The Drawback of Multiplayer: Other Players

[wraggster]

People who call me an elitist are quite mistaken: I'm actually a misanthrope. It's not that don't associate with certain people, I don't associate with most people. Present company excluded of course. Or included. However you want to read it. John Walker at Rock, Paper, Shotgun feels somewhat the same way, and that's why he's fired up about The Old Republic. And he has a novel argument for why it'll save MMO gaming, for antisocial types like myself.


An MMO where you get NPC party members? Good grief, yes. A thousand times yes. I get the extra hands I require to tackle a stronger foe, but without them bitching and whining at me because I didn’t use my double-cloaking no-hit AOE poison buff at exactly the point they would have used it if they were playing on their own. See? SEE? Every single bugger in these games just wants the others in their parties to be the over-qualified AI companions that perform the tasks they don’t have time for. If you don’t play like they would have done it, you’ve failed them, you’ve let them down, you’ve spoiled their game. ... But if my party members are NPCs, they’ll do what they’re programmed to do, or when I tell them to do it. That’s great for any of the above frustrations I might experience. But more importantly, when I don’t do what they might want when they might demand it, they’re not going to storm off in a giant pissy huff and block me on IM.

John deflects the "then you don't want an MMO," argument — "I really do want an MMO of KotOR’s world, because then I’ll have myself a KotOR game that doesn’t end! And Bioware, mightiest at the RPG, utterly suck at endings."

This does make a lot of sense, and BioWare's shrewd for implementing the NPC party member option. I haven't gamed MMOs ever partly because — well I don't even own a PC, but that's beside the point — I'm just not that into what other people are doing with their game experience. I have enough on my hands just managing my own. And holy shit, Walker's right when he talks about people playing Team Fortress 2, "screaming - and I mean SCREAMING - in anger at a Medic’s failure to uber-charge them the very instant they wanted it." Go through that, or anything close, and you start to question whether multiplayer really is fun.

Anyway, you can tell I'm in something of a pissed mood this AM, so the argument resonates. Check it out.

http://kotaku.com/5068778/the-drawback-of-multiplayer-other-players

[pspandrew2006]

agree

[MicroNut]

Agree.
Been there and Quit playing WoW for that reason.
I have posted the same argument before.
For people that feel the same, the only way to play an MMO is with people you really know.

[osgeld]

as a asherons call player for almost 8 years, and many many games since and before that i personally dont want to play by my self, but at the same time dont want to play with others

6 time zones days of foreplanning just to get everyone to maybe show up at a meeting where everything has be decided to 1 persons idea, just to wake up early on a saturday (like 5 am) to see no one knows what the hell is going on, all the while waiting on bob from west where ever to show upl 30 min late

do a rush job becuase people have lunch at 9 am, then people die becuase they are gimps blah blah blah

get done at 5 pm your time, pissed as hell

ah fk it, the exact reason i dont play those games anymore

give me an option like this, and ill be glad to check it out

[davidcrew]

agreed dude. Many times other peeps ruin it for me.

[Pilot_51]

I don't play any MMORPGs, but I do play a lot of FPS and sometimes other genres. For me I need to play online, otherwise the game dies way too quick and I feel that I don't get my moneys worth, but for the reasons mentioned in the article I play with friends 95% of the time.

If the people on a server drive me crazy (most often people with a 30/1 KDR that everyone wants to call hackers, or people using exploits like wall glitches, or the occasional break-their-own-rules-while-strictly-enforcing-it-on-others clan), I'll switch to another server and that'll usually solve the problem.

It's sort of my unwritten rule to not get into arguments with people I don't know, which typically means not saying anything to them if they're rude, but unfortunately it's hard to avoid 100% of arguments since many start seemingly innocent.

The bottom line(s): Get good friends and play with them. If you don't like playing with your friends, they probably aren't really your friends. If you have no friends to play with and you don't want to deal with public multiplayer, you're stuck with single player, which kinda sucks if you've already played through single player on all your games. If you fall that deep, good luck finding even more friends to play with.

[dragoncurse10]

Well the problem with mmorpg is that you have people playing over 8 hrs for 1 lvl and some may take over 24 hr for 1 lvl and one death would mean a lot that's why you would have people cussing at you cuz there so into the freaking game and forget that it's just a game.

That's why I learn to ignore those people yelling at you and just do whatever I need to do. Then it's another story when you get people who don't know what there doing even though they been playing so far that you should get the idea of what you should be doing.