The Timid MMORP Gamer

Massively Multiplayer has been all the rage after Blizzard introduced the westerners to the wonderful world of nolifeism and hit the jackpot with the money making machine that WoW is. The designed way to experience an average MMORPG is built around grouping be it guildies or total strangers in co-op or against each other, this is the way you are supposed to play.

Well, I hate it. I enjoy co-opping with friends and guildies to accomplish major things but I absolutely hate playing against a human opponent and I hate almost more the fact that I don’t have possibility to solo all content without interaction with other humans.

Group play has next to no redeeming qualities. People need breaks, there is a major quota of jerks around in general public and you need to share the loot and the jerk populace can make fair sharing an impossibility. Communication is clumsy when you need to type to get a point across. When you are in Vent or TS … why exactly would I want to talk to strangers, maybe I want to listen to Black Sabbath at full blast and could not care less what the others are saying. Again, grouping with guildies and using a voice chat can be very fulfilling but that’s it and guildies and friends are not available 24/7 for playing when I want.

In most MMORPGs there is an ongoing debate between the solo enthusiast and group fanatics that seem to think enabling more solo play is a direct personal insult to them. Solo players request more content to be available for solo play and the others rage against any such concessions. The question is where is the harm in allowing all of the content to be playable solo? If grouping is such a superior way to play surely there will be enough people that continue doing so even if amount of soloable content is expanded. By all means go ahead and scale the loot and xp so that grouping is still lucrative but do not treat the solo minded as a second class citizen just for fun. For some players the only desirable interaction is to be able to trade with others through a preferably very advanced auctioning system that minimizes direct contact.

The simplest way to address this and make everyone happy is to make all of the content scale dynamically according to how many people are playing. At the same fell swoop remove group size limits because it makes no sense that for example instances in WoW are 5, 10 or 25 man, make them all 1-40 man and be done with it. This will in no way harm anyone’s gaming experience, it makes it richer and gives the paying customer more ways to enjoy the content.

To illustrate that I have some experience I have played the following MMORPGs: Anarchy Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Tabula Rasa, Age of Conan, EVE Online, Runes of Magic, LOTRO, WoW and Aion – all of these had artificial restrictions on solo play and it does not need to be so.