Massively Single Player, Part 1

[Optimystic]

Experienced Points: Massively Single Player, Part 1

What's with all the people wanting to play MMOGs by themselves?

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Shamus, you forgot the biggest reason for people playing MMOs solo instead of single-player; they still want to progress, so they're not going to play a single-player game at work and then their favorite MMO at home, when they could progress in the MMO at work and reap the rewards of higher level/more gold/new questing areas once they're able to jump into a team session.

 

[Melvic Lilith]

Honestly speaking, for me when I set out into a MMO world.....I intend to do it alone, and oddly enough almost always as a cleric or other support class. I'm talkative once people get me going, but aside from jumping into a conversation to get a word in edge wise, I don't know how to start a conversation with peoples whos faces I can't read. Now its not because people hold me back/steal mah rarez...I actualy plod along leveling up wise. My big example of that is one of the free mmo's I'm playing now, its taken me over a year to get past the half way mark to a level cap. Even though the power players reached it in the space of a few months.

Of course I also pick up and drop MMOs faster then Family Guy goes through random cut-away clips. I've tried most of the free ones and many of the paying ones, yet if I can't enjoy a solo experiance, or find people to converse with I'll move on to the next one coming up within a month.

My only irk right now is I'm a big sci-fi nut, and the only MMO scifi games either aren't to my taste (EVE online for being based around humanities worst aspects, RF Online for not actualy being a sci-fi game) or are so poorly supported (Phantasy Star Universe for the fact I played it for years enduring all the issues) that its a joke trying them out, let alone staying long enough to find people.

 

[carpathic]

I just don't play mmo's. I used to play muds, but I found that the behaviour of other players often detracted from the immersive world I created in my own head. Put simply, others acted in ways that did not fit what I was looking for.

So, I adventured alone, and killed a lot of crappy little rats for minimal XP. But, I enjoyed it more than playing with people who pretty much automated their characters or were favoured in some way, or were just power tripping with their juiced up characters.

 

[brassknight]

Being the team isn't the problem, it's those people that don't know HOW to that frustrate you into a constant state of solo play.

 

[bigolbear]

Been playing mmos for YEARS. heres the list of the bigger ones.
ultima online, everquest, everquest2, diablo2, swg, shaiya, ddo.
I tried wow for a week but hated it, couldnt stand the cartoony graphics.
curently just playing DDO now (if any one is interested in characters/server names pm me)

Well as regards the comment about mmos being treated as single player online games i can definately see where the op is coming from. There are a lot of people who solo a lot of the time. The point is tho that these people almost certainly wont solo ALL the time. It gives you an option to group up with people when you want (like when your freinds are online) or to still be able to play the game when you cant find a nice group to do a mission your looking to do. Further more there are some things that can be acheived easier in games solo than with a party, stealth missions are a good example.

I think there are very few people that would solo play an mmo all the way to end game. Rather that as the genre has developed there has come a realisation that players will want to group up some of the time but not all the time. Its this added flexibility that will make mmos more popular than traditional single player games - especaily for those gamers that would other wise be spending 30 quid a month on a new game to play they can spend 15 quid on a regular subscription and have access to a much larger game world.

To the various people that have commented that people solo so that they can grind there character up to level cap where all the fun happens - im sory but i honestly dont understand you folks, some of the best gameplay hapens along the way. Stop grinding and enjoy the ride.

 

[ReverseEngineered]

I think you should replace "casual" with "people with lives".

Honestly, I've been a gamer since I was a little kid. I used to spend entire days playing video games and I still spend much of my free time doing so. But I'm a grown man now and most days I don't have time to run a 4 hour instance. I have to go to work, clean the house, make supper, and all that other grown-up stuff. Long gaming sessions are almost non-existent, so I can't dedicate myself to scheduled raids, large instances, and takes-half-an-hour-to-walk-there quests.

But I still like to game and I still like to play with people. That's why MMOs, despite how much I have hated nearly every one I've tried (Can we please do something other than kill waves of baddies? It's getting old.), are still interesting.

