MMO Realizations
I’ve played through a few MMOs, for a few years, and have come to the following realizations:
- I enjoy playing support classes, and helping my friends who are awesome at certain aspects of the game be even better.
- I enjoy playing healing classes because I enjoy decided what lives and what dies.
- I enjoy playing games cooperatively with friends.
- I enjoy playing games against humans, and not against scripted robots.
- I enjoy sandbox games where you can do ‘anything.’
- I enjoy ‘outdoor pvp,’ ‘world pvp,’ or whatever you want to call it, but basically unconstrained, uneven and sometimes unbalanced PVP.
- I enjoy leading small groups of people.
Naturally, from this I can also definitively say what I don’t want to do and don’t enjoy:
- I don’t enjoy farming instances over and over.
- The same goes for raiding.
- I know I can’t and can never compete with people who have more time on their hands to play, so I don’t try.
- I don’t want to run a huge guild.
When the new WoW expansion Wrath of the Lich King comes out, I’m going to be playing it, and will be playing it centered around the above things.
Re: playing with/against people: The latest Warhammer Online newsletter has a video that explains their ‘living guilds’ system, and one of the things they bring up were games we used to play as kids. They were social, collaborative, and competative. MMO games started out as just ‘playing games alongside other people,’ then evolved into ‘playing games with other people against robots (the computer), and have turned into, finally, ‘playing games with and against other people and/or robots.’
Re: Farming instances: I enjoy doing them once or twice to see the story and for the both literal and figurative experience, but doing them more then that and I just can’t be bothered. I ‘get’ the teamwork aspect and element of coordinating a lot of warm bodies to accomplish huge goals and the utter thrill of finally achieving them, but to me, I would rather participate on a team fighting against humans together and not trying to overcome some pattern or gimmick-based goal. Originally, this was the only way to advance your character, which isn’t the case anymore.