Musing on Group Work

Melmoth from Killed in a Smiling Accident made a great post about the inherent difficulty of tanking (and learning how to) in a liable-to-be toxic environment. It hits the nail on the head and rings of so much truth that it isn't even as funny as his regular posts. Just too much serious and sad to be offset with a few attempts at humor.

Nor are there any easy solutions. If there were, MMOs would have implemented and copied it off each other long ago.

Part of it is a communication issue. And that again can be broken up into technical design and social attitude components.

The technical design challenge of communication is just how are players to communicate?

Typing? Not everyone can type at the speed of light. I can, but I make no bones about how the WASD mouselook controls and rapid response combat does horrible things to my will to converse in a typical MMO - my brain just cannot process fights and produce meaningful conversation at the same time, the same parts of my brain are being used or something, maybe to hit the correct keys on the keyboard. In ATITD meanwhile, I can go on and on with really long sentences since I don't have to hit '1' '2' '3' 'E' 'W' 'X' every 3-5 seconds or so.

Voice? Then you bring in the having a microphone issues, the real world mixing with fantasy world problems of discrimination and accents and ageism and what-have-you-isms. Some people don't process audio very well anyhow.

Nor do certain others process text or reading very well, come to think of it. So what is left? Either a new as yet uninvented way of communicating must be introduced into MMOs... Something akin to the emotes/actions/one-button keypresses like F7 = Ready! and avatar gestures of CoH? Maybe a one keypress scroll wheel similar to FPSes where simple words like Yes, No, Going ahead, You go, can be expanded into full fledged immersive voice-recorded sentences with avatar gestures?

The other possibility is to remove the need for players to communicate at all. Crowdsource the solution, so to speak. Rift's rifts are a pretty decent example of this. Though I suppose as the difficulty increases, a shifty pressure is put on certain people to at least type a few sentences like "bring the werewolves to the stone" and so on.

Dungeons are trickier. Just what is the sweet spot of dungeon communication? Is it one where no one talks but everyone magically knows what to do? Is it one where people take a few moments to assign roles and then stays silent for the rest of the time? Is it one where an unfortunate wipe or two necessitates some re-strategizing?

And just how do you control or influence or encourage or offer little design nudges to players to speak up in a positive light, instead of overwhelming negative with little patience? This question brings us to the second aspect of social attitude.

While hate is a strong word, I have to rehash my deep disappointment in WoW's attempt at blending accessible design and the gear/raid loot ladder together because it is a recipe for lousy social attitude. Players are subtly taught via the game's design that one can selfishly do it all by themselves, one's primary goal in the game is to get the leetest shiniest gear of them all by winning it from 24 or 14 others (or n-1 raid members), in the fastest, most optimal, less painful/stressful manner possible, and that people are disposable and a dime a dozen where they came from (tons of people per server to cross-server dungeon with, after all.) Why shouldn't they act like spoiled self-centered brats? There's no consequences.

Thing is, I don't want to go back to the old EQ or even old MUD days of yore when there were far too many consequences and too many social ties/binds/alliances to complicate matters either. Who has the time for all that drama now?

Smallness of the server (100-300 odd people) and a shared global chat may also be important in building such a community. In an MMO though? It just seems like a recipe for having your eyes deep-fried by selfish people who decide to use it as their personal conversation vehicle. Not to mention, gold spam.

I can't help but think of ATITD where it is so MUD-like, you can recognize all the names of the people who log on, you hear them talking and chatting, when you see them, you say hi and well, there's downtime and there's a certain amount of social incentive to make that connection because both of you are cognizant of the fact that later down the line, each of you may need each other for something, and you may be neighbors or people living in the same region.

This may be part of the problem. We are nomads in our MMOs. We have no home. (If we did, it is instanced and the 120824th copy of some town or another.) We are disconnected from and not part of the world, which is just backdrop and scenery. We have no opportunity to bump into the same people and become familiar with them. Different people have differential leveling speeds and separate themselves rapidly anyhow. People jump geographic regions and map levels in a flash, and are no longer limited to a certain locality. How can you build trust and positive good feeling when every man is an island solo questing for himself?

