In massively multiplayer online games, are player associations more hindrance than help?
The immediate reaction from most players will probably lean heavily towards “help”, but I remain unconvinced that this is the case. I’ve seen plenty of raid content. I’ve been a member of incredibly efficient and well-organized guilds. I’m not a casual player by any means, but I really…truly…believe that the current setup could be vastly improved.
I’d argue that player associations are killing the practice of Pick-Up-Grouping, and that the whole scenario is a catch-22. A significant reason for joining a guild is access to a pool of regular, reliable people for grouping. Once membership is gained, players will no longer seek groups with those outside the guild. Loose alliances of guilds will form to provide a greater pool of players from which to draw, thus increasing the chance for members to get a group going. Does this not seem ridiculous to anyone else?
First, let’s reduce the number of people we’re potentially going to play with from hundreds, to a dozen or two. Then, let’s realize that this smaller pool of people isn’t enough to fit our needs. We’ll talk to another pool of players, and team up with them to get more groups! And so the cycle continues. Surely there’s a better mechanism to accomplish this than what we’re doing now.
Then there’s the forum drama, and occasional guild meltdown. I doubt there’s a person who’s played for any length of time who’s a stranger to this. The anonymity afforded by this type of game will unleash the inner asshole in just about anyone. Witnessing unchecked greed, selfish behavior, power struggles, and all this crap really doesn’t make the game more enjoyable. I doubt there’s really any way around this, human nature being what it is, but I believe the current way guilds are handled within these games promotes this kind of crap.
Being in a guild seems a requirement to play these games now. Ten years ago I wouldn’t think twice about picking up any game I wanted to play. Now, I actually consider whether any of my friends will play my next purchase, not that it will affect my decision much…but the fact that I stop to think about it is troublesome. Why should it matter? How much is game content limited by the guild you’re in, and why are we willing and required to make this sacrifice? A guild of a dozen people is unlikely to see any content where 50 are required, yet this limitation is completely artificial.
What if players were left with a more level playing field? What if there were no in-game support or functionality to assist player associations? What if better mechanisms were in place to assist all players in getting raid-level groups going, and why aren’t there? There is simply no reason players should be excluded from in-game content they pay for because of out-of-game situations.
So I ask, is the status quo really the best way to handle this? Am I completely out to lunch?
Player associations allow players to discriminate between people who suck and people who don’t.
I know that in the MMOs I’ve played, PuGs tend to suck unless they’re not really pickup groups but rather groups of people you’ve already played with/against before.
Based upon my experience in several different MMOs, I would say that guild dynamics have always been the core of these types of games. Where I think you’re seeing a split is the dynamic that occurs in WoW.
For example, in DAOC you had alliance chat. Now it created a ton of headaches (spamming and whatnot) but it also allowed for different guilds (up to 20) to converse with each other. This allowed for PUGs to occur between different guilds and whatnot. Just having that forced channel gave everybody the sense of being part of the same thing, like an extended guild. It was very common to have multiple guilds in a group based upon this fact alone.
In WoW, you don’t have this option. Granted you can creat a channel that other guilds can join, but it isn’t forced upon them and this each and every person in those guilds has to manually join that channel. What happens (this from personal experience trying to relocate an alliance of guilds from DAOC to WOW) is that nobody signs up to the channel outside of the core group of catassers from each guild. The masses either are to lazy to sign in or just don’t care too. This then leads to people staying in the confines of their respective guilds when it comes to LFG, raids and quest support.
The problem is that current MMO’s aren’t creating social tools for us, the user. We have half assed tools that allow us, with lots of manual work, to find people to play with that don’t suck. Being in a guild/clan is obviously not a guaranteed note on sucking or not, you have to remember how is good and who isn’t.
I wish for a whole pile of tools, better more automagical friends lists, looking for group lists, etc.
The first MMO that sets off to create a social environment on top of it’s good gameplay will be such a difference (assuming they pull it off), we’ll look back on things like WoW and say, we really did it like that?
So, until that point, guilds are one of the half assed tools we can use to help us sort through the asshats online to find people we don’t mind grouping with, gosh forbid even like grouping with.
This line of reasoning is self fulfilling. Good players join associations because pick up groups have poor players. Good players no longer join pick up groups. Pick up groups suck because there are no good players. Therefore, good players have to join associations to get good groups.
I often think back to my early days playing Everquest, when Pick Up Groups were the norm. Perhaps I’m looking through rose-colored glasses, but getting a group seemed much easier then. Of course, it was also pretty impossible to solo in that game.
This is largely true for me, however you’re leaving out a huge factor here:
I don’t have any desire to group with random people. If I didn’t belong to a guild, I would instead use friends lists and eventually it would grow large enough that the same effect would be seen. It would just be more annoying.
Loose alliances of guilds will form to provide a greater pool of players from which to draw, thus increasing the chance for members to get a group going. Does this not seem ridiculous to anyone else?
