One discussion that is as old as the genre itself when it comes to MMO’s is that of solo play vs. group play. Probably no other topic stirs as much contentiousness and strikes closer to the core of people’s playstyles than that of to what extent do you support, encourage, or even require players to play in groups versus playing solo. I personally, in true diplomatic fashion, am a fan of both. Some of the very best experiences I’ve had in MMO’s have come out of being in a group. Not just the social aspects of it — of accomplishing something amazing and having people there to share it with — but that incredible feeling of satisfaction that comes from being on a team where each member of the team has their role and each of you performed your role expertly, and in doing so, accomplished something really hard. These experiences are why I’m still a huge fan of class based systems (and always will be), and why I feel strongly about having group roles.
But on the other hand, easily over ninety-percent of the time I play in MMO’s these days I play solo. For all the reasons that just about every solo player lists, my lifestyle is completely in-conducive to most MMO’s requirements for group play. I have neither the time nor the patience to sit and do nothing while either attempting to form a group or to wait for one to be formed. If I’m in a group, it is entirely likely I could be called away at a moment’s notice to take care of some real life crisis of the moment. There is absolutely no block of time in my day that I can dedicate three hours to a single session. So I have argurably the most pathetically geared level 80 warrior in all of existence because I got to level 80, looked around, saw no real content for me as a solo player, and so promptly started working on an alt.
So it’s a dilemma from a developer’s standpoint. We know that people that form ties and become a part of the community in your game will want to stay in your game, and that’s something you want. So you want to encourage group play. But at the same time, you have to, or you should, at least, recognize that the average age of your player is maturing, and if you want really broad appeal, you simply can’t require people to group up after they’ve reached some certain level to progress their character. One of the things that always has me shaking my head is when people talk about how “back in the day” how awesome it was when the MMO you were in simply required you to group to progress. It wasn’t even a question, so it was just inherently understood you had to group to progress, and so everyone did it. What those people fail to realize is that yes, the people they played with did know that. But the vast majorify of the people that got to whatever level the content decided you had to group to progress in the game simply left the game. Which is why those games never had more than about 200,000 subscribers. It wasn’t until WoW came along and said no matter what class you play, you can solo the entire game, that all those thousands and then millions of people that started the game stayed in the game. Because they didn’t have to leave their comfort zone. They could play the game they wanted to play.
So I have, in the past, already talked about systems that I think could encourage grouping, and teach players very early in their career that it’s okay to group, and how we as designers can go much further than we currently are in removing the barriers. But today I’m going to talk about going in the other direction. About doing more to support the solo player. I’m going to talk about the privateer.
Designers really like to toot their horns about how cool it is for players to make decisions that affect their characters in real, meaningful ways. Well that’s exactly the kind of decision I’m talking about. What if, at some point in your character’s career, you could declare yourself a solo player. What if there was a talent spec called “Privateer”, or perhaps a flag you throw on your character halfway through his career. And this flag, when set, could not be unset, save perhaps through some incredibly arduous and time consuming process. It essentially says to the game you are the “rogue demon hunter” of fame and fortune. You’re a maverick. You prefer to work alone, and anyone else is just getting in your way. From a game mechanic standpoint, what does it mean? Well it’s a series of tradeoffs, like any good decision should be.
The first thing it does is unlock content that is only accessible to other privateers. Exclusive dungeons and instances full of pitfalls and challenge — some more time consuming than others, and certainly some incredibly difficult. And you are rewarded with gear that is as almost as good as some of the high level raid content gear. Mind you not the best gear in the game, but still extraordinarily competent gear. Having this gear doesn’t say you aren’t a skillful player, and no high level twink ran you through this instance. It says you worked hard and long and solved difficult challenges to get this gear, but you did it alone.
It would also mean you’re blocked from some of the highest level raid content. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, after all. You want to be a solo player, you want the game to reward you for being a solo player, and the game does so by providing content exclusive to your style of play. But it means you are saying you are okay with not participating in the high0end raid gameplay as well. So it’s a decision you want to think about.
