Specifically things like instanced 5 man dungeons (like Ragefire Chasm or the Deadmines in WoW) which are explicitly designed to challenge a full party of a certain level range. Notably, not endgame content. I’m sure the answer changes based on different factors (e.g. how good are the rewards? What are the drop rates like? Are similar rewards available elsewhere? How long is the dungeon? Am I late picking the kids up from soccer practice?), but I’m curious what folks’ thoughts are. I’m personally sour on the idea, but I understand that my attitude is “the less MMO an MMORPG can be, the happier I am”, so MMO designers should probably disregard my opinion.
Supplementary Context: usually about once a year, I get the bug to hop into an MMO. However, I am not a good MMO player. I tend to flit around my gaming library like an ADHD pixie on cocaine, and there’s no telling how long my interest will sustain itself. Therefore, any “meta” choice I make is purely by accident, and I don’t spare even a moment of thought on “efficiency”. In fact, I’ve often thought of my dalliances in MMOs as digital tourism. By and large, I’m there to craft, read quest dialogs, and poke around in the weird corners of the map for a couple weeks before logging off for another few years. Anytime I’ve ever done group content (which is, admittedly, not often), I’m desperately trying to keep up while someone nukes everything in the dungeon as they sprint towards the end. I wind up feeling like my lackadaisical approach is probably fucking up someone else’s farming loop. Now, I don’t think either the sweatlords or I are playing the game “wrong” so to speak, but our priorities are in conflict. Maybe I’m letting people-pleasing anxiety get the best of me, but I feel like the person that cares enough to grind a dungeon reward as fast as possible should get right of way over my happy ass who will intentionally sandbag my way through a dungeon if the vibes are right. Therefore, I tend not to engage with such content, if it’s not possible to solo.
This has all come to a head because my current preoccupation is Star Wars The Old Republic. Given this game’s much greater emphasis on story and dialog than a typical MMO, I actually feel like there’s RP content that I want to see in the dungeons, irrespective of any item reward. To the game’s credit, many of these can be done solo by selecting the “story” difficulty option before loading in, but not all of them. I just don’t want to be the asshole holding up the party cause I want to watch the 3 minute into cutscene (or whatever) while everyone else is hammering their skip buttons trying to get to the boss.
Not necessarily asking for advice, as the solution seems obvious to me (it’s “talk to your fellow players”, like it always is), but I thought this might foster some discussion, especially from old heads who might have lived the raid life back in the day, but now have different priorities.
Playing with other people is such a hassle. You mentioned SWTOR, so let’s use that as an example. The “Operations” have some fun story content, don’t they? Suppose I want to play one of those.
If you get a bunch of randoms, you’ll get a bunch of people who don’t know what they’re doing, or could try doing their own thing. Many of the Operations bosses have mechanics that require coordination, so your party of randoms is going to get wiped.
Clearly, you need to get a team together to do it. But Operations want 8 players (including you), who all have their schedules free to do the operation with you. And you have to hope that people don’t get other plans or drop out midway through. And you have to be in a position where you can arrange such a group in the first place.
I’m fine with forced group content if it’s easy for randoms to clear, and if no one gives a shit to queue for it anymore, that it can be done solo. Coordinating big groups isn’t feasible these days.