After playing the Left 4 Dead demo for the past two weeks, the two levels provided were getting rather stale, plus they were far too easy for experienced FPS hands. Oh it was great fun, for sure, but repetitive. I was getting a little worried that the full game would be a fun, but too short romp.

Just from playing tonight however, I can see I shouldn't have been concerned. Valve left plenty of surprises in store and the Chapters get more intense as they go along. The versus mode really takes it over the top too.

I'll probably write more about it soon, but for now I'm going to get back to surviving the zombie hordes.

I don't subscribe to the theory that gamers are anti-social nerds who hide in their basements and have no real friends. Too many MMORPGs seem designed around that cliché, that we're loners who need new introductions in order to play a social game.

Leveling systems are used as motivation for players to push through content. But players of disparate levels don't mesh well together, so grouping with your existing friends is usually tossed aside in favour of constantly finding new ones. Grouping and guild tools operate as a social introduction system, trying to integrate you with others at the same level.

It was understandable a decade ago. Back when Everquest was released, it was unlikely that your real-life friends would be playing an online subscription game, so you needed mechanics that helped you group with strangers. But now this genre is mainstream and even if players aren't together with their local buddies, they're bound to have strong bonds from other games as they migrate to the newer MMOs. Cross-game guilds are becoming commonplace.

Some games even require a large diverse population for the content to work correctly. WAR is the biggest example so far: if players aren't active and working together in any given area, the content just doesn't work. Players are sorted into level tiers, realms and racial pairings, so new bonds are needed between players even more, if only temporarily for the task at hand. This is supposed to be 'epic'.

But I already have friends.

I'm okay with adding a few new friends now and then, but I don't need a pool of hundreds of them. I'd rather concentrate my time with a few close friends that I can relate to. The 'epic' crowds are more of a sideline interest, I like them there, but not at the expense of my primary enjoyment of simply playing together with my friends. Most of the group and guild tools aren't helping that.

The number one reason I enjoy Endgame is because eventually I end up on even strength as my friends and only then can we enjoy challenging game content together. Unfortunately, most Endgame content then shifts to even larger groups (raiding, warband sieges, etc.), presumably to reinforce the need for yet more new friends.

When Cryptic created their Sidekick / Mentoring system to allow players to pair up and balance their level differences, I thought it would be a paradigm shift for all MMORPGs. I was shocked that Blizzard didn't implement the feature for World of Warcraft's release. I was also disappointed that Age of Conan gave barely more than lip-service to mentoring, it was poorly implemented and quickly nerfed because it didn't match their content. WAR has similar features automated within tiers for Scenarios and RvR, but again it's a limited and half-assed implementation that doesn't come anywhere close to resolving the essential problem while leveling.

I have friends. I'd like to play with my friends, not just chat with my friends while I play.

No wonder Left 4 Dead has had phenomenal pre-order sales, it's a game focused on small groups of players cooperating together. Friends. It's a a shame the MMORPG genre hasn't learned from the popularity of small-team coop games.

MMORPGs should focus on content that allows players to get together in small groups of their own choosing.

Please give me more tools and content to play with my existing small group of friends.

My first day in WAR was great. I'd expected population-related problems, but that just didn't happen on our server. It was well populated for both sides, I never encountered any login queues (Michelle did, but it was less than a minute long). Public Quests were well attended and anytime we wanted to play a Scenario it would start almost right away.

Some of the problems that nagged the Open Beta had evaporated too, it was far less laggy for us, although there were still some disconcerting moments of high latency and WAR still doesn't handle that well. Framerate was all over the place, but that was largely due to the high numbers of players running around.

Game? Great

Michelle had the day off, so it was perfect for an epic gaming session. Our /played time is already scary. Her Witch Elf is Rank 12 and my Squig Herder is Rank 9. Both of us ended our day still in Tier 1 so we can start fresh in the next tier.

Michelle likens the Witch Elf to her WoW Druid's Cat form, which makes a good deal of sense with the Witch Elf being a sort of rogue archetype. I found the Squig Herder has a few unique abilities but pet AI in both pathing and controls response is still poor, my Squig could use some love.

Public Quests were a hoot, although some are definitely better than others. A few players whined about loot, and some were overly competitive (healers happy to let others die, DPS grabbing mobs that they shouldn't, etc.), but for the most part I was thrilled with the cooperative nature of the game.

Questing is fun but standard faire, I'd seen it during Open Beta and already decided that I liked the Greenskin storyline the best.

Open Groups work really well, I was a sceptic and now a complete fan of the system WAR has developed. It could use some tweaking, there's no listing for the group's intent and some players have a tendency to join then wander off while still grouped, but overall the Open Groups combined with Public Quests are a new level of convenience that coaxes even the most insular players (that's me) into participating.

Players? Lots, but some suck

The only serious disappointments so far have come from what we've seen of the playerbase.

Michelle & I witnessed numerous botting and boxing attempts, especially in the Scenarios and RvR where some players clearly intend to farm for exp + renown with multiple characters at a time. The worst situation was when we were faced by a well-coordinated premade, but on our own side almost our entire team barely wandered from the starting mound to attack: The score ended at 500 to 1 as five of us futilely tried to fend off the enemy on our own.

I'm starting to really loathe boxers. They're really obvious right now while they try to get their setups working well with WAR, and it seems they're commonplace. I'm hoping these are just spillovers from WoW and they'll get bored with WAR's lack of raiding, but the mechanics of WAR are particularly open to being exploited this way. I don't automatically consider boxing an exploit, but I'm concerned we're going to end up playing alongside a bunch of players with scripted healers behind them and that's definitely an upset to the balance of the game.

The bots and semi-bots didn't spoil much of our fun however, despite being noticeable they were a minority and the sheer joy of the rest of the game offset their annoyance anyway.

Co-op, Co-op, Co-op!

As I stressed earlier, the cooperative nature of the game won out. With the many Public Quests, ample Scenarios and Open Grouping, it's more co-op than I've seen in any MMORPG before. City of Heroes for instance has great teamwork, but a lack of things for those teams to do. WoW is far too PvE-competitive these days for my taste and I hate what it's done to the WoW playerbase.

I'm a huge Co-op nut, so this is big for me.

RvR works well, the large zergs are the norm, but we found that a small strike team can do wonders. RvR so far is oddly the least coordinated part of the game, but I suspect that's entirely because Tier 1 RvR lacks keeps and siege engines, it's essentially a slower version of the Scenarios.

This game is working for me, even though it's missing a lot of features I'd usually prefer. It just goes to show what good solid gameplay can do.