Someone from an online game I play made a post in a game forum about how she had a hard time making friends on that particular online game.
The game in question is Guild Wars. Depending on one’s definitions, it is not quite a Mass Multiplayer Onlne Role Playing Game (MMORPG) of the traditional style. Most MMORPG have a contiguous world, players move from one place to another seamlessly, and can bump into other players anywhere in that world.
Guild Wars is almost entirely based on instancing. Instancing and instances are industry terms to describe how a seperate copy of a part of the world is created for the players to play in. So, players in Guild Wars form groups in towns, and they will go into a part of the world that is specifically generated for them. They will not bump into other people in their copy of that part of the world.
Managing the game in this instanced manner allowed Guild Wars not to charge a monthly subscription to maintain the servers. They make their profit by releasing new campaign worlds instead.
Without charging a subscription fee, Guild Wars is also freed from artificially creating time-sinks for their players. Subscription based games tend to waste the online time of their players, so they need to spend long hours getting things done, and hence, will play the game longer and pay for fees.
Part of that freeing up of time-sinks is that a player can teleport to anywhere in the gaming world he has been to before, without having to walk across entire game continents to get there.
I used to think that being able to travel instantly to anywhere in the game world, would be an asset to the social aspect of the game. If your friend needed help halfway across the game world, you can almost instantly go to his aid, as opposed to most games, which would require a 30 minute walk and ride to get there.
Another aspect of time savings that Guild Wars is able to attract players with is the fact that not many things need to be done repeatedly. Gamers refer to repeatedly doing a certain task in the game as grinding. Guild Wars has very little grinding compared to most subscription based MMORPG.
It also has a low level cap. Most games gauge progress with character levels. Most subscription based games keep players interested by forever dangling a carrot in front of them in the form of a high maximum level and game content playable only by higher level characters.
Guild Wars has a maximum level of 20 and it can be achievable in 2 weeks of casual playing. Everything before level 20 is considered the tutorial. Most of the game content is then catered to level 20 characters and the edge that people get is in their playing skills.
It all ends up being an attractive game package. Players pay for the game, and they are not burdened with a monthly subscription. They do not need to waste time traveling around, they have access to almost all of the game’s rich content quite quickly, and they are not forced to repeatedly go through certain game content in order to move onwards.
For some reason, the social aspect of Guild Wars is lacking, compared to other games. Players are not able to form lasting relationships as they are able to in other MMORPG. I had pondered about this and realised that all the aspects of Guild Wars that attracted me to the game, is also detrimental to the development of the social aspect of online gaming.
As I have mentioned above, being able to teleport to any part of the gaming world should be helpful for buiding relationships. The game architecture that allows this to happen is instancing. The downside of instancing is that when someone is asking for help, it is likely that all his friends are in an instance, halfway through doing something.
Players in other MMORPG are usually faced with time consuming rides in ships, flying beasts or walking, if they want to travel vast distances within the game. Many people hate this waste of time, and occupy themselves during this time chatting with their friends online.
Occasionally, if a player only has 15 or 30 minutes to spare in the game, the long travelling puts them off, and they end up sitting in town for that period of time chatting with other gamers. Paradoxically, the instancing aspect of Guild Wars allows players with only 15 minutes to spare to at least get small parts of the game done, doing a simple quest, or a single round of Player versus Player (PvP) battle.
Players for many games get stuck at a certain part of the game, because they are not able to defeat the monsters in the next area. They continuously train in a certain area of the game in order to level up and improve their characters for the next challenge. This grinding can sometimes be mind numbingly monotonous, and the players are denied access to the next part of the world because of their level.
However, if a player plays in a certain part of the game day in and day out, he will bump into others who share his predicament, people of the same level as him. After a while of repeatedly meeting, friendships can be formed. While they might part ways later on, they can continually compare their progress of the game with each other
Guild Wars players are freed from most grinding, on top of that, being in an instanced game, they need to spend very little time in the towns, and hence, is not likely to form relationships with other players in the same stage of the game as them.
Guild Wars characters are also freed from resupply needs, one less reason to hang around in towns.
All those aspects that make Guild Wars more efficient, in terms of giving players more playing time, and less wasted time, also reduces the time and opportunities for players to interact with others.
It should have been so clear to me, because thats the way it is in the world. Social interactions happen when you are not efficient, when you are on a bus, when you are eating and when you are sitting around not working.
Most MMORPG gamers out there pay $5 – $15 a month and spend a fair chunk of their gaming time sitting around chatting. Guild Wars players do the complete opposite.
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