How I wounded grouping and starved communities.

One afternoon, after being frustrated by looking for a good group several hours without any luck, I made a desperate wish that the MMO devs would wise up and let all classes solo for XP so nobody would ever need a group, ever again.
Some genie dev somewhere pricked up his (or her) ears and said, that seems reasonable, let it be so… and thus the World of Warcraft sprang into being. And soon, the change spread to newer games like Everquest 2, EvE Online, and so on, and now it seems to everyone that this is how it has always been, and none remember how it was, save the people who still struggle in Everquest 1 (where, ironically as this was the game I played when I made this wish, groups are still, by-and-large, required and one can still go several hours before finding one).
That same game where I had such trouble finding groups, though, I can return to, and though it’s been nine months since I regularly played there, I will find people who know me, maybe have known me for years. The guild I was in, had a reputation, and people still talk about the time Crimson Eternity and A Twist of Fate battled each other for the rights to kill a certain dragon in the Western Wastes… or the time Lost Sock Patrol earned the enmity of the entire server of Stromm by waking the Sleeper from his slumber in Sleeper’s Tomb.
Nobody would have cared much about any of those things if there hadn’t been a community to do the caring.
Communities are built one group at a time. I group with you, we don’t get along or you think I suck — that’s a bond. I group with this other person, we hit it off, tomorrow we group again and now there’s a third person. It’s all about bonds. Guilds become, not a collection of individuals with a common tag and raid schedule, but a collection of people with tightly interlocking bonds. Strong. A family. Everything is shared.
Take a game where soloing is encouraged, like, say, World of Warcraft, which actively discourages groups by dividing experience, making certain quests (such as the very common collection quests) more difficult in groups, and having very many weak monsters to kill in most zones.
Now, if I see you come into my hunting spot, I wonder what your plans are. Take my mobs? Steal the named? Maybe we group for one tough mob, but as soon as it dies, the group disbands and we go our separate ways (I used to think that was one of WoW’s best features). No bonds have been made, and, lacking any other reason, when I join a guild, I join the one that will get me the stuff I want.
Groups are good. Being forced to meet other people at every stage, is good.
I don’t hate grouping. I hate looking for groups.
The easy and obvious solution — making groups unnecessary — doesn’t work in the long run. Though it seems a godsend at first — perfect for the casual “I have a life” gamer, those who play with a lot of distractions (this includes me sometimes) — to those people I say, if you don’t have time for a good group, it would be like signing up for a doubles tennis match, and bowing out after the first point because you only wanted to play for a couple of minutes. Play a single player game — I mean that. I like Dungeon Siege 2 and Oblivion and Pokemon Diamond and Neopets. (Send me a note if you want to do Pokemon battles over the Internet on the Wii or the DS, btw).
At the later levels, people do group (at least in EQ2; I suspect grouping is still as optional 60-70 in WoW as it was 1-60). Community can begin to form past 50. Too late, I think. People in EQ2 at 70 drift in, drift out, lots of times I can’t remember their names. They join a guild, leave it, join another one.
EQ1 is a game that made it harder to find a group as it matured. The usual way to find a group was to figure out where you wanted to group, travel there (usually taking a very long time, and often frustratingly dangerous), stand at the zone and shout LFG with class, level, and anything else you thought might get you a spot.
You’d also be getting in touch with friends, guildmates, people you grouped with once, asking them to keep an ear open for you. Crypt group in OS had an opening for a druid in ten minutes — if you could make it there alive? Challenge! Find a rogue to pick the lock see where groups were so you could hopefully go by a clear way (and maybe they’d help you down by clearing an inconvenient mob or two)… Every SINGLE thing you had to do to get a group — and no, they were usually not easy to get — had the side effect of building community.
Making a common zone just one port from everywhere (in EQ1, the Plane of Knowledge), made that die a little bit. Now traveling wasn’t an issue. Then came the global chat channels — and overnight, looking for group went from something that took effort to just sitting in the guild hall, bleating “LFG” over and over again in the chat channels (and eventually, in my case, just having “LFG” on and not even bothering to look for a group. Hey, I told you I was the one that killed grouping, right up top. My laziness did it.)
And that was the time, when I had LFG up for several hours but nobody wanted me for anything fun, that I made that desperate wish to let everyone solo and make groups something unusual.
Is there a way out of this mess, maybe a way to satisfy the casual gamer who refuses to play a casual game (the villains), and also please the person who wants to play a MMO to be part of a community?
I think so. And that will be the next article.
 

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