It’s fine when there’s enough people wanting to run what you want to run but if I’m new and you’ve been playing for 5 years, it may be rough finding a group for what I want to run.

For me, dungeons and raids were THE thing that made me want to play WoW. It’s fun working towards a goal with others and there are so many possible encounter designs you can make that would be basically impossible if the content was meant to be done solo.

That said, two caveats:

• It’s fun to work with people you trust and like, not randos. So while I do appreciate the dungeon finder they added to WoW in WotLK as it really let me experience the dungeons long before I was able to establish myself with a guild, I do see the ways in which design catering to that system has hurt a lot of content. My favorite period of WoW was actually early Cataclysm before they nerfed the launch dungeons. They were difficult in a genuinely engaging way and at least when I played with guildmates, I was pretty happy to spend an hour or two trying and failing at a heroic dungeon. Unfortunately that isn’t true for most players queueing with randos, so they got dumbed down.

• I had a very similar experience to what you described but in FFIV. The leveling experience was pretty heavy on story, which was nice, but for the final part of the story of the base game, you needed to go do basically a big dungeon. Not quite a raid, but more people than the normal dungeons. It was pretty clear that most of the people queueing for this were just there to farm whatever and they were rushing through the place, not even killing enemies, so I just had to run after them to keep up. There were a few mid dungeon cutscenes, but you could skip these individually. While I watched the cutscene, most of the group moved along and they did so so quickly that at some point they would trigger a new cutscene before I had finished the first so that as soon as it was done it played the next one. This didn’t update my position, so even if I wanted to continue the dungeon, after a certain point I just couldn’t. It was such an awful experience it made me quit on the spot.

Absolutely love it! Scratches the same itch playing team sports did!

They were never a thing I wanted to do, but I thought it was great the content existed.

It’s an MMO. As in “Massively Multiplayer”. If you don’t want that, then go play a single player game.

IMO, the friction between players is the point. The dependency on others in the world is what makes it an MMO, otherwise it’s just a bunch of people playing a single player game next to each other.

But that’s also not the current design meta of MMOs. Dependency on other players means that it’s difficult to have a clear definition of a player’s experience with the game will be, which means it’s hard for the designers to make guarantees about player retention to investors. Imagine telling an investor who doesn’t play games that “we don’t know exactly what keeps players playing, but we do know that it’s possible for one player to ruin another player’s experience.” So over the last 15y, player interdependence has been optimized out of MMOs.

I wind up feeling like my lackadaisical approach is probably fucking up someone else’s farming loop…I feel like the person that cares enough to grind a dungeon reward as fast as possible should get right of way over my happy ass

Those players exist, but they’re not important. I do think most players want to go at a chill pace and have an experience they will remember. Running dungeons as fast as possible to farm gear without interacting with any other players creates a very dependable dopamine loop, and a very forgettable experience.

I don’t think it’s fun to be forced to interact with others in an MMO, but I do think it’s fun when your best option is to interact with other players. Ex. make it possible to do something by yourself in 5h of play, or with a group in less than 1h, and people will just prefer interact. I think cave quests in wow are a great example of this. Caves can be lethal to a player questing by themselves, very inconvenient, but if they run into another person questing the same cave, there is safety in numbers. Their survivability goes up exponentially, and they can complete the work faster. It just makes sense.

I think the cave quest has been optimized out of modern/retail wow. Every quest is easily solo-able, everyone can self-heal, everyone can take on 5+ mobs at a time, everyone can just fly in/fly out. My hope is that they’ve learned how unfun this, and WoW Forever will retain that old-style fun where players just have to talk to each other.

In FF14, it tells you if it’s someone’s first time, so for big setpieces, there’s a culture of “let the newbie take the lead and do all the cool stuff.” I’ve seen everyone like stand beside the interactables and pose, too, so they know where they have to go. I absolutely don’t mind waiting for a newbie and letting them get the full experience.

But then, they’ve also gotten better about not making it, like, 20-minute unskippable cutscenes, and weaving it better into the gameplay so the people coming back have less waiting around to do.

I think Warhammer Online had the best mix. They just had some balance problems, and of course huge technical issues. There were some great elements to the game though. The automatic pickup raids and scenario system were pretty good ideas.

I don’t like it. I play odd hours or very sporadically, sometimes with large gaps, due to life/work. I would prefer the ability to jump in, have fun solo, and bounce.

I think it is the only way to do it.

Most MMOs don’t go far enough with “forced” group stuff.

I played wow again not long ago after years and you where forced to do group dungeons but talking to each other was never encouraged. Quite the opposite.

Idk man I play gw2 now which it’s fine.

If you have a group of friends it’s good fun, and really cool. You can also get in Groups fine for easy enough content and it’s there if you want more but also in gw2 nothing is really forced there’s a ton of open world content and story and etc you can do even for endgame that don’t require you to form a party. But also that games built to make seeing other humans a good experience instead of bad, and map meta events bringing everyone together but not needing to coordinate or anything save for specific maps make it fine for those who don’t want to talk to others (or are trash at the game) but still want big cool fights and such.

There is story in the 5 man dungeons but the literal story paths for those are soloable, and the 5 man ones do I guess have story but it’s mostly irrelevant (plus it’s not very hard content)

If there’s a good in-game group finder, where you can specify like “first time doing it” or “chill group” vs “speed runner” then it’s probably fine. If you can find players, that is.

I played a lot of guild wars 2. I’d start groups on the lfg with a message like “chill [content] run - I don’t care about your build” and people would join, and we’d have a fine time.

Some other MMO, I forget which, I’d end up sitting at the lfg for a long time and never got a full group

Hated it for anything related to story completion. For all cases where it was optional in the scope of the story, no problem.

I feel like forcing the multiplayer, and especially communication enforces the “multiplayer” part of MMOs, and it’s great. I’d often just play alone till I get bored if it wasn’t for these “forced” interactions with random people.

We got couple new guildies while leveling in classic TBC earlier this year, and some of them still play with us which is nice

In a single sentiment? Fuck em.

If you didn’t want me to sit there watching the content cutscene, reading intro text and participating in your game, don’t put cutscenes and text in. Somebody worked on it and put in the effort, least I can do is try and enjoy it without peer pressure to get me to skip any optional bits.

Ultimately a good mmo should be playable and fun solo without the need to involve other people, but adds interesting twists, complexities and mechanics when there’s multiple people attempting the same content as a group.

The game design should serve the people playing it, not people serving the design of the game in order to make it playable.