Furthermore, the game provides specific missions that are available only to privateers that provide gear and goods that guilds want. Say there is an alchemy lab at the bottom of an enemy base is only accessible to privateers. Upon completing the instance successfully, the privateer is rewarded with three stacks of consumables that provide substantial raid benefits. So guilds — even raiding guilds, are encouraged to include privateers in their ranks, or to hire them for one time jobs and missions. And perhaps in PvP content, there are areas that only privateer players can access — setting up the idea of infiltration and deep recon missions that make use of their style of gameplay. So you encourage even further the idea of this player that is available for hire to any guild that is willing to pay their price, and they can provide substantial benefit. Now is the dependancy so great that guilds are reliant upon privateers? Absolutely not. But the idea is you do receive benefit by making use of them.
In this system, solo players get to do what they want — play solo, and to be rewarded for doing so. But guilds are still encouraged to include privateers and make use of them, so the privateer player can still find the level of social play that they are comfortable with. The solo player is able to get not just adequate gear, but excellent gear. But they are willingly giving up on the highest end content and gear of the game. The raiding players, the players that are able to and are willing to dedicate the time and effort in organizing groups of players and dealing with loot distribution methods will still have the satisfaction of knowing they get the best gear in the game.
So, if such a class, or flag, existed, would you use it? If you are a solo player, would you be willing to give up access to the raid dungeons and highest end gear for the opportunity to participate in your own high end solo dungeons – that no raiding player could ever see – and be rewarded with gear commensurate to your effort? People talk about making meaningful decisions for their characters. If such an opportunity existed, would you embrace it, or shun it?
Thoughts and comments? Post ‘em up. You know you want to! I even expanded the comment box!
Tags: Design, group, privateer, solo, WoW
July 14th, 2009 on 10:43 am
Preach it! and Amen!
That’s a brilliant idea, and I love it. Don’t make it impossible to switch back and forth, but don’t make it just a button-press either. Even *I* would have to think about that for a bit, because while I don’t big-group a whole lot, hubby and I duo very often, so I’d have to figure out what chars I wanted to flip that solo/group switch with, if at all. Choices and consequences, two cornerstones of any game design, let alone MMOs.
Speaking of, when’s your MMO coming out so I can get a lifetime sub, eh? Chop chop!
July 14th, 2009 on 10:55 am
You, sir, are a genius! As a soloist, most of the time, I have always been appaled that people only consider the reason one plays an MMO is for the socializing aspect (nevermind the constant content, the large world, the opportunities for storytelling, etc).
I don’t think we’ll see this on the ground, however innovative an idea it may be. The first-blush reason would be publisher’s fear of the unknown. Deeper then that, there’s the mechanical reasons: instead of just the singular progression from noob to raid grouper, there would have to be a whole new mechanic that would run in parallel to the staid group mechanics.
The biggest reason we won’t see something like this, though, is because developers would have to truely and publiclly recognize soloing as an institutionalized playstyle. The fact that you’ve devised a “solo raid” mechanism is direct recognition that it’s not possible to raid solo NOW. Currently, those who group can see EVERYTHING, but soloists can’t. The grouping bias still exists despite the “soloability” in many games.
July 14th, 2009 on 11:04 am
Just one question: What’s a rogue demon?
ba-dum-bump… CHING! I miss Cordelia…
Anyway, it sounds like a great idea to me. I bet most folks would end up with (at least) 2 characters, a Privateer and a ‘Normal’ character, which is good for the game, too. Different content for each, just by nature of them being different kinds of characters.
What about the economics from a dev standpoint? How much does doing that extra content and armor sets impact the bottom line?
Of course I’m a solo player. Looking forward to hearing what those folks who frown on solo players think about the idea.
July 14th, 2009 on 11:10 am
Really enjoyed reading this entry, you’re onto something with this. I think it is important with such a lone wolf division that there is some visible prestige linked to the best privateers. A Charter of renown? Something, somewhere that allows privateers to be directly growling at their closest rivals on the lonely road of the brooding hero.
