Why "multiplayer" tends to ruin my fun

Er, creating a steam account /is/ free. No subscription involved, and you can add as many friends as you like.

I don't know Samuel from Adam, but I can't argue too much with the rant in his OP. The problem is less about him, more about PUGs or what-have-you. I don't think we need to psycho-analyze Sam in this case. Have you done any PUGs lately? Your average PUG is filled with people who think City of Heroes is an arcade game, not an RPG made up of stories that you're supposed to play through cooperatively. I didn't subscribe to Street Fighter online.

I've been lucky here, I've discovered great joy in running regular missions with people who like to stop and read all the clues and mission texts along with me, people whose playing styles aren't a complete (and nasty) surprise like in PUGs; People who like small teams like I do, who take the time to play strategically on missions, and so on. I was lucky enough to meet some of these people on the day I joined. So to be fair, I almost wonder if Samuel hasn't made the right sorts of friends in-game yet.

In the MMORPG I played previous to CoH, I went for three years and never made any real friends. Most of the people I met there were so obsessed with XP and mashing buttons, they had barely any clue as to what the game they were playing was even about. Sound familiar?

Nope. I thought it was, but it wasn't. In fact, Steam recently informed me of this in plain text. If your Steam account does not have any PAID titles attached to it, you are not allowed to send friend invitations and you cannot accept friend invitations sent to you. A have a friend of mine whom I recruited to play a free game, and he literally had that alone on his account. He was never able to add me as a friend because Steam kept insisting that "certain features" are disabled on accounts until they make their first purchase. He recently asked me to buy a game and gift it to him, and I had a couple of extra copies of other games I'd gotten out of bundles, so his account is "paid" now, and he can have friends. He couldn't before, and as a result he never used his Steam account.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

It's interesting how you give two almost opposite descriptions within the same post I don't mean to nit-pick, though, I just wanted to have the "old man" and the "snob" argument in the same post so I can address them at the same time.

I'm currently 26 years old, but I've been described as a "grumpy old man" pretty much since I was 19 when I first started posting here on the CoH forums (and holy crap has this game been around long). I really don't take offence at that prospect and I don't think I ever have. See, the "grumpy old men" you run across in your life, they aren't grumpy because they're old, they've been grumpy their entire lives, they're just more likely to tell you about it in their old age when they start caring about putting up with "the youngins" any more than when they're youngins themselves.

If I'm grumpy, it's because that's just how I am. It doesn't mean I'm unhappy, angry or evil. It just means I have a lot to say about the things I hate and relatively little about the things I like. You know what they say: Those who can do. Those who can't criticise. If I can play how I want, I play how I want and see little reason to come to the forums and state that I'm having fun and playing like I want to be playing. Honestly, my dubious reputation aside, who really cares? How many threads have you seen that state, essentially "I'm having fun with the game!" then get a couple of "So am I!" responses before the whole thread drops off the first page with seven replies total? But when I CAN'T play the game how I want to, I come here and talk about it, both in the hopes of at least getting my point across to the people in charge (whether they heed or ignore it is largely irrelevant), and so I can talk about it so it can stop pissing me off. Check out how many threads that start with "I hate <this> part of the game!" go on to stretch for five to fifteen pages and linger on the first page for weeks?

I hate things. It's what defines me as a person. For me, "not bad" is often the height of compliment, because it means I don't hate the thing in question, and that's quite an accomplishment. If that makes me a snob, then all I can really do is shrug my shoulders and accept it. The Cinema Snob does, so why can't I? I try not to ruin other people's fun when I can help it, of course. It seems obvious, but it's a hard lesson to learn that trying to "fix" how other people play and enjoy themselves is not a good plan, even if you feel they're doing it wrong.

You are incorrect on one particular point, however - I've never, ever, EVER complained about being alone in-game. I have, on occasion, complained about finding teams for tasks that explicitly require teams to complete, like the various simu-click missions or non-Ouro TFs, but NEEDING a team and WANTING a team are not the same thing. If given the choice, I'd sooner simply not do the tasks that require a team, or otherwise do them very rarely. As a rough example, ever since the ITF came out, I've run it no more than about 15-20 times. And it's been how long since then? I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that if you asked around, you'd be find a fair few people who've run the ITF more than that in a single week.

But that's kind of the point, though, and it's a point you seem to either deny or honestly just not understand (no harm, no foul, by the way) - I don't mind this. Don't like doing TFs? OK, so I won't. Don't like running Trials? Well... I don't, but I kind of don't really have an option if I want Incarnate progress. So I'm put in a situation where either I do something I honestly don't like and I quite honestly never will, or I DON'T and miss out. So far I've been missing out, and I haven't been all THAT heartbroken over it. I didn't play my 50s before and I'm not playing them now. Nothing lost, nothing gained. But in almost everything in the game, I always have the option to not team with other people if I don't feel like it right now, today, this week, etc.

