Does WoW provide incentive to meaningfully interact with other players?

We all know what an MMO is, right? A Massively Multiplayer Online game, usually an RPG (Role playing game). But what's an MSP? To us at Ten Ton Hammer it is a Massively Soloplayer game, and it's hard to think of a better example of one than WoW. The question I look at this week is "What does massively
multiplayer really mean to you, and does game WoW provide incentive to
meaningfully interact with other players?".

I have looked at various aspects of World of Warcraft before and given my opinions about them. But this time I look specifically at the end game content, the life at 60 stuff. How easy or hard is it to solo the game at the end of the level progression? I also have tried to forget everything I have written about on this topic in the past. I have done this for two reasons, the first being that now I have 3 level 60's all in raiding guilds and have had a bigger exposure to the end game. Secondly, the previous articles looked at WoW as a whole all the way from level 1 through 60. In This article I focus just on where we spend our most time, the end game. The grind to 60 isn't that much of a grind and takes most players less than 12 days of time played, while several of my characters have over that amount of time played at 60 alone!

I have played several characters through to 60 now (a Paladin, Hunter, and Priest) and have several more that are close (Warrior and Shaman) so feel I can comment from many sides on the solo aspect of WoW. As discussed before, I feel that WoW is too solo friendly at low levels and can be played almost completely as a solo game until 60. What happens at 60 though?

What does MMO mean to you?

An MMO to me, means grouping. Plain and simple. In an MMO to accomplish things you should have to group, make friends and move through content together. The harder content should require you to work together better to make it through. If you do not have the communication skills, cooperative skills, play skills, intelligence and reflexes you should not be able to make it through high end content in an MMO.

Notice something I didn't mention? The number of friends. While I do believe that MMO's should be group and communication based, I am not convinced that they should require you to know 40-100 players to form raids all the time to progress. This has been a raging debate in WoW since the only way to require the highest end items is to raid in 40 man raiding groups. That is a whole other topic though and best left for another discussion.

An MMO to me should mean more than having to connect to an online server and pay a monthly fee just to play all alone. WoW for many players though is just that. Many players do not group at all until they hit 60 and even then just start another character.

Does WoW provide incentive to meaningfully interact with other players?

For such a small, seemingly straight forward question, it gets very complicated. What is incentive? Is incentive: better items, more loot, getting farther in the game, making friends, joining groups, etc. Meaningful interaction is also complicated, is it meaningful to just get more loot, or does it mean something more. Should meaningful interaction be more about communication, getting to know people, making friends, etc?

In the end I decided that the question can really be taken in two main ways. The first is to take everything as meaning to get you ahead in the game, the second is to get you ahead through friendships, communications, guilds, etc. So, now that we have broken this into two pieces, lets take a look at them.

Does WoW provide incentive to interact with people to get you ahead when just looking at loot?

Seeing as there is no way to get most of the best items in the game this is a dead easy question. If you want the best armor, weapons and gear you almost have to raid, the only other option is PvP in the Battlegrounds. Not being into PvP I can not detail the PvP side other than I know that it does take some teamwork but can be done by just joining many groups as well. In a raiding guild it is very easy to get 20-30 epic items in a single night. I have been in several runs that clear MC in several hours that bring in a minimum of 20 epics over the 4-5 hours. The same can be said with BWL, once in farm status it is very easy to bring in a huge number of epics to the guild in a very short amount of time.

Blizzard has recently tried to address some of the concerns from non-raiding players about the difference in gear by introducing the dungeon armor set 2 (Tier 0.5 set). While it is an option for players that do not raid, in many cases it is just a minor upgrade from the Tier 0 set, and no were close to the tier 1 epic raid set. It is a start though.

The imbalance between raid and non raid equipment makes it very obvious to most players. Join a raiding guild at 60, PvP or start a new character. I would say that is pretty strong incentive to interact with others. Back to my comment about numbers though, I am not convinced that it is fair to everyone. It is incentive, but a small group can be just as hard to do something with as a large group.

Does WoW provide incentive to interact with people to get you ahead when looking at friendships, communications, guilds and more?

This is where I feel that WoW is really lacking. In most MMO's friendships and communication skills are formed very early on in the game. You grow with your other player, you learn to rely on them for help and help them in return. In WoW with the game being so easy to solo in, that generally does not happen. I have gotten to level 60 and been going into instances with other players and had to explain to them what an instance was (IE: what that big shimmering door was)!!! I have had to explain tactics, pulling, tanking, off tanking, aggro management, protecting cloth wearers and much much more. All to players who are my own level but chose to never group before they ran out of things to do solo.

To be completely fair there are those that do group early and often and do form friendships and communication skills. They are in the minority until level 60 though. Even then I would argue that most players do not have good communication or teamwork skills, they are in it for themselves only.

Part of the problem is to be laid on Blizzard though as the game is just too easy and fun to just solo through, which is of course part of the reason it is such a huge success. The other part is that many player have not figured out that an MMO is to help have a social life, not destroy it. An MMO can be an amazing form of social interaction as you meet new people, become friends and almost a second family in the case of good guilds. It can also be something that destroys social interaction due to the time spent on it. If you are going to remove live social interaction you should at least have an online version of it. Better yet make sure you keep real life time balanced with your time in WoW!!!

There are many ways Blizzard could improve the incentive for grouping by upping the difficulty of the early game, or by giving better rewards to group quests. They could also implement a system that rewards interaction on some other level, such as EQ2's guild rating system. The system has guilds work together to complete large scale quests to up their guilds reputation over time, which in turn improves how the guild works together and interacts. They reward this communication and interaction with an in game benefit, what a novel idea!

Conclusions

Here I am at the end of another rant about WoW and how it is too solo friendly, and I am a little less depressed about the topic this time around. While I still find the game 90% solo based to get to level 60, I have been having a ton of fun and making many new friends since the release of 1.10 and the tier 0.5 items. I had to run Stratholme at least a dozen times to get my priests gloves and made a bunch of friends that ran it over and over with me. I've had some of those players start to message me to offer help, look for help, offer items, etc. I have also helped some of them out with items, trades, and running other instances that I didn't need. All this from a sense of friendship that was formed over the course of running an instance to get an item, having to work together and having time to talk.

While the game is still not perfect for the social aspect, I see that it is getting better. The Tier 0.5 quests really force people to work in groups if they want item upgrades. This catches all those that do not want to raid in large group, yet want items. It seems to be doing a good job already, even if I don't believe the items are enough of an upgrade for the time and effort require.

To answer the title of this whole article though "How solo friendly is WoW at 60?", which is a semi separate issue than the one we looked at, I would say that WoW at 60 is not solo friendly. I also would state that, that is just fine with me. As you've seen, I don't believe it should be as solo friendly as it is for the rest of the levels, so why would I complain that it isn't solo friendly at 60! My suggestion is that if you like solo play, when you reach level 60, create another character.

Have comments or suggestions? Thought of something that has been missed? Found an error? I would love to hear from you! You can email me at [email protected]