I think there should be avenues for group play at penalty… or in set instances and quests that are designed to open up a plot element revolving around the grudging assistance of such a solitary hero. Penalty wise if a privateer features all uncommon loot and upwards is bound to him/her?
The privateer’s market has a nice ring to it.
Another nice idea revolves around the privateer as a dungeon opener, a quest trigger… By hanging around in privateers haunts a privateers should have a chance of unlocking quests that allow him/her to open up a dungeon for his/her guild but not to actually partake in the glory. The privateer does the initial set-up questing and then, if supported makes it available to the guild pending activation by officers/guild leader. Every time the guild runs the dungeon to completion the privateers gets a % of the loot value in his mailbox?
Lots of potential really.
July 14th, 2009 on 1:56 pm
One thing I ran out of room for in the blog but wanted to add was that the design I had in mind for this is not completely mutually exclusive. You could still group as a privateer, and there would still be plenty of solo content for non-privateers. But rather by setting this flag, you are in essence unlocked certain sets of exclusive content, while locking off certain others.
@Pete S – I miss Cordelia too.
@Tompl – Oooh I like the idea of privateers unlocking content for guilds that the raiders can then participate in. Sort of re-emphasizes that notion of an “advance scout” role.
@Scopique – yeah there are actually a ton of things that would need to be worked out for this to be an actual workable solution. But I don’t think developers are opposed to solo content per se. I do think publishers and developers are still hung up on the idea that you want people to form community bonds so they’ll stay, and to get them to form bonds they have to group.
@YSharros – Heheh MMO’s are hard. But we’re working on it..
July 15th, 2009 on 2:37 am
Interesting idea!
Still, I see players having a main, a super cool privateer – which will make up 90% of the population of the MMO, and everyone will have an alt char for raiding. This alt would not be so secondary, rather the second main char.
But the idea of “solo dungeon instances”, maybe even tailored to the player class, is intriguing. A bit like Age of Conan’s “Night” quests in Tortage and “Destiny” Quests.
July 15th, 2009 on 7:36 am
[...] settles the old argument about which a game should cater to more, the solo or the group player, by proposing a “soloer flag”. You couldn’t do anything BUT solo, but you’d get special, solo-only versions of the [...]
July 15th, 2009 on 9:25 am
Dusty, why is it important that you have to switch on a permanent flag to do this? Could you not just offer solo content and solo instances without needing someone to be specially flagged?
July 15th, 2009 on 10:16 am
@Spinks – You absolutely could (offer solo instances and content) without having to flag yourself in one way or another, and that is certainly a solution, and an admittedly safer solution. This is the AoC Tortage Night time solution, and LOTRO also does this already with many class quests.
I like the idea of a flag to unlock exclusive content for two reasons. One – it asks you to make a decision about the character. Now as I said before, it wouldn’t necessarily be permanent, but the process to undo the decision wouldn’t be trivial. People are often talking about how they wish they could make meaningful decisions about their characters, and this is an opportunity to do that. Of course, it remains to be seen if people *really* want to make meaningful decisions about their toons.. *grin* This is the gamble SW:TOR is taking too.
The second reason is I like the idea of having something special, exclusive. In any current MMO, if you are able to raid, then you can do *all* the content – both the solo content and the high-end content. But for the thousands of people that can’t raid, there is content they will never see. Now Blizzard’s current solution is to try to increase the accessibility of the raid content in patch after patch so that thereoticaly everyone can do it. But by appealing to the lowest common denomitator, they cheapen the experience for all the people that were already doing it. How many times have you heard from folks that “Oh the current day Naxx is a joke..”
What I’m proposing is that you keep some exclusive content. That it’s okay to have content that you have to work to get to. But provide exclusive content for the people that prefer (or are only able to) solo, as well as for the raiders. Two kinds of exclusive content, for two kinds of playstyles. But you can’t make solo content exclusive unless you ask people to make a choice.