(Admittedly, the ATITD global Egypt-wide chat is moderated. So were the MUD chat channels. And Fallen Earth, which has a certain notable reputation for a helpful community and surprisingly un-horrible chat channels, is also moderated by GMs.)

Rift offers little baby steps towards very teensy wordless interactions. You may party up temporarily on big global rifts and see the same names for a while. You may duo or just share a quest reward for a couple seconds, or a friendly healer/buffer may decide to help you out against a mob that is handing you your ass, a simple /wave or thanks just to acknowledge the other is there. Really baby steps. This wasn't new once. It was expected. It was etiquette. It was player mindset and attitude. Somehow lost after WoW.

We aren't there yet on Rift. It still has a lot of the WoW disconnectedness. Dungeons are still a random luck of the draw problem if you aren't in a guild group. Maybe your PUG has someone who knows what they're doing. Maybe not. Maybe the opposite... And sometimes they refuse to talk. And there's no social consequences beyond lost time for everyone and really bad grumpy feelings all around. But no positive learning experiences either.

Ironically, I have to say I felt there was more communication and interaction in Aion. Maybe because of the difficulty, which is so critical that you really have to rely on each other, or else. Often, the OR ELSE. But despite it leading to so-called deeper bonds of feeling or mutual enforced reliance, it's still a little too hardcore to tolerate for long. Truth is, I don't really want to feel forced to talk, even if I will find it more memorable later on. I want to WANT to talk.

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Course the other part of the tanking issue is not just the communication to the team aspect. There's coordination to the team aspect, there's learning how to tank (or heal) as a specialized skill, and there's learning the dungeon specifically.

I've always wanted to learn how to mark properly. I've also always been so scared of marking because it doesn't seem like a common habit here in Rift (Aion's culture was different, maybe because you'd wipe if you didn't mark) and one is always so fearful of PUG (im)patience and thinking you're too slow or hesitant a tank. What is the proper pace to set as a tank anyhow?

With a group of 3-4 friends, it would be different. You'd expect them to be able to wait patiently as you learned. But somehow, with PUGs, with strangers, it's different. Is there any way to make them less of a stranger? Or do we move the tank's learning elsewhere, away from the judging eyes and accusatory whines of lazy dps who expect the world?

I'd really love practice dungeons, or NPC allies and things to figure out one's skills, builds, gear in a solo or duo type of way before building up to the big leagues and mean streets of PUG RL university. We learn how to kill stuff efficiently solo, but we don't really learn how to tank or how to heal. In Rift, at least there's rifts to do some of it, but it's really not the same. Stuff can die too fast with too many people around. The build that is most effective soloing a rift may not be the same as the one that can block/parry/accept heals well. And little tank tricks like pulling, LOS pulls, aggro, etc. are never really taught in an explicit tutorial-y manner. Why not?

Learning the dungeons themselves is something else altogether. The common accepted route is to go stare at a video or at a guide someone else wrote, in order to know what to expect. Everyone is scared of discovering it the hard way unless one is in a tight group of very patient friends seeking 'firsts.' Otherwise, it's just more efficient for someone to tell you what to expect/do.

I don't know what can be done to solve this. Right now, it's pretty much me (or say, a tank) being self-motivated enough to hang around after a successful group has completed and run the length of the dungeon to slowly know the layout. Rift allows me to view the dungeon first as a dps or heal role, relying on others who have done it before to run us through as a tank.

In theory, at least I remember in the first and third dungeon that the 'M' key works and a dungeon map exists in Rift (and also in LOTRO and DDO) so that an uncertain tank can actually refer to it. And there are a few quests with labeled waypoints. But really, in practice, learning while one is in the spotlight under the bright glare of strangers paying attention to your every move with close scrutiny is not something that many people are thick-skinned enough to do.