And that's a good thing. Options are a good thing. To try and get people to understand that some of us simply like to be left alone for a certain portion of the day in the same way that people need to sleep during a certain portion of the day isn't necessary. So long as I have the option to keep to myself AND STILL PLAY THE GAME, then I don't really need anyone's permission or approval to do so. Some people don't like it, questioning my intelligence for playing an MMO and not wanting to team while others just don't get it, and that's OK. To each their own. So long as the game has a niche for me where I can hide away when the team game pisses me off or tires me out, that's more than enough for me.

Interestingly, learning to admit one's shortcomings and find ways to adapt to them is something I've found leads to a very stable psyche in the long run. Far more so, in my experience, than constantly trying to challenge yourself and change your preferences and stress yourself out. In fact, I've been close to quitting City of Heroes on a few occasions for the simple fact that I was playing the game "wrong," or at least in a way that's inappropriate to my personality. At one point I believed that this is an MMO and I havsta team! Only when that stressed me out, I started thinking the game was just bad, and it wasn't. I just needed to be by myself. At another point, I found myself swapping characters every day and never really developing any attachment to them. I though my characters just sucked or that the game was just boring, but the truth is I need a few days to "settle" into a character before I can truly start having fun.

I have a whole laundry list of such examples, but the moral of the story is always the same - figure out what the root of the problem is, figure out what you can change about your own approach, what you can add or subtract, and then just do it. The key here is accepting that we all have our faults, we all have our likes and all have our dislikes and, rather than constantly fighting them to no avail, simply learn to deal with them. So I don't like teaming with other people for long times. OK, then I won't team with people for long times. "Exposing" myself to what I don't like doesn't make me like it more, it just makes me hate it more, and that's no fun and not very healthy, either.

I'm not unhappy. Knowing what pisses me off is a good thing. That way I can avoid and anticipate it much better. As Maros would say, we learn nothing, but through revelation.

Eh... Not exactly. I mean, I've gone through the "Mom! Look! Look! You're not looking! Come on, look!" stage in my life. Who hasn't? But that's really not the point these days. Anyone who enjoys creating sooner or later develops the expectation that most people won't care. Well, you do if you're not very famous, anyway. In my spare time, I write stories, rather long ones, in fact. Some I post here, some for my friends, some I don't post at all, and being that they're tl;dr, I don't really expect much of any response or feedback. I mean, most of the posts in the thread for my Tale of Two Hearts are still mine And, to be fair, would YOU have the patience to go through what ended up 84 Word pages long spread something like I think 20 chapters? I would, but I made it, so that's a given.

What I'm trying to say is that I don't really ask for people's approval, praise or attention. I enjoy that when it's given, obviously, but I don't demand or expect it. We each care about different things, and it just so happens my tastes are weird, confusing and unpopular. It is what it is I don't even make it a point to ask that the game acknowledge my work, like I don't expect Xanta to face prejudice because she's a woman who's taller and more ripped than most men, with hands big enough to fit your entire head in a single fist. The story is made for a generic "hero" or "villain" or "grey" build, plot depending. The story can't explicitly include every possible bit of nonsense we can come up with, but I just want it to not be so specific that it EXCLUDES a large chunk of fairly obvious character concepts.

When it comes to other people, I can't expect them to care. Not only do we all like different things, but we can't honestly team with ten thousand other heroes over the span of a few years and approach them all with verve and enthusiasm, of course not. To expect otherwise would be unrealistic. But as before, I kind of wish the team game wasn't such a clusterhug a lot of the time, where just tossing more bodies on the fire is more important than what these characters are called, what their powers are and what they wanted to be when they grew up. Gameplay which reduces my unique snowflakes into a mere AT and powerset combo just irks me. I can do it for a while - every character has been in a giant monolithic melee at one point or another. I don't "hate" people for it. I just need my time off when it's done, and I kind of want to be able to actually DO something in that time off. Relaxing and playing the game are not mutually exclusive.

I'm not sure if anyone is still around from back when I first said it, but "All I want out of this game is more 5th Column to fight." I stand by this statement even to this day. I got into City of Heroes for the game it was back in 2004. I never asked for it to be more complicated, I never asked for it to be "wider" and even now I'm perfectly happy with arcs like Crimson's World Wide Red, Angus McQueen's Division: Line, the "Corporate Culture" arc that's given by about three different contacts, the "Path of the Dark" arc. I really don't need complex mechanics, I don't need achievements or badges or loot or collectables or anything of the sort. I'm perfectly fine to be sent into a mission, told to look for one specific person to defeat and given free reign to stomp the teeth out of the mouth of anything I come across along the way that I can target.

