I agree with ya. the decline on making long term friends to play with is pretty lame im not playing WoW anymore but when i did i had this same feeling. personally i only had one friend i raided and continually played with on there.

While this is going on in certain games, it isn't going on in other games. Depending on what gameplay you're after though may affect what games I could recommend to you that don't and hopefully won't fall into this trend.

It is a trend, and may or may not continue to gain popularity. Blizzard found out that they could make more money that way, and others followed. Or Blizzard followed some other guys that were successful. Either way, it may not be around forever.

I agree with you entirely though, which is why I play DDO / LOTRO / Darkfall, where the communities are strong. Darkfall may be filled with silly adults but it is still strong, and reputable.

If you want group combat, try DDO man, it's the best group game I've ever played, and I am totally in love with it. (But my college internet sucks too much to play).

So you want things less massive?

You wanna play a Somewhat Massively Multiplayer game?  A SMMORPG?

The way EQ worked was basically the same way MUDs worked.  But most MUDs just had one server.  Veryone who played that MUD played on the same server.  In some sense EQ was even less massive than most MUDs (even the MUD EQ was based on) because the player base was irrevocably divided.

I have seen some people argue that this is why EQ was an MMO and MUDs are not. 

In the end true clustering rather than separate instances of the same game code across separate clustering is the way to make your game truly Massively Multiplayer.  Everyone and anyone can play with each other.

Rather than harkening back to the more primitive I suggest you look the real world small communities.  The idea of a small town versus a big city is not new.  All the problems you are having, are things that have existed for thousands of years.

Some people like the big city,  they don't mind being "a face in the crowd" (see we even have idioms in our languages to represent this old idea).  They like all the action of the city.

Some people want a small or medium town where things are more personal.

A truly good MMO will provide mechanics to capture both.  Don't settle for going back to the primitive setup.  You might as well be playing a text based MUD.

Originally posted by gestalt11

So you want things less massive?

 

You wanna play a Somewhat Massively Multiplayer game?  A SMMORPG?

 

 

 Heh, well I dont think the word massive was every realy defined by a number.  I think the OP though, wanted to play an MMORPG instead of an MMOAG (massive multiplayer online arcade game).

So in otherwords you want the feel that a small community causes, but want none of the disadvantages.

Originally posted by anemo

So in otherwords you want the feel that a small community causes, but want none of the disadvantages.

Actually we all know that there are issues with both ways of doing this - anyone who played EQ1 can point out that standing around LFG for hours was not fun - that is what the random dungeon was designed to do. 

What I would actually like is some way to include community in the world of instances - perhaps random dungeons could first check lfg on your local servers and then branch out untill they are full, perhaps you could have a "random dungeon friends list" - WoW has real id but thats far to much information for a person to share with strangers imho.

How about holding off the MMO part until one's earned it. make people miss it.

Im watching sparticus right now. How about you start as a slave gladiator. Your're in the little training place whatever its called. 10 people max. You and your friends and npc's, or thrown in with randoms people. Whatever you want. You train or level there, every so often you go to the arena and have a fight blah blah til your max level. This little area is it for you, other than the arena or some random crap. The people or NPC's with you are your only possible in game friends until you get out.

 You then have one final fight for your freedom, or you talk everyone into waiting until you rebel against your owners and escape. Pretty linear experience. One that CANNOT be steamrolled through  as fast as you want. Playing for 10 hours wont make it faster or you stronger than playing for 1 hour.

Now you are free in rome in an sandbox. (ya sandbox) Either as a hero gladiator, or as outlaws. Options for gameplay are limitless. Still guilds or gangs are 10 people max. But longer playtime will help.

screw the loot whore server first multi-game guilds no one cares about. This is a game specifically designed to ignore them. That it how you advertise it.

For a good reason, not because they're lame and they hurt me long ago. Just because they're lame and would ruin the game for the real people.  All stupid things I listed are for a reason. Target audience. They more people cry about it, the better it sounds to the target audience. Tears turn into dollars. My market research is in the same place your is..bullshit land.

Cheap, easy, defintely profitable.

with great combat and well made, buy to play with endless gladiator matches, or free yourself and pay more, it would have more people than any SOE or cryptic  game at least. Maybe not something you could employ 100 people for no reason for 5 years. probalby wont fund some console pet project that will never see the light of day. So you could use sub fees for what they were supposed to be used for and live well.

It's not DIKU though...so nevermind. Plus all game ideas suck because some dude has a blog saying so. He's somebody too i guess. 

But it is for sale for cheap.  I need  beer money.

A typical server may have tens of thousands of people who play there.  You don't get to know tens of thousands of people.  You probably don't get to know 1% of the people who play on your server.

