All you're doing is proving that most people really don't like to group, they need to be pushed into it, bribed or penalized for not doing it.  Otherwise, people just don't group for the pure enjoyment of grouping.

Originally posted by Palebane

Where do you draw the line though? Eventually players will want the runs to be just as fast with even a poor group. Then they will want the runs to be just as fast if you are solo. I don't think groupers are necesarily arguing for exluding solo gameplay, they seem to be simply trying not to become excluded themselves. If everyone is soloing, it becomes very hard to find groups, in my experience.

That's really the problem though, you don't have people grouping because they like to group, but because they get extra rewards.  People usually solo because that's what they enjoy doing, not because they get any bonuses for doing it.  So many groupers, though, only group because they want extra and exclusive crap, they don't care about being in a group, just benefiting from being in a group.

People who enjoy grouping for the sake of grouping wouldn't give a damn about extra rewards, they'd do it just because they enjoyed grouping and there would be no problem finding people to group with.

Hopefully, I like companions.  In fact, I'd like to see their use expanded.  If you're putting together a group and cannot find a particular class, why not be able to get an appropriately leveled companion of that class to come along?  They get the same loot as anyone else, they gain experience like everyone else, they level up like everyone else, they're just controlled by the AI instead of a player.  It would speed up grouping.

I had to say 3.  I'm not playing anything now, I haven't in a long time and every time I've tried to play an MMO in the past year or so, I've gotten bored within a couple of hours (or less) and given up.  There just isn't anything I find fun in most of these games anymore.

Originally posted by Palebane

 If 99 out of 100 players are rushing around, it doesn't sound like that 1 player has much of a choice in that regard if they want to play with other players. They are getting gameplay imposed on them as well. I don't think slower games create better communities, but I definitely think "faster" ones create poor communities.

Which is why I solo 99.9% of the time, because there's nobody out there worth playing with.  I don't care if everyone else wants to rush to level cap, I don't, I won't, I just want to be left alone to play the game the way I want to play the game and not have anyone else's playstyle forced on me.  I don't think slow games create good communities, I don't think fast games create poor communities, I think that it's the quality of the players who make the difference and I have yet to find a single game in the past decade or so that wasn't stuffed to the gills with selfish, entitlement-happy, obnoxious asshats who would just as soon throw you under a bus if it gets them a rare drop as look at you.

Is it any wonder I don't want to play with any of them?

Originally posted by Palebane

 I agree with both of you. Adding time-wasting game mechanics isn't going to magically create a better community. If anything, nowadays, it's going to create a smaller community which is exactly the opposite of what publishers want. On the other hand, the speedy gameplay that is so popular right now, does affect how players act towards one another, in my opinion. Players no longer expect downtime, so they see it as a waste and believe that nothing fun or interesting can ever come from it. I believe it can.

Taking time to help or get to know a player can be very rewarding and makes the downtime more bearable. By contrast, it doesn't matter to me how fast my character is progressing if the only reason I'm doing it is to get more powerful. Maybe if there was more down-time and interdependence I would get to meet and actually interact with some of those players from the older games that seem to have disappeared from the modern games. Maybe I could actually tell if they were people that I'd like to hang out with more instead of being just another part of a huge blur created by the warp speed these new games play at.

But people can learn that on their own and impose their own down time if they wish to do so.  Having it imposed on them by the developers is never a good thing.  People need to be able to make choices.  If they want to rush by and level as fast as they can, that's up to them.  If they want to slow down and smell the roses, that's fine too.  I don't think it's going to create a better community because most of the people playing these games aren't going to be part of a good community regardless.

Originally posted by Goatgod76

What else would you do then at cap? The same dungeons and zones again to amass gold, gear to sell, etc...which is grind, which is a timesink? Craft?...which is a timesink. Or go play an alt...doing all the same stuff again...which is a timesink to keep you playing. There is NOTHING in any MMO that isn't a timesink to one degree or another. So really, there is no choice or way to avoid them if you want to play. That is why MMO's are a different genre from console games....they require time, and a lot of it (Hence a monthly fee..or use to be anyways...sadly). Where console games were made for quick fun and gratification with no breaks in the action.

I don't play at cap, any character I have that reaches max level gets immediately retired.  I find nothing fun whatsoever at level cap.  So I'll either start over with another class or, if the game bores me, I'll move on.  It's not a time sink, it's a choice that I'm making to go back and replay parts of the game.  It's my choice, not the choice of the developers.