Yes, this makes me the odd man out - big surprise there - in that in all of this diatribe I laid out just now, I never mentioned "efficiency," "power" or "rewards." What people want to do these days, if we discount farming the Architect, seems to be to grind Alignment Merits. And, to be honest... These aren't grindable missions. They have story, they have complex mechanics, they take a certain amount of attention and they're time-gated to five per day. And there are a grand total of, like, 10 of them per level range per side. Hardly something I want to run through 50 times for all of four Merits. Before that it was endless paper missions, and before that it was Barakuda farms or egg farms, and before that it was Dreck and Wolf farms, and before that it was endless street sweeping for Hydra in Perez Park, and before that was CoH Beta which I wasn't in.

My point is that I just want to play the game, not necessarily earn the rewards it offers. I see rewards as just a natural step of the process, exactly as important as the gameplay leading up to them. To me, trying to shorten gameplay so you can get rewards just makes me feel like I'm cheating myself out of a game. Not many see it that way, so whenever we team, I always feel like I'm being rushed while simultaneously not at all engaged in the game while other people feel like I'm slowing them down and making them bored. It kind of works, but only for a while, before I simply have to unleash the hounds to charge off in pursuit of prizes while I sit down on a park bench and contemplate my navel.

For starters, I like doing this. This right here - composing these tl;dr posts and discussing interesting topics with people who actually care to construct a meaningful, substantial argument. These are what I come to the forums for, believe it or not. And even if it seems I'm snarking at you, or if you feel you're offending me, I still enjoy this. Gaming aside, there are few things I enjoy more than those which make me think, and think hard. Even if they make me think about stupid things, such as what texture would best represent the slime on a girl made out of slime or what I will miss from a zone that's being taken away. It's just simply interesting stuff.

What else do I enjoy? How about this? I enjoy the artistic side of the game, I enjoy the freedom it gives us to create any weird esoteric character and still have that make sense and I enjoy just creating things then getting to watch them come to life on the screen in front of me, evolving organically and taking on an identity of their own. It's not just the act of MAKING these characters that's fun, actually playing them is, as well. The game - to me - is the most fun when there's nothing standing between me and seeing my action figure in action, kicking *** and taking names. If that's wrapped up in a cool, moving story that manages to balance delivering its narrative with letting me flip out and kill stuff, then all the better, but story-writers of recent times seem to have made it a point to hard-pause the action with too much scripted stuff. That's not important now, though.

What else do I enjoy? Interacting with friends, even if that's just over Global chat across servers. I've discussed topics as esoteric as Middle-Eastern politics, the appeal of "furry" artwork, the border between machine intelligence and sentient life, the recension I was asked to write for a student preparing a diploma graduation and the quality of her workmanship, that local Soviet monument in our capital where the Russian soldiers were painted like DC heroes and all manner of things like this. I don't have to team with people in order to interact with people. Even if we're not joined by gameplay right now in this very instance, my friends and I are joined by shared interests and a share fondness for just discussing things of all natures.

And, occasionally, I like to go out and run TFs and team with large groups of people. Just as a change of pace. A collection of global channels means I can usually just pick up whatever is being advertised and join that, and my experiences of the last couple of months have been overwhelmingly positive. when I don't feel like I HAVE to run TFs, but instead opt to run them by choice, the experience is much more pleasant, and they're rare enough to where I forget anything that ticked me off and just remember the fun parts. That, in my eyes, is how it should be.

You're not crazy, just... A bit presumptuous. This is a question you can ask me, since I started the thread with no real reason to do so. Other people who respond, however, do so because I both posed some implied questions and because a discussion is already going, so everyone is naturally more inclined to pitch in than to start it.

On the other side of the question, I don't think anyone is asking for the post to be left alone. It's merely a statement of fact and preference. I think it was the Vulpish One who said that extroverts are see introverts as simply extroverts that need to be brought out of their shells. In addition to being one of my favourite quotes in general, it also highlights a profound misunderstanding between people who LOOOVE to team and those who don't really like to - the belief that if you don't team, you don't like other people, you don't actively look to make friends with everyone you meet, then there's something wrong with you and you need help. Not only is this untrue, it's actually very damaging, to say nothing of unpleasant for the person in question.