The hard-core players may well get to know each other to a significant degree.  The overwhelming majority of the playerbase really only gets to know a handful of guildies, and for them, dungeon partners largely appear random whether they can only group with their own server or with anyone who plays the game.  What such people will notice, however, is the difference between grouping with random players versus not being able to find a group at all because too few people on their server want to do the given content, and most of those who do want to do it are on other servers.

If a game is fun for a handful of hard-core players, but not for the overwhelming majority of other players who like the game, then it's going to be a commercial failure.

The issue is more that you can't hook up with those players afterwards than whether you can group randomly (because that's exactly how you hooked up with those guilded raiders in the past: random groups.)

So moving away from a 1-server community is fine -- as long as a game moves completely away from it and treats the entire community as a single entity.  (Which I guess you could argue is moving towards, not away from, a 1-server community.)

Originally posted by mylin1

 

I

I was sitting down with some friends trying to work out why the current mmo's - our current one being WoW wasnt keeping me absorbed as of late - and this is what I decided (imho of course)

 

In the other games, EQ1, EQ2, AoC I played you were always getting your dungeons filled with people on your server, someone you could actually be bothered talking too and sometimes people who you spent an entire day group with - got invited to join raid guilds etc on EQ2 purely based on spending some time in a dungeon with raiders and impressing them enough that they wanted to poach me for their guild etc.

 

I really hate this junk food dungeon grouping that WoW has got going - all your group mates are disposable assest that you can use and abuse without any recourse (unless you cross a line and get reported) - even the best of groups often end with a "thanks bye" and drop - in all the time we have played wow I think we had 2 times where peoples at around afterwards and chatted or did theory craft etc with each other - this use to be the norm for rpg games I played.

 

The community is gutted when random playing partners replaces playing with groups within your server.

 

In the other games a guild with our activity could expect to have 40 members in it due to the raid focus etc, populated with people who we had grouped with over the course of 1-85 and made friends with, instead I know no one other than my guildies on our server, i dont feel part of this server at all, or part of the community - you just don't get to know your neighbors' which is what made mmos special.

Well in the wow Example, I think its two folded, the community defines the game but the devs change around to the community's desires even if they were intended to do elsewise to keep sales.

The other problem is most people you meet from the random dungeon finder are on other servers so you can't really play the game with them at the same level, because you aren't on the same server. I had a couple other server friends, but it quickly became a pen-pal relationship because the dungeonfinder didn't allow you to invite certain people into your group from other servers, even though you were just going into a instanced dungeon anyways.

At least you have your loot.

I agree, too. The social aspects of recent MMO's have greatly evolved, in both good and bad directions depending on how you look at it.

However, for many of us, especially those who began in classic MMO's like AC and EQ, we are much more sensitive to the issue.

I do think we will see significant changes in the up and coming MMO's when it comes to the social aspects of the game. However, we can only hope that those changes survive the current market and trends. Only time will tell.

Originally posted by Axehilt

The issue is more that you can't hook up with those players afterwards than whether you can group randomly (because that's exactly how you hooked up with those guilded raiders in the past: random groups.)

In which case the problem isn't one of allowing grouping across servers.  It's of allowing too little interaction across servers, not too much.

Personally, I haven't seen any games that allowed grouping across servers without also allowing easy full transfer across whatever notion of servers the game has.  I have seen quite a few of the latter, though.

Originally posted by mylin1

 

I

I was sitting down with some friends trying to work out why the current mmo's - our current one being WoW wasnt keeping me absorbed as of late - and this is what I decided (imho of course)

 

In the other games, EQ1, EQ2, AoC I played you were always getting your dungeons filled with people on your server, someone you could actually be bothered talking too and sometimes people who you spent an entire day group with - got invited to join raid guilds etc on EQ2 purely based on spending some time in a dungeon with raiders and impressing them enough that they wanted to poach me for their guild etc.

 

I really hate this junk food dungeon grouping that WoW has got going - all your group mates are disposable assest that you can use and abuse without any recourse (unless you cross a line and get reported) - even the best of groups often end with a "thanks bye" and drop - in all the time we have played wow I think we had 2 times where peoples at around afterwards and chatted or did theory craft etc with each other - this use to be the norm for rpg games I played.

 

The community is gutted when random playing partners replaces playing with groups within your server.

 

In the other games a guild with our activity could expect to have 40 members in it due to the raid focus etc, populated with people who we had grouped with over the course of 1-85 and made friends with, instead I know no one other than my guildies on our server, i dont feel part of this server at all, or part of the community - you just don't get to know your neighbors' which is what made mmos special.

Yep. MMORPGs--erm, games in general--are moving in a direction that allows really undesirable players to exist along with us (much more so than before). It's all about YOU the player; everyone else is disposable. 

The only thing we can do to fix this is actively seek or form groups that hold a strong sense of community above all else.