I'm frappin' nuts.
Call it my Seeker or Explorer nature or what have you, but I have this crazy love (some might say obsession) with learning more about new systems in game mechanics/design.
Especially when they are clever tweaks to promote team play.
Cooperation is a rare thing in the first iteration of games that "graduated" past two or more players sitting in front of a shared monitor screen offering hints/tips/advice in physical form.
In FPSes, the first multiplayer implemented was free-for-all deathmatches. Pewpew. Haha, I got more kills than you! Competitive in leaderboards and point score.
I watched games that promote teamplay in FPSes with much fascination. There was Counterstrike, which simulated the whole terrorists versus counter-terrorist aspect, and the crazy-at-the-time notion of asymmetrical but equivalent team goals - plant the bomb, defuse the bomb!
Team Fortress Classic brought the concept of classes. Specialist gameplay to allow different players' strengths to shine. A scoreboard that reflected not just player kills, but also an overall team score. The burgeoning notion that even if you had 100 kills and your team lost, it was a crushing defeat.
Natural Selection brought in even crazier ideas. A Commander for the Marines who had a top-down view and created an overall strategy that the aliens had to react to. Asymmetrical routes that small aliens could take to ambush marines. Different combat styles and classes and even structure-building. The notion of sacrificing individual points for overall team success. Maps that funneled players to LOOK in the same direction together for more comradely feeling.
Sure, there were other games. Day of Defeat brought a more lethal few-shots-dead system into play, forcing you to stick together, rush together or die in a turkeyshoot. I'm sure Call of Duty and the Battlefield games and Tribes brought their own design spins on teamplay into the mix, I just have no experience with them.
The crowning pinnacle of co-op teamplay design in FPSes still has to go to the Left 4 Dead throne. At least for now. Never before has an FPS so sneakily reinforced the notion that if you don't stick together, you DIE. Seeing other players through walls in any other game is called a "hack" and a "cheat." Here, they turned it into an information device so that players can find each other. You have the whole "look in the same direction" aspect that brings people together. Friendly fire isn't. Should you give in to the urge, the entire game is derailed and the experience sucks shortly after.
So suffice it to say that sampling MMO teamplay design is another crazy lure of mine.
A lot of MMOs do it poorly. Very poorly. Especially MMOs in the classic fantasy vein.
The LFG tool is usually a chat channel. LFG LFG LFG! LFM! LF HEALER, GTG once we got one! PLEASE?
It's fun to see how CoX twisted the player search tool into a relatively decent one for teams, yet the etiquette is still to send a tell first. CoX also has the benefit of being FUN and non-stressful to team due to non-holy trinity reliance and room for "leechers." More on that later.
WoW's new LFG tool is the talk of the town. It's just a spin on automated player-matching that FPSes and PvP battleground/scenarios do all the time, really. Except going cross-server really opens up the pool of available players (at that time, at that level range, wanting to do one particular dungeon instance.)
Therein lies the problems with the classic system. It's stressful to team. It's a high-stakes gamble. You're driven by greed for a tangible reward, else you wouldn't put yourself through the agony. What agony? Travel time to the dungeon instance. Risking costly death penalties due to another's poor performance. Hoping you've a tank that knows the map and how to tank/hold aggro. Waiting for a healer who masochistically enjoys playing whack a mole with green bars. Praying no one in the team is clumsy on the keys and accidentally pulls aggro that would wipe the party out without a chance to recover. You creep forward, one mob group at a time. It's such a pain to fight that wherever you can avoid it, you do... by hugging close to walls and platforming on cliffs that weren't really meant to be scaled in order to save time towards the last boss who holds the reward. That MAY pop. That you MAY win, with a lucky dice roll. If your teammates weren't jerks who ninja'ed it away from you by needing when they were supposed to greed. Repeat until reward won.
Or you hit burnout with the system as the case may be. Did I mention that if you're a healer or tank, you're doubly screwed? You have no chance to practice what you're supposed to be doing in a team unless you're with friends who are really patient while you're learning. PUGs expect you to know wtf you're doing or they kick or run out of patience and run away in a hurry.
