the fear of the soloist.

[krimsonrane]

I solo because I never get a chance to do anything in a group. If I'm a rogue, everyone just runs through the trap anyway and just chugs 10 pots after. If I'm a healer, everyone can self heal. If I'm a tank, the speed 30 9th lifer is already 7 rooms ahead of you. If I'm a mage, I get to buff at the start, after that mobs die so quickly 60% of my spells are wasted.

All the barrels are intact at the end of the quest. That's an anathema to me. Optionals are skipped. extras missed, nobody talks in chat. Only a "hello" at the start of the dungeon and "ty 4 grp" at the end.

When I solo, every barrel is smashed, every optional (thats possible to do depending on build) is done. I can cast spells, I can hit stuff. I can spend more than 3 milliseconds at a chest seeing if the item I looted is ok for my build...I can spend time making room for loot if my backpack is full. I can backtrack and use shrines I missed. I can plan. I can make time to get a cuppa mid dungeon.

I group when I need to if I need quick xp but I really do not enjoy it one bit. Every now and then you luck out and get a nice n slow group. Or I can spend 2 nights a week grouping with friends (which I do).

Ditto.

[RevCo]

Enjoy!

[Arctigis]

nice post.

there is nowdays a major problem with what she said back in 1999, lets take dragonage for example.
dragonage 4 was due for release a while back a single player game and one of the better ones imo.
alas it was postponed and now is coming no longer a single player but an mmo. the industry itself is
as far as i can see is changing, they have worked out that they can earn more money by doing this as
a single player game cant sell cosmetics etc etc like a mmo can. forbes actually released an artical about
this a couple days back.

your friend sil

I'm not sure this is true. This is a gamble that some big publishers such as EA have taken over
the last few years. It's looking like a bad bet; single player games are thriving. Many of the best selling
games of 2018 were single player focused (i.e. Red Dead, GoW etc.)

[Cantor]

I'm a soloist. My wife is a raider. She made me play EverQuest... raiding... FOR EIGHT YEARS almost every day. I still haven't forgiven her for that.

She said it simply in 1999 : "You can always solo on your own time on single player games. MMOs are designed as group games. Every solo-er is someone that is playing a MMO like a SPG... which is frustrating to see when you're trying to get your 72 person raid going. Feels like doing housework alone when everyone else is watching TV."

To clarify = recruiting was housework to her. The actual raid was fun to her.

Games have changed since then to devote resources to soloists... and therefore my wife has basically quit gaming with the computer. She's back to PnP with 10+ player groups. Not as big... but she's making due... except for still missing those 72 people raids.

You can disagree with her all you want. Hell... I do. But that's the mentality.

I raided in EQ also, and the 12 man raid cap in DDO was a huge draw when I started. Even for a planned raid 1/2 your time is often spent getting everyone together instead of playing.

I really enjoyed DDO when at least a 4 man group was standard to complete content. It went through a change from solo accomplishment to solo friendly. Since then I mostly solo/duo, for all the various reasons stated (time played vs time waiting be a main one, and the fact that I might be called away by RL at any time the other). When you have a healthy game population the waiting isn't as long, but now the population has shifted so far from grouping most are not willing to wait to run something, myself included. Power creep doesn't help, Quests that used to take a group (or a dedicated soloer at a crawl) are now soloed at sprint boost speed. I once spent hours soloing a quest in amrath when the cap was 20, it's just not that game anymore. Reaper could have provided this challenge, but they put in the stupid trees. I remember planning to do a life doing every quest at level until we got the highest skulls we could... reaper introduced with trees, nevermind: it's not a challenge mode it's a new grind.

[Selvera]

I just can't stand zerging people. I just can't.
Devs put so much effort into a raid or a quest and what do people do ? They are not noticing all these efforts ! They are zerging through it like through a grey tunnel !
Sorry, but I just can't understand zerging.

I think you'll find out that a lot of the zerging people have explored the quest, thoroughly and understand it better then a number of the flower sniffers. And in understanding the quest, they know what is and isn't important to do to complete the quest, so they chose to only do what is important to complete the quest. Because they've done it 20 times before, so they're not there to experience the quest as much as they're there to experience their build in action.

As someone who solos sometimes and groups sometimes, I can say the fear of the soloist is founded on a fear of new quests being implemented in boring repetitive patterns which have been proven easy to solo. Let us consider for a minute that every quest in the game can be solo'd currently, (and most of the raids), except maybe one of the necro 3 quests.

If every quest is easy to solo, then how can people who enjoy party dynamics or figuring out difficult to solo quests be catered to? We're not asking for many quests being made anti-solo; just maybe 5% quests have a good anti solo mechanic. Or even a good class/skill-specific mechanic. Some variety. Not every quest needs to be played by everyone every life.

