Ekim's Gamer View: Playing Casual

Michel "Ekim" Veilleux
2003-04-25

I recently made a complete 180 degree turn. Where I used to be a dedicated defender of Grouping and had little respect for those that tried to tell me they wanted to solo in an MMORPG, I am now admitting my idiocy and count myself among those who want to be able to go about things on my own. Did something finally happen to me to make me change? Did someone utter some magic words to me? Well, no, not really. In fact, I just finally got the point

Lonely crowd

There’s a method to my madness… no, really there is! Not very long ago, I played MMORPGs because of the social interaction. I always considered it more fun to be able to expect coming across another human-controlled being at the next corner than going about long roads filled with nothing more than what we call artificial intelligence. I’ve never really been able to strike up a conversation about the quality of my sword with an AI character. So interaction was key for any and all MMORPGs as far as I was concerned.

I’ve never understood why anyone would actually want to pay a monthly fee to play in a crowded game and want to solo through it. I’ve never understood those that didn’t want to play with groups of other players, arguing that it was at the very base of any multiplayer game. Through various discussions with people that were on the other side of the fence, I finally decided to jump over and try to experience what these people were trying to explain to me. Turns out I wasn’t thinking the right way.

Unlike I used to think, wanting to play solo in an MMORPG doesn’t necessarily mean that one never ever wants to play in groups. It just means that some players out there want to be able to advance within any given game without needing to resort to grouping. The question that remained, for me, was why would anyone even want to solo if their life could be more interesting if they grouped? Why would someone not want to socialize while playing?

Playing to advance… Advancing to play

The answer finally occurred to me when I decided to come back to a game I had left for a while. The friends I had made before I left, although they were still there, were now way too high in level to even think of grouping with me. And I suddenly understood that this is how it must feel to someone that would only play a few hours a week in such a game…People you meet one day are 10 levels higher than you by the next week. While they’ve been playing every night, others only play once a week, and now they have to make entirely new friends to group with. This can become very frustrating…

Anyone who has played any MMORPG for at least a couple of months knows how hard it is to find compatible people. By compatible I mean people that agree with your playing style and visions. To be honest I generally don’t play very well with teenagers because all they seem to want to do is go to the next kill, seeking more and more danger as if their life depended on it… I’m not saying that this playing style is wrong, or that all teenagers are like this. I’m just saying that I don’t play like that, and to force us to cooperate usually causes some nasty sparks to fly. No one wants that, and no one should have to experience that while playing a game. We’re all there to have fun in one form or another.


Forceful Incompatibility

So why force incompatible people to group together to actually have a chance at getting to the heart of a game? Why force casual players to perpetually look for new friends that are of appropriate level to have fun? Casual players should be able to drop in once a week and join the party. Instead, they are politely cast aside because the people they know have played more than them, and they suddenly got too powerful to hang around with “lowbies”.

The XP (Experience Points) leveling system is at fault here, in my opinion. There’s just no way to make it possible for anyone of level 50 to group with someone that’s level 5… It just doesn’t make any sense within this system. So the answer is, in my humble opinion, to switch to a skill-based system. Since skills would get better as the player uses them, there would be no penalty for someone to group with anyone else. A more experienced player could hang out with a younger one, the older making sure that any critter they encounter would not “agro” on the younger so that he may be given a chance to get better. A swordsman’s skill would not necessarily affect how much damage someone would do with a weapon, but rather affect how well and often he could hit something against any kind of enemy. This would make the casual player just as important as a power player in a group, wouldn’t it? It would certainly go a long way in eliminating the discriminations we keep seeing where levels are concerned.

Some developers try to make it seem like they understand. They make changes to their XP systems to allow players of greater level differences to group together without too much penalty. The problem is that it doesn’t fix the fact that the lower level player often feels useless in a group as he won’t be able to help out even a little. The only people this is actually helping are what we call “leeches”, or power levelers, people who latch on to stronger players to gain levels faster. They can usually be recognized by looking at a group and seeing one of them sitting on the ground AFK (away from Keyboard) while the others are busy hitting critter after critter…

So I’ve turned a new leaf. I’m now an aggressive defender of the freedom to solo in MMORPGs. I now even find myself wishing I could do as much in my favorite games! It’s just a fact that if the genre wants to mature and attract more people they have to do away with the level discrimination. Casual players probably make for more than 75% of the whole gaming community out there, so why alienate them outright by making them suffer?