Iksar said:Personally I think it's a symptom of the rise of social media. Sprinkle on growing toxicity over the years & the rise of trolls.
Back in the mid to late 90s people were FAR more chatty online, the age of chat rooms and talking to random people. Not to mention it could often be much faster to just quickly ask someone online when trying to find some specific information since search engines weren't amazing back then. If you weren't specific in your search you'd often just find yourself neck deep in geocities and angelfire sites. Social media (Facebook/Myspace) came around eventually and most people shifted into that, becoming content in their own bubbles talking to people they know in the real world & promoting their own lives to one another.
In EQ I remember most zones had a pretty healthy /ooc chat going on at any given time in addition to people's group chats, even in DAoC I saw it only a little less commonly. WoW I only ever remember seeing it (Horde) in Orgrimmar and The Barrens (early in the games life) with increasingly rare conversations in instance groups after matchmaking entered the picture. I don't know if it's voice chat that killed it, an increase in people who only talk with friends/guildmembers, something else entirely, or all of it together. I'm cautiously optimistic that Pantheon will have much more of a community feel, but we'll see.
I suspect you're right, and that makes me sad.
philo said:I struggle with pugs. Not knowing my group and their capabilities/personalities (both in game and out) can make things difficult and less fun. Once I've been playing for awhile and get to know people I tend to never pug.
I may be an outlier here, but I love pugs, especially as a tank when I'm able to control the flow, speed, and direction of the group.
That doesn't mean I take drive-by invites - those are obnoxious. But one of my favorite things to do is form a group of strangers and enter into an unkown dungeon together.
This also translates into my love for guild recruitment. Love it, and favorite part of leading a guild. It's odd, because that's something unique to MMO's for me. Out of game, I'm a grumpy, angry son of a b**** that just grunts at people - In game i'm sociable and love meeting new people.
Up with Pugs!
Kilsin said:What part of playing your character in MMORPGs do you struggle with the most? #PRF #Communitymatters
Grouping mostly.
Initially in EQ1, I had no issue randomly talking to new people and grouping up. As games came and went, and the player base changed, I found myself often wondering why I grouped with these people.
Not usually because of how they played, but the stupid things they talk about and say. There's been times I knew I was in a group with people in their 30's, but if I had to just go by the chat, I would have though they were in their teens. It's amazing how the anonimity of the internet has made people say and do stupid stuff, and generally act like immature morons.
This, and the emergence of voice chat and many peoples insistance that you use it in group, have really turned me off of PUGs.
PS: We all have had that one guy in the group with the open mic, and you spend the entire night trying to identify the noises, and hope beyond hope your most twisted guesses are incorrect. :)
Well said Fulton. I'm intrigued by the various preferences listed in this thread. Some people despise pugs for any number of reasons. Some prefer them. Some players want to chat more...others would prefer if people refrained from chating (or at least the chat was more mature).
To me, most of the issues in this thread would be solved if you are only grouping with highly skilled, mature players. Good luck with that in todays MMO landscape...
For me, the hardest thing has been the expectation that you will jump in voice chat with people you don't know to do some bit of content or other. First, I typically play on my laptop in my living room, so putting on the headphones and shutting out the room isn't always possible - and talking when others (namely my wife) is trying to watch TV next to me is downright rude...
But second, while more often than not, the people in the chat are fine... you do sometimes end up in voice with people you just don't want to be in voice chat with.
So for me, the proliferation of voice chat in MMO's has been a double edged sword - I enjoy using it on my terms... I don't always like having it thrust upon me if something is going on that I want to do, and it's "get in voice with us, or don't come." Their choice to do that, my choice to go or not... but it does create some moments for me that end up being less than enjoyable.
Wandidar said:For me, the hardest thing has been the expectation that you will jump in voice chat with people you don't know to do some bit of content or other. First, I typically play on my laptop in my living room, so putting on the headphones and shutting out the room isn't always possible - and talking when others (namely my wife) is trying to watch TV next to me is downright rude...
But second, while more often than not, the people in the chat are fine... you do sometimes end up in voice with people you just don't want to be in voice chat with.