No. Why should it? Does it lock random players I don’t know out of my circle? Surely. Why is this a bad thing? If I’m too elitist about who I play with then it’s problematic for me. Conversely, if I’m not elitist enough, it’s also problematic for me. If, however, I’m just elitist enough, it maximizes my access to people to play with while minimizing my necessity of putting up with absolute morons. (Mind you “absolute morons” is by my definition; I’m sure I fit that definition for other people. It’s not an absolute value judgement, but a relative one.)
First, let’s reduce the number of people we’re potentially going to play with from hundreds, to a dozen or two. Then, let’s realize that this smaller pool of people isn’t enough to fit our needs. We’ll talk to another pool of players, and team up with them to get more groups! And so the cycle continues. Surely there’s a better mechanism to accomplish this than what we’re doing now.
Such as? I would disagree that this is a bad thing, but I’d also point out the following:
When I need to expand the circle of folks I play with, nothing opens up a potential chunk of new groupmates like playing with 2-3 people all from the same guild and finding that I appreciate their play. Suddenly whenever I see anyone with that guild tag, they’re extended the benefit of the doubt, because I assume that their guild, like mine, nucleates around a common play style paradigm. This is easiest to see for uberguilds where one uberguild knows the reputation of the others, and thus knows if someone from uberguild X applies to their guild what type of player they’re likely to get.
The anonymity afforded by this type of game will unleash the inner asshole in just about anyone. Witnessing unchecked greed, selfish behavior, power struggles, and all this crap really doesn’t make the game more enjoyable.
Now you’re just flat out whining and projecting. One of the reasons I treasure my guild is that 99% of the people aren’t unleashing their inner assholes, and 99.99% aren’t greedy or selfish. All of us will constantly find nice drops in our mailbox because someone thought the recipient might use it. I’ve had multiple things just show up in my mailbox because they might be useful for my character.
I’m not saying experiences like yours don’t exist. They do. However, they generally indicate that someone (probably you) needs to be more selective about the criteria you utilize in order to choose your associates. Are you honestly trying to argue that you have more greed or selfishness within a guild than with random people? If so, the problem isn’t the guild structure in general, but rather the guild you’ve placed yourself in.
Being in a guild seems a requirement to play these games now.
It’s not. But it does make things easier. Much of it depends on what it is you’re wanting to “play”. If you’re concerned about rapid advancement and seeing it all before everyone else, the requirements are, of course, much more stringent. But that has to do with the inherent discipline the whole group needs in order to progress. While it’s theoretically possible to obtain all of that outside of a guild structure, why would you ever try to do so? The implementation of common leadership and structure streamlines the process, which is quite key for maximizing advancement.
If you just want to see things, well, I think for the most part looser agglomerations of people who don’t want such stringent structure tend to naturally form to overcome obstacles. But they take longer and are more organic (and hence less efficient) in nature.
Why should it matter?
Because you’re only considering multiplayer games where a large part of the draw is player interaction. It doesn’t matter one whit if you want to play, say, Oblivion. It matters a lot more if you want to be a dominating Quake player. It’s exactly analogous to the way that really superb chess players don’t really get a whole lot out of going to local chess afficianado meetings and playing against new players.
A guild of a dozen people is unlikely to see any content where 50 are required, yet this limitation is completely artificial.
A) I don’t accept your premise, coming from a guild of roughly that at the time and nevertheless having seen endgame WoW raiding which requires 40 people. It was, of course, at a much more leisurely pace. But that was a tradeoff I was more than happy to make given that it allowed me not to have to put up with the really onerous social structures of large powerguilds.
B) We’ve discussed this multiple times elsewhere, but the limitations are not artificial. If anything, current performance in the WoW expansion would tend to point toward the idea that bigger encounters (i.e. for more people) actually are more accessible to players, because they don’t require such rigid performance constraints when there are extra players who can take up the slack to make the “average” quality of play meet a certain level. (This is offset by logistics, of course.)
What if players were left with a more level playing field? What if there were no in-game support or functionality to assist player associations?
People would organically organize to do this. This used to happen all the time in Everquest before we got raid groupings. You’d take 36+ random people up to the Plane of Hate. People were told not to talk in open channels so that instructions could be conveyed there. It got incredibly spammy if you were raiding somewhere that was also a normal play zone, but people managed to do it anyway. The social interfaces aren’t built to enforce a playstyle; rather they’re built to ease a playstyle that’s already been demonstrated to grow organically. I suggest it’s because at the end of the day we’re still social creatures and we tend to organize along social lines. This has good and bad repercussions in games, just like in real life.
So I ask, is the status quo really the best way to handle this? Am I completely out to lunch?
Good players no longer join pick up groups because they sucked in the first place, because they contain people that suck.
If there weren’t Guilds, there would be friends’ lists which would perform the same use. For instance, in DAoC, I had a maxed out friends list on all of my characters that had the main (and many of the secondary) characters of all the players I invited to my pickup groups. If I didn’t have enough, I would ask them to invite their friends, etc.
Picking up random people from the battlegroup was a surefire way to get people that didn’t listen, weren’t geared, had oddball and innefective specs, or simply sucked in some way or another.
Also, WTB friends list with ridiculously high limits. Like, in the thousands. I should never run out of space on my friends list.
