Originally posted by Icewhite

Originally posted by Loktofeit

So it's the Grouping = Socializing argument. I guess that could work, however it's never been seen to extend any level of socializing beyond the guild/clan unit.

Really? I read it as the "co-dependency = socializing", ala EQ1.

Co-dependency seems to be related but separate from what he is saying. His post and the follow up reply were about group rewards and grouping. I completely agree that co-dependency is a way to get players functioning as a group, albeit a borderline sick one. :) .

Getting people to group to do tasks and getting people to socialize are two completely different things, the former being one possible way to work toward the other but the argument that grouping = socializing is false, as collaborative efforts and creative expression, especially outside the realm of combat mechanics, have proven to create far more social interaction beyond the insular guild unit.

The strength of collaborative or creative content lies in its voluntary nature. This is in stark contrast to grouping and co-dependency, where the reason for forming the group is necessity, as they are handicapped or hindered from progressing further without doing so.

If you read the posts about grouping as a social catalyst, they have one thing in common - combat rewards. It is a consistent theme. Now, if we are going to say that MMOs are now and shall forever be just fantasy level-based games where combat is the only path of progression, then I would agree with their stance wholeheartedly. However, virtual worlds such as UO, ATITD, Socialotron, Puzzle Pirates, EVE Online, Muxlim, and a host of others do exist and do offer content that promotes socializing without forcing people to be tethered to another guy in order to get a reward as the reason to do it.

Lawmaking, player councils, game-filled taverns, and other features allow players to go places to meet up with others looking to socialize. Player-editable books and paper, bulletin boards, broadcast and chat tools, ladder/tournament tools, playter event tools and social network sites ( ex: BSN and  EQPlayers) also facilitate this both in-game and out.

Originally posted by Lorkii
I can say with all honesty, I made more friends and chatted more with 1 Darkness Falls Princes raid in DAOC, then I have in all games combined since WoW. It s sad but true, only other game that comes close and was FFXI. Really miss the old school ways. Too many console gaming, go go go go go go crowd entered the genre.

Well in DAoC, raids were an open affair. Anyone could join in the fun. In games like WoW and EQ, they're locked out, linear progression, clique/elistist guild exclusive events.

Originally posted by Tardcore

Originally posted by AlBQuirky

Most socialization occurs during "downtime." Games today just do not have downtime. You instantly heal after every fight and queue up for group content and go. People seldom sit and chat anymore.

Yeah I think this pretty much nails it. People are just caught up in the game rush. More and more developers adding solocentric, or at least smaller more focused group content has sent the social portion of these games into a tighter and tighter spiral, where any interaction with the majorty of other players isn't needed anymore. Well at least until you need some warm bodies to PUG a dungeon, but most games haved added tools to turn even that experience into a completely non-personal one.

 

It seems as more companies "streamline" MMOs they start to resemble certain "other" types of games, and the community seems to be mutating with them.

 

This absolutely.

I'm just afraid of the day when people forget how to socialize at all in these games; or are we already there?

P.S. Tard - I very much enjoy reading your posts (completely serious). What MMO are you playing these days?

Originally posted by TobiasGrey

Originally posted by Lorkii
I can say with all honesty, I made more friends and chatted more with 1 Darkness Falls Princes raid in DAOC, then I have in all games combined since WoW. It s sad but true, only other game that comes close and was FFXI. Really miss the old school ways. Too many console gaming, go go go go go go crowd entered the genre.

Well in DAoC, raids were an open affair. Anyone could join in the fun. In games like WoW and EQ, they're locked out, linear progression, clique/elistist guild exclusive events.

I agree, but DAOC in general, had way more socializing then those games combined. Just going on what I experienced.

Originally posted by Kyleran

Originally posted by TobiasGrey

Originally posted by Icewhite

Originally posted by Loktofeit

So it's the Grouping = Socializing argument. I guess that could work, however it's never been seen to extend any level of socializing beyond the guild/clan unit.

Really? I read it as the "co-dependency = socializing", ala EQ1.

Co-dependency is not the same as giving better rewards for doing things as a group. In DAoC you could solo all you wanted, but it wasn't going to be as fast as grouping. Grouping is a much harder thing to do, so by design it should yield a greater reward, or people won't do it, and then the feature will vanish for those that like it. It happened in DAoC after they added /level 20 and kill tasks to the game.

