MMO = Group play!

Decided to play Kotor2 on my laptop instead of my netbook (since it doesn't work) and also decided to take another look at the SWTOR forums. I'm really looking forward to SWTOR and i'm always interested in new information about the game.

I stumbled onto a forum post about Solo vs Group play, and about rewards for Casual vs Hardcore.

One thing that's always annoyed me about World of Warcraft, was the point to get all the good stuff you had to raid, you can't get any of it solo. If a PC game comes out without a single player mode, there will be people that complain, but it's just accepted in WoW. Hell, I play Team Fortress 2 a fair bit, but I don't have to organise a group of 25 people together to start at 7:30pm, I can just jump in, even considering Pick Up Groups in WoW, it's alot easier to play Team Fortress 2.

But why should you be forced to Raid to get the best rewards, and maybe "rewards" is gear, titles, achievements, whatever. In the forum post I was reading it was taken as a given, no one seemed to argue it, which annoyed me. At what point does doing something as a group mean you should be awared more than doing it solo?

You can go with a couple of arguements, which don't make sense to me, like "An MMO is about playing in a group, if you don't want to play in a group go play a single player game", you mean, a single player game that doesn't cost me £9 a month? Which I can play whenever I want instead of the preset times made by the guild? While I never got to top level, I played Tabula Rasa for a while, and I loved the fact I could Solo instances, or I could get people to come for a laugh and group play, it was great, what was wrong with that?

"It's harder to organise a group of people than it is to just do something yourself" so, if I played with 10 friends on a game (and I'd imagine 10 is a high number for real friends) I can't do 25 man raids, unless I get other people involved, once other people are involved raids might very well happen when i'm busy doing something else. So I then either have to accept I can't raid Ulduar or whatever each week, or join another guild, leaving my 10 friends behind... Yes it's harder to organise something with a group than to play solo, so what? A reward system shouldn't be based on how easy it is to get people together for something.

One of the main problems I think (not played many other MMO games) is that WoW is raid based. There isn't a Solo option, which means that people see what you can do like dailies, which are easy, then they seem to assume that any solo content would be easy. Why would it be impossible to tune encounters so they work for solo players? Then tune it so it scales somewhat with the number of people? Even if you have preset: 1, 5, 10, 15, 20.

Which opens up the further problem. In WoW currently you can do content 10 man or 25 man, and you get better rewards in 25 man. Why is this? When there are 3 healers and 2 tanks, it can be a push and errors made can screw you, if there are 8 healers and 3 tanks, there is a greater margin of error, and with a better reward why not?

I'd be interested to hear an arguement on why 25 man raiding should give better rewards than 10 man, unless that arguement is "Because the 25 man content is tuned to be harder" at which point you could just tune them so they're just as difficult and offer the same rewards surely? The main reason you wouldn't do that is to stop people doing the content twice a week, which is hardly a huge thing I think... but currently you're just rewarding people for being in a bigger guild.

I'm hoping SWTOR has a good end game, i'm still unsure how they're pushing story and the story will be better than WoW end game, which has been good since Burning Crusade I think. Fair enough leveling might be alot more story driven, but anyone who's spent alot of time on an MMO will be mostly looking at the end game. Either way, I'm hoping there are lots of options for Solo End Game, which won't leave me behind gear wise, why should I have worse gear because I would quite fancy playing Wednesday instead of Thursday this week?