When I talked about match making killing communities I felt very strongly that removing the match making tool would improve the way people interact. I still do to a degree, but there's a much better way to look at the situation that I had not thought of until I read a bunch of related and absolutely unrelated arguments about this or that and realized that the tool is never the problem. You may be realizing why I attached the photo of this handsome gentlemen to this post. His shirt is a joke, but it's a decent way to put a bow on the argument that tools aren't intrinsically good or evil... it's the use of the tools. Now, don't get all real world on me here, this is leading to more game talk... this isn't the blog for gun control discussion.
Anyways, The tool that matches us up with compatible teammates/opponents isn't evil. It doesn't kill communities on its own, but it does allow for social interaction to become redundant if the game isn't designed properly. What this means is that the match maker should help those with limited time or social contacts but should be a supplement to the game, not the game.
How many times have you heard people talk about League of Legends or DOTA2 and say "I don't like the community. I only play with friends."? THAT'S THE IDEA! You are supposed to be making friends through the solo queue and eventually have a group of people you enjoy spending time with to play games with when you're online! People have become so reliant on match finders and queues that they have no idea what they are supposed to do when they end up in a game with people. It's like putting two people in a room together and they both take out their phones and start checking facebook instead of talking to one another.
So, let's look at MMOs and how they've changed thanks to the Dungeon Finders. EverQuest is a great example of a game where you were on your own to build groups. If you were known as a good tank and a good person you'd get groups with other people who respected your abilities/personality. Great, right? Well, as a good tank with a decent personality and long friends list I'd still end up sitting around in the /lfg lists trying to form/be invited to a group. This would sometimes go on for hours. I distinctly remember trying to find groups for 3+ hours only to end up having the group break up 10 minutes after reaching our destination. Sucks.... a lot.
Two days ago I updated my Rift client for the first time in probably a year. All of my skill trees were reset due to changes that were made since I last was on so I had to rebuild my healer tree. I threw a ton of points into the Warden tree and queued up for a dungeon. A minute or two later I was dropped in with 4 other guys and we were off. I didn't even have time to buff myself before we were fighting the first wave of enemies. I was getting decent xp and was moving quickly from place to place as the rest of the group was at the new level cap while I was still at the old one (60 and 50 respectively). Nobody was taking damage so my heals were pointless. I had all my skill bars messed up but it didn't matter because gear and xp were flying.
IT FELT AWFUL.
The idea behind dungeon finders is to allow for people with limited time or friends the ability to do group based activities and get good group xp/gear. It came from developers who wanted nothing more than to pack the game world with fun. They wanted to remove the frustration of sitting in town spamming "/ooc 50 warrior LFG" for hours and replace it with a rewarding experience on a small time budget. While they were at it, they also removed the frustrating time sinks like retrieving your corpse after a death, getting buffs from other players, and all sorts of other things people were always complaining about. Great, right? Well...
Time for another movie character! This time, it's The Architect from The Matrix Reloaded. In case you don't remember, he talks about previous iterations of The Matrix where they gave everyone a perfect world and they rejected it. The simulation failed because people didn't get the suffering and hardships they expected from the world and couldn't live in absolute happiness all the time.
See where I'm going with this? People look back fondly on their time in games pre-match making. They tell stories of corpse runs and long dangerous journeys that ended up a failure. They laugh about the time they lost a level and ended up having to play naked for a day while they got back to the required level of their gear. BUT... they won't go back to it because people are wired to do what is the most fun and avoid suffering.
This has to do with community?
Yes. Be patient.
Min/Maxing
So, this guy spends his whole time online breaking down exactly what the maximum amount of xp per hour is possible and it turns out that it's running dungeons back to back to back with a strong group. He fires up his twitch stream and shows off how him and his friends can make 100x the reward that you can by doing dungeon after dungeon. You then log in and do the same thing to a similar result. Eventually, everyone is aware that doing dungeons is the absolute best way to get xp and want to do nothing but the best for themselves while they are online. Great. Now we all know exactly how not to "waste" time while we're grinding. People start requesting more and more of this "optimal" content and the company delivers. When you get online you press a button and are dropped into a queue. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, you'll just be dropped right in on the action...