I'm starting to think DAOC might have been a bit of a unique animal in terms of how the group mechanics worked, Mythic seemed to have hit more or less the perfect storm in terms of balance between soloing and grouping, at least in terms of encouraging players to group.

I didn't play every title back then (who had the time), but the ones I did play had nothing really resembling it.

DAoC was definitely a unique animal, and I think even Mythic is searching for the answer to what magic they had created there that made the game as much of a social experience as it was. Some that I feel really contributed to the experience:

• Common mythology - people came into the game with a working knowledge of the lore and were offered a choice of which area of the lore they preferred. Coming out the gate the game had already put people with common interest together. They gave a diverse group of people a common topic to work with and a comon interest to share.
• Relatively dedicated crafters - you probably remember who your guild's crafters were. Your guild's crafters probably remember the names of the other crafters in their realm, as they traded with them and spent a lot of time at the same forges and crafting stations with them. There were roles beyond just Killer of Things and people in those other roles spent time with similarly interested parties.
• Strong forum and community support - Team Leads, an active forum community and a site that regularly promoted player creations and player sites let players build their communities around the web. MMOs currently work toward bringing all the info under their official site. The communities that built around sites such as UO Stratics, DAoC Catacombs and Allakhazam are rare these days. I admit, this one is a double edged sword, as the loss of the smaller communities is replaced by better availability and a central location for information for the community as a whole.

Originally posted by Calerxes

There is plenty of interdependency in modern MMO's its just not forced it happens naturally through playing the game. If you choose not to see it thats your problem. 

Calerxes, I think you have some confusion about the use of the term "interdependancy"....by it's very definition it is "forced"..

"interdependence" is a relationship in which each member is mutually dependent on the others.

Dependent means not just that you want some form of assistance from the other individual but that you actualy NEED it.

Now, you may or may not like the concept of interdependance in a game but by it's very definition it is "forced"...if not then it's something else... perhaps "interaction" would qualify....

Personaly, I think "interedependance" as a design goal for a game makes for a better game community, atmosphere and player experience (i.e. "fun" ).

Clearly it is POSSIBLE to play socialy in modern MMO's (or games without those design mechanics) but that does not mean such games are actualy CONDUSCIVE to such play.

For example, I'm an avid RP-er and was part of quite an active RP guild in LOTRO. While we were able to do stuff....for the most part we fealt that the game and it's mechanics were FIGHTING AGAINST what we were trying to do rather then SUPPORTING it. I'll give you some specific examples of what I'm talking about.

              - Kinda tough to RP storylines and the actual movement of events in a completely static environment where nothing ever changes and the players actions essentialy have no effect on the environment. By contrast in the MUD's I've played in, the GM's actualy ran storylines/arcs themselves which the players participated in, the players actions made a difference in the outcome of those storylines and actualy had significant lasting effects on the game environment.

             - Significantly limited in the content on could RP against, when much of that content was tucked away in "private instances" with predefined group sizes that would not fit into your RP group (meaning such content/environments could not be used without excluding members).

          - Difficult to RP in Open World areas and present any real sense of danger/difficulty to the group when most of the open world content was scaled to a single individuals and even doing it with even 2 characters was so laughably easy that you could do it while asleep.

          - Difficult to RP in Open World areas because in doing so we were actualy distrubing the play of other players who were trying to use those areas to level and were not interested in nor understood the concept of RP-ing and did not want it "messing up thier game."  As a RP-er, RPing only really works well when those around you are participating. It's an inclusive activity.... and the last thing you want to do is disturb someone elses play who is not interested in it....so you are essentialy "ghetto-ized" to try to find someplace that is deserted of others in order to pursue your chosen play style without annoying others....because there is no clear understanding that (RP-ing) is a commonly accepted focus of play among the community.

         - No PvP allowed in the Open World (other then timed duels)....so difficult to construct your own storylines that involve conflict. The one place that allows PvMP.... the players there mostly see that as a "competitive PvP environment" so attempting to use that as a backdrop for conflict generates complaints among the other players in that environment...because once again you are disturbing thier play...and they view what you are doing as not an accepted/intended  use of that environment (see point above).

I could go on...as there are plenty of others...but hopefully I am making my point. Yes, we could RP (and socialize) in that game (LOTRO) but functionaly we were left with little better mechanisms then we could have gotten out of a chat room. In fact in many ways less.....since at least in a chat room you aren't disturbing other peoples use of that environment..... and LOTRO was actualy supposed to be one of the most heavly RP oriented modern MMO's released.