Originally posted by meleemadness

Bingo!  That is a time sink.  In wow they just put the time sink in at the end so you have already invested into your character and now feel the time sink of raiding is not so bad.  Other games have time sinks spread everywhere, during the leveling process.

I personally love how EQ2 does it.....there is so much to do beside try to become an elite snob in a high end raiding guild.

It's not a time sink if it's a choice.  You choose to stand around looking for a raid group.  It's not something imposed on you by the developers.  There's a difference.

Originally posted by kilun

 This is where many playes differ.  If I want to fight and progress I'd rather do it in something such as Diablo, Darkspore, Hellgate, etc.  If all there is in a game is to fight, it keeps me until I crack cap and a few instances.  Then I'm done, because frankly I don't see the point in get some gear so I can do the next instance and repeat the cycle.  That is boring.

I want a world to live in, not to conquer.  Part of a living world would be to have a house that I can decorate.  Not everyone wants to bash heads in MMO's all day long, because thats what I got FPS and action rpg's for.  MMO's are focusing only on combat and not social aspects and the genre player base mentality and "community" has been in a large decline because of this. 

The problem is, there are rules to any game and in pretty much every MMO, if you don't go kill things, you stop progressing, you stop playing the game.  It's like saying you want to roleplay while playing Monopoly.  Okay, if it really turns you on, but while you are roleplaying, you stop playing Monopoly because you've moved outside the rules of the game and thus, are acting against the established goals of the game.

Nothing says you can't do it, but there's no denying that it's not what the game was designed for.

Originally posted by cheyane

We seem to be forever mired in our memories of the games we have played. We also tend to vilify the players we currently meet in games. They are all boorish , greedy and inapt in our calculation.  The pool of players in the games we now play are greatly increased compared to when I played Everquest in 1999. Yes there seems to be a great deal of players we seem to want to stay away from. It is harder to find good players with whom you might want to form bonds.

 I do not however subscribe to the belief that by creating excessive time lapses between regenerating health and mana or whatever mechanism our fights are controlled ; this will create more likable people. We will encounter the same people they are not going to magically become nicer people because we force them to meditate behind a book or take long boat rides. I also think that the reason we find the people we like so rarely is that many of these people belong to older guilds. They do not randomly join pugs. People who are from older games also tend to have older friends who they might play with even if they do not belong to a guild; might only play with a few friends. So we generally get an even smaller number of players from the older games to group with. The current population has grown up on a different diet of games and they also belong to the iphone, facebook , messenger  generation and while they may not be intentionally rude have different priorities.

We forget that we too were once young but we are not so forgiving once we meet them and dismiss them as being unworthy of our time or effort. It is not going to change though if you just introduce timesinks as that is not the problem. 

Excellent points.  The issue here is that most people grow up and realize that the people they used to enjoy hanging around with, the people who are boorish, greedy and ignorant, are the same people we used to be way back when.  But we improved and we no longer want to hang around with the boorish, greedy asshats that largely inhabit these games.  We want to be with people who are like we are now, just as we wanted to be around people who were like we were then.

The problem is, when you have forced down-time, the people around you don't get any more mature, intelligent or interesting, they're still the same obnoxious assholes they always were, the people who you don't want to be around in the first place.  Putting in artificial time wasters just makes us want to get back to the fun, which for many of us is playing with a small handful of similarly-viewed friends, or playing alone if you cannot find enough decent people worth playing with.

It's not that we forget that we were once young, we always go through cycles of who we want to spend time with and those people are the ones that most closely mirror our own experiences and maturity.  The ones who are too old or too young are never our target associates and as we get older, the majority of the players in any particular game are the ones we'd much rather avoid than play with.

EQ is a ghost of it's former self, the game is still running with a low population, clinging to life by the skin of it's teeth.  That's not success, especially compared to what came afterwards.

Secondly, the OP specifically referred to time sinks as time spent standing around doing nothing waiting for something to happen.  Modern games do not have these.  Grinding is still playing the game, even if it fulfills the same general function, you're not standing around bored.

Originally posted by allldin

You're doing it wrong then :D

No, but maybe you are.

It wasn't part of the fun, it was part of what killed those games and why the majority of players moved on to games where there were no ridiculous time sinks.  Nobody except the geek living in his mother's basement has time to sit around for 20 minutes waiting for something to happen.  Most people have very little time to sit around and play a game.  Wasting time standing around is time you can't actually play.

Good riddance to time sinks.  May we never see them again.

For those of us who have no interest in ever raiding, max level means nothing except retiring the character and starting over.  Thus, we're in no hurry to level up, period.  7-8 months to max level?  I've played games where I've taken 2-3 years to get there.

Originally posted by Angier2758

Originally posted by Cephus404

Originally posted by Sulaa

Perfectly ok. Noone forcing you to like housing, you just don't enjoy it and it is ok.

For many people good housing is not "fluff" like it is for you.  Simple , people enjoy diffrent things is games.

I didn't originally say "fluff", I was repeating someone else who was defending housing as "fluff".  I simply asked what it was about housing that really mattered because honestly, I don't see it.  These games exist for fighting and progression, this isn't "World of Warcraft Sims".  It seems to me about as silly to demand housing in an MMO as it does to demand it in, say, Halo.

It's that the world is persistant so therefore... where is your hero sleeping?  Some people like me think fo their hero as a wanderer.  Others think of their hero as a member of a family or guild with roots in a place... thus a house.  In Halo your character never really rests or sets down roots... you play through an adventure and then you're done.  If you don't get this then you're being willfilly ignorant of the obvious.

As I said earlier housing doesn't make sense in a lot of game worlds.... we want free form housing and castles... but to me that ruins the game because if you want a house away from a city it needs to either be defended or be hidden.

Your hero isn't sleeping, when you log off, you vanish from the world.  That's the way it is in every game and the way it has to be, otherwise you'd have bodies littered across the landscape.  In most games, you never set down roots either, you move from one zone to the next as you level, you don't set up shop in a low-level area when you're very high level and you have to run for an hour to get back to the high-level content every day.  It's absurd.

But then again, I'm being realistic here.  Far too many people aren't.

Another vote for Anarchy Online, although I probably wouldn't go back and play it, it has too many other problems.  They've promised a new graphics engine for how many years now?

Originally posted by Sulaa

Perfectly ok. Noone forcing you to like housing, you just don't enjoy it and it is ok.

For many people good housing is not "fluff" like it is for you.  Simple , people enjoy diffrent things is games.

I didn't originally say "fluff", I was repeating someone else who was defending housing as "fluff".  I simply asked what it was about housing that really mattered because honestly, I don't see it.  These games exist for fighting and progression, this isn't "World of Warcraft Sims".  It seems to me about as silly to demand housing in an MMO as it does to demand it in, say, Halo.

No, group quests are always horrible, speciflcally because of people like you who are racing to max level and just want to race through the quest, killing as fast as possible, so you can get to the boss, get the loot and go do it again.  Those of us who are in no hurry to get to end-game, who want to take our time and go through each and every quest slowly and carefully, never have any fun in group quests.  That's why we don't do them.

Originally posted by Marcus-

 For me, in UO, it was player towns....

 

It was another layer of "community". Events were held, such as crafting fairs, RP events, and hubs for dungeon crawls. Having your player town attacked by reds, and getting the call to come defend, personally, i would drop whatever i was doing.. Imagine raiders having to stop what they were doing to come defend their towns "honor"  

 

When UO added the housing tool (whatever it was called) where you could design your own house, I thought in game housing was really going to take off in MMOs, it was just a really fun "fluff" thing to do when times might be slow, or limited... The imagination i saw with that in game was really quite fantastic.

 

ahh well..

AO had player towns too, or at least guilds could buy towns and build them for their members.  I think I wandered into my guild city a few times.  Most people used them as places to set up storefronts to sell their unwanted loot.  Since I really had no connection to the city, I never bothered defending it (they had events regularly where aliens would attack the city) and there was no honor to being in the guild or not, it really didn't matter.  Heck, I didn't even put my "house" in my guild's city, I just left it where it was, the one I got the first day I ever played the game, the one I pretty much abandoned because it had no utilitarian use to it.

I don't play games for fluff.

Honestly, I've never seen the point of in-game housing.  I've never really used it, never really decorated it, what difference does it make when playing the game?  At best, it's a place to hang out, but there are lots of places in most games to hang out.  I know it's not a good example, but Anarchy Online has in-game housing and, for years, I used to run across the planet every day before logging out so I could "sleep" in my house.  Even if it took half an hour to run back home, I'd do it so I could sleep in a particular corner in a particular room that nobody else could access.  Who cares?  I gave up after a while and I doubt I stepped foot back in my house after that.  What's the point?