With a group of strangers. If things go well you may ask if they'd like to restart the dungeon, but for the most part you'll be re-queuing because it's easier than talking to people. Your character is still just standing in town waiting for the next group to pop.
Meanwhile, there is this whole world around you that you learned to avoid via min/maxers figuring out what's best...
But... what if the min/maxers found that your time was better spent out in the wild farming mobs in a high level zone rather than doing dungeons? That would make it so you'd have to form a group, travel to a spot, interact with other people, and work together for an extended period of time. That sounds a whole lot like social interaction doesn't it? Isn't that how you make friends? Get to know people? Build a reputation? Yes!
So, are the dungeon finders the problem or is the open world the problem?
The dungeon finder is a tool and by definition cannot be "evil" on its own. This particular tool's use is destructive only because it's the best option in the game across multiple titles. Tera? WoW? Rift? Yeah... do dungeons if you want to make the most of your time. Zones are no longer built for groups. They are soloable experiences for people who don't feel like grouping with others. With how little people get to know each other in match made groups there are more and more people who would rather just solo because "the community is bad" which puts more and more pressure on the devs to make the world easier and more solo friendly. This pushes more group oriented people into dungeons which give a distorted view of communities. So, over time, this cycle leads to people who could be the best of friends not even saying hello to one another because there's no reason to. Add in that these match made groups are pulled from multiple servers and everything that is being thrown at you is another valid reason to never interact with anyone EVER.
Dungeon finders have their place, but they are out of balance right now. They also don't typically give you the options you'd need in order to make the most of the situation. Let's say I'm a tank and I have a healer friend and a dps friend but we would like to meet someone who plays a strong crowd control role. We should be able to go into a dungeon finder looking for a crowd control player from OUR OWN SERVER so we can basically have "try outs" for a new friend. I've never seen the option to only draw from your home server.
Dungeon finders could also be adjusted to help with general LFG stuff as well. Why can't I say what I'm doing and where and have the game find the missing piece to my group? It would be really nice to be able to use the dungeon finder like that as well. "Warrior, Cleric, and Monk farming RSS looking for DPS/CC" into the finder and in pops a shaman and rogue! I'd even be okay with allowing group members to teleport to the group leader or the zone line to make it easier to meet up.
Why is the open world so important? Because that's where you set up shop and hang out for an hour or two getting to know people instead of plowing scripted content over and over where everyone knows exactly what's going to happen. I made way more friends chain pulling in Wall of Slaughter as a bard than I ever did healing dungeons in Tera. The open world gives you a chance to put a spotlight on your personal skill and show what you bring to the table. Are you the type of healer who never goes OOM? Are you a tank who never loses aggro? Are you so fast with your crowd control that we never have to deal with more than one mob at a time? Can you pull fast enough to always have a mob at camp? Are you DPSing so hard that mobs are melting without ever pulling aggro off the tank? These are all things you never really get a feel for in dungeons... and even if you do, those guys will be replaced with new ones when you queue back up anyways.
You also get a feel for who likes what you like as well. If I meet people who are grouping together in my favorite zone and it's their favorite zone as well then we have something in common and can learn to make the most of our time there. If you like to plow around a zone and find a group that also likes to plow instead of pull then that's great! It's just a way more social environment than static dungeon encounters.
I hear more and more complaints about "communities" and lack of social interaction than anything else these days. People want to get to know one another and form new groups of friends. What's more common is for old groups of friends to migrate from game to game without adding anyone new into the mix. Is that what Massively Multiplayer is all about anymore?
The bottom line is the more games get streamlined the less we need one another. This can be fixed by adjusting the rewards available from different activities. These are just games. The worlds can be completely changed if the motivation is there. It's time we start pushing for compelling open world experiences that reward us better than taking part in disposable groups.
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