Yes you could do it....and yes you could socialize...but it was largely IN SPITE of the game...and not DUE TO IT. Contrast this to some of the older MUDS where the entire design focus of the game is built around supporting that style of play.

Originally posted by Calerxes

Originally posted by TobiasGrey

Originally posted by Khaeros

Originally posted by TobiasGrey

In modern games, there is no harsh world to band people together

 

If we can band people together in 'games' that have zero game mechanics (like MUSHes, which are mostly just roleplaying frameworks), then I can certainly do it in any MMORPG structure, whether it be themepark or sandbox, old or new, text or DX11.

 

That's the difference.  I don't need the game to give me a sense of socialization.  We create and invoke that sense out of nothing. 

When a game is built around anti social mechanics, it draws anti social people to it. That is the community that forms. Your weird philosophy is pretty flawed. I can like working together with people all I want, but if people never group, never respond to chat, and never interact with you, there's jack shit you can do about it.

If a game doesn't encourage community and socializing, a social community WILL NOT develop, no matter how much you want it to.

 

Khaeros has already stated that he facilitates the making of a community he doesn't need the game to encourage him to socialise he goes out there and makes it happen. There seems to be a crowd of old time gamers who expect the game to dictate to the populous what to do while others go out and make it happen regardless of mechanics, I find RP servers are the best places for this.

I think that many of us "old time gamers" expect that the game has a specific design focus so that it encourages a player community with a specific and somewhat like minded set of expectations on what that game environment is about, so that people have an easier time finding individuals with that style of play interest and there are fewer conflicts involved when using that environment for clashing styles of play. We also expect the game will have mechanics that support that style of play. It's the difference between something that is labled as simply "Field" and something labled "Softball field".... If I show up at the "Softball field" I can reasonably expect most of the others there are going to be interested in playing softball...not football or golf. No one else there will have justifiable cause for people using the field to play softaball instead of football or golf..... and the field will likely have a diamond and basepaths laid out...rather then a bunch of holes with flags sticking out of them.

I think this is true of modern MMO's as well.....but the design focus does not appear to include most of the forms of socialization that many of us "old time gamers" recognize, enjoy and are interested in. It seems mostly focused on progression, solo-play and instanced based RAIDING of static PVE Dungeons. That's certainly fine if your interested in that sort of thing. I may even, once in a blue moon, feel like indulging in that myself. However my entertainment time is far too valuable to be wasted on products that aren't really designed to support the type of play I enjoy....and communities that by-in-large are not welcoming of it, nor really even understand it. YMMV.

Edit: As a consumer, why would anyone want to use a product that was not designed to support your intended use of it. Had a minimal feature set to utilize for that intended use and has quite a number of feature that actively retard that intended use?  I would never buy something like that would you?

I really think Dev's want to have thier cake and eat it too.....They want to sell a product to people that have incompatible intended uses of that product, and then they can't understand why many folks aren't satisfied with that design. Sorry guys, that's not the way real world product design works. You pick an intended audience, you design a product with features that appeal to that audience and you market and sell to that audience. If you want to widen your audience...you need to design a different product with a different focus and a different set of features. You aren't going to build one vehicle that appeals well to the eco-freindly sub-compact crowd, the muscle car guys and the guys who want a monster off-road vehicle with a large bed to haul stuff.

People think having 500 facebook "friends" is being social. People think one liners on twitter is being social. People think posting pictures of their breakfast is being social. Making insta group action mmos is only part of the problem. We are living in an age of fucked up interaction all around. We watch reality tv shows where people fight and cry over nothing, then log onto facebook to see of anyone commented on our youtube link. Everybody wants to be heard but nobody has anything worth listening to.

Originally posted by Foomerang

People think having 500 facebook "friends" is being social. People think one liners on twitter is being social. People think posting pictures of their breakfast is being social. Making insta group action mmos is only part of the problem. We are living in an age of fucked up interaction all around. We watch reality tv shows where people fight and cry over nothing, then log onto facebook to see of anyone commented on our youtube link. Everybody wants to be heard but nobody has anything worth listening to.

true story.

