dpk’s weblog

When I played EverQuest, Saga of Ryzom, or Ultima Online, and now World of Warcraft, I primarily play solo. Most of these games are designed to play in groups. Often, that requires joining up with random, anonymous people you’ve never met before, and will never meet again. Given that your character in these games are part of a particular “class” (for the most part), these random, anonymous people tend to judge you on your class alone, and often your equipment. Groups are always of limited size, so they will pick the “best” random people they can to fill the group.

Obviously, this is not optimal for those of us like me who are “casual” players, unable to get (and uninterested in getting) the best of the best equipment/spells/items.

My idea (although I don’t claim that I am the first to come up with it, I just haven’t seen it in a game I’ve played) is loosely inspired by Planetside’s gameplay. In Planetside, there are three factions of warriors, and you’re playing PVP against the other two factions trying to take over bases. Everyone in your faction is working towards the same goal. Everyone in your faction near a base is working towards the same specific goal — taking over the base. When the base is captured, everyone gets a porportional allotment of experience for being part of the assault.

In more traditional MMOGs, the PVE ones, I propose eliminating the concept of “grouping” as it stands. In its place, I propose that every player automatically join and leave “groups”, as they arrive and depart from dungeons or buildings or small outdoor regions. As long as you’re within the group, and killing things, you get a share of the experience from everyone killing. You can spend half an hour and still help out the “greater cause” — the elimination of whatever pest it is the game is having you kill.

This takes care of a number of problems:

• No more “kill stealing” — Since everyone’s working on the same goal, and everyone shares in the experience, there’s no more need to worry over kill stealing. You can feel free to help that guy who’s trying to solo more than he could handle.
• No more “we don’t need any druids|warlocks|warriors” responses when people want to join a group.
• Less crowding in popular zones — As more people show up, there would be less XP to go around, so people would naturally spread out more
• You can contribute even if you don’t have much time to play. You don’t have to join and then leave a group, causing hard feelings if you have to leave early.

Of course, the traditional way of splitting XP earned from kills would have to be redone, so we don’t end up killing a dozen creatures and getting 1 XP for our troubles. That would be a trivial modification however.

The key to it is its automatic nature. Nobody would ever get left out, even on accident. Another bonus is that “raids” (massive attacks on enemies) are automatically handled with no additional code.

I haven’t been able to find a place to have a good debate on this idea, so I guess I’ll leave it here and call it good. Anyone can have it. I hope to one day play a game which takes advantage of this. Soloers win. Groupers win. Everyone has fun.