Its a Group Thing

Been spending a bit more time in post-cataclysm Norrath of late.  Sony Online Entertainments “Legends of Norrath” promotion got Mrs. P and me sucked back in in large part due to Gaff’s urging.  So far, I can’t say I have any regrets.

As I mentioned before, I had bailed out before when EQ2 was the 3d game for me.  3d game means that’s the one I don’t play.

I like to explore and I like to play with a few select friends.  And, from time to time, I enjoy crafting.  All of these takes a fair amount of time.  Exploration is its own reward.

Group play is its own challenge– time wise its no where near as “efficient” as well-studied solo play or  some kind of Machiavellian minmax group play but its infinitely more rewarding.  Of course with current game design, sharing content and experiences with others requires an almost herculean effort.

In games like EQ2 and City of Heroes/Villains, there are mechanism that allow players of different levels to play together, but lets face it, the higher level player is mostly playing with the lowbie as a charitable act.  Chances are they have already experienced the shared content.

Mrs. P and I have been exploring the evil side of Norrath and generally having a good time.  Gaff has about 87 characters on no less than 34 accounts of all races, genders, classes and levels, and is quite adept at multiboxing so I think he’s hoping we stick with things long enough to plug into one of his multi box groups.  We’re actually looking forward to replicating on a much smaller scale some of our WoW group experiences.

As no doubt Wilhelm will report this week, we had a challenging weekend foray with our WoW group.  As Mrs. P and I retired in the wee hours Saturday/Sunday, I prattled on in my usual Monday morning quarterback fashion about the night’s efforts.

While we were not altogether successful in our primary goals, I was reminded of the extremely rarefied space our little band of adventurers occupies.  Three of us have been playing as a regular group since WoW’s release in December 2004.  Four of us have been playing together since about April or May 2005.   The latest incarnation of our group has been playing together since September 2006.

In a few short months our current group will have been at it nearly two extremely casual years.  In WoW terms, we are finally nearing the current level cap (70).  Until last week when we lifted the self-imposed soft level cap, we had managed to stay within about 1/3 of a level of each other after nearly two years of play with wildly divergent play budgets.  Not too bad I’d say.

As Mrs. P and I were doing the post-instance night post-mortem, it occurred yet again to me what an amazing accomplishment we’ve achieved irrespective of the night’s outcome.  One of us had a baby, four of us moved, one about 800 miles in the same time zone, one about 3000 miles two time zones away, one of us a few dozen miles and one of us twice in that period of time.  One of us lived out of a suitcase for more than a year and still managed to make our Saturday night runs and when they moved to their new permanent abode not miss the Saturday night event after the move.

No thanks to any game mechanic, through heroic efforts of self restraint and self auto regulation, we have shared collectively extraordinary experiences.  Indeed the chronicles of the group that Wilhelm has recorded has created that singular heroic fantastical narrative of shared experience that MMOs should strive to provide for their subscribers.

When I look back on it, we have a single shared narrative which should be the essence of the MMO experience IMHO.  If you read Wil’s amusing and insightful reportage of our collective adventures, you are in fact largely seeing all the data points of the collective narrative.  Except for perhaps crafting, there is no other narrative.  What you see is pretty much our five individual and collective stories in the game universe.

As we’re getting a bit more immersed into the EQ2 scene and frankly a bit bored with everything else currently out there, I’m struck by fundamentally different character of the experience we’ve been having in WoW and Tipa and the Nostalgia the Guild folks have been having back in EQ.  I’m hoping we might replicate at least a shred of the same thing in EQ2.

Maybe I’m just getting old and crotchety but I’m not seeing any of the current crop of games make this kind of gameplay easier.  The “all solo” MMO is a function of the reality that we all have different play budgets and asynchronous progression is the new norm.  I can’t help but think that we’ve lost something by turning the dial completely to solo and not to provide mechanisms whereby different folks with different play budgets can still play together and create the shared experiences that are the most rarified that MMOs have to offer.

I’m not sure there’s a eureka moment buried here as its late, but I gotta think the devs might have a few better ideas than mine to facilitate this kind of gameplay.  Capping XP generation would be a start, but many more aspects would also need to be managed in order to accommodate different play styles and still support the unique squad-based objective.  Thats different from a guild, that’s different from “i have friends who also play the game”.

Then again, maybe I’m over thinking it.  Maybe all it takes is a group of people committed to coloring within the lines and being selfless enough to recognize that a greater good comes out of self restraint and “staying with the group” as they adventure through a virtual world.  I sure wish a few devs would bend their brains to make it a bit easier for us though…

3d World, 2D Map, WTF

Mrs. P had to pop over to Darnassus the other day to run some errands (much easier for a mage to just pop over, but don’t get me started) and mentioned what a shame it is that its so underpopulated. Blizz must have spent so much time on it and its so underutilized compared to Stormwind or Ironforge (if you’re alliance that is).

Demonstrating my firm grasp of the obvious, I agreed with her and lamented that “that’s life in a city on the edge of the map.” Demonstrating my virtual multiculturality, I suggested that its really not that different from Thorin’s Halls in LotRO or Ak’Anon back in Everquest. Edge cities. Off the beaten path.

Wait a minute. Edge cities? Edge of what? A 2D map? Don’t we play in 3d fantasy worlds? Why couldn’t the gnomish equivalent of Magellan sail east from Ak’Anon and get to Qeynos?

I’ll give Thorin’s Halls a pass here (and any other “regional” game like DAOC or PotBS), because LotRO’s world really is only one region of Middle Earth, Eriador, so the concept of the edge of the game world is consistent at least.

But why shouldn’t I be able to sail from Booty Bay to Darnassus or the Exodar (or at least Feathermoon)? Or go left from the left, right from the right, up from up or down from down? Of course that probably explains why there are no cities on the east side of the Eastern Kingdoms… Even so, we still persist in reinforcing the hot equator/cold poles paradigm (which again implies a spherical world because of the differing density of solar radiation received).

Flat worlds are sooooo 13th century. How bout a “next gen” virtual world that is a sphere?