I don't think the idea is for the post to be left alone, so much as for the post to be taken at face value as an honest admission and gesture of mutual understanding. Some people need their alone time. This is not a challenge for those who don't, it is not a criticism of them, it is not some kind of statement of superiority. It is merely an admission of personal position, specifically intended to inform. I see nothing more in the post you quoted.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I have and I haven't. Let me explain

I've made a lot of friends in-game at one time or another, but I've almost always had more patience than they did for City of Heroes, so my friends list these days is almost always dark. Most everyone simply left. I do have a few friends still with the game even now, and occasionally they'll run events that I try to join when I can, but this sort of need for organisation is a bit off-putting. Once upon a time, I was teaming with a friend of mine when I got a random idea. "Hey, you wanna do Mender Lazarus' TF?" "Sure." he said. And so we did. No preparation, no coordination, not setting up schedules with exact times days in advance and so on.

For most of the game, that's fine. Even when I don't feel like playing by myself, one or two other people are enough, and I do have one or two other friends often online But when you start doing something like Manticore's TF that takes seven people... Well, I don't have THAT many friends readily available. If we'll be doing that, it needs to be scheduled for a time and day when everyone can be available, it has to be organised and, by that point, I don't want to do it any more. It's not that good of a TF anyway. When you go into something like an iTrial that takes, what? 12-24 people? Yeah, I don't think I have this many friends PERIOD.

Large team events I either have to run with strangers and chance it, or I have to schedule long ahead of time, and neither option appeals to me. Solo and small-team content, on the other hand, is always available for no cost or effort. That's where the friends I have really help.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

There's no such thing as an average PUG.

That's really the problem.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Actually, that's not how it works. The more equal the kills are, the more of a difference each one makes. Being able to consistently kill three rather than two enemies is going to win you the game far more consistently than in more lopsided scenarios.

As it should be. I play games to unwind and let my imagination run wild. If I wanted to excel and compete, there are always actual sports to try. Sports are real even within the confines of their rules. Games aren't, and never should be. Games are there to have fun in, not work at. Challenge needs to exist only insomuch as it keeps the game from being boring, but "challenge" that pisses me off over and over again has no place in my games.

I recall the following anecdote from that tank game I mentioned:

We were playing a map that's basically two siege lines with no man's land in-between that's essentially a killing field. You crest that hill, you die to the barrels of ten people waiting for you and you alone. So my team-mates chose to wait for the enemies to come. And they never came. This lasted for 5 minutes. then 10 minutes. Then 15 minutes. In the meantime, I'm watching TV, listening to music, browsing forums, clipping my finger-nails and still the game keeps showing me a picture of nothing happening. In that time, I could have played three whole matches and actually had fun, but no! We have to be cautious. Eventually, I crested the hill on purpose, got my tank shot to ****, again on purpose, and left that boring snooze fest of a match. I went on to play I think three more games and STILL my tank was unavailable, stuck in that battle still ongoing. I don't know what the timer on that is, but this must have gone on for half an hour, and I don't have that much time or patience to sit on my hands.

This, as a point of fact, is part of the reason why the multi-player aspect tends to ruin my fun. Obviously, I don't want to rush through content head-long like a spastic monkey. But this doesn't mean I want to spend 45 minutes discussing strategy and pulling every single minion around a corner one by one because we can't afford to let any team-member lose a single point off his health bar. I hate overcomplicated, overcautious strategies for doing simple things. When there's an easier option - like punching faces - I will always pick that easier option. If the team insists on picking the approach which has me sitting on my hands for 20 minutes, I pick an easier team. If the option doesn't exist, I pick a different game. It's really that simple.

Games shouldn't hurt and be boring. Games which treat me with "tough love" and try to hurt me into being a better player don't really get me to shape up. They just get me to resent them even more. The point of playing a game isn't to become good at it, it's to have fun. Sure, becoming good at a game usually means having more fun, but it just as often means having LESS fun when you realise that the best strategy is to have seven people fall asleep for ten minutes with the eighth person finds the boss and teleports us all to him. When being good at a game interferes with enjoying a game, the enjoyment trumps the skill every time. Because I'd rather die 100 times and have fun succeeding than never dying at all before I win and then coming to the forums to complain about how boring the task was.

There's something I firmly believe: City of Heroes is the most fun when things go wrong. When everything's going like clockwork, the game puts me to sleep.

I disagree. It created a hostile community from what I've seen, because no-one ever trusted you, everyone always freaked out when you got them killed, everyone was always calling everyone else a "noob" and no-one wanted to take any risks. In other words, what should have been an exciting, action-packed adventure was turned into a PowerPoint presentation. "Now we do step one. Now we do step two. Step three is kind of tricky, so we'll split it into two parts." This is HORRIBLE gameplay, at least to me, because it turns a game into a job. Being cautious and methodical, that I can understand. But when my gameplay involves me taking my hands off the keyboard for over a quarter of its running time, something is horribly wrong.