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Originally posted by Loktofeit

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Originally posted by AlBQuirky Most socialization occurs during "downtime." Games today just do not have downtime. You instantly heal after every fight and queue up for group content and go. People seldom sit and chat anymore.

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How do you explain UO?

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Originally posted by Khaeros

Originally posted by TobiasGrey

Rewarding socializing and grouping is a great idea. Why? Because its harder. Doing harder things should yield a better reward than taking the easy route.

 

Our definitions of 'social' are a little different, then.

 

I'm not concerned with the small, singular journey of one player or small group to the level cap in a game.  To call group leveling 'social' is an extreme overstatement, to me.

 

I'm talking 'social' as in server-wide communities, events that tie in entire guilds with each other, creating a positive mentality with respectable ideals that encourages other players to do the same to the new players, 'passing it forward'.  Leaving the community in a better shape than it was when we took root.

 

It's larger than just the leveling experience.  It's about making an event where everyone worth mentioning on a server shows up and loves every moment of it, coming together (or going against each other if we are talking more PvP-heavy games) in camraderie or rivarly.

 

That's social.  That's developing a sense of community.  Some people like to say that they want a social game.  We make it.

That's so sad. You have to do all that work. When I played A Tale In The Desert we had an acro party or a dig going literally every day. Often more than one. We organized a sheep gathering and breeding fair and we had 10 players together for a solid 3-12 hours farming wood for charcoal to get a new tech. We didn't have to "organize" events. The whole game was events. Signing off on sculptures and hand puzzles the Riverland Public Works Guild, I was in like 10 guilds simultaneously.

Public Works set up special work stations all over the region to get newbies free access to resources crafting tools and machines and we did all the local techs and funded people's compounds and guild halls.

I had a storehouse of thousands of public mats like slate and grass and mud next to the region spawn to get instant compounds, dozens of public kilns and so forth.

You know about the homestead act? We basically had that with mats and stuff like starter sheep herds. That's what we did all day. And it matters because the way techs are set up the good of the community is the good of the individual. Sure you can't run a dig for medium stones all on your own but who cares because there were 2-3 digs every day and acro parties to get your acrobat skills for strength bonuses and a sculpture district where we each went to sign off.

If you saw another person you had never met you did acro, signed off on titles, any oustanding petitiions and so forth and maybe traded carrots for onions or w/e so we all had access to all seeds. And no one whined about how it was sucking up their free play time to acro with you.

You can yak all you want about your WoW guild but unless only 5% of players in the entire playerbase are likely to bitch at you because you ask for some sort of assistance your community is nothing compared to social sandbox communities.

Originally posted by Ausare
Just about every guild i have been in in many gsmes are aways talking and helping each other.

 Kind of like every game were you have the ability to build internal communities. 

People always make this comment in these sorts of threads, neglecting the fact that socializing is more then just what you do in a guild.

Like the guy obive this poster stated, in essence if you give the players the ability to avoid it most of them will.  MMO's do a very good job of that now. 

Developers have taken casual to mean that players need the game to be easy and quick to progress through, when casual only means that you don't play for long periods of time every day.  Even casual players enjoy a challenge, and most MMO's are completely removing that aspect of the game, at least in the leveling process, and that in turn leads to people not needing to use the social aspects of the game.

It's pretty normal, even for social people, to do those things on their own that can be done on their own.  This is how they make MMO's anymore.  Most peopel though, I believe, need an incentive to socialize; that usually means putting emphasis on community building within the game, and giving people a reason to actually interact with each other. 

If you get people interacting with one another, they'll inevitably start to socialize more.  This is kind of the bedrock for Mortal online and the guys making it.  Get peope interacting, something many developers seem to be moving away from.  The dynamic event stuff that's become popular sinse WAR, is kind of becoming the bane of social gameplay.  They don't actually encourage people to "play together", but to instead "play around each other".  Every game I've played that uses this sort of a system, has had the exact same result, lots of people simply playing around one another but no one actually playing together. 

So, no and yes.  It starts with the developers who insist on making online MULTIPLAYER games as single player friendly as possible, and that leads to players doing less socializing because they don't need to.

 PS:  What the poster above me wrote as well.  Exactly same thing applies to EVE.  Corps interact, it's not corps only interacting with it's own members.  The server is a community as a whole, and peoples actions tend to have impact in the larger social enviroment; as little or as much as they wish it to.  Guilds mean very little in the overall social structure of most MMO's because they're self confined groups that have no reason to interact with other guilds, and the members of guilds have no reason to interact outside of their guild.  Guilds don't spur social interaction in most MMO's, they secgregate it.