So for me, the proliferation of voice chat in MMO's has been a double edged sword - I use it and enjoy using it on my terms... I don't always like having it thrust upon me if somthing is going on that I want to do, and it's "get in voice with us, or don't come." Their choice to do that, my choice to go or not... but it does create some moments for me that end up being less than enjoyable.
Lol I don't like being "forced" to do anything...don't give me a choice either or else. I'll take the or else (don't come) and go off on my own. :) I can be ornery sometimes. lol
Sarim said:Pretty easy. For me its playing a certain class, then noticing "I could really use ability X of class Y right now". So I start an alt of class Y, and then notice after some time "Oh, now it would be really neat to have ability A of class B". So I start an alt of class B, and so on...
Really, in EQ this has been the case a lot. Its a sign that significant class abilities are well distributed, but it also has repeatedly made it difficult for me to really decide for (and stay with) one class :)
Wow, Sarim. I was going to say exactly the same thing. Going to try and stay focused on my main this time...I'll pre-make alts for name reservations and play them a little, but want to stay more focused on my main.
Perhaps I'm taking Kilsin's question too literally, but difficulty playing my character makes me think more of previous world issues rather than social ones. Here are my top 10 in no particular order.
1. Low ceilings and narrow hallways in dungeons which caused erratic camera behaviour in 3rd person view. I don't mind the small spaces but there needs to be an alternative to 3rd person to be able to detect mobs coming up behind you. Perhaps better audio cues or an alternative camera system of some type? This is especially true for CC classes.
2. Levitate negating jump. You should still be able to jump when you are levitated, even if it's a bit of a mushy jump. Small races were particularly disadvantaged by getting jammed up in terrain and had to cancel lev to get free.
3. Inventory management. Things like spell research components all looked the same and finding items through tooltips or clicking each one was a pain. Need a bag search search feature in any modern MMO.
4. Inventory management redux. Losing items that are "on one of these alts somewhere". I think with the demand for more situational gear, it's going to be even harder to keep track of which character has a given piece of gear. It would be awesome if there was some way to search for an item across characters on a single account.
5. Finding friends online. Not having a shared friends list across characters meant that I often didn't notice when friends were online, especially when I was on a lesser-played alt. Ditto for ignore lists. I'd like the option of adding friends or ignores to just one character or all characters on an account.
6. Missing friends who log in. I'd like to get a notification if one of my friends logs in.
7. Mouse/Keyboard interchange - I've never really be satisfied using just the keyboard to control my character. I'd like to be able to, but the keyboard always seems like a sluggish control option. I'm not sure if that's a function of my keybd, the game's I'm choosing to play or just a fact of life for all game keyboard controls.
8. When we had relatively low resolution screens and modest sized monitors it was easy to stay on top of all of the alerts, messages and in-game activity. When screens got huge I found myself still wanting to put major UI components around the border of my screen to keep the centre open for immersive play. I also started to notice that important bits were spilling into my peripheral vision to the point where I was missing things. So a challenge is to keep the important stuff all together where it will be noticed yet maximize the high resolution gaming experience. The ability to individually scale UI elements would be a big win in this regard.
9. Not knowing who is in a pickup group. Not to kill the social interaction, but I'd like to be able to see at a glance the makeup of my group. Class and level.
10. Not knowing who the group leader was. All too often you just didn't know. A group can live for hours and hours with a rotating cast of players. It was surprisingly easy to lose track or even not know that someone had made YOU the leader.
I really struggle internally with the Min/Max side of my personality and it's competition with my role playing, it's just a game, better to figure it out slowly over time and own it - side of me.
A lot of games I've played there's a strong emphasis on measuring yourself against other players with absolute numbers(not in the I want to be good, but in the I don't want to be kicked out of this group or called a noob), which seems to lend itself towards sacrificing true immersion and time played towards finding some website / calculator / magic max build someone else has done all the work for, so you can be the person in the game others want you to be quickly enough to not be isolated from groups or raids.