You’re saying game mechanics should be designed to force good players to go out and mix with the general populace so as to improve the quality of the pickup groups?
I wouldn’t put up with a system like that. I’d stop playing. In fact, I did stop playing - DDO made PUGs absolutely necessary, and mixed people around a lot, and Turbine did take steps to try to prevent players from telling each other “hey, I was in this group, and these people were in it, and they sucked, avoid them”. End result, some good groups, some crappy ones, and the crappy ones are what I remembered and a big part of what convinced me to cancel.
This amounts to socialism of good-gamerness - the cooperative and effective players need to spread themselves out and not play with people they know are fun to play with so as to bestow the gift of maybe having some occasional good group members on random passers-by, who haven’t done anything in particular to deserve it other than exist. It’s entirely different from what would be a valid and laudable goal of directing good new players towards the guilds where they are likely to find people they like playing with - there are ways of doing that, which have been implemented in past games, and forcing pick-up groups is not it.
The problem is they are trying to cater to two disparate groups. There should be two games. One for Uber, Type A, gotta be the best, effeciency is priority is number one people, players, and one for the catassing, lets dance naked on mailboxes, go wherever our fleeting thoughts take us, players.
Both groups want their progress quest and both groups don’t want to feel like they’re getting shafted for their efforts. This results in gear from raids that’s only marginally better than non-raid gear and a large portion of the player base cut off from endgame content. So understandably, since everyone sees their 15 dollars a month as equal, why aren’t their needs being addressed equally?
When it comes to WoW (I haven’t followed other MMOs as closely), I tend to side a little bit with the latter group. Blizzard did almost nothing for that group the last two years when compared what they implemented for the former group, unless you consider the pvp grind the casual gaming experience. The people that really get shafted are the borderline cases, they’ll run through content quickly, but generally get locked out endgame content.
Another thing not being taken into account is many people play these games who know each other in real life. I have been gaming with some of the same people for 5+ years now. If we didn’t have a guild, we would have some other way (shared chat channel, even outside of game chat like AIM etc) to get in touch with each other.
WoW doesn’t have nearly the social aspect that DAoC had, but there still is a pretty good one. A guild is, untimately, something that the leaders have to put in effort to make successful. And, for the most part, you get out of it what you put into it. So it can be a good situation, or a gigo one.
QFT. There were only two circumstances under which I ever ran pickup groups in World of Warcraft:
When I was drunk and thought it’d be funny to watch retards die to the exploding ghouls in Scholo.
When a guildmate and I started charging random fuckheads 500g for their 45 minute Baron runs.*
I can’t see any other circumstances under which it would be desirable to run a PuG. Hell, when I was farming books in Dire Maul, I just abused the West Tome / treant pathing nonsense to solo it. PuGing to farm books would have been as desirable as an 8am root canal.
We actually made a lot of gold doing that. I <3 eBay Superstars.
See, I’m not so sure. Believe me, I’m no emo carebear. I’m quite the competitive asshole. I’d even go so far as to say, given a month, I can play your class as well or better than you can. I’m simply wondering if this mentality is part of the problem…if the games we’ve been playing up 'til this point have us conditioned to think this way. I’ll readily agree that currently, the average pickup group will be 60/40 good players to bad.
It’s easy to dismiss other players as poor performers. It’s easy to say, “Well, I know the people in my guild are pretty good, so I can safely assume that any friends of theirs are friends of mine. Additionally, I like three people in Guild X, so I’ll give the rest of their members the benefit of doubt.” I’d bet that more than half of the guilds on any given server contain players worth grouping with.
The problem here is a human one, and I’m not so sure there is a solution. No one can argue that MMOG players tend to favor safety and conservative play. It stands to reason that they’ll take the same approach towards grouping.
A point I’m trying to make here is that guild-membership seems to be a barrier to entry for some aspects of the game, and it’s a completely arbitrary and artificial one. I know what the kneejerk reactions are, but think about it…do you honestly believe there’s no better way to do this?
See, I’m not so sure. Believe me, I’m no emo carebear. I’m quite the competitive asshole. I’d even go so far as to say, given a month, I can play your class as well or better than you can. I’m simply wondering if this mentality is part of the problem…if the games we’ve been playing up 'til this point have us conditioned to think this way. I’ll readily agree that currently, the average pickup group will be 60/40 good players to bad.
It’s easy to dismiss other players as poor performers. It’s easy to say, “Well, I know the people in my guild are pretty good, so I can safely assume that any friends of theirs are friends of mine. Additionally, I like three people in Guild X, so I’ll give the rest of their members the benefit of doubt.” I’d bet that more than half of the guilds on any given server contain players worth grouping with.
The problem here is a human one, and I’m not so sure there is a solution. No one can argue that MMOG players tend to favor safety and conservative play. It stands to reason that they’ll take the same approach towards grouping.
A point I’m trying to make here is that guild-membership seems to be a barrier to entry for some aspects of the game, and it’s a completely arbitrary and artificial one. I know what the kneejerk reactions are, but think about it…do you honestly believe there’s no better way to do this?