Originally posted by AlBQuirky

 

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Originally posted by Loktofeit

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Originally posted by AlBQuirky Most socialization occurs during "downtime." Games today just do not have downtime. You instantly heal after every fight and queue up for group content and go. People seldom sit and chat anymore.

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How do you explain UO?

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I can't. Never played UO. I take it this was an exception? Did you instantly heal after fights and queue up for group content and go? Were there LFD and LFR tools available, or something similar? I truly have no idea what UO was like. It was heavily PvP based and I never was interested in that aspect so never gave it a shot.

Extremely social game, regular community activities, player-run venues across the shards with at least one prominent one on each shard. There was no queueing and grouping only came several years later, but really wasn't used for much other than chat. There was ZERO downtime in the game. ATITD, Puzzle Pirates and several other games have extremely social environments and extensive communities that extend beyond the guild unit because the tools were there to facilitate interaction and the gameplay was more than just raping the countryside of every living thing in your path.

Didn't bother reading the first 7 pages so I'll just chime in @ the OP:

I don't think that it's the fault of the players as much as it is the fault of the current design of games itself.  As you said, games used to be tougher, and require groups to do anything.  Furthermore the groups had to consist of players that KNEW their role and how to play it, with less "wiggle room" than many games seem to have now except in the toughest raids.  Because players can simply jump in and out of short-term "relationships", if you will, with other players, there's less of an inclination to develop a lasting friendly relationship with that person.  Not to say it doesn't happen, but it's not as important as it once was.

This is why I'm so for the creation of new iterations of the EQ/FFXI model, where groups were an absolute necessity.

Originally posted by Lorkii
I can say with all honesty, I made more friends and chatted more with 1 Darkness Falls Princes raid in DAOC, then I have in all games combined since WoW. It s sad but true, only other game that comes close and was FFXI. Really miss the old school ways. Too many console gaming, go go go go go go crowd entered the genre.

 original daoc (pre TOA) was awesome wasnt it?

Originally posted by Lethargic_Synapse

Didn't bother reading the first 7 pages so I'll just chime in @ the OP:

 

I don't think that it's the fault of the players as much as it is the fault of the current design of games itself.  As you said, games used to be tougher, and require groups to do anything.  Furthermore the groups had to consist of players that KNEW their role and how to play it, with less "wiggle room" than many games seem to have now except in the toughest raids.  Because players can simply jump in and out of short-term "relationships", if you will, with other players, there's less of an inclination to develop a lasting friendly relationship with that person.  Not to say it doesn't happen, but it's not as important as it once was.

 

This is why I'm so for the creation of new iterations of the EQ/FFXI model, where groups were an absolute necessity.

This is why I kinda "blamed" it on the players in the OP, because as far as I'm concerned its the players that want the game to become easier, Hell even on this forum which probably has the most "hardcore" mmo players in one room, there are still people that cry that the games are to hard.

Everyone says its the devs fault or that game need to be harder, but when you nail them down on specifics it goes like this..

1:"you want the game harder?"

2:"yes! they are way to easy now"

1:"Ok lets make it so there is no instant travel"

2:"whoa lets not do that...its not making the game any harder, and who has 3 hours to travel to the frost lands?"

1:"ok...how about making it so you have to be forced grouped"

2:"uhmm how about no, I want to be able to get on and off in a hour or less"

1:"fine, what about a steep leveling curve?"

2:"yeah no thanks, GW5 and SWTORMOROGO are coming out in a few months...so I'd like to be done with it by then"

And it goes on and on, my point is.. I really think its the players fault we have the current mmo situation. And like I said in my OP I feel its because everyone is in a rush now, no one wants a 30 second cooldown after a fight.. its go go go! and even with the WAY faster action MMO's that are out now, there are still people shouting for the live action call of duty stuff.

Anyways this is all IMO..

P.S. on a side note, one term or phrase i've seen more and more as of late, and happen to agree with. "we have to many gamers in the wrong genre"

which I do beleive is the biggest problem with MMO's and why I dislike WoW, I think WoW's a decent game, but the fans it brought into the genre I do not care for at all.

And yes I would LOVE to see another FFXI -ish mmo.