The other problem is what John Gabriel termed The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Put a thousand people together in a room with no real identity and no fear of recourse and see what comes out of it: homophobia, racial epithets, and general ass-hattery. The hardest quest in most MMOs is finding a group of 20 amicable, amenable friends. Unless you come into it with your own huge group of friends, you may as well get used to playing alone, because it's not worth the effort to try finding a group most days.

Lastly, most games really punish you for working in groups. Sure, it's the only way to do a 25 man instance (which is where all the good loot is), but during your three month crawl from level 1 to 80, you'll be penalized heavily for having a friend along: you'll each get less than half of the XP you would normally get, plus you'll blow through the limited number of mobs long before the quest is over and spend 20 minutes waiting for them to respawn. At least you'll have somebody to talk to while you're grinding through the meaningless, unchallenging quests.

So there's a good reason many people play solo, and it has less to do with "casual" gamers infesting our "hardcore" games and more to do with the limitations of adult life, the social skills of your average gamer, and the broken systems used in nearly every MMO to date.

If you want a real multiplayer game, go play Team Fortress 2. Not only do you get to interact with that massive group of people, you can kill them if they piss you off and you can ban them if they are being asshats.

 

[DeathQuaker]

I am a single player gamer and I don't play MMORPGs, but the one time I almost thought about getting into WoW was when I couldn't find any good, new, single player RPGs to play. I genuinely wondered, "I wonder if I can just do the quests by myself and ignore all the asshats who'll say horrible things to me because I'm a woman--let alone a newb or anything else?"

Not actually having played MMORPGs, I can't say for sure, but I'd have to wonder if at least some of these single player MMORPGers are folks like me, looking for a good video RPG to play in. In their case, they just picked the MMO of their choice as an additional option (me, I just decided to play Nethack until a new single player game came out). Or as others on this thread mentioned, maybe the players joined in part to be social, but then found the company lacking but the gameplay to still be enjoyable.

 

[Feste]

I genuinely wondered, "I wonder if I can just do the quests by myself and ignore all the asshats who'll say horrible things to me because I'm a woman--let alone a newb or anything else?"

I'm just curious as to why you assume you'll have horrible things said to you because of your gender? I'm also a female, and I've never been insulted in a game because of that. How would your fellow players even know you're a girl?

 

[DeathQuaker]

I genuinely wondered, "I wonder if I can just do the quests by myself and ignore all the asshats who'll say horrible things to me because I'm a woman--let alone a newb or anything else?"

I'm just curious as to why you assume you'll have horrible things said to you because of your gender? I'm also a female, and I've never been insulted in a game because of that. How would your fellow players even know you're a girl?

I've been shown some screencaps of some fairly horrible harrassment going on in some MMORPGs chats. Not just of women, but just rudeness in general as well.

But you have a fair point--I'm sure there's plenty people decent as well.

I probably shouldn't have included the comment, it wasn't necessary nor especially illustrative; just venting one of my fears I guess. My main point remains: I prefer to play video games single player, and the only reason I'd join an MMO is because I was out of single player stuff to play. Which isn't enough incentive for me to start paying subscription fees (in the case of WoW) or what have you.

 

[onelifecrisis]

Shamus,

I have been, in the past, a solo MMORPG player, and I don't fit any of your guesses at why someone would do this. I'm not a housewife nor did I play from the office. I wasn't multi-tasking.

In a single player RPG you typically have a broken economy (you wrote a good article on that once) and a bunch of bone-head AI opponents. In a good MMORPG you can have a real, player-driven economy (such as in EVE Online) and real, human opponents (such as in, er, EVE Online) that no single player experience can rival. I gave up on EVE for many reasons (all of which can pretty much be summed up in the word "grind") but I still like the concept of going solo in a player-driven world.

 

[Ledan]

Lone-Wolf ideal.... which doesn't make sense because wolf are pack animals.
But that's the general idea, I prefer to play by myself and interact sometimes with other people. For me, an MMO is a huge game that I will play singleplayer unless one of my friends is also playing it. I like the whole idea of going into the wild (in an MMO), killing loads of wolves on my own, and then.... I dunno. Don't play MMO's that much due to shitty internet.
How about many gamers are social-recluses, and as such prefer to play on their own/ are shy of other players?