Cooperation in MMORPGs

One thing MMORPGs are surprisingly bad at is getting a group of random strangers together to have fun. Jeromai is describing his experience with Wildstar dungeons:

"People say that Wildstar dungeons are fun. And challenging. It really makes me wonder about how and what they define a challenge. Mechanics-wise, yeah, they’re complex and interesting. But learning how to perform them well seems to be much less of a challenge than assembling a properly prepared (read: gear and build) group together in the first place. If one considers the random nature of the PUG as part of the challenge in a difficult dungeon, then I could also say that getting a precursor in GW2 is so fun-and-challenging because one is battling a most cruel RNG in the form of Zommoros’ Mystic Forge. Personally, I’m left feeling less ‘challenged’ per se, and more helpless. It’s the same sort of challenge as the Marionette. You could teach until your tongue turns blue and ultimately, your progress is still at the mercy of someone else not screwing up. It is RNG. RNG you could skew in your favor by joining an organized community – a hardcore dungeon guild, or TTS marionette-running instances, fer example, but still RNG, rather than a challenge that one can defeat through one’s efforts."

There was a time when I was a hardcore raider. But even in a hardcore raiding guild you get this helpless feeling. I've been a healer in a boss encounter where everybody was still alive at the point when the boss enraged, making me feel helpless in view of insufficient DPS. And I have also been in the situation where I didn't play for a while, got invited by friends into a raid on coming back, and felt helpless like the weak link of the raid, the guy being carried. Neither situation is pleasant. You don't want other people to make you fail, and you don't want to make other people fail. But trying to always be with a group that is exactly as good as you are and exactly as well equipped as you are is practically impossible.

Rohan was analyzing the claim that players in EVE Online could be useful on day one, and found that it relied on there being no maximum group size and no scaling of difficulty. Another game where a player is useful on day one would be A Tale in the Desert, because of the same effects: If the group project is collecting a million bricks to build a huge building, every additional player making bricks is welcome, regardless how good he is at that. And to some extent, vanilla World of Warcraft also had that. Decent guilds could run a 40-man raid with just 30 players and succeed, which gave them 10 slots for invites where you weren't too worried about how well they played. But overall dungeons and raids with a fixed number of players do badly in making people feel friendly towards each other, because you always would like to replace the weakest link by somebody better.

Wildstar does some things right by giving full kill credit to everybody who participates in a fight. Which means that if you have a quest to kill a boss mob, and arriving there you find somebody else already fighting, you jump right in. And usually the other player won't mind, and be happy he gets the fight done faster. Unfortunately Wildstar also does some things very wrong, Jeromai calls the game bipolar: "Kill certain mobs or reach a certain area and a Challenge will pop up – asking you to accomplish something within a certain time limit. If you manage it, you get a random roll for some bonus loot. Which I found rather fun, up until the point where I found the area denuded of mobs and unable to progress any further while my clock was running down, because there were five other players in the same area as me trying to do the same thing. (Cue HEAD SLAM and heartfelt CURSE TO THE GODS for the stupid traditional MMO model of competitive nodes and competitive quest completion.)". There is a cow-tipping challenge in Algoroc which sounds really fun, but ends up being one of the most frustrating early experiences in the game because of this design. Hell is other players.

I faintly wonder if EQ Next will have a better approach to cooperation. If there is really a dynamic world where players care whether a village is burned down by orcs or defended against them, there could be a design where the difficulty of the orc attack was fixed, and every additional defender would be a help. That could make players feel a lot better about the presence of each other than current designs do. Here's hoping that some day an cooperative end game design can be found that doesn't make players hate each other.