Ethic from Kill Ten Rats wrote an excellent post on "where did the social go?". Early MMORPGs like Everquest had enforced grouping, and developers discovered over the years that the ability to solo was very much valued by the players. But then they overshot the goal and instead of making soloing possible, they made soloing the most efficient and fastest way to advance your character. With the sad consequence that MMORPGs lost a lot of their social cohesion. Concepts like loyalty to your guild or the reputation of your character are only alive in some veterans, while players new to the genre change guilds more often than their underwear, and take the guild bank with them if possible.
As Ethic points out the solution is to "Don’t force the group, make it so you can’t wait to group." Developers spent too much time to develop ways to sanitize their games from possible anti-social behavior by minimizing player interaction. In the previous post I mentioned how Pirates of the Burning Sea managed to set up a player-run economy that doesn't contain any actual contact between players. Ethic mentions how games introduced mechanisms against power-leveling and kill-stealing that ended up isolating players even if they were at the same time at the same place and after the same monster.
Simple thought experiment: You see at equal distance a rare named mob and another player. What do you think?
A) I need to hurry to grab that mob before the other players tags it
or
B) I should cooperate with that other player to overcome the challenge of that named mob
In many cases the answer is A), because cooperation isn't rewarded. Only if the mob is an elite quest mob (and most elite quest mobs have just been removed from WoW in patch 2.3) where grouping with the other guy and killing the mob would solve the quest for both players would it be advisable to team up. But in most cases you are well able to kill that mob alone faster than the time it takes to form the group, and if you kill it alone you get more xp and loot. The game mechanics encourage us to solo, and while there are other players around us, we end up being alone together. This lack of social interaction has consequences in diminished longevity of MMORPGs. If you don't make friends, there is no reason to keep playing the same game as your friends do. If you can hop guilds, you can hop games.
This is sad, because it would be so easy to remedy this situation. People do not group in World of Warcraft (especially not below the level cap), because the challenges and rewards are structured in a way that a group which doesn't turn out perfect earns less rewards than solo play. A pickup group where maybe one player isn't playing all that well, or somebody has to leave due to Real Life ® events, is a high risk, which isn't compensated by the rewards you could achieve if the group turns out well. And for some quests (of the "collect 10 foozle ears" type, as opposed to "kill 10 foozles) even the most perfect group would take more time and get less rewards when doing the quest together than if every member just soloed it. As Ethic suggests groups should have more possibilities to work together, like combo moves. And as I already mentioned previously, the group xp bonus has to be raised substantially. If you meet a stranger in the same area where you are questing, inviting him should give such a substantial bonus that you overcome your fear of the risk that the guy might turn out to be an idiot. Advancing solo should be a definitive possibility, but it shouldn't be faster than cooperation with other players.
And of course games, especially World of Warcraft, need to introduce more tools to enable cooperation. The guild tools of WoW are woefully inadequate. Why is there no in-game event calendar? Why does every guild have to go through the painful process of finding somebody able to set up guild forums, finding free or cheap hosting, chasing after the members in game to tell them where to sign up for the forums, setting up a system of forum access rights, and organizing a way for new players to apply for membership? It would be so easy to offer guild forums automatically to every guild, accessible from in-game and outside browsers, with access rights handled automatically based on guild titles, and new players being able to apply for membership from inside the game. And that would only be covering the bare necessities of guild life, the stuff players already set up privately outside the game because it is so essential. It is easy to imagine far more powerful guild tools and ways for a guild to cooperate on common projects, with reward structures that encourage loyalty and cooperation.
Players don't like to be forced into anything, but they strongly react to rewards. Just look how suddenly everyone is doing PvP while group PvE is in decline in WoW, just because the rewards for PvP are now better. If it is so easy to influence behavior with rewards, instead of putting up lots of barriers to isolate players from each other and prevent anti-social behavior, we need reward structures that encourage social behavior. The stronger communities that would follow from that also benefit the game companies, in the form of higher longevity of the game. "I can't quit this game, my guild is already level 17" should be a developers dream.
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