@Dewm,

In that sense you are absolutely correct. Dev's are clearly responding to audience demand or at the very least what they percieve as audience demand. If they didn't think something would be popular, they wouldn't do it.

I think the core issue here is that you really have very different audiences for MMO's with very different and conflicting desires in what they want in a game and what they consider fun.

The problem is that pretty much all the Dev's or at least the ones with significant resources are chasing after just one particular segment of that audience (which doesn't place a high value on socialization), one that they percieve to be the largest (and probably, in fact is, at least of those currently playing MMO's).

That creates a problem for both us players and for the Dev's. For the players, it leaves those of us who really don't match that target audience segment floundering, without many game options to chose from. For the Dev's it creates a problem because even if that particular audience segment is the largest, it's not actualy large enough to sustain all the games that are aimed at capturing it. So they end up fighting each other for the same customers and alot of them fail or underperform because there is too much competition for that finite pool of players.

The other issue is that Dev's will sometimes try to reach out to satisfy too wide an audience with too many different divergent and conflicting preferences in a single product in order to maximize that games audience. They end up making complicated, compromise mechanisms that don't work very well...and ultimately don't satisfy anyone well. 

There are plenty of us who do place a high value on socialization and the design mechanisms that support it. However right now our voice isn't weighing very heavly with Developers because they still percieve thier most proffitable path is to chase after the audience that doesn't. Hopefully some will start to percieve that there are simply too many mice trying to chase after the same piece of cheese and peel away from the pack to look for different target audiences. I think we may actualy be starting to see that now.

Originally posted by GrumpyMel2

@Dewm,

In that sense you are absolutely correct. Dev's are clearly responding to audience demand or at the very least what they percieve as audience demand. If they didn't think something would be popular, they wouldn't do it.

I think the core issue here is that you really have very different audiences for MMO's with very different and conflicting desires in what they want in a game and what they consider fun.

The problem is that pretty much all the Dev's or at least the ones with significant resources are chasing after just one particular segment of that audience (which doesn't place a high value on socialization), one that they percieve to be the largest (and probably, in fact is, at least of those currently playing MMO's).

That creates a problem for both us players and for the Dev's. For the players, it leaves those of us who really don't match that target audience segment floundering, without many game options to chose from. For the Dev's it creates a problem because even if that particular audience segment is the largest, it's not actualy large enough to sustain all the games that are aimed at capturing it. So they end up fighting each other for the same customers and alot of them fail or underperform because there is too much competition for that finite pool of players.

The other issue is that Dev's will sometimes try to reach out to satisfy too wide an audience with too many different divergent and conflicting preferences in a single product in order to maximize that games audience. They end up making complicated, compromise mechanisms that don't work very well...and ultimately don't satisfy anyone well. 

 

There are plenty of us who do place a high value on socialization and the design mechanisms that support it. However right now our voice isn't weighing very heavly with Developers because they still percieve thier most proffitable path is to chase after the audience that doesn't. Hopefully some will start to percieve that there are simply too many mice trying to chase after the same piece of cheese and peel away from the pack to look for different target audiences. I think we may actualy be starting to see that now.

I agree with everything here.  I think the main fault of the devs is casting too wide a net.  Everyone wants to be WoW, and nobody wants to be EQ.  This is why they need niche MMO games more than generalized cookie cutters.  It's simply impossible to release a new MMO and hope to top the scale, magnitute and overall success of WoW.  (Or perhaps not impossible, but at the least improbable.)  How many "WoW-killers" have we seen rise and fall within a matter of months?  Most of which are now free to play, by the way.  SWTOR is a great example of how HUGE budgets and professional devs don't make as much of a difference as the audience you're appealing to.  There is a very large "hardcore" gamer base whose needs aren't being met.  It seems the typical response by devs is to simply "add more stuff to do at the end".

I've always personally thought the journey was more important than the endgame, even though I'm what most would consider a hardcore player.  Because of this, I usually end up doing at least one go around of all the endgame content, then creating tons of alts (which is the only reason I lasted through 6 months of TOR).  It's just not fun to me doing the same content over and over for predetermined rewards.  I much prefer games that require grouping and specified battle tactics to the generic MMO model we have now, which is basically designed to propel you to endgame so you can repeat content.  On the other hand, these games are great for people with limited time or that prefer playing solo for the most part.  The problem is we have too many of column B and not enough of column A.