My silly Gripe with MMOs

[Chased]

So you want to play a MASSIVLY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE game , solo . Your right this is a silly gripe . I can't sympathise with you , sorry , you don't play a multiplayer game then complain you can't play it solo .

I have to agree with this good sir. It's like wanting to play a racing game without vehicles or a finish line.

I've played my fair share of WoW and up until 85 you can very easily play the entire game by yourself and still have a somewhat decent experience. Though you can do this the purpose of an MMO is foster the sense of world building by having large amounts of people play the game with you. Designing a game to be balanced with group play is difficult much less than also transforming an already group oriented experience into a single player one.

There are some single player games that still have that "MMO" vibe by having big open worlds with lots of space. The most obvious example of this that comes to mind would be Skyrim.

To call MMO a genre like Racing is silly, its like saying movies for theater and movies for home viewing alone, its hardly a genre. MMOs are RPGs with large world that CAN be populated by many people but a) They dont have to be (you can still play on an empty server) and b) Has no reason to force you to interact with those people. YOU, as the player, choose your interaction level like, to use examples from WoW, talking to ppl, doing quests with ppl, doing instances, using the auction house, joining a guild, etc.
Merely because MMORPG was the coined term does in no way mean that you have to play with other people, much like you dont drive on a driveway and dont park on a parkway.

MMOs are a genre of video games most commonly associated with RPGs.

They're designed to be played with a great deal of people and are not always balanced when gone through on "single player" mode because many of the tasks are intended to be completed by groups. Also, the term MMO is not a misnomer. In MMO's you do play with massive multiplayer games online. You don't have to but that's what the game's core mechanics revolve around.

 

[Woodsey]

I've started playing it again and have found people are more than willing to help with Heroics - I can see there being more of an issue with Flashpoints but I'm still only level 16. So at the very least, ask about Heroics. The populations are such right now that there's usually always people looking to do the same one you are.

snip

MMORPGs are MMOs that are RPGs, MMOs aren't necessarily RPGs. Planetside is an MMOFPS, for instance.