Me, I gave up the notion of teaming in LOTRO simply because I'm a tank who has no time to learn the dungeons, and has poor gear due to very casual gameplay. Fortunately, Turbine realises they have a ton of such soloists in the world and adjusted the Guardian class to be a decent soloer at the cost of tankiness, and the new Skirmishes give me some of the mass chaos of a multi-character brawl without actually having to talk to another player. So yay. (That's not to say that LOTRO doesn't support some very strong social bonds from its setting. It's just how I play LOTRO.)
Aion is my WoW 2.0. The lore and graphics just attract me a lot more. It pretty much copies the old classic system in every damnable way, just shy of the forced teaming that would make me quit. I put up with it now and then because I missed the whole experience in WoW, but the more I learn, the more I get fed up with grouping. I do it because I want to speak knowledgeably about the whole teaming shebang, but I'll be damned if I can put up with raiding 3-7 times a week in any game.
Some games tweak the grouping system a little.
Some force cooperation for survival and profit. Darkfall Online or Eve Online is much better played in big groups, but alas, the finding of the groups is still sink-or-swim. You'd better have done your research and found your friends, or if you die as a newbie, too damned bad, tis your fault. It's one way of doing it, but I'm a little too carebear for that, so I prefer not to sample beyond a no-stakes trial.
Some don't force cooperation at all. They let you rely on yourself more often than not. Oddly enough, I consider all these pretty fail games. Champions Online, Fallen Earth, Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa are the only examples that come to mind offhand. Yes, you can team. Not sure why you would want to. There's rarely any synergy unless you build specifically for teaming. No higher-stake reward/incentive (be it actual loot or fun.) Sometimes, it's even feels like it's fighting the game design in order to play together with friends.
Seems like the key is to offer a balance. And viable choices between the two extremes.
Age of Conan lets you band together for survival in a PvP server. You have your PvE raids where people group for greed/loot. Solo quest if you want to. WoW, LOTRO, Aion, Vanguard, EQ, WAR, you name it, they generally follow this multiple option vein.
I have a deep abiding fascination for MMO games that move past this model though.
Guild Wars brought us the hirelings to form your own team. It brought us big-sized mob groups that have linked aggro, mobs with class skills, using tactics like a PvP team.
DDO instituted the reward only at the end of the dungeon. No mid-dungeon combat xp. You log out halfway, you forfeit it all. Ouch. It's a design decision I don't personally agree with, but I gotta give credit where it's due for being -different-. And they happily copied Guild Wars for hireling companions, and brought in solo options and micro-transactions when they realised their forced teaming decisions were sinking them quite steadily. Guess we are learning what the market can support.
I'm crazy about A Tale in the Desert's sneaky socio-political teaming aspect. They start you off with tasks that anyone can solo. They put in bottlenecks which could be conquered by reinventing the wheel on your own, with sufficient time and grinding... or if you're just not stubborn about independence, by being friendly and accepting other people's help. (Or a free public facility built by others out of the generosity of their hearts and desire to encourage newbies to stick around.)
ATITD has tasks which force you to talk to people. Or you just don't get the task done. Your choice. There are tasks that bring you in competition with people, and tasks that get you to cooperate with people. Your choice. You can barter trade with people for tasks they're better at. Like it or not, you are interacting with people. Somehow. It's not quite close-knit teaming, but the design naturally forces you to form a community.
You SEE the same people in your region. You HEAR them over a regional chat. REGIONAL chat, mind you. They see and hear you. It's a niche game, so everyone remembers each other's names. There are tasks you can do as a duo. As a quartet. And larger weirdass numbers like 7 and 11-12 and as big a region as you can possibly beg/con/persuade into helping you. The entire game is built around accomplishing these tasks that make you interact with people. It's nuts. It's crazy clever nuts.
It's only too bad that some of the easier tasks get hopelessly repetitive and chore-like, and some of the harder tasks involve way too much brainpower, spreadsheet calculations, and extended lengths of time like 1-6 RL months. (Obvious timesink is obvious.) The middle ground tasks are more skill reliant and nice, though there are a few time critical ones which can get obsessively nuts. (8 hour stopwatch, log in, tend, log out! Kinda Eve-like.)
