There are a number of different ways to play an MMO. Consequently there are a number of different factions who expected different things from an MMO. I’ve danced around a lot of these ideas in posts prior to this, but only as I was waking up today did some of these ideas gel. This post is about the disconnect between different groups of players.
I’m an older gamer who cut my teeth on pinball long before computer games or even video games were a thing at all. My introduction to RPGs was through pen and paper, not arcade games. As a result, PvP isn’t infinitely fascinating to me, nor is raiding. Not because I want to take the easy road, or because I don’t want to put effort into something (anyone who knows me can vouch for that), but because my entire approach to gaming is based on trying to recapture pen and paper Rping, rather than playing a video game.
Actually single player games are more suited to my personal taste than MMOs. Because when we got together as a group to RP, with a real life GM, we didn’t play for dice rolls, or trying to the same D&D module over and over. In fact, we didn’t have modules at all. We had a dungeon master who created a world/story that we moved through. It was much more like a single player game, but with friends.
Here we are, now, 40 years later, and I still want to capture that experience, and for a long time, that’s precisely the experience Guild Wars 2 delivered for me. A living, breathing world I could move through, with friends, exploring, hanging out, having a great time.
Never in all my years of Rping did we fight the same battle over and over again until we beat the boss. That simply wasn’t the game. I guess I’ve sort of thought of MMORPGs as a massively multi player RPG, rather than a massive multiplayer war game (PVP), or a massively multiplayer dungeon crawl, because my D&D group wasn’t really about dungeon crawls. Dungeons were never an end in themselves. Dungeons were a way of telling a story that furthered the campaign we were playing. The Fellowship of the Ring didn’t repeatedly try to get through Moria until they made it. They got through Moria as part of the story. This is why I come to MMOs. I want to play through a story with my friends.
As such, it’s less about putting in effort to beat a single boss over and over and more about enjoying a living breathing world, as much as that’s possible in a computer game. That’s what drew me here. That’s why dungeons and fractals were never my focus. Not because I’m lazy. Not because I can’t beat a dungeon or a raid or a fractal, or I’m not good enough to PvP. It’s because my entire approach to the genre comes from what I want out of a game. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this.
I played games like Dungeon Master, the old infocom games, Prison (on the amiga). Prince of Persia. I liked puzzle games, and later games like Tombraider, which again, told a story. Which is probably also why I like jumping puzzles so much.
“Go play a single player game” is one of the comments I see a lot of these forums, followed by comments like “you want the rewards without doing any of the work”. The funny thing is, yeah, because I didn’t come from a game with challenging content that gave me better rewards. I came from a game where you progressed through the story, with friends, and got rewards as you played…not played the same dungeon over and over again, which we never did.
Some people might ask why I don’t RP in Guild Wars 2. Because RP in Guild Wars 2 is less like the Rping I did with pen and paper and more like cooperative writing. Rping has evolved into a very different beast, and it doesn’t fulfill me in the way that an RPG would. Games like Skyrim or Dragon Age or The Witcher are far more the type of experience I’m looking for…but with friends. And in none of those games are the best rewards locked away from me. And I’d be pretty annoyed if they were.
I’m sure people who came through mobas or FPS’s are more likely to not worry about dying in PvP. But I hate dying in PvP, because of where I came from. I’m sure people who came to this game from raiding in WoW are more interested in challenging content that they have to bang their head against by memorizing a pattern and moving out of red circles while attacking a boss before the rage timer goes off. . But I don’t think anyone should assume that because some of us want to play the type of game we’ve seen MMOs to be that we’re lazy, or we’re entitled or we want to deny people challenging content. We simply don’t want to be locked out of story and lore and loot because we’ve come here by a different route, and we’re looking for different things from our gaming altogether.
If years ago, a DM came to me and said, you can play in my world, but you can’t the best drops unless you run this one dungeon over and over again until you beat it, I’d have told him I wasn’t interested in playing in his world. This is where the disconnect between me and some other players come from. This is why I’m passionate about how this works in Guild Wars 2.
I’m going to stay away from future debates on raiding, because raiding is like a completely different game than the game I started playing. Dungeons were too for that matter, which is why they were never my focus. But if you want to beat raids, it’s sort of hard to do that without focusing on them and that would ruin the game for me.
Guild Wars 2 was once the game I wanted to play because it filled the need for an online RPG better than any other MMO. And that’s still largely true. Out of all the MMOs on the market, nothing fulfills me like Guild Wars 2. But with the addition of raids and the focus on PvP, something admittedly lacking in the early years of the game, it’s also moved away from my ideal.
Does everyone deserve content for them. Sure they do. Does everyone deserve exclusive rewards just for their content that no one else can get because they’re looking for a different in game experience? That one I’m not so sure about.
Either way, I’m going to be posting less here, because raiders aren’t wrong for wanting focus on raids, PvPers aren’t wrong for wanting focus on PvP and people like me, we’re not wrong for not wanting to be driven into game modes that do not interest us just to get specific rewards.
Edit: typo
