The Importance of Friends in an MMO
I’m a pretty solitary MMO player. I tend not to group very often, because I play at weird times and for somewhat random amounts of time per session. But, that doesn’t stop me from being influenced heavily by friends to stick around and continue playing a massively multiplayer game (or any multiplayer game, for that matter). Never underestimate the power of friends.
I’m still playing WAR. Despite the slow-feeling pace of progression for someone who only spends about an hour playing every day, various bugs, and being on a lower population server, I’m still playing. Why? It’s certainly not the fault of the game, and it’s certainly not my fault either. I blame my friends.
I have a group of close friends (we endearingly refer to ourselves as the “Idiot Patrol”) that I try to keep in touch with. MMOs are one of the primary ways we keep in touch despite living pretty far from each other. And, I belong to a guild called Casualties of WAR. It’s my favorite guild I’ve been part of in years.
Were it not for the Idiot Patrol and Casualties of WAR, I would have opted not to add a valid credit card to my Warhammer Online account, and I’d probably be playing Fable 2 instead of writing this post here on Nerfbat.
They are my friends. They keep my playing these games long past the point at which I keep myself playing these games. Mythic, and every other company whose MMO I’ve played with my friends, should send a “thank you” letter to all of my buddies. They deserve it.
I’m not even going to get into anything about how some games make it extremely hard to play with friends (no free server transfers early in the life of the game, hard factions that make it impossible to join the other side, no mentoring/sidekick system, etc.). That’s another post altogether, and one I think I’ve probably written before.
Thanks, friends, for making me play WAR for longer. Maybe I’ll make it to 40 (the cap). The pivotal moment will the first week of November, when I have a catass session planned for the entire work week (because I took the week off).
If I’m playing Warhammer Online during that week, I’ll probably hit the cap and will stick around even longer. If I succumb to the pull of Fable 2 or Fallout 3, that will be the end of it (but they still got $15 more from me because of my friends).
Damn straight!
If you are bringing your own group of friends, how much does the MMO matter? You could all get together for anything (online). Cameron at Random Battle has been talking about playing D&D online (not “D&D Online”) with voice chat and a program for sharing maps and such.
My make or break on mmos eventually comes down to the games my friends – not so coincidentally, the same Idiot Patrol as above, as well as friends i’ve gained online in other successful guilds like CoW and SolEternum – end up playing for the long haul.
I’m not typically one to go find a random group – and I’ve never joined a random guild. I met the SolEternum folks while playing AC2, when the guild, mostly built by us Idiot Patrollers, merged with another guild on the server (Guardians of Goodwill) – we moved on through Planetside and WoW – and they’re still in WoW as SolEternum, and I hang out in their IRC server pretty much every day – heck, I talk with them more often than my friends in real life.
I’ve quit more games because most of my friends move onto other things, or our playtimes never coincide and I cant keep up with their leveling pace, making it impossible to play together. I get much more enjoyment out of playing with a group of folks. AC2 had big problems and I stuck it out to level cap and beyond because I enjoyed the people I played with online. I think WAR will fare much the same way, though I have a feeling WAR will stick around longer heh.
Yup, that makes me decidedly ‘non-hardcore’, but I don’t really care that much. I want to have fun in my game, and there are a number of things that dictate that – and friends is a HUGE component of that.
Yeah – there are other ways to get friends together, online especially, but there does seem to be a much lower bar to entry on the MMO front. Online D&D has never really worked for me – where even if your regular group isn’t around, you can still screw around in your MMO.
Despite EQ2 being a great game, if I was playing it alone, I would have stopped playing as soon as I hit the cap. That was within the first three months, I believe. Like you, I have played some MMOs to keep in touch with real life friends. My friends kept me in EQ2 for more than, what is it now, five years past the time I would have been there by myself? I’ll probably even go back to the play the expansion next month.
CoW has definitely made WAR worth the time. The people are great. I stick to one of my first forum posts on the CoW boards before the game launched. WAR will only be as good as the players make it. A little over a month into the game and still believe that is true. Not really prophetic as I believe any MMO will only be as good as the players make it.
I am in line with Zubon above, and recently wrote an article on my blog about a different multiplayer model. Play any current PVE-MMO with JUST friends and the entire experience would be increased tenfold. I used WoW as an example because I won’t/don’t sub to it anymore. I would gladly “rent” my own Blizzard sanctioned server and pay for it – and collect donations from server users to cover the costs. Kicker is, let me choose who gets to play on my server. In WoW you only need 25 people online to enjoy 100% of the game. You can enjoy 95% with 10 other people. 90% with 5, and 80% solo. Not very massively or multiplayer. (numbers are arbitrary to prove a point – but you get it.)
Friends have kept me along in a lot of MMO’s and while it is often worth it to be with friends, it also gives developers yet another excuse to not develop better games. They don’t have to win over every subscription – just a few, because those few compound into several once you add in their friends sticking around to be with friends.
I guess my latest beef is developers trying to disguise single player/lan party games as MMO’s to get the mighty subscription dollar. SW:KOTOR just did an interview on Gamasutra where they said the experience will basically be a different single player (typical bioware game) for each class in an MMO environment. Why not make 10 different single player games instead? (or however many classes they are going to have)?
You’ve never made it to cap in any MMO I’ve played, but then again I’m a fickle MMO player and I agree with friends keeping you in a game.
Never said they kept me forever.
I haven’t capped in an MMO for years. I don’t have the time or patience to push through anything if I’m not having fun, except for the friend factor… but that only holds me in a game for so long.
You sir, will never make it to cap unless you create a GM character in your game.
Teljair is right – BG will never cap anything without some “help”!
Great post BG. I highly doubt I’d be playing MMOs at all if it weren’t for the crew I’ve run with close to 6-7 years now (seesh, it’s been that long?!) We had a blast in EQ, but when my 2nd kid was born I took a break, and a few months passed, most had moved on to WOW so I called it quits. But after many a phone call and e-mail, they pulled me back into WOW. We were over 20 strong then, and today, 4 years later, there are still ~15 of us are still kicking around (though a handful of them have split into another guild.
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Gaming companies should absolutely be more creative in finding ways to match-up friends split by servers. The concept of free transfers early in the game’s life is a good start, but I’d like to see that go further. Give guilds of a certain size (or time in existence) a free transfer every X months; If someone’s subscribed for a year and so has their friend, the two of them can merge their transfer to meet up. The option to transfer at any time for a fee should still be available — but I think a gaming company can make a far larger sum of cash in the long-term if they find way to facilitate friend pairing up (or keeping guilds going, for in the end when a guild fails, it can lead to a fair number of canceled subs.)
Vald
I am totally with you on this one. I am dep leader of nexus a casual guild made up of friends from eq1. We are now in Eq2, war and LOTR, myself in EQ2 and WAR. I am playing WAR still because of the guild, EQ2 half guild half game as I still love that game.