But still cool because the systems are so different.
(Kingdom of Loathing is different and cool too, but I've never tried their teaming mechanic, so I can't comment.)
Now I've found another seduction of systems. Puzzle Pirates is built around puzzles. Normally found as casual flash games, these puzzles have evolved around their own pirate-y theme. They challenge the intellect, being easy to pick up and hard to master. I'll go into combat mechanics another time.
I'm a fan of their teamplay. There's the option to solo in Puzzle Pirates: it's called sailing with the navy, and is useful for practising puzzles in a non-stressful setting and improving one's puzzle standings. It yields small returns, but still something, and can be done in very piecemeal bites. Good for people who have to AFK in a hurry.
But ah, pillaging with a crew is where it's at. That is the standard accepted manner of gameplay, so at all hours of the day, you're going to find people looking for PUGs.
Newbies get automatic hyperlinks to click that send job queries to captains seeking crew members. So far, the folks I've met are very accepting of newbies. Maybe it's my particular crew who are highly supportive, but I like it. What I find deeply ironic yet encouraging is that I barely talk and I still get automatic acceptance.
Perhaps it's the culture of the game. It's hard to type and chat if you're dragging a puzzle around, trying to do your best. Maybe these guys have learned that the best way to encourage a newbie to stick around and develop an addiction to the game is to keep dangling temptations in the newbie's face.
Each pirate player contributes to the running of a ship. The captain gets to navigate and battle navigate. Officers (more trusted members of the crew) tend to man the guns (it's a minigame that takes a considerable amount of skill). The normal grunts and rookies get to sail/rig, do carpentry and work the bilge (duty puzzles.)
Each is a minigame puzzle, and your skill at it contributes to the overall successful running of the ship. It's well-arranged in the sense that each of the tasks grows in complexity. Frankly, I don't want to learn about battle-navigation as a newbie, it's all I can do to master the main duty puzzles. I'll be ready for that later.
I love the sense of contribution. If you do poorly, the ship does poorly. Conversely, if everyone does well (or passably), the ship runs well and you get to rob NPC brigands and pirates for loot that is shared out at the end of the pillage. Captain decides how the loot is split, and quite amusingly, most captains do an even split. It seems the principles of cooperation and altruism are alive and well in Puzzle Pirates.
This free-to-play MMO has incorporated one important principle. Teaming has to be fun. You're not bound to stay the entire pillage by the way. Even if you leave earlier, you get your share of the booty dependent on how many ship battles you were present for. People bounce in and out as their time permits, with the more hardcore staying and sailing on to reap more rewards.
If anything, the temptation comes from my crew. After I stayed on for a pillage, I found myself promoted from jobbing pirate/cabin boy to full fledged crew member and Pirate rank. (Except that to reap the benefits of Pirate rank, you need a Pirate badge which costs 1 Doubloon.)
Thank goodness for the Doubloon Exchange. I had 6000 pieces of eight I wasn't going to spend on vanity cosmetics, so what the heck, I picked up 1 Doubloon and bought the Pirate badge. This unlocked the Gunnery minipuzzle for me to try out and some other stuff (like getting a fair Pirate's share at the end of the pillage.) Nice enough.
Today, I found myself sneaking on to practice some puzzles. (Shhhh...) I went sailing with the NPC navy and put myself on the Do-Not-Disturb mode I newly discovered. Interesting twist on AFK, shutting off chat channels, tells, invites, etc.
Mid-puzzle, mysteriously, I noticed a message turn up saying, you need a badge to enjoy all the privileges of your rank. Huh? What rank? Did the Navy promote me when I wasn't looking? What the hell unlocked?
Eventually, I discovered someone in my crew sneak promoted me to Officer rank from Pirate. Talk about blind press-ganging! Being an Officer allows you to buy/sail your own ship, probably unlocks more minipuzzles and so on. It also costs 8 Doubloons to get an Officer badge.
Ehh... Personally, I'm not ready yet to take the leap to Officer. Tis not the money. I'd spend $10 on Puzzle Pirates over $15 on Champions Online. Tis the responsibilities and the learning of MORE puzzles that I don't want to deal with just yet.
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