[systemshaker1941]

I pug and solo all the time. I can see the attractions; DDO has a better interface and better mechanics than most single-player games hands down. I like the simple element of hotbars tied to keystrokes. If grouping weren't the easiest way to advance at a fast pace, I'd probably spend more time soloing. As it is I'm doing a lot of it now as I farm for gear.

[Chai]

Players "fearing" other players ability to solo is a strawman which is often used to draw the conversation away from the real elephant in the middle of the room on this topic. A game where a single player playing a single character can defeat the content on the highest difficulty setting simply cannot be balanced for grouping. Suggestions to use lower difficulty settings for soloing and keeping the higher settings for grouping are heavily lobbied against. This is in part how elite became too easy, remained that easy for the significant time that it did, which necessitated reaper - and even that is being dominated by soloers.

[Dalris_Thane]

I raided in EQ also, and the 12 man raid cap in DDO was a huge draw when I started. Even for a planned raid 1/2 your time is often spent getting everyone together instead of playing.

Agreed. And, the problem with me, was the stress of my position in a raid. I was there in EQ since 1999, and my most hated raid was the Plane of Time flagging when that expansion dropped.

Rathe Council. Plane of Earth I believe it was. Have to kill the 4? (been a while) bosses simultaneously. I was an enchanter. I had to stun lock them and make sure they didn't wander, etc... like a normal stun lock. But I had to do it with spells that didn't wipe aggro... or they'd nearly instantly go back to 100% health. And, of course, 2 (or was it 3) resists in a row... they break the lock... and we wipe.

This from a guy that... in DDO... hates everything above casual.

As I said... 8 years... and I STILL whine about it... heh.

I love my wife... but love doesn't mean liking her all the time. They're 2 separate measures... like and love. Like height and width. It's not a spectrum, heh.

[silinteresting]

Players "fearing" other players ability to solo is a strawman which is often used to draw the conversation away from the real elephant in the middle of the room on this topic. A game where a single player playing a single character can defeat the content on the highest difficulty setting simply cannot be balanced for grouping. Suggestions to use lower difficulty settings for soloing and keeping the higher settings for grouping are heavily lobbied against. This is in part how elite became too easy, remained that easy for the significant time that it did, which necessitated reaper - and even that is being dominated by soloers.

first off nice sig,

now thats out of the way does dungeon scaling not exist anymore?

i think the word dominated is a bit strong, i dont see to many people soloing reaper 10.
now reaper 7 and below fair enough some of us are soloing them but and a big BUT is
the time difference between a solo run and group run is massive. when people are soloing
reaper 10 with the same times or very close to groups then and only then will i agree
with you.

your friend sil

[silinteresting]

We're not asking for many quests being made anti-solo; just maybe 5% quests have a good anti solo mechanic. Or even a good class/skill-specific mechanic. Some variety. Not every quest needs to be played by everyone every life.

this i can get behind providing that every other quest in the chain is able to be played
without the need to run the anti-solo quest.

your friend sil

[silinteresting]

I pug and solo all the time. I can see the attractions; DDO has a better interface and better mechanics than most single-player games hands down. I like the simple element of hotbars tied to keystrokes. If grouping weren't the easiest way to advance at a fast pace, I'd probably spend more time soloing. As it is I'm doing a lot of it now as I farm for gear.

nice post.

your friend sil

[Veriden]

I'm a soloist for the most part because I know I'm not a friendly person. I usually play after getting home from a 12 to16 hour shift of work, being that I deal with people at work. I'd rather not deal with people in games I enjoy if I can choose to run something by my self vs solo I usually opt for the latter unless I know the party in question to be quiet and efficient.

[rabidfox]

I don't run solo; my normal and gold seal hirelings are in my group... If they let them in raids, I'd go out and make 6 more NPC friends. Elieri Thistledown ran around helping me attune to raids and now she can't go inside; the poor thing is devastated by this anti-grouping attitude that keeps her locked out.

[lyrecono]

In my opinion : "always online" = DRM. So to say. I mean, forcing people to play online in an MMO is the best form of DRM one can think of. MMOs simply can't be pirated.
So, using the "always online" way is more interesting, because it creates more revenue. DRM caters to those people with a high money greed, cynically put.


Me, I'm rather a soloist, because in RL I have learned that I just can't trust everyone. Some good friends, yes, but not everyone. Being rather introvert doesn't make me a natural group player, either. For trusted friends, however, I'm almost always there willing to help out.
But some days are so bad I just want to close the doors behind me, and forget a sh**** work day.

