Not sure I agree. True, competition makes people care more about what other groups of players do, but it also tends to turn bring out the worst in many people. And it tends to weed out a lot of nice people that perform poorly. I would also argue that WoW is much more competitive than EQ ever was. Sure, you can't cockblock guilds like you could back in EQ, but between omnipresent performance metrics and the sheer number of players you get an extremely competitive environment at the top. I think one reason that EQ had a strong community was that internet access back in 1999 wasn't something that your average illiterate 13 year old had. Most people I played with were either collage students or IT professionals. Other games of that period such as UO and SWG had very strong communities as well.
How would you re-socialize MMOs?
- Thread starter TragedyAnn_sl
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Kreugen
Vyemm Raider
- 6,599
- 793
This is completely the opposite of my point.
I was referring to the annoyance of reaching the point where doing anything useful requires manually putting a goddamn group together, which is made even more difficult if the game lacks the things you list as negatives. Without shit like LFG tools or a simple metric like gearscore applying for a group becomes a fucking job interview. But mostly I'm talking about accessibility - can I log into the game and within a short period of time start doing something useful likeplaying the gameinstead of waiting around for people to fill out a group.
Since this is yet another "fellate Everquest as the perfect MMO ever" thread you should keep in mind that Everquest evolved into every player running their own multi-boxed group because it was too much of a fucking pain in the ass to not only get a functional group together but also to find people willing to do the specific thing you wanted to do. Even if they were friends/guildmates you wound up spending hours upon hours doing things they wanted in order to get to do the things you wanted. This is fun?
What you need to be asking is do you want a good multi-player game or do you want 3D Facebook. Because the reason EQ and Eve work is because they are barely games at all.
Kreugen
Vyemm Raider
- 6,599
- 793
After sucking the cocks of people I hate to get things done in MMOs I've lost the taste for dick, is what I'm saying.
If the gameplay is thin and trivial then you can just play with people you like. As soon as you make the game challenging enough to care about the performance of your teammates, then you find yourself down on your knees chugging the cock of some asshole.
I'm done with that. No more dick. I'll play the game up until it reaches that point, then I'm gone.
If the gameplay is thin and trivial then you can just play with people you like. As soon as you make the game challenging enough to care about the performance of your teammates, then you find yourself down on your knees chugging the cock of some asshole.
I'm done with that. No more dick. I'll play the game up until it reaches that point, then I'm gone.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_in_the_Desert?
Take everything from this game.
Incorporate it into your combat oriented game.
Profit.
Take everything from this game.
Incorporate it into your combat oriented game.
Profit.
If I want to socialize I log off and go do it . "people" in game are just meaningless blips of pixels that really add no value to my life.
Miele
Lord Nagafen Raider
- 916
- 48
I developed over the years a repulsion for two type of things in MMOs: people not talking at all and people judging my performance being totally oblivious to their own one (basically letting me carry them to loot). At this point, if socializing is forcing me to play with these asshats, I'll take mercs and bots and companions every day and twice on sunday.
Sometimes, but not too often, I get into a guild that has decent people and enjoy a bit of socialization in that context.
While questing/levelling the occasions to socialize depend on the game, for example swtor has some group quest and from those I get to occasionally chat with somebody beyond a simple hello, but it's not a standard procedure anymore.
Of one thing I'm sure: I don't want to go back to 1999. I'd be ok with a vanilla wow experience, where you needed to form a group, travel to dungeons, join guilds, raid together with 40 people, etc. instead of the automated queueing of the modern days, but in the end, I'm ok with those as well, except for the emphasys on raiding, modern MMOs are very casual friendly and admittely I'm a casual nowadays.
I keep saying that there is a huge difference in the type of people that play these games now versus 15 years ago. You're not playing with people with entirely different mindsets when it comes to games so it's harder to find people you have something in common with other name playing MMOs.
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
- 8,372
- 10,410
Finance and business scale.
In the 2000s, SOE, and Turbine, and Mythic, and all those MMO pioneers were relatively small, autonomous structures. Basically, they had a local presence, and international sales were what happened by chance. I know, I got my EQ box by mail from a friend who was in the US, and most expansion boxes were to be had in small computer games stores that had an import business. You just didn't find those MMOs in any mainstream stores in France.
It all started to change around 2002, as gaming became a much bigger industry. That's when SOE tried to offload its european business to Ubisoft because it didn't had resources to properly expand - or so they thought - in that market, and, well, taxes were starting to come in play (quite simply, Europe started asking US companies for the tax on "local sales of services"). It failed, because EQ was already saturated, and the only way they could justify their existence was migrating existing customers to the non-returnable blackhole that was Venril Sathir (I think?). Just a before, Mythic tried the same, offloading their european business to GOA which was big online gaming business at the time (well, sort of). Didn't work, for the same reason: players were already playing on the US DAOC servers, and didn't want to migrate.
Plus GOA wasn't that good at online business. But I digress.
When Vivendi-Universal Games wanted to launch World of Warcraft, they already knew that people were interested in playing games in their own language rather than english (you had a number of people that had completely stopped EQ, even for years, that were interested enough in EQ French or EQ German to resub), and they had a european subsidiary already in place (due to the fact that, well, the Vivendi part was originally french). That, plus the tax hell that is Euro-wide VAT for non-euros made the decision easy: a separate business unit for EU and US, and localized games.