I was terrible in EverQuest for a really long time, and I strangely remember that being some of my most fun game times. I enjoyed the struggle, the process, the lack of easily found information and the community relationships that came out of discovering it together. Now I find myself wanting to log onto websites and spend a half hour researching to forgo days / months of hard work so I can efficiently be highly functional in a game. I kind of hate myself for it, starting with high ideals of self discovery, but knowing I will probably have a moment of weakness internalized as being efficient and sell my soul again. Also boils down to my opinion about damage meters (which I don't want to derail the OP), but that which becomes a yardstick to develop the Min/Max and quantify it in such absolute terms. I for one was most happy in game knowing I was trying my hardest in a group and community of people I mutually trusted to be doing the same, and not having to be told I wasn't meeting my 20% damage requirement for my class, etc. It really seemed to dumb down the value of the interaction.
Good question Kilsin! Made me think a lot about myself.
Number 6 is on my wish list: 6. Missing friends who log in. I'd like to get a notification if one of my friends logs in.
And I am not a min maxxer, I am a completionist however. :) I don't research sites for the current template, they started using templates of the week or the month in the original Guild Wars (pvp) I like to test my skills against others according to what I know, what I learn. I don't want to be a clone of someone else. :) "We are the Borg". lol
Cana
Calendor named a few familair ones...
1. older quests, EQ had the quest "Breakdown in Communication"
what I found a bit dissapointing is that when the game progressed, it was about imposible to get enough people to do old raids and thus completing an old reward; don't get me wrong, the effort should reflect the effort in the past. Just give me a path I can follow, even if it is a long solo one, so long as I can tell the old guy I put as much effort in it and deserved it equally.
2. quest difficuly, don't make quests too hard, 14 years in solving time:
https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20748466235
3. UI-fighting-gameplayjoy, don't make fighting too complex where it distracts you from the immersion; heroic opportunities is a wheel too far imo
4. swapping, swapping presets of spells/weapons/gear would be nice, as if it was only to reduce downtime when a group sets itself up
5. typing talking blockers, EQ been a while for me, but spamming a key to drag a corpse was annoying, especially if you had to talk-type to someone too
6. getting to it, when you get invited to a group, and you have been there before, there should be a limit on wait time. if the group has to wait more then X minutes, you could be dumped half way your travel distance. (and then still if you want to play with a compatible group, but your current\new character did not travel there before). this would ofcourse not be the case where you know in advance that you have to be somewhere (for raids for example)
7. where again? - reagent map, though the experience of getting somewhere the first time is exciting, getting lost when you haven't been somewhere in a while could be annoying too. So what's a character preventing from drawing it's own maps in game? like a fog of war that reveales map when having been there before. let the character do a mapping course quest, buy parchment and a quill and have those like food and drink be used up while you explore the map (or something like that)
8. game changers, too many changes in play style for a class over the course of level progress.
9. all mine, quad kiting and the like, but I suppose that was more a lack of practice on my part.. then excessive are players taking all the mobs
10. train through the red light, I don't mind being run over before a fair warning, but when your group gets wiped by someone trying to avoid xp/buff loss suddenly is annoying. So much extra down time.
11. stuck, Getting stuck in the scenery and not getting away on time when roamer comes by. The rewind option made it better but not always. (needed to yell when stuck in a tree in PoK, lol, as , as a wizzy, I was not able to cast bind being ducked)
Pointless timesinks that are there just to be timesinks. i.e. Long travel to get to the good stuff. I'm ok with it once, but having to repeat it over and over is not my idea of challenging game play. I want to play when I log in. I commute about 80-90 minutes a day in real life. I don't want that crap in a game.
Rydan said:10. train through the red light, I don't mind being run over before a fair warning, but when your group gets wiped by someone trying to avoid xp/buff loss suddenly is annoying. So much extra down time.
This. Very annoying. I know there needs to be risk in the game, but game mechanics that let unscrupulous players grief others is not cool. I think if a mob is engaged with someone outside of your group/raid, it should not aggro anyone else but the player it is mad at. Once the player zones, the mobs should go on a leash mechanism to take them back to their spawn point without aggroing people who are in the nearby vicinity.