Dev Discussion #3 - Group Gameplay

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Glorious Ashes community - it's time for another Dev Discussion! Dev Discussion topics are kind of like a "reverse Q&A" - rather than you asking us questions about Ashes of Creation, we want to ask YOU what your thoughts are.

Our design team has compiled a list of burning questions we'd love to get your feedback on regarding gameplay, your past MMO experiences, and more. Join in on the Dev Discussion and share what makes gaming special to you!

Dev Discussion #3 - Group Gameplay
How do you feel about grouping in MMOs - what's your ideal group experience?

Keep an eye out for our next Dev Discussion topic featuring your best/worst MMO experiences!

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Comments

dphantomtv

The best times in video games is with your ideal group. Couple of friends bantering and having fun. That being said my ideal group experience is when you need to work as a group but there are mechanics to make certain individuals greedy.

What I’m trying to say is if group experiences in AoC have grief mechanics I’m all in. I want to be able to shoot my friend in the knee if he’s talking shit.

Azryil

dphantomtv wrote: »

The best times in video games is with your ideal group. Couple of friends bantering and having fun. That being said my ideal group experience is when you need to work as a group but there are mechanics to make certain individuals greedy.

What I’m trying to say is if group experiences in AoC have grief mechanics I’m all in. I want to be able to shoot my friend in the knee if he’s talking shit.

I can see it now, you and your group get into some big boss fight and all the melee get blown up by friendly fire cleave damage....what could go wrong.

Tearl Stoneheart

I play games like this for the social/friends aspect. My wife and I have been playing games together for over 18 years and we've always enjoyed gaming most with groups. While raiding is fun (LARGE groups), we prefer the smaller groups.
The best group dynamic comes with two trains of thought: Fun and Function. The Fun aspect is just being able to have the most fun with the folks you play with. The Function aspect is ensuring you have a group make-up that allows for accomplishments (but each class needs to be fun to play).
Then again, sometimes, when all your friends aren't on, it's nice to enjoy content for small groups or duo's...so keep that in mind when designing encounters!

TruthEternal

An ideal group is one that formed *intentionally* and with the intent of interacting in *more than the immediate term* whether a guild group, social organization group, or even a group that forms randomly out in the world. These types of groups become teams which is where so much of the fun of MMOs is brought to bear. The idea of forming groups via a finder might form a convenient group that can complete a piece of content, but this group has no incentive to become a team in the same meaningful or longer-term way that keeps players invested in the game.

Rabbit

An ideal group experience is borne of necessity. That's not to say the people playing aren't friends, or don't like grouping together, it just means that every player should bring something necessary to the fight-- abilities which overcome game mechanics, boost or heal party members, etc. Too much redundancy makes players feel irrelevant, which has a major impact on group excitement or enjoyment.

Promethesus

Best group for me is a random party of nice folks. Most important is that every role feels useful to the group. After the fun we will make friends ingame and stay in contact :-)

SphinxenDK

The ideal group? Hmm.. Definitely having my friends with me. Being able to be very silly, fail miserably and have a good laugh about all of it

The crew I used to run with, my boyfriend and some of his mates, there was never a dull moment, with those guys. I really hope to recreate something close to that, with new friends I will be making in this game

nestharus

There are two steps to grouping. The first step is the group creation itself. This means identifying the content and how to conquer that content. What classes are you going to need? What items will you need? What levels should people be? Group finders and poor class interdependence kills this step. To enable this step, the content must be diverse, deep, and challenging, beyond simple numbers and 1-shot mechanics. In a prior post, I mentioned fast moving enemies. There can also be things like poison, enemies that charm, blind, root, nuke, and gate (teleport back to their origin). There are many mechanics that can be thrown into an area alongside traps that can require certain classes that can fulfill certain roles. With good class design, many classes may be able to fulfill a role to varying degrees. Group creation is important to creating a satisfying and enjoyable group. You decide on an area you want to tackle, you identify who you need to tackle it, and then you ask people. You all get together and formulate your strategy on what each of you needs to do, the items you need, and some of the danger areas that some people may not be aware of. Then you begin your actual adventure.

Key: Preparing for an adventure is just as important as the adventure itself.

A constrained and defined adventure, an on rails experience, removes the organic nature of groups. A group becomes more mechanic when it can't decide on its own direction. This is the weakness of instanced linear content. A dungeon that doesn't necessarily have a final boss or order to it is a dungeon that promotes crawling and exploring. How deep will you get? What will you find down there? Not to mention that the dangers mentioned before could cause an immediate wipe if people aren't on their toes. With punishing death mechanics, the risk factor can make players actually feel fear and excitement as they traverse the dungeon. Even if they've done it 100 times, if the dungeon is open (other groups) and non-linear with non-static spawns (things change all the time), it can cause sudden dangers to crop up that the group may not have been prepared for. Every area of a dungeon should have its own challenges and dungeons should progressively introduce new and different combinations of mechanics. This makes for a group that plays as a team and talks with each other. Another important piece of this is pockets of high level content mixed in with low level content!