Right now, I'm kind of relishing that "old school" look and feel of DDO because I'm kind of "burned out" from playing SWTOR for several years. I wanted a challenge again, I wanted a diversity in gear and skills again, so I returned to DDO. And I still believe they do a fine job with that.




Oh, how well I do know that !

I just can't stand zerging people. I just can't.
Devs put so much effort into a raid or a quest and what do people do ? They are not noticing all these efforts ! They are zerging through it like through a grey tunnel !
Sorry, but I just can't understand zerging.

I solo during weekdays , there are 50 people online, spread across 30 levels and of different powerlevels.
Back in the day, i could drag a few noobs through content, however in elite and reaper, the mobs, champs and reapers do too much damage and they feel like they are no longer participating. The gap became too large for them so now i have even less people to run with.
Soloing isn't always by chooice, however, with three uber completionist toons (3X every heroic, epic, iconic and racial past lives), i have seen every nook and cranny of every quest in the game. Soloing provided me the chance to explore.
After that, it becommes a money issue. By zerging, skipping optionals and breakebles most of the time, i get more quests done that benefit from an exp boost.
Due to all the game breaking changes the devs implemented over the years, a ordinary rednamed optional boss has b comme a billion hp nightmare that takes too long to kill, that pot is still running.

There are a few exeptions, in older quests like tear of the dakhaan, the optionals are often directly in your path or can be done quickly by splitting the party.
Older quests are often better done imho, in terms of optionals everyone can handle instead of endurance tests that seem to reward busrst dps on ranged builds(due to the insane damage output some of these mobs and bosses get), for the rest of us, they waste time on the exp pot, they are literal newby traps.
A good example of a bad optional is in "Search and Rescue", i rarely see that one get done. You know wich one i mean XD

Ps, this quest is still broken, years down the line, that bug report tool must be clogged again, better call that fat italian plumber to get that koopa unstuck again.

Basically
Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.
Exp per minute to get toons tr-ed.

I solo because I never get a chance to do anything in a group. If I'm a rogue, everyone just runs through the trap anyway and just chugs 10 pots after. If I'm a healer, everyone can self heal. If I'm a tank, the speed 30 9th lifer is already 7 rooms ahead of you. If I'm a mage, I get to buff at the start, after that mobs die so quickly 60% of my spells are wasted.

All the barrels are intact at the end of the quest. That's an anathema to me. Optionals are skipped. extras missed, nobody talks in chat. Only a "hello" at the start of the dungeon and "ty 4 grp" at the end.

When I solo, every barrel is smashed, every optional (thats possible to do depending on build) is done. I can cast spells, I can hit stuff. I can spend more than 3 milliseconds at a chest seeing if the item I looted is ok for my build...I can spend time making room for loot if my backpack is full. I can backtrack and use shrines I missed. I can plan. I can make time to get a cuppa mid dungeon.

I group when I need to if I need quick xp but I really do not enjoy it one bit. Every now and then you luck out and get a nice n slow group. Or I can spend 2 nights a week grouping with friends (which I do).

Lots of people skip party chat.
Low font size for high res monitors (realy bad on 4 k) and apps like discord (to avoid ddo's broken and crackling voicechat)
Broken as in hearing mics go off or hear coversations from people that left your party hours ago.
As for speed, make a complaint towards the devs, they re-re-re-re-designed the loot in such a manner that everything is incorrectly tiered. Veteran players will have picked up the quiver of allacrity from the raid or birtday hand outs or use lv 7(i think) loot that dropped a decade ago.
(The same way we get wierd fortrification numbers on new heroic loot when it easily aviable on older loot)
As for the fast gameplay, it's hard to keep 1 toon at cap with all the past lives required to participate in the endgame meta, let allone 3, after checking the quest oh once, i've seen what i wanted to see, exp pots are expencive and i don't want to waste them, nor will a lot of other people .
So blame the grind, blame the power creep, blame the game balance that requires incessive grinding to keep up, most important of all, blame the people that design the game this way, those that put up bariers, those that segregate the players.

As someone who solos sometimes and groups sometimes, I can say the fear of the soloist is founded on a fear of new quests being implemented in boring repetitive patterns which have been proven easy to solo. Let us consider for a minute that every quest in the game can be solo'd currently, (and most of the raids), except maybe one of the necro 3 quests.
.

Any quest in necro 2&3&4 can be solod witha hire
Necro 1 has a quest that requires 4 bodies on switches though helds mobs, pets, hires and turrets can fill that job too.

I call BS - Soloers (in my experience) generally don't care about these things (which is not the same as