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.

You hear this term a lot, I use it myself plenty, but what is Endgame exactly?

It comes from standard RPG gameplay, where the player "levels up" to progress. But an online world needs persistence, you can't trap players into leveling up forever. It has to plateau, it needs an End. At which point players begin a sort of new game, where some of the rules change and new activities are repeated or take a much longer length of time to complete.

Anyone who doesn't play these games could look at that description and shake their heads. We don't repeat the leveling grind into infinity, because the repetition without end would frustrate players-- So we give them an End, but then redirect them into other activities that repeat anyway. Or make them progress very slowly.

That about sum it up?

I think it's perfectly possible to have activities that aren't a grind, the plain and simple of it is: gameplay and content.

It's easier to repeat gameplay and stretch content than to provide more of it.

Clearly it's impossible to create infinite quality content, but I also think there's this situation in MMORPG development when they stop making a game for the players and start cashing in. Further development slows, they accept the monthly fees but the content trickles out, reducing cost and turning the whole thing into one big cash cow.

I'm generally not this sort of cynic when it comes to game developers, the ones I know are passionate about their games, but I can't explain the trend for MMORPGs any other way.

I think this market is wide open for the first game that keeps up a better pace with quality content and a greater variety of gameplay.

Congrats are in order for Ilterendi, the first guild on our server to kill Vashj. Landroval and I discussed the fight at length and it sounded very entertaining. His post regarding the kill made some interesting notes however:

"My biggest regret for the populace in general is that (So far, going by that amazingly nifty wowjutsu armory magic) so few will ever see something quite like it."
. . .
"Wowjutsu has 806921 characters in 14310 guilds listed in it's database. Those numbers represent (mostly) every player that has killed something in Karazhan on up. 56% of that 800,000 have killed High King, 42% gruul, and a spare 20% Magtheridon. SSC kills dwindle even more, with 13% of the playerbase having seen at least one thing in there. Players that have beaten Vashj drop to 2.77%, or 22,351."

If you calculate by the total subscribers in North America (2 million is the Blizzard ballpark), the percentage that have killed Vashj is just 1%. Worldwide, it would go much lower because mainland China still doesn't officially have TBC.

This is no surprise. Raiding content is designed to trickle down from the few guilds that master it quickly, giving other raiding guilds a goal to progress towards. For the rest of the population it provides mystery and perhaps jealousy. It makes the world feel bigger for all but a few, which is exactly the point. If everyone could see all of the content sooner, the feeling of having completed the game might set in for the general population.

I don't know if I agree with that, it's not bad design, but it also leaves a good deal of players feeling unsatisfied. It ~IS~ part of "The Vision", which Everquest started and Blizzard follows now in all but name.

I've submitted Jeff Kaplan to You Are Damned. Possible way to cleanse his soul: "Make less raiding dungeons". Since I'm not privy to his actual email address, I entered wowcmfeedback@blizzard.com (an imperfect choice, but options are limited). They'll probably consider it just spam, but I'm quite honest in my desire for Mr. Kaplan to get my forwarded message.

To that effect, I encourage others to damn Jeff Kaplan / Tigole, so that demons can chew on his innards until eternity for the things he has done. I don't expect a dogpile of damnation via my blog, but I do think the message is sound. =)