Dusty
July 15th, 2009 on 10:26 am
“Of course, it remains to be seen if people *really* want to make meaningful decisions about their toons..”
Hah
I already know that I don’t. I want the freedom to try a bit of whatever the game has to offer, then decide what I want to focus on, and then to be able to change my mind later if it doesn’t work out. I suspect this flag is rather punishing to that mode of play unless everyone has both solo and group alts which seems to rather miss the point?
I call it ‘character design through play’ rather than ‘character design at start’ because at the start of a game, I never know what I will want to do later on until I’ve played it for awhile.
July 15th, 2009 on 4:01 pm
I was initially intrigued by this concept, but after a bit of consideration I’ve found a few flaws.
1. This requires additional content. Let’s look at WoW as our example: if they added the “privateer” dungeons then there would be less time to work on the raid dungeons, balance the game, etc. Even for Blizzard, time is a finite resource. What gets sacrificed to put in these new dungeons?
2. Soloers already have content. Again, looking at WoW, soloers currently have the 1-79 content. (Or perhaps more accurately, the 70-79 content after they race through all the old stuff.) If they max out and don’t want to raid, they roll an alt as many have done. The closest equivalent I can think of for what is being proposed is daily quests; is the gameplay for daily quests so compelling that people will keep playing a max level character they don’t want to raid with?
3. Players don’t want to be interdependent. The concept of giving privateers raid-focused rewards won’t work. Any time a design has had some sort of interdependence like this, one things has happened: people prefer to do it themselves if they can. In this case, people will do what Longasc says above and roll an alt. In fact, I’d bet that the hard-core raiding guilds will require members have an additional privateer character (or simply run privateer dungeons if there’s no flag) to supply the guild. This is essentially directly forcing the solo style of play on people who prefer to group.
Unfortunately, this proposal seems like a solution looking for a problem. WoW has given us a template for how to create a solo friendly game. But, solo content has been the norm for most of the history of online games, even back in the days of text MUDs. I think the bigger contemporary challenge is to find ways to allow people to group without it being a giant pain in the ass.
July 15th, 2009 on 4:04 pm
Spinks wrote:
I call it ‘character design through play’ rather than ‘character design at start’ because at the start of a game, I never know what I will want to do later on until I’ve played it for awhile.
That’s interesting because those two systems were identified by paper RPG fans as ways to build a character. They were called DAS (developed at start) and DIP (developed in play). Just funny that you’ve re-discovered that old system.
July 15th, 2009 on 4:56 pm
Soloers don’t really have content at cap though, Brian. It’s very rare any endgame activity even allows for pure soloing, and you can only level an alt so many times before its just running in place.
I think this is a good idea if applied to endgame only. Usually that’s the main problem with forced grouping, that you can’t do raid-level events at all solo unless you multibox, or the game enables solo classes that can do so through heroic efforts that 95% of the playerbase simply can’t. If i get a class I really love to cap, but can’t contribute to endgame raids due to time, I’d like the privateer option.
This also helps the classes that get shunned from endgame events be able to actually play the game, instead of leveling an alt for raiding only. Either way you’d have to level a wanted job privateer or not, if you picked one that can’t contribute much.
July 15th, 2009 on 7:17 pm
Dblade wrote:
It’s very rare any endgame activity even allows for pure soloing, and you can only level an alt so many times before its just running in place.
So, looking at this from a developer’s point of view who has to justify the cost: what is the size of the playerbase who are interested in soloing but not interested in running more alts? As I said in my first post above, taking time to implement this system means that you’re taking resources from some other content (probably raiding), so a developer needs to be able to justify this expenditure. Based on my observations, I’m not sure this audience is big enough to justify the shifting of resources in a typical game.
Overall, I think it’s better to start consider developing a new type of game rather than trying to patch DIKU-inspired games.
