The Joy of Doing It “Wrong”

Tags

gameplay, gaming, group, guild wars, guild wars 2, gw2, MMO, mmorpg, path of fire, play, pve, solo

Below is a picture of my build in Guild Wars 2.

I’m running a Guardian right now who wades into battle almost exclusively with a mace and a shield. I’m not entirely sure that I’ve gotten this build optimized, but damn if it isn’t optimized for me.

Building That Dance Floor

Tags

choices, content, design, group, MMO, players, playstyle, preferences, solo, soloing, vision

…so I sort of missed the original point.

Syl’s comment on my previous blog post about solo playing in MMO’s pointed out a couple of things:

1. I was preaching to the choir.
2. She wasn’t really asking why people solo so much as why said players feel the need to demand such things out of MMO’s–a failure of reading comprehension on my part.

 

Coincidentally, I just ordered this on Amazon! 😀

So let me expound upon this whole thing a little further. I think I touched on why people solo in an MMO. Now I’m going to directly talk about how MMO devs can make good design choices to feed solo players and group players without causing risk to the genre…and like anything else, it’s about striking a balance.

Solo Dancing

Tags

MMO, multiplayer, playstyle, preferences, progression, single player, solo, soloer, soloing

The delightful and probably fun to sit around with Syl of MMO Gypsy posed a rhetorical question to the Twitter ether today, asking why anyone would want to play an MMO solo and why they’d want a multiplayer game to design specifically around that playstyle.  On the surface, sure, it sounds like pretty much anathema: the idea of an MMO is the “multi” part of that acronym. It’s literally designed to allow thousands of people to do things at once.

Of course, like almost anything else, it’s not quite that simple once you scratch the surface.