And again - back in the day, I've had more than a few people insult me because I got them killed by accident. These days, no-one cares. Someone dies, you say "Sorry about that!" and they laugh it off. No-one's ever angry, no-one's ever stressed. We're all here to have fun. If we succeed, great. If we die, well, **** happens, to quote Predator II. I haven't been yelled at for not performing to some arbitrary minimum standard in years, and I haven't seen people complain that their Kinetics Defenders get kicked from teams because they didn't take Speed Boost or their Blasters getting mocked for not producing some made-up minimum level of DPS. The game isn't stressful, which is exactly how it should be.

I disagree. That's EXACTLY how an MMO should be. It should present a persistent, communal world for people to meet in and interact if they so chose, but a scaling experience for anyone to tackle how he wanted to. Dr. Zeus once made the hilarious comment that teaming is like marriage - you dread it and refuse to commit to it, but once you do, you realise how great it is. Presuming that we still club our significant others over the head and drag them over to the cave, that's still not true, given how many divorces we see these days (including my own parents, incidentally, though that's besides the point). Forcing people into interacting with each other when they don't want to is a BAD thing. Sometimes it forges friendships, yes. Most of the time it causes people to treat each other like luggage.

Say I want the Romulus Sword, but I don't like teaming with people. I WILL team with people, because the ITF tends to be quick, easy and I can fall asleep at it without anyone noticing. But if I do it at a time when I don't feel like teaming, not only will I not have fun, but I may very well ruin the fun of everyone else on the team, too. OK, I probably wouldn't since I know when to shut up, but the point is that forcing people together - effectively locking them in a room with each other - is not the right way to foster pleasant relations.

Games like WoW and many of the newer MMO models are more popular for a reason, and it's not because everyone has suddenly forgotten what it was like "back in the day." In fact, for the longest time people cited their reason for subscribing to City of Heroes as being because it explicitly did NOT have raiding and loot and gear grind and PvP and all the other things that have been added to the game since those comments were made. More broadly, people don't want their games to piss them off. Sure, some like the rough treatment, but they aren't many. In order for MMOs to become mainstream, they needed to stop abusing their players, which is precisely what's happening. Once you open the game up to more people, more people come to play it. That's not a bad thing.

Let me put it this way - if MMOs had remained like how you describe them, I would never have joined City of Heroes. Not in a million years. In fact, my biggest fear when I first bought the game was that this is what it would be like. Luckily, through a collision of chance, City of Heroes was the most un-MMO MMO on the market for a good long while after it came out, and remains one of the least punitive even today. I've considered giving Lineage II another try, for example, but my brain hurts every time I remember my experience in that particular soul trap. Ugh!

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I like City of Heroes DESPITE the fact that it's an MMO, not BECAUSE of it. And before you ask: Because a single-player version of the game doesn't exist. But I'm hoping whatever the game is when it finally shuts down (nothing lasts forever), that the game will be resold as a standalone server-client package that I can keep on playing even when the official servers have gone down. What I'm saying is I'd play this game even on a server all by myself when all the players have left, because I like the game first and foremost. Everything which stands in my way of enjoying the game... Well, gets in the way.

Teaming with people is great when I feel like it. Teaming with people when there aren't people immediately available or the ones available disagree with my choice of hairstyle, however, is a problem. When I log into the game, I want to start playing. I don't want to spend half an hour looking for a team or building one before I can play. I don't want to depend on other people's when I can't rely on other people's help to always be available. It's like a server queue. When I log into the game, I want to play, not watch a zombie dance for an hour before I'm allowed into the actual game.

Older, "classic" MMOs, at least as I have seen them, are games designed to hurt, scare and insult their player base until players are too afraid to play through content, and so said content lasts longer. They're purpose-designed time sinks that aim to waste your time and steal your progress to keep you playing more because you have to in order to accomplish anything, rather than because you want to as the game is too much fun to put down. I didn't play "classic" MMOs and I wouldn't want to play them even if we could turn back the clock and make it so. I like City of Heroes specifically because it gives me an option to play by myself when I feel like it, and only ever ALLOWS me to team when I choose to, rather than forcing me to do it. Jack went out of his way to force us to team, and found to his dismay that players simply didn't want to. So why not, instead, "give the players what they want?"

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I started this thread explaining why "multiplayer" tends to ruin my fun. That's not a problem. That is a solution. If multiplayer ruins my fun, I simply won't do it, because the game gives me that option.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.