July 15th, 2009 on 9:46 pm
@Brian:
As I said in my first post above, taking time to implement this system means that you’re taking resources from some other content (probably raiding), so a developer needs to be able to justify this expenditure. Based on my observations, I’m not sure this audience is big enough to justify the shifting of resources in a typical game.
Actually I suspect just the opposite is true. In fact while there are certainly are all kinds of problems with the system I outlined above, my biggest fear would be that it would be too popular. If you look at the historical end game content, it’s always been that developers spend an extraordinary amount of time building dungeons and raids and boss encounters, then only a extremely small amount of the player population ever actually got to see that. Now over the past few years, and especially since Wrath came out, Blizzard has worked very hard to make that content more accessible, as we all know, and much to the chagrin of some of the former hardcore players. My worry would be that if you make soloing too appealing, everyone would do it, and you wont’ be able to form groups at all. That’s swinging the pendulum too far in the opposite direction. For instance, I think this is a real problem in the PvE portion of Guild Wars right now. With Heroes and Henchmen so successful, it’s next to impossible to get full groups of actual real players to accomplish PvE quests.
It’s a definitely a fine balance, between catering to one playstyle or another. But I like discussions like this that both propose and counter-propose solutions and some of the problems with those solutions. I don’t think it is a solved problem, or that it can’t be better in future games than what it is right now.
July 16th, 2009 on 2:10 am
I’m not sure I understand the purpose of this idea. Providing endgame content for soloists would be a good thing, but what’s the design goal behind making it exclusive? Meaningful choices are also a good idea, but why specifically do you want players to make a choice that forces them to solo (and locks them out of half of the game’s content)?
Modern MMOs are already heavily weighted toward soloists. Most have much more solo content than group content. Not only that, the solo content is usually available right from the start of the game, whereas the group content isn’t accessible until the end (meaning that people who want to group have to go through hours of solo play first). If your specific concern is endgame content for soloists, that could be addressed by adding solo endgame instances, epic quests, or the like. I’m just not sure why you want MMOs to encourage soloing more than they already do.
July 16th, 2009 on 3:26 pm
Ok without having read all of the responses, I’m going to throw this out there.
First I love the way you are thinking, and I had never considered a ’solo’ dungeon solution for players who still want to be challenged but avoid raiding parties.
However, I have wondered about creating equal or near equal content for smaller parties, giving them challenges on par with their group size/makeup and having to work just as hard as 25 or 40 other players would have to for equivalent rewards in a raid setting.
That said, I don’t know if you want to ‘lock’ a player into a playstyle with a flag like that. For instance, what if one day they decide they want to go on a 40 man raid? why should we stop them? Because they’ve been doing mostly solo content? And if the flag is reversible, then would raiding players feel cheated?
What if there were instances designed for smaller groups that would tweak the difficulty/encounters for the group size/makeup and then reward appropriately? You could even simply put a cap on the number of players required to complete a ‘dungeon’ even down to 3 or 1 solo player. This way the ‘tweaking’ of content to the party would be easier.
I’m going to have to say, solo content and small group content a big bonus. Exclusive content, I’m not a fan of. I think for some folks this will be a draw, but I prefer the idea of making more of the game accessible to more players.
August 3rd, 2009 on 5:58 pm
Somehow I missed this post when it was fresh and new.
I would use such a flag and never look back. For all practical purposes, I do anyway, the way I play.
That said, it strikes me that a simpler solution might be to make raids scalable all the way from solo to zerg party, and let players self-select. You can even use the same loot tables.
So what if that makes soloing “more efficient” at loot gathering? Grouping should be something that players do because they want to and because it’s fun, not because they get exclusive loot. The loot lottery is a lame way to motivate players, and it ultimately tends to foster bad design decisions like grind, low drop rates, and reinforces the unholy time sinks in these games that directly feeds the subscription model. (The subscription model *needs* grind, and it tosses good game design out on its ear a lot of the time.)
Of course, that *does* mean making it easier to group up, and likely tossing out established DIKU conventions, as Brian notes.