DefinitelyNotWingz wrote:So, if the game is supposed to be balanced around grps (wbs) but nobody is interested in grping, does forming a premade needs to be more appealing? (carrot on a stick)
My impression in the past was that 6on6 and therefore grpplay is a niche and the pure joy of playing in a grp is supposed to be the only incentive behind.
According to op/this thread it is not working.
My thoughts exactly.
sotora wrote:altharion1 wrote:It was more of a wider social commentary on the community, game as a whole and its player's mentality. However, the more i think about it, the more i see that its just something we should expect - its just a reflection on real life society.
In same way that people are happy with mediocrity in game, people are happy with mediocrity in their real lives. Many people do not contribute to society, are a negative drain on society, do not look to better themselves as people or their situation/wealth, dont invent or create, and commonly take the path of least resistance and unwilling to take risks.
I suppose ones personal level of need for self improvement and cicumstances can define both your success in real life and in game.
I am bit baffled by this statement.
Many (most?) people reserve their energy and willingness to improve at non-trivial life things, so improving at video game get lower priority. Kinda logical.
I'd like to comment about this subject.
I wholeheartedly agree with you that people play games to enjoy themselves, have a good time and chill.
But
learning and improving yourself is part of the enjoyment. How can people not realize this? Why do people seem separate as, you can either:
a) Be a good player
or
b) Have fun
Learning new things and acquiring knowledge is fun.
The "energy" you spend is actually the same for a good or a bad player, the enjoyment vary based on your expectations. So a player that is used to having 2k renown points per gaming hour (or 5 decent fights per hour, or any other meter you can think of) will be baffled by how much more they can get if they only improve themselves, and go up to, lets say 5k renown points per hour (or take on larger groups of enemies finding decent fights more often). They'll feel their gaming time is being spent way more wisely and will feel much better about themselves. This goes not only for gaming of course as Althi said, but for work or any other department in life really. That's the general attitude I have regarding everything, be at work, or with my gym workouts, or my diet, or my studies or whatever really, and I don't feel I'm "spending more energy", it actually means the opposite. It means i'm spending the
energy wisely. Learning doesn't occupy space, that's what I grew up by.
And in a game like this where skill is not determinant by how often you play (gear is not really that hard to get, and high RR does not give you a huge power-creep). It is not determinant by how quickly you can react like in FPS games, or by how low your ping is - I'm used to play with around 300 ping in here - its determinant by knowledge of mechanics, classes, synergy, positioning & coordination, all of this you can pick up by simply playing with people, observing and asking. As a factual example from my part:
Once I started playing my WH (le Pink Fairy) very early I'd notice that guarded targets were a pain to take down, I thought what's the counter to that? To look into his buffs (in vanilla UI is very hard to see them) to determine who has guard and who doesn't? So I did this super pro skill move in which I simply asked in advice chat.. I got told to use BuffHead addon in order to easily see who was guarded or not. Now I cannot fathom how people think that spending 2 minutes to download an addon and learning how to set it up is "not fun"? Didn't you had to learn your class, skills, rotations, read the tool-tip of skills to figure out which ones are good, which ones are bad, wasn't all this part of your gaming experience as you leveled along?
And in response to this thread, once people actually understand that it is fun to learn new things, and that by doing so, they'll discover how powerful and how much easy it is using synergy from the classes at their disposal and coordination from group playing - they'll do exactly that, they will form groups. And that is far from simply using fotm groups or fully geared characters, as I explained in some other thread way back about the difference between fotm players and good players, good players will honestly pick up any spec and make it work within their conditions, and the best way to do this, is to pick your fights wisely.
Rewards should be increased for group play, just like balancing should be around group play (as I'm tired of mentioning), how can people not realize that this game is hugely group focused? And in order to not discourage a "fresh" group after being stomped by an experienced premade, the losing group should still be rewarded above solo players or puggers, so that solo players and casuals will feel more inclined to participate in a group (after all this is a massive multiplayer game no?) and that the fresh groups will try to become the experienced premade. Problem is that that's not the general view here, we want to lower the skill/knowledge bar instead of rising it.
I really liked the idea of the event done sometime ago (even though I couldn't participate) about having team captains picking players and grouping them up and spreading out general rules and directions of what they should do in order to win, if this was a common theme, I garantee that casual players will understand and see how strong they can be playing grouped up.