I'm pretty sure that the EU companies have to pay VAT as well. Before the taxation law change you basically got away with not paying VAT at all for things like MMO subs.
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
- 8,372
- 10,410
Of course they have. But if you're headquartered in the EU, it's very simple to pay VAT: you pay in your headquarters' country. Done.
If you're a US business distributing in Europe, without a local presence, each government where you sell will ask your for the VAT. 23 countries, 23 VAT filings. At potentially different tax rates, and you need to be able to figure out where exactly each of your customer lives. That's what I am referring as VAT hell: it's so much simpler to set up a EU business unit, and make sure the EU business unit sells to the EU... and then, to be sure you don't have stray EU customers trying to purchase the stuff cheaper in US$, you lock them out of the US market.
Note that there's other reasons why you'd want to segment your market once you're established in multiple continents. Market segmentation allows you to set different prices for different markets: a higher price where people are able to pay more, a lower where you need to reduce it to get customers at all. However, notably with immaterial goods and services, if you do that without segmentation, well, everybody purchases the asian sub, then uses the english client to connect to the servers and play with their US friends. And you've lost a % of high-paying US customers. So you make sure those asian subs can be used only on asian markets, where, presumably, your US-based customer will not be tempted to play because of too much rang-rang. But that works only if you have a business operation for that market: if you have no local market established, you're not going to lock out your potential customers.
And then you get Australia.
shabushabu
Molten Core Raider
- 1,409
- 185
There was something special about teamwork in online games from grouping to raiding... I enjoyed that socialization and the community that developed around it. The current model has removed that completely in part due to the conveniences you seem to cherish... I get it and I like games where I don't have to socialize as well... ( for that I play single player stuff )... I just think when you lose socialization from MMOs, they are like shitty single player RPGs that I would never play anyway.
If i want a single player experience do i play some MMO ? Hell no, i play Skyrim or some other great single player experience... Of course there are room for multiple types of games and right now there are a plethora of games that are solo centric and I certainly hope a more group focused game comes out at some point.
shabushabu
Molten Core Raider
- 1,409
- 185
Interestingly this is what i originally liked about MMOs. I would spend time with people I normally wouldn't yet all the socialization was channeled around gameplay and mechanics and server drama ( for the most part )...
I think now games are so simplistic and so few require socialization so you lose that community and instead you are talking to some 15 year old about life, which I have no interest in doing.. talking about how we down a boss ? I can do that.
Srathor
Vyemm Raider
- 1,884
- 3,045
If I hit the lottery, I would design a game that The server clusters would be a continent, each server would be a township or "State" and npc guilds and player guilds would be the towns and cities. There would be overworld commodities like food, water, ore, oil, power crystals and the like.
The games would start almost civ based. The different leader npc's and pcs just starting out in a new world. (Insert story about refugees fleeing dying planet with a new type of magic.) Have guild based tech and magic research trees. Have overworld npc transport of goods. Have capturable mines, fields, towns and such. Have NPC's with factions and loyalty to factions. As well as guilds with faction rewards and losses. Have hireable guards, peons, packmules, carts and boats. Even have hireable mage transport of goods, or pc transport as well but with major costs involved. (Tech/magic upgrades)
Guild based politics and pvp over resources, If you travel/explore far enough you find the other "State servers" that you can visit and given enough movement by your people invade.
Have aggressive NPC factions that take over mines and dungeons/ruined cities as well. Have the ability to populate your guilds captured spots with npc's as well as pc's, Your guild housing could be based in Befallen and have you fix up the place.
NPC factions can be driven out but not wiped out due to the "other universe refugees"
Now to play the lottery.
The games would start almost civ based. The different leader npc's and pcs just starting out in a new world. (Insert story about refugees fleeing dying planet with a new type of magic.) Have guild based tech and magic research trees. Have overworld npc transport of goods. Have capturable mines, fields, towns and such. Have NPC's with factions and loyalty to factions. As well as guilds with faction rewards and losses. Have hireable guards, peons, packmules, carts and boats. Even have hireable mage transport of goods, or pc transport as well but with major costs involved. (Tech/magic upgrades)
Guild based politics and pvp over resources, If you travel/explore far enough you find the other "State servers" that you can visit and given enough movement by your people invade.
Have aggressive NPC factions that take over mines and dungeons/ruined cities as well. Have the ability to populate your guilds captured spots with npc's as well as pc's, Your guild housing could be based in Befallen and have you fix up the place.
NPC factions can be driven out but not wiped out due to the "other universe refugees"
Now to play the lottery.
Cinge
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
- 7,307
- 2,363
I laugh at stupid comments like this. You and people like you must live in bubbles and refuse to even try to reach out beyond it, you don't want socialization, you want the game to force others to come inside your bubble and talk to you. The bolded is even more retarded, since that that literally happens as much as it did previously as it does today, the main difference is its on VOIP instead of text for the most part.
Morrow
Trakanon Raider
- 3,341
- 948
Unless you were a Bard, then you just learned to socialize in 2.9 second intervals.
shabushabu
Molten Core Raider
- 1,409
- 185
Bullshit. What the fuck do you talk about with guildmates when most MMOs today are solo experiences 90% of the way? My point was I like talking about game mechanics with people of all backgrounds and in the past this was a necessity to complete content... even trash mobs took teamwork...Duh that shit is nearly all gone now.