One thing I used to love to do was theory craft group compositions. What groups are best for what content?

When content gets scaled up, that is raids or invasions, the original mechanics that made small single group-play so good can be scaled up, not in terms of numbers, but in terms of many moving parts and the relationships between those parts. I've never gotten to experience this, but large groups clearing dynamic scenarios, something Ashes is primed to do, would likely be very interesting and enjoyable. The players get to continue to play in their small groups and enjoy the content from their perspective as any other small group content, but they must work and coordinate with many other groups to clear the scenario. Not to mention each group would need a different composition depending on what it needed to do.

Key: Ideal group gameplay stems from social interaction and teamwork from the inception of the group to its execution. The group doesn't have to be a group of friends. Completely random strangers can come together without any issues if they are all involved in the group's creation and preparation. Skipping this crucial step is what causes groups of random players to fail (netflix 'n chill vs actively involved).

One thing that's going to be really fun with grouping in Ashes of Creation is the open world PvP aspect. Not only does your group have to counter the content, but it also has to counter other groups ; O. You'd end up with some groups that focused on killing players in a dungeon to grab their loot and other groups that focused on the dungeon itself ; ). I've barely gotten to experience this, but it was a thing in Legends of Aria and Albion, though their PvE content was pretty sad. They relied on the PvP to keep the dungeons interesting. Would be really interesting what PvE mechanics can be mixed in to add a bunch of flare to the PvP and how the group gameplay can evolve from that! I can only imagine what scenarios would be like O_o.

I hope that helps ^_^.

mytherios

I think group game as fun as may it be with friends won't last unless the classes have an identity to them, each class should have something to add to the group regardless of the size of the group. And the most important thing is the reason that the group was formed for unless the content was hard enough to a group to be formed then there is no reason at all to form it, and the harder the content the better.

mtrj1776

My ideal group party is the old type healer does healing no need to dps, possibly a buffer such as chanter on aion. Couple of dps and a tank that also is tank focused not dps focused.

5 to 6 members per dungeon is good enough, not really a fan of huge raid content often.

Also outside of instances world areas should be useful and not just to say the game has a world (ffxiv is pretty useless outside of instances dungeons), your node system seems to take care of this so far

Davlos

It's Agile user stories time again.

As a grouped player, I want a diverse array of easy-to-use ping markers to indicate whom to follow, where to go or what to target to enhance communication within groups for PVE or PVP.
As a grouped player, I want text chat starting with https:// to be linkable so it's easy to send Discord/Mumble invites for voice chat. (However this is a possible security risk)
As a group leader, I want party/raid UI to make it easy for me to understand my group composition at a glance to better optimize group play for the rest of the players.
As a grouped player, I want my individual class abilities to be helpful to any kind of encounter so there's no such thing as an 'irrelevant class' (see: if you're not a mage/paladin in Bless or Elementalist in A:IR, don't bother playing) and make players' time pointless.

StreetCornerPoet

My ideal group experience depends on what I'm grouping up for.

RP - Having interesting characters with the understanding that we aren't all powerful flawless snow flakes who can never get hurt, everyone can do everything, and plot armor abounds. I want flawed characters with interesting stories that can get hurt and can't just wave their hands to make everything better.

Quests - Questing at a decent pace while taking time to also explore and see the sights. I don't want break neck skip everything that isn't immediately important kind of questing, I want quest is in this direc....oh what is that over there, okay now back to the quest kind of questing. Or the "hey you're doing this quest, I'm doing this quest, lets team up. Quest done? Cool enjoy the rest of your game." as I go off and do something else.

Dungeons and Raids - Get a group that is learning the fights and won't start slinging insults if it turns out we aren't ready for that boss or we haven't gotten the mechanics down. Or if its something that is well known, get in and get it done, or use it as a training run for newer guild members (something I don't think happens often enough, where you have a raid pretty well handled so you use it to train new members on raids without just steam rolling it and carrying them.)

Open World - Oh hey X even is happening, want to team up for it? Event done, every one go about your regular business. Or just group up with some friends/guildies and go exploring. Pick a direction until things get to big to handle and see what you can find and explore.

Alpha Soul

Tough Question!

I'm primarily a solo player, but not i'm adverse to grouping so long as its more advantageous. In FFXIV I primarily grouped because its worth it.. its the best way to advance you and there is a noticeable advantage to doing so. In SWTOR I avoided it like the plague because there was almost no advantage to grouping. In Wildstar I couldn't group.. because there was no easy way to group based on how the game was setup.

To me the ideal group experience involves a couple of facets.

1. Communication - Would love for it to be easy to communicate with the group on the fly. If its easy to communicate and not onerous then jumping into a group is less daunting.
2. Valuable - Specifically what I mean is in relation to being a solo player. Operating as a group to me should confer noticeably more value .. tougher challenges, better loot, better experience.. all to balance out the challenge of getting a group together and having to work with others.
3. Role Variation - It's more fun to me when groups are more than the standard Trinity of Tank/DPS/Healer. Buffing? Utility? Crowd Control? Having different ways to meaningfully contribute is an awesome way to look at groups.
4. Variability - In group composition. Ideally it shouldn't be that much more difficult to create a group with strangers as opposed to people you know. The inherent advantage to people you know is knowing how they play, but barring experience forming a group shouldn't be a daunting task.
5. Fun - At the end of the day I want to be able to enjoy myself so the prospect of being in a group should be in inherently fun. That could mean so many different things but I did want to point that out, as some games lose sight of it.

jodypse

There are various forms of groups and AoC will bring yet another into the mix.

