazy by nature :) which means that if there is an easy way to attain a goal that is the way it will be attained. Why wait for 15 minutes to form a group when you can just whip out your heroes (perfectly trained and geared to complement your skills) and get that phat loot without the wait?

I hope developers do not remove the unpredictability that comes from having to work with others. Sure it can be frustrating at times but the rewards, when it works, is that much greater. And when it comes to GW, those are the memories that stick and makes me nostalgic. Not when I blazed though Nightfall with my well-geared heroes.

I like solo play because its all dependent on you, if you want something done fast, you can do it fast, if you want to stall and skip to a new task, you can do so. The problem with team play/co-op is that you can fail easy, if you have one troll, newb or jerk on your team, you are bound for doom.

Originally posted by Ifeedtrolls

I like solo play because its all dependent on you, if you want something done fast, you can do it fast, if you want to stall and skip to a new task, you can do so. The problem with team play/co-op is that you can fail easy, if you have one troll, newb or jerk on your team, you are bound for doom.

That's what makes otherwise boring game play, grinding mobs or grinding quests, fun, IMO.

Originally posted by Ihmotepp

Originally posted by Ifeedtrolls

I like solo play because its all dependent on you, if you want something done fast, you can do it fast, if you want to stall and skip to a new task, you can do so. The problem with team play/co-op is that you can fail easy, if you have one troll, newb or jerk on your team, you are bound for doom.

 

That's what makes otherwise boring game play, grinding mobs or grinding quests, fun, IMO.

I agree, learning to succeed and overcome obstacles such as new players, or even jerks is part of the challenge and fun.  Anyone can solve the issue by going off on their own, learning to work with a team is the real art in MMO's IMO.

Originally posted by Ihmotepp

That's what makes otherwise boring game play, grinding mobs or grinding quests, fun, IMO.

That's an interesting way of looking at it.  I always thought the COOL people made the game fun despite the inherent suckiness in most MMOs.

You think it's the bad people that make it fun? D:

Tell you what, you can group with all the annoying people, I'll group with all the fun people, and we'll both have more fun. :D

Tolerance is a wonderful virtue. Socialization is the greatest metagame the genre posesses, in my opinion. If you can turn a jerk into a nice guy even for an hour or so, you've won.

Originally posted by Palebane

Tolerance is a wonderful virtue. Socialization is the greatest metagame the genre posesses, in my opinion. If you can turn a jerk into a nice guy even for an hour or so, you've won.

I'd rather tolerate people in real life, who I can't avoid.  For my gaming time, I don't really want to waste my time on people I dislike, or who have bad behavior.

I win AHEAD of time, by starting off teaming up with a nice guy. :D

Originally posted by Meowhead

Originally posted by Palebane

Tolerance is a wonderful virtue. Socialization is the greatest metagame the genre posesses, in my opinion. If you can turn a jerk into a nice guy even for an hour or so, you've won.

I'd rather tolerate people in real life, who I can't avoid.  For my gaming time, I don't really want to waste my time on people I dislike, or who have bad behavior.

I win AHEAD of time, by starting off teaming up with a nice guy. :D

Sad to hear. To each their own I guess. I enjoy putting aside my differences to succeed. Like others have said, that is part of the challenge and excitement for me. Some players are a lost cause, I agree with you there. But some really nice people just have bad days, or are new. Often times they are just looking for a little sympathy or encouragement. In many cases, ignoring the problem only compounds it, in my opinion.

Group vs Solo play...
Why limit choices? Sometimes (most of the time) I feel like soloing so I can go at my own pace, which is slow. Other times, I just want to carve things up in a group and go go go.

People mistake the term "Massively Multi-player" as grouping. There are far more players outside of a group than in a group. How many other players does one interact with within a group? How many other players does one interact with outside of a group? If your idea of "massively" interacting is a group of 5 or 10 players (40 in a raid), you may need to rethink your definition. Do people who sit in trade chat (WoW) and interact with others soloing or grouping? I don't know about the "We MUST group to interact" people, but I interact LESS in a group than in solo mode. While in a group, there is a fixed set of other players being interacted with. One is always rushing to the next objective so they don't make the other members of the group wait. Outside of a group, there is a whole world of other players to interact with. I don't "have" to be in a group to interact with them.

