Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I made a post, and after reading through the comments… specifically that of Bhagpuss I realized I did make quite a few assumptions. After playing so many MMORPGs with so many different people over the years, I assumed that most people had a stacked list of acquaintances after spending decades playing these titles. I long ago ran out of space in my Battle.net friends list and am consistently having to delete people to find space to add new ones, but that is in part the side effect of leading a raid for a few expansions. As a result, I decided to test these assumptions to see how true my point of view happened to be. So the easiest means of doing this was to cobble together a Twitter poll and then ask folks to retweet it around a bit to try and get a more diverse smattering of eyeballs on it.
So first off I realize that my methodology is a bit flawed. There are only 144 votes at the time of taking this screenshot, and it is limited to those who are active on twitter and the range that 29 retweets will get you… which according to Twitter analytics is a little over 800 impressions. Folks who are active on social media are probably already self-selected into a group of those who are either more socially active or at least more interested in being socially active. However, if you accept those flaws, the numbers more or less shake out like I thought they would. Some 86.1% of users view starting on the same server as friends as a positive thing, 4.2% considered it neutral, and 9.7% prefer to go it alone. Part of what makes me think these numbers are pretty stable is for the most part yesterday after the first hour of the poll, the percentages stayed mostly unchanged within a margin of error. If you want to chime in or just watch the process of the poll, I believe I have it up for another day.
I played a bit more of New World on the PTR server yesterday, and if I thought the redone Monarch’s Bluff was cool… Everfall is even cooler. It has a whole gaslit industrial revolution era vibe to it, with considerably more modern housing. This makes me wonder what exactly the rework of the other towns will bring. I am hoping that they keep this going forward with doing each town as though it had been built during a different era on the island. I think I have followed the main story quest as far as I can for right now because it bugged out when I tried to do the latest version of the Soul Warden trial. The leveling is so much faster than when this game went live initially. I’ve only really poked at this game for two days and am already level twenty, and most of that was just from following the story quests. So I do believe then when they say that you will no longer need to do the town boards to gain levels.
In my travels, I came across someone with the name “Dr Demone Kim” so I am not sure if this is actually THE Youtuber or just a fan trying to look like him. I do know that he was recording some videos in Monarch’s Bluff but I have no clue what his new character name is. He got his original character stuck in Brimstone Sands, where anytime he logs in he pretty much instantly dies. It is super cool thought to bump into a name I at least recognize, even if it is not his account. We are still trying to sort out how we are going to approach this game when the patch drops. Right now I am leaning towards picking whatever normal server happens to be the lowest population and rolling there, in the hope that everyone else that is planning on doing the same can as well. This would leave open the option for folks who don’t want to re-roll to just move their characters with one of the free tokens, whereas the fresh start servers will be locked for transfers.
I had one of those weird nights where nothing really felt right gaming-wise, so toward the end of the evening, I wound up back in Cyberpunk 2077. I thought I would check out some of the patch changes, and so far I am on board with the wardrobe system. It was always one of the things that bugged me that I could not really control my appearance if I was trying to optimize my gearing. I would try and latch onto the first decent-looking legendary item I could find and then just keep upgrading it, so I could maintain a specific look and feel. I started another femme V as I have yet to play through the game completely on anything other than my original masculine V. I went for the nomad story start, in part because I actually want to see the questline that involves Alanah Pearce. I have no clue if I will stick with this play-through or bounce back into more multiplayer nonsense.
It is a bit of a scattered post this morning, but those sometimes happen.
It’s the perennial problem for those of us who both play and try to analyze these games – the huge majority of the data you’d need to make any kind of confident assessment of the demographics just aren’t visible. Every game has some form of social structure but who participates in it, to what extent and for what reasons is a mystery. For obvious reasons, it’s even harder to quantify how many people are playing who aren’t joiners. They’re hardly going to register outside of ther metrics game companies collect. Given the direction of mmorpg development, though, it seems that invisible group casts the biggest shadow. If not, why are almost all new mmorpgs so eminently soloable and why do the handful that require grouping get such short shrift?
I’d really love to know the real picture but I doubt we ever will. All we can do is try to guess the elephant from the pieces we can touch. Just to take a handful of anecdotal examples from bloggers I read – you describe your very extensive, established network of potential play-partners in the post above, Wilhelm writes about a static group of four or five players, Syp regularly mentions looking for and joining new guilds with people he doesn’t already know in every new game he plays and UltrViolet only ever talks about playing solo.
Even what social terminology like “Friends” and “Guildmates” mean varies wildly from game to game. I generally play alone these days but in Noah’s Heart I have a growing friends list and I’m in a guild… and I’ve never spoken to any of those people, not even once. I just get invites and requests from people to be “friends” which I accept because there’s a whole part of the game based around sending and receiving gifts. It’s a purely impersonal transaction. As for the guild, I accepted the invitation by mistake and then found it also works much the same way, with a whole set of guild-only activities that give rewards, all of which seem to be automated and require no person-to-person contact. Just as well because as far as I can tell I’ve joined a Greek guild where Greek is the only language used!
New World does at least have some content suitable for groups of players – the expeditions and the RvR particularly but also some of the tougher open-world stuff. In that sense it’s a good fit for pre-made friends’ groups, which does make the issues with smaller server size problematic. Unfortunately, that seems to be a legacy of the original design as a survival pvp title. If they didn’t change it when they swerved towards PvE it seems unlikely they’ll change it now. And if there’s any company in the business that ought to be able to handle server capacity it surely has to be Amazon. That they’re handling it the way they are suggests some kind of technical limitation, I guess.
Thinking on it more, at my age now, with all I have going on in my life, the most I really want to do is not so much play alone, but to play a game with my wife. No organized rush to level, rush to gear, dungeon/raid max out reputation, grind daily quests etc. Just log in when we want and do old stuff or new, just do things to relax and have some fun. Modern Warcraft has become not even a part time hobby, but more of a full time job, and it’s suffering for that design choice.