The Shrine

I remember reading on psychology stuff and you read stuff about how if you tell people to hit a button to shock somebody they'll do it, and if you put a bunch of people and tell them they're acting as prisoner/warden the warden guys will eventually abuse the prisoners. Stuff like this makes me feel depressed about humanity in general since it says we're basically a bunch of losers who will do despicable things if you're in the right environment that looks like something out of a survivor horror movie.

Recently I've looked at the community of EverQuest and the server I'm on and I realize EverQuest is an unintended social experiment. The game is on its 10th year around, so the community the game forms is quite long-lasting. If you look at the structure of EQ, it is essentially some kind of Ponzi scheme. The toughest content requires 54 people and they're usually tuned to ensure it's very hard to even do it with 48. The population of EQ is mostly stable, but it is certainly not increasing.

Now I remember when the last place I worked at was throwing a party, we invited like 50 guys to go to bowling. Everything was on company expense and stuff, and only half of the guys we asked show up, which would be about 25. So if you ask 50 guys to show up for free stuff, and only 25 did, that'd suggest getting 54 people to slay the dragon is a logistical nightmare, and it is. Even WoW which has a gazillion people playing done away with 40 man raids, because 40 is a lot to organize, but 40 is still quite a lot less than 54 when you consider the difficulty to organizing a group of people probably goes up far faster than linear. I cannot think of any modern MMORPG game that has any PvE content that requires more than 40. PvP is an obvious exception.

Over the past 3 or so years people have been realizing that even if you have a game as big as WoW, there cannot be very many successful guilds that feature 54 players, just because this is a lot of work to find people who all show up at roughly the same time and don't hate each other's guts. Even back when EQ ruled the world there probably isn't more than 100 of such raiding guilds. But nobody plays the game to lose. You obviously want to beat the hardest stuff, but the game physically cannot support too many 54-man entities simply because that's not logistically possible. So this is where the recruiting process begins. As early as 3 years ago I know there are guilds that will have a 'phat lewt' package for new recruits, and sometimes they'll even pay for the server transfer fee ($50) if you're willing to leave your guild to join them, assuming they're on a different server.

And of course, as one guild starts losing a few guys to another guild that is trying to get more, that guild becomes increasingly incapable of doing the same content that requires 54. If you had 48 you might be able to barely manage a 54-man content, but if you're down to 42 now it's suddenly way harder.

It's rather amusing when you've people you play with for a long time that they've done all they can and now they're going to join another guild that has 80 people to be backup #13. In fact they probably won't even be playing the game at all. If you're 81th guy on a raid that means they'll probably just swap you in for loot (EQ does not require you to be present at the time of mob's death to be eligible). So you're not even playing the game. You just show up and you zone into somewhere after the mob is dead and get your loot. Why does the guild do this? Because they want to have insurance against other guilds that might be poaching members. You're just a dog they feed with loot and they figure if 3 out of 10 guys they got that way stick around then they'll never fall below the 54 threshold. After all, it's not like the game is hard. Most guilds who can field 54 people consistently can actually beat this stuff with no problem.

So really what I learn is that if you're in an enviornment where upward mobility is very easy, but doing anything is hard, then people will backstab you or sell out for 150 more HP. It doesn't matter that absolutely nobody will be impressed by the fact that you have 35000 HP in EQ because 99% of the people in the world don't play it, and the 1% who do knows that just means you paid $50 to server mode somewhere to a guild that needed some extra insurance.

And the weird thing is the game is striving pretty well as a whole. Most of the casual people I run into like the game. SoE has made some very good changes at the group level to make the game enjoyable for its core audience, the casual. Yet at the same time the hardcore guys are stabbing each other on the back for another 150 HP on their character. I suppose since hardcore guys are, after all, irrelevent, maybe the developers don't even care that the high end community of EQ looks like Alpha Centauri where you sent 10 guys to a deserted island and they start killing each other as the first thing they do.

In retrospect, maybe Blizzard know it all along. The 'hardcore' guys seem to be the lowest lifeform you'd find in a game in general so there's no point to cater to them. I have been playing MMORPG at a level that generally falls under hardcore, and it's not a label anyone should be proud of, just because the people you have to associate with seems to be some of the worst guys to ever play a video game.

Most raids in LOTRO require 12-ppl. The bigger stuff requires 24, but that's the max. It's pointless to try to require 40-50 people in a single group.

SineSwiper wrote:Most raids in LOTRO require 12-ppl. The bigger stuff requires 24, but that's the max. It's pointless to try to require 40-50 people in a single group.

Yeah, and that's why I think it's a social experiment, not a game concept. It's like seeing what happens when you put an impossible criteria (require 54 people) and see how low people will go to sell themselves out to achieve it. I can bet you even as big as WoW is, they'd have a hard time getting the people to do 54 man raids simply because the organizational headache. They didn't even want to deal with 40 man raids.

Heh, it's hard to manage 6 people sometimes. All it takes is one person to fuck it up.

I remember the original Mata Muram encounter in EQ was joked that the boss is actually a sentinent AI because he always knows who the retards are in your raid and will find them and make you wipe. And it's really not that far from the truth. But why do you include the retards in the first place? Because if you removed too many of them (like say, 3), you will simply fail on the logistical part of the fight (damage, healing, tanking, etc).

I mean obviously you want to make sure everyone is responsible not just cannon fodder, but having 54 guys pay for the mistake of one guy really sucks. Like Sine said I don't even like it when 5 guys have to pay for the mistake of 1 retard, let alone 53.

Of course it's easy to say 'don't group with retards' but honestly there aren't really that many awesome players in the world to group with. I mean this is supposed to be a game after all.

I played WoW in the 40-man raid era and the 20-man raid era too. It seemed like in someways even if you drop the number of people it requires to do something you still have an absence of people. It seems like you always need those last 5 people, or you don't have the right balance.

I haven't played an MMO since June or July... and I don't know if I plan to go back anytime soon.

I met a lot of the people in my last guild in person and still talk to a few of them, I think thats the more interesting social experiment.

Let's say you have 54 and 3 of them are retards. Now you drop your raid to 40 but then you'll now realize 3 of the guys you thought that was okay in the 54 are retards in a 40 environment too. So again you drop to 20 but then you'll realize 3 of the guys you thought that were okay in 40 are retards in a 20 environment.

But the difference is that one is need and the other is want. If you have 30 guys you can never do a 40 man raid. You NEED 10 more people to have a chance. If you're doing a 20 man raid with 30 guys, you might argue who gets to show up. You might WANT to have 1 more dwarf shadow priest or whatever you happen to believe is needed. But that is a want, not a need. If you have 20 people you can definitely do a 20 man raid, but not a 40 man raid. You might not be able to do it the way you want to, but you can do it.