Then you have the over-simplified example of overcoming obstacles and ease in how to do it. I find overcoming an obstacle solo is MUCH more difficult than getting others to help out. It is much slower solo than in a group, including downtime trying to find a group. There are characters types more suited to solo play. Doesn't help much if a rogue sneaks up on an opponent when the rest of the group goes charging in. Crowd control in a group I have found to be far down on the "way to do this" list. It is a slower method of doing things.

Personally, I find large groups (10+ people) too hard to keep up with. I wait to let the tank get the aggro, and many times, the mobs are down by the time I start in. As a healer, there are just too many people to keep track of. (I don't trust other healers to do their jobs, which makes me suck by watching too many other peoples' health bars.) Also, without Teamspeak or Ventrillo, I hardly interact at all with my group as my fingers are busy doing other things than typing in chat windows.

Why is there a "vs"? Aren't both playstyles viable? To me, they are two very different ways to enjoy a game. I guess the conflict comes with the "risk/reward" perceptions. Why doesn't anyone clamor about solo only top end gear? Why do the best rewards come from overcoming obstacles with many specialized players co-operating instead of a single, single-faceted player overcoming an obstacle? Maybe my rogue can pickpocket the dragon for the uber loot instead of killing him... Of course there should be uber bosses that can only be defeated with massive groups of people. And the gear won reflecting the effort. But what about an uber boss that has to be taken down solo, using wits and strategy? Maybe sets of uber grouping/raid gear and uber solo gear should be available... lol

I just don't see the "vs" in all of this. To me, these are two equally viable playstyles which give players more choices in how to play. I think people may want more rewards for playing a certain way to the exclusion of some other, just as viable way of playing the same game.

As I've said all along, an MMO is a Multiplayer game. It's not a single player game with an auction house, leave that to the upcoming Neverwinter. This whole idea of being able to solo through a multiplayer game just boggles the mind, that people can think this is acceptable.

Let's take, for example, a Call of Duty game. You buy the game for the multiplayer, you log in, there's a room where all the players can gather and chat before jumping onto a map. You jump onto your first map hoping for a 16 v 16 match and instead find a world populated by Bots. Your team mates are bots, the enemies are bots. It's a single player game but that chat room allows it to be called a multiplayer game.

That's pretty much how I see the current crop of MMO's. They're single player games with chat rooms and a trading post of some sort. That's it. If that's how you enjoy MMO's then all the power to you, but personally I'd like my multiplayer game to be.. you know.. multiplayer.

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Originally posted by UsualSuspect
As I've said all along, an MMO is a Multiplayer game. It's not a single player game with an auction house, leave that to the upcoming Neverwinter. This whole idea of being able to solo through a multiplayer game just boggles the mind, that people can think this is acceptable.
Let's take, for example, a Call of Duty game. You buy the game for the multiplayer, you log in, there's a room where all the players can gather and chat before jumping onto a map. You jump onto your first map hoping for a 16 v 16 match and instead find a world populated by Bots. Your team mates are bots, the enemies are bots. It's a single player game but that chat room allows it to be called a multiplayer game.
That's pretty much how I see the current crop of MMO's. They're single player games with chat rooms and a trading post of some sort. That's it. If that's how you enjoy MMO's then all the power to you, but personally I'd like my multiplayer game to be.. you know.. multiplayer.

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My point is this: I don't care if you like to group, or think that MMO means "grouping". Why do you care that I think MMO means massively multi-player online? My way does not exclude you, yet your way DOES exclude me.

And yes, I enjoy grouping. I also enjoy reading through quests, stopping near someone fighting and healing if needed, giving directions to newbies, drive-by buffing, working on crafting, or talking gameplay points with more than just 5-10 people at a time. Or is this your complaint? Do you think there are too many "non-grouping" activities?