112248-carbine-haventand-they-still-dont-teachedcontributed-players-to-form-value-and-respect-groups-big-mistake

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But it doesn't. You obviously view it as anti-social, but I view it as a chance to meet new people. Some people, like myself, remember names or nicknames of people they ran with in completely random queues. Sometimes you see those people again and you recognize each other and it's fun. It's like "Oh, hey, you!" Edit: STOP MAKING ME CUPCAKING AGREE WITH A CHUA.


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OLIIIIIII!!!!!!! missed you m8, how was the vacation, did lots of sience? OT: Soooo in Aeon, you had zones that you had to clear with a group. IN WS you have dungeons that have to be cleared in a group. Both the zone and dungeons are needed for progression. So the ONLY difference is the lvl required to start running these zones/dungeons in groups. I also kinda agree with Oli, the reason i play MMO's is because of the social aspect that naturally comes with these games. You really shouldn't have to be told that  you should group up in an MMO to increase your fun :P


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Noone cares about others, while everything is ok for themselves. But low population may change vector of the game content development.

I already said about a lot of exp and good loot and main storyline in those elite zones. In wildstar nothing forces you to play dungeons on low level, only curiosity and gameplay experience. But it's not enough for most of the players.


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The devs will never nerf the content. The game will be hardcore even if there was only one player playing it. Devs will sell their organs to keep the servers running. Hardcore.


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The problem is, players DO play these games without the expectation that they have to be proactively social. There should be no auto-macthing group finder functionality, and it was also a mistake when they made shared mob tagging a thing.


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You can't reach anything solo. Every zone has 2+, 3+ 5+ quests, 5 man rare spawns, 20 man event bosses, world events that always take more people. That LFG is putting you in groups where you are playing with people. Hell, I've been doing some events with people of the other faction (we're like that on Evindra) just to help them out. There's a lot of group content, not to mention that you essentially have to never use your chat to make friends to maintain your bubble. And that's not mentioning PVP. If you chose to skip that stuff, not only are you missing some of the best content in the game, but you're intentionally not making friends. There are social tools all over the UI that help you. Carbine's put everything you need at your fingertips. If you leveled up by yourself, skipping anything group oriented, then got to the end and wondered why Carbine didn't teach you how to function in a group (is that really a thing for MMORPG players now?  I thought we all knew how to basically form up by now) you've missed the point. Carbine gave you a way to skip that stuff and blitz to the end so people could easily level cap alts. I've got a virtual rolodex of people to call up for whatever I want now, and that's before becoming friends with a lot of the coffee people here and joining one of the guilds. And that wasn't me going out looking for friends; that's just the game being what it is.


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I like to think that if there's one thing game developers have learned in the last 10 years, it's that trying to force players to do something they do not want to do is not a good way to keep players. Why so many of the players still haven't figured it out yet is beyond me. Maybe it has something to do with the way players don't actually depend on the playerbase as a whole to pay their mortgage and grocery bills. Those who want to do group content already have tons of ways to do it, and tons of group content that is, by all accounts, among the most challenging on the market. Those who don't--and there are a variety of perfectly legitimate reasons why they don't, by the way, not least of which is the appalling behavior of some people in groups--are not going to appreciate efforts to force them into doing it, no matter how much you think they ought to.


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Looking over the wreckage of the past few months, I honestly have to say Wildstar gets a failing grade in gamer psychology 101. 'Solo your way to 50? Drama over LFG/medal abuse? Bypass itemization RNG by crafting? Whoudathunkit?'


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This has already been solved long ago though. Solo content = Average rewards. 5 Man content = Good rewards. Raids = Great rewards. Why this had to be changed to begin with is the real question here I think. If 5 mans offer little or no reward people aren`t gonna bother. When you have easier stuff you can do in LFG and then all of a sudden things that require coordination so you can`t use the LFG, the learning curve is broken and the OP is right.


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It might be, but it was also the end of the concept of a server as a community. I didn't necessarily say LFD was a bad idea, but we did lose that sense of not only community, but social congruity. There's a reason so many people here are complaining about group functionality. Quite a few, I'm assuming, haven't even played a game where they have had to care about the social aspect of an MMORPG. It wasn't necessarily an absolutely positive idea, and something was definitively lost when it became standard practice to be able to wait in queue, be teleported to the instance, and to dispose of the group at the end of the run. It's something that an in-game system cannot restore. It may be necessary, but obviously we still haven't overcome the ill effects the system tends to produce. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Unfortunately, there are actually a lot of highly effective single-edged swords that simply don't have the problem. Double edged swords were very rarely worth the other edge in practice. Nice in theory, but in practice they did very little. You have to remember that these systems have deeper ramifications. It returns to concepts we've been discussing lately about megaservers wiping out communities, what bronze medal attunement changes mean to the skill base, etc. I've been for a number of these changes, but I'm very acutely aware of how things that seem exceptionally simple very fundamentally change the game. WoW implemented the system you're talking about. Individualized loot. After clearing a raid, every single player individually rolls on their own gear which is always useful for them. This was a direct response to what we've been talking about happening in Wildstar, the result of extending anonymity and disposability to what was originally intended to be a highly social game. And this was, of course, a response to people saying they didn't want to have to walk to instances and put together groups in the LFG channel because it was so hard. Maybe it was for the overall good, but these changes turned WoW into a MUCH different game than it was in vanilla, and not all of the changes have been positive. It's turned what was once a more vibrant, open world with a lot of people randomly grouping or bringing guildmates in to help them into one where you can largely play alone while you wait for a queue to put you into a random group. It's one of the reasons why, even with guilds and circles, so many people are still saying it's impossible for them to run group content with less playtime. That didn't used to necessarily be a major complaint, you found people on your schedule and ran with them. Now, a great many players (such as the OP) seem to have no way of actually putting together some form of group. That's a major blow to the MMORPG genre as a whole. While convenience has made the games easier to operate in, it's also greatly reduced the social impact that sets those games apart from just another RPG game that lets you randomly group together to play co op. That's a more pressing problem, really, because it's negatively affected how we even speak to each other in the open world and how we view the people we group with. It's affected how we view content itself, now seen as much less of a destination and dungeon and more of a "level" as in a more common game. It's changed how we see each other. Your guild used to be your circle, and I know people from the very first guilds I joined in WoW and FFXI. That's not as much of the case anymore, people don't always see a guild as a good group of friends, they often see it as a burden. Very often, we lose things we didn't even know we'd miss. We look back at the things that abounded in vanilla WoW and say, "Why did we like this?  We had to summon people into the stone, runs took hours sometimes, people wiped, we needed 40 people for a raid, what was good about all that?  WoW now should objectively be a lot better than it was!" Maybe it is, in a way, but we do miss things that were inimical and intimated by the system we had, things we can't synthetically reproduce bereft of the conditions they existed in. This entire topic is entirely tied to what MMORPGs have become with these improvements. Maybe they're better and we can't go back, but we've lost quite a bit of the good things as well. Things we can't get back simply because a group isn't a group of friends anymore, it's a pishposh of machine parts judged solely by their function. Other people in this game aren't as important as they were ten years ago; they're disposable and replaceable commodities, numbers meant to fill up your raid so you can see content. That's a fantastic departure from where the genre came from. It's made game designers a lot more money to do it that way because it draws in players who have no intention of being social, but I'm not sure it's made the overall experience better than it was. It's simply made it easier to treat people like pieces.


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One of the rare cases in this day and age of "substance over style". :P


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