Specifically things like instanced 5 man dungeons (like Ragefire Chasm or the Deadmines in WoW) which are explicitly designed to challenge a full party of a certain level range. Notably, not endgame content. I’m sure the answer changes based on different factors (e.g. how good are the rewards? What are the drop rates like? Are similar rewards available elsewhere? How long is the dungeon? Am I late picking the kids up from soccer practice?), but I’m curious what folks’ thoughts are. I’m personally sour on the idea, but I understand that my attitude is “the less MMO an MMORPG can be, the happier I am”, so MMO designers should probably disregard my opinion.
Supplementary Context: usually about once a year, I get the bug to hop into an MMO. However, I am not a good MMO player. I tend to flit around my gaming library like an ADHD pixie on cocaine, and there’s no telling how long my interest will sustain itself. Therefore, any “meta” choice I make is purely by accident, and I don’t spare even a moment of thought on “efficiency”. In fact, I’ve often thought of my dalliances in MMOs as digital tourism. By and large, I’m there to craft, read quest dialogs, and poke around in the weird corners of the map for a couple weeks before logging off for another few years. Anytime I’ve ever done group content (which is, admittedly, not often), I’m desperately trying to keep up while someone nukes everything in the dungeon as they sprint towards the end. I wind up feeling like my lackadaisical approach is probably fucking up someone else’s farming loop. Now, I don’t think either the sweatlords or I are playing the game “wrong” so to speak, but our priorities are in conflict. Maybe I’m letting people-pleasing anxiety get the best of me, but I feel like the person that cares enough to grind a dungeon reward as fast as possible should get right of way over my happy ass who will intentionally sandbag my way through a dungeon if the vibes are right. Therefore, I tend not to engage with such content, if it’s not possible to solo.
This has all come to a head because my current preoccupation is Star Wars The Old Republic. Given this game’s much greater emphasis on story and dialog than a typical MMO, I actually feel like there’s RP content that I want to see in the dungeons, irrespective of any item reward. To the game’s credit, many of these can be done solo by selecting the “story” difficulty option before loading in, but not all of them. I just don’t want to be the asshole holding up the party cause I want to watch the 3 minute into cutscene (or whatever) while everyone else is hammering their skip buttons trying to get to the boss.
Not necessarily asking for advice, as the solution seems obvious to me (it’s “talk to your fellow players”, like it always is), but I thought this might foster some discussion, especially from old heads who might have lived the raid life back in the day, but now have different priorities.
IMO, the friction between players is the point. The dependency on others in the world is what makes it an MMO, otherwise it’s just a bunch of people playing a single player game next to each other.
But that’s also not the current design meta of MMOs. Dependency on other players means that it’s difficult to have a clear definition of a player’s experience with the game will be, which means it’s hard for the designers to make guarantees about player retention to investors. Imagine telling an investor who doesn’t play games that “we don’t know exactly what keeps players playing, but we do know that it’s possible for one player to ruin another player’s experience.” So over the last 15y, player interdependence has been optimized out of MMOs.
Those players exist, but they’re not important. I do think most players want to go at a chill pace and have an experience they will remember. Running dungeons as fast as possible to farm gear without interacting with any other players creates a very dependable dopamine loop, and a very forgettable experience.
I don’t think it’s fun to be forced to interact with others in an MMO, but I do think it’s fun when your best option is to interact with other players. Ex. make it possible to do something by yourself in 5h of play, or with a group in less than 1h, and people will just prefer interact. I think cave quests in wow are a great example of this. Caves can be lethal to a player questing by themselves, very inconvenient, but if they run into another person questing the same cave, there is safety in numbers. Their survivability goes up exponentially, and they can complete the work faster. It just makes sense.
I think the cave quest has been optimized out of modern/retail wow. Every quest is easily solo-able, everyone can self-heal, everyone can take on 5+ mobs at a time, everyone can just fly in/fly out. My hope is that they’ve learned how unfun this, and WoW Forever will retain that old-style fun where players just have to talk to each other.