Forming Groups in a Sandbox World

Nothing I’ve seen about EQN suggests it will be a sandbox.

You know those experiments where they give rats everything they want with no work and the rats stop having sex and die off. Kind of feel that’s what happened with MMOs.

No person or organization shoving tons of money behind a game will want to go against opinion polls this large(well unless there is a way to scam stocks with it). This is why even with all so called change that is happening, nothing is changing The problem is systemic and will only change if crowd funding actually reaches MMO funding levels (like star citizen).

Idk how a dungeon finder will work though. Remember they have said the world is completely destructible.. You can just start digging down and find a dungeon. Seems hard to have a dungeon finder for randomly generated dungeons like they are suggesting

As a dirty casual, I liked the dungeon finder. I didn’t want to spend an hour looking for a group on a server just to finally get in it and someone had to AFK for dinner or facesmashed themselves on the keyboard instead of playing. I had invested at least 30 minutes into that groups success. With the random dungeon finder it was quicker in finding the groups. If it was awful I would know i could bow out and find another group in 5 or 10 minutes. I didn’t need to feel a connection to them. If I wasn’t feeling that into it, there also wasn’t any bad thing that was going to happen to me if I slacked off on the DPS, I could coast and not worry about the DPS checking all the time…

If I was a tank or heals and the group was bad, I could just leave and it wasn’t a big deal. DPS could cycle in and out freely and if someone wasn’t pulling their weight they would be gone.

I understand I wasn’t building any meaningful relationships in the game, but sometimes its just not worth it. I can’t commit to an extensive online friendship when I don’t play all the time… It doesn’t make sense for me to friend a guy and then not even see him for another 2-3 weeks. Most of the time I won’t remember befriending them anyway.

Just my 2 cents.

Any game that is designed using poll results is going to end up very similar to WoW, because ultimately WoW is very close to what the vast majority wants. When a poll directed at hardcore fans of a game franchise that is known for the characteristics that you like and even that poll turns out a result that is the exact opposite of what you want, you have to admit that your preferences are in the very narrow minority.

I just hope that more companies wake up to the fact that there is enough demand out there to support niche games.

Only unemployed, students, or people who spend their entire free time in a game can manage that kind of time sink. It’s a small crowd because so few have the time to devote to that kind of game play. You can’t make money with that audience, too small.

I played EQ for years. Some of my least favourite memories involved assembling groups manually. During the heyday of LDoN especially, I spent more than one night assembling a group only to watch if fall apart before any of us actually zoned in. 4 to 5 hours wasted. On some weekends, that could go up to 8. What did i get out of it? Frustration. I promised myself I would never try to form a group ever again, I was that traumatised. I got over it, but the stigma is always there for me.
WoW’s dungeon finder is a great concept with a just insanely flawed execution, cross server. In EQ, you had to be on your best behaviour because your rep made or broke the game for you. The only drawback to a LFD is that the human filth can always get groups using it, bypassing their sullied reputation. If an LFD enforced people’s ignore lists, then this can easily be resolved (it doesnt put you in a group with anyone on your ignore list).
If SOE introduces cross server LFD, then they have failed (and for a multitude of other reasons, I’m hoping EQN does not even have server shards, but one server, I like playing with friends and new friends, regardless of their inital arbirary server choice), and lack a basic undestanding of the concept of building a community. Since community is one of their stated goals, and no matter what you say about them, they seem to have at least as much sense as a drunken lemur in a blender factory, I have hope they will do it right.
I dont ever, EVER again want to spend 5 hours a night herding cats, listening to promises, excuses and sorrys, and making appologies to the guys that did turn up and were sitting next to me for the last three hours waiting for the healer or the tank (I was an enchanter so we had CC and slows), that part of things made me feel terrible and I’m sure did not enhance my rep to them.
I made a couple of friends through it, sure, but i made 80+ when I joined a social guild. The ones from the guild lasted much longer, too. If WoW’s LFD was your server only, then there are more than a few other players would have friended in a heartbeat, but they were on other servers…
LFD also forcibly expands your world view. You wont only look for shaman slowers or Warrior tanks. You wont only look for people in the same zone as you. Your view of the world is expanded. You are exposed to more., you can find out how that world event is going on in Kithicor from a first hand account, even though you were in lake Rathe a minute ago. More people are exposed to you increasing your potential friends. Yes it takes you out of your area briefly, before dropping you back, but some people like that. I do.
Non-Cross-Server LFD is a tool, just like OOC or Chat, except it is without bias and without frustration and the most awful job of any MMO (that of assembling a group) is handled by someone else.

If you believe SOE’s hype machine, then yes, it’s “The Biggest Sandbox EVER”.

The actual details we got seem to suggest otherwise. If you read their website it sounds eerily similar to GW2’s pre-launch marketing, and we all know how that turned out. They go on about a “living world” where “your choices matter” and there is “permanent change”…. and then give the example of saving a village from mobs or not. Literally the same example Areanent gave of dynamic events for years. All of their examples talk about content SOE is designing for you to play, which doesn’t sound sandbox to me.

Then there’s the whole voxel “everything is destructible!” line. Except it turns out not everything is destructible, because of course they can’t let you destroy really important stuff. And then of course stuff can’t stay destroyed, so everything you change about the landscape will just “respawn” moments later like any random MMO mob you kill.

I’m just saying to be careful with your expectations. All we’ve seen so far are a lot of buzzwords that are very common in MMO marketing today and never live up to much. Already the few details we know seem to water down some of the hype. I think you’re overestimating the degree to which EQN will be a sandbox. Not to mention that this is SOE, they haven’t exactly pulled off any great games lately.

@Lupinus :

“as much sense as a drunken lemur in a blender factory”

I assume he would have fruit, and I’ll bring the rum, sounds like a Tiki party to me, not boring at all.

Otherwise I agree that putting together groups can be very tedious even in a smaller guild setting. I don’t have the same vehemence against LFD as some purists may, but even in that context devs could make the process less artificial than getting ripped out of the current environment by the hand of God when it pops.

One idea could be having fixed regional teleportation gates, which players need to interact with be brought to a large central community hub where people could gather and set out for dungeons; this hub needn’t be solely dedicated to LFD activities either, but be fleshed out to serve as a general environment for community activities and events. Of course this may solve one perceived problem for purists at the cost of another taboo topic, fast travel; perhaps if there was a percent chance that upon using a portal someone could experience perma-death with full looting then it might be acceptable?

…I kid, I kid. 😛

It seems that for a number of people on this site the primary problem is with the cross-server aspect, and less with the finder tool itself.

In any case we all agree that SOE is not some independent studio, and as such I cannot envision it purposely hindering accessibility to a larger gaming audience to cater to an old-school purist demographic’s desire to make the game purposefully more difficult to enhance one aspect of player communication.

One sees a similar argument against cell phones where immediate unlimited access and texting has negated the need to set actual concrete meeting times for group activities, as well as the necessity of meeting someone face to face to finalize arrangements; this is largely true, and likely does undermine a certain aspect of human interpersonal interactions, but now that this has become established as a standard operating procedure for social interactions, how many people would look forward to going back to landlines?

I think that it is important to recognize that at the heart of these discussions of how gaming communities are best fostered is the idea of social engineering, specifically how 2 communities of gamers with different expectations (hardcore and casuals for lack of better descriptors) can coexist in a virtual world.

It is here where we can run into strongly bigoted love it or leave it exclusionary attitudes, specifically in this blog against “dirty casuals” as Yotor refers to, something I myself am also responsible for perpetuating. In this way many gaming blog lurkers are akin to conservative traditionalists looking down upon the immigrants who have disrupted the established community norms they have come to cherish (as exemplified by Morreion’s description of the good old days of gaming); the thing is that concept of minority-majority is at work, and we traditionalists are no longer the lynchpin for mainstream MMO economic success.

In the context of an optional recreational activity the concept of separate, but equal, is most likely applicable, with WoW being the land that hardcores want to send the casuals back to, perhaps ignoring that the “but we were here first” argument is not an economically relevant argument.

The thing is that the formation of a homogenous community is best suited for smaller countries, and I doubt that a massive corporate entity such as SOE is shooting for that level of boutique specialization.

TL;DR: SOE is not a boutique game developer so I expect game mechanics that conform to modern standard operating procedures such as dungeon finders, fast travel, minimal death penalties, and simplified get in and get out casual-oriented options.