The first is the group you are running with. Preferably for me a smaller group, not 8 man size but more 3-4 man size, sometimes even Duo size, makes for more fun gaming, more of the RPG part of the MMORPG, than the larger groups, full 6-8 man groups, in which content clearing suddenly becomes more of a focus than role-playing and social enjoyment.

The second is the Guild group, from which you can get people to clear content with as well as enjoy teh social aspects, RPG'ing again. Here I prefer again a smaller size, 10-15 people maybe, so that all can get to know all in the Guild. With 30+ people a lot might stay strangers despite being part of the same Guild.

A third group dynamic is absent in AoC, Alliances, unless one can see Node Citizenship as something similar, though it won't be that as Guilds can have members from any number of Nodes.

The new one introduced with AoC is Citizenship, Node belonging. Here I can't really say how it will affect me as a player as the size of people in a Node is yet to be seen. I would imagine it might feel more of a loose relationship with members even though it will be the highest form of belonging in the game. Finding people to do content with should, I think, be easy through a Node Citizenship party finder, and to partake in Global Events with Node members even if not joining Party's with people.
How well one gets to know those in ones Node remains to be seen, and what Social opportunities will be available within the Node itself.

Plateau

Zelkova

Playing with friends is what makes an MMO enjoyable. Even as a "solo" player myself playing with friends is always more fun and optimal. The idea of being able to play whatever you want without having to specifically fill a role is one of the best things for me though. In games where everyone can heal themselves at least moderately so they dont need a dedicated tank or healer there's little pressure to specifically stick with something. I cannot tell you how many guilds i've joined that really wanted X role and ultimately either we'd hit a wall or one of us would have to drop our preferred class to help the needs of the many. (which usually meant me re-rolling healer). I love having group diversity but I also like being able to play my main role. I do think it is still important to have a place for solo players cuz honestly sometimes I just dont feel like being bothered with a new group and their demands/requests. I left several guilds over the years in several mmos once my irl friends quit games cuz they suddenly wanted active members who were on x days a week or you'd get purged. I'm not playing an mmo for a second job im here to chill, goof around, make friends, explore and progress at a casual level (in most cases) and sometimes you get pressed into a corner where you HAVE to stay in some kind of group to stay current and that to me is the real killer. Its sometimes hard to find a good balance in a games design where you can be a solo player or group player at any given moment (for any stretch of time) but group play is almost always more fun.

Damokles

One thing (or maybe two or three)
Did you ever run from Stormwind to the Scarlet Monastery? Banter with your pals, write silly things, gank some enemy players? If yes, then you know what i mean: The closeness that you can build with total strangers is really cool.
I want the times back, where you can make connections with other players, where you werent just one face in a crowd, but you actually knew each other.

Recap:
-Give us a group chat, guild chat, zone chat, yell emote (where ou can scream your message ;D) and I will be happy (together with a normal /say ofc

)

-Make grouping a positive thing, many players think nowadays, that grouping is just a hassle, because they can just do most of the high end quests etc solo normally

- Make "Class/Tank" classes be able to actively tank (just not as good as a "tank/class") and "class/cleric" classes heal at least passably xD

-Give us a greed/need button (it is surprisingly usefull for groups

)

- And please, dont implement an automatic group/dungeon finder. A good implementation of a non automatic group finder could be a board in a tavern, where you can list your group and people could find you that way. That board could be only accessible in major nodes and then connect with all the nodes in its zone of influence.

aaronvienneau

As other have said, the game needs to reward cooperative play in order to be successful. Simply putting in systems that are optionally cooperative isn't enough.

Players will tend towards the most efficient path from point A to point B. If it isn't more efficient to be partied up, the majority of players will complete their tasks solo. In other words, seeking a group for the sake of seeking a group -- with no additional benefit -- is rare. It's even more rare for someone to accept a group invite if there's nothing in it for them. Grouping should be symbiotic.

The short of it is, by rewarding ( not necessarily requiring ) cooperative play, you encourage the community to help itself.

An ideal group experience involves:

1) Content that scales in difficulty and reward depending on group size
2) Each player feeling needed in their group dynamic (Their class impacts the group in a unique way).
3) Content that encourages players to play their class (Tanks pull, DPS damage, healers heal, utility buffs).
4) Content that encourages a variety of classes (A reason to play classes outside the normal DnD archetypes)
5) Group strategy: players strategize together to complete group content.

Plateau

OrcLuck

My favorite times with a group were when we were just a bunch of randoms but we did well together.

Things going well tends to grease the social cogs as it were and you friend em for more easy delving.

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