This isn’t about random queues or soloing
As social hooks facilitate socialization, asocial design features actively erode social ties. That doesn’t mean soloing, though. There are very valid reasons to incorporate solo play and solo-friendly content into an MMO. Having solo friendly content is not inherently asocial.
The converse is also true, group content is not inherently social content. There are a number of MMO players, including some of you reading this article, who decry the use of random dungeon queue systems and cross-server gameplay, largely because they facilitate asocial game play. Players queue up, get in group, romp through content with nary a word spoken and the disperse with likely no chance of ever reconnecting. Group content can certainly be asocial content.
I would argue that random dungeon queues and cross-server gameplay are overall a good thing. There are people on lower population servers or servers with lower time coverage than others. There are people who play just off peak time and still want to group. Cross-server play and group finders facilitate that and it’s a good thing.
The asocial part comes when you are rewarded primarily for breaking social ties and just randoming up or going solo. That’s when it becomes asocial. Blizzard system designer Greg Street gave an example of exactly this problem. One of the other developers queued up a random dungeon that Greg would have loved to run and was available to run. His coworker didn’t check his friends list since the queue system is just too convenient.
Square-Enix created a similar problem with their implementation of Duty Roulette in FFXIV:ARR. As initially implemented, DR paid out rewards if you random queued and no rewards if you queued with even a partial team of friends. The net result, it was easier and faster to hit your weekly currency caps if you hit up roulette solo. That’s an asocial system, it’s not just building a tool for the solo player, it’s actively penalizing you for having friends.
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You also often see asocial design in quest construction, but this doesn’t inherently mean that questing is asocial. Lots of quests can be completed in groups and some even work better in a group. A quest system is asocial, though, if it’s better to split up to complete. Collection quests often work this way, doing it in a four-person group makes them take four-times as long. One of the primary reasons I get frustrated with quest hubs is that I like playing in a group and far, far too often the best tactic is “everyone go in a different direction.” That’s bad in horror movies and it is also bad for creation of social hooks. Why can’t we share quest updates?
As an aside, solo-specific certification type quests aren’t the same thing as an asocial quest. Having specific quests that are gates and must be soloed can be an important part of the skill mastery part of an MMO. As an example, Funcom uses a gating system as an access point for their nightmare dungeons in the Secret World. Before you can run them, you have to be able to complete a solo encounter as either a dps, a tank, or a healer. Blizzard intends to incorporate a similar certificate system in Warlords of Draenor, tasking you to certify in the role you intend to queue.
Leaving it to chance
It’s easy to simply hope that the community pieces assemble themselves and to focus on the individual player experience. However, that’s probably not a good idea. Communities will form with or without game hooks, but without the hooks, the communities tend to decouple and turn into atomized guilds each easily pulled away to the next shiny toy (MMO launch) on the horizon. When I think back to the differences between my early MMO experience and my modern ones, one of the things that stands out the most is the nearly complete lack of server-wide ties in most modern MMO’s.
I suppose it’s also important to note that social hooks, on their own, will not a successful MMO make. You still have to have an interesting world and lots of things for the players to do. You also have to address the whole “fun” aspect, which is a pretty fickle beast in and of itself.
Stacking the Deck
In some ways it’s a bit funny to see Blizzard championing social hooks. They are largely the company that deployed many of the initial systems that revocated older social gaming systems. But saying that is a bit unfair to Blizzard, they have always provided good group and multi-group gameplay elements, they just go out of their way to make a world where the solo-oriented player isn’t punished.
Listening to Blizzard’s reflections on these issues, it’s clear that the pendulum swung a bit too far in WoW. Solo-friendly isn't’ inherently asocial, but it’s easy to take a solo system and inadvertently make it asocial. I freely admit that this is a lot easier to talk about than it likely is to design.
The idea of social hooks aren’t new to WoW, but they seem to be getting some time in the spotlight with this next expansion. Some of the pieces are in place now, some look to be coming in WoD.
- Stacking the deck. Currently this is a bonus for queueing up a dungeon in an all guild group. At different points in WoD development, it’s been bounced around as a Valor bonus for pre-built teams as well as for teams that start as random finds and requeue together. How this will all shake out if Valor goes away remains to be seen, but it’s an interesting idea.
- Flex Raiding. This was the subject of my last column. Flex raiding allows any number of people from 10-25 to hit a dungeon together. No worrying about being the eleventh person out or having your 25-person raid fail because one person worked late.
- Cross Realm play. In any other MMO, this might be viewed as breaking up the community. With WoW, though, the sheer number of players means that its very easy to have ties to more than one realm. While its not server-focused community development, it’s a realization that making it easier for the meta-server community to play together is a good thing.
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What I like about each of these ideas is that it’s a step towards more than just guild gameplay starting to shape up here. The initial discussion of stacking the deck included the idea of providing the same reward if a group of random players continued to play together in the same session. Flex raiding opens the door for adding spots to your raid for people who are not immediately tied to your raid crew, while keeping a level of organization unlikely to be present in Looking for raid. Cross realm play aligns the players to the larger community and points towards a world where small servers, as we once knew them, may go away completely.
As a long in the tooth, ten-year old MMO, WoW has had just about every MMO customer in its stable at least once. Most of us have a hook back to WoW through some person and Blizzard seems focused on those hooks with WoD. They also seem focused on working on reward-hooks over penalty-hooks and that’s likely a good thing. If Blizzard can reinvigorate those hooks, it should generate more subs, more players, and more time in the World… of Warcraft.
What do you think about social hooks? Do you miss them or are you glad they are gone? Which ones, in which games, did you most prefer? Which ones did you dislike? How many degrees are YOU from Kevin Bacon? Hop into the discussion below and share your thoughts.
Ryahl / Ryahl is a columnist for MMORPG.Com. He once demonstrated that being central in a social network increases the number of people who want to collaborate with you - whatever that means! You can follow him on Twitter @EorzeaReborn or just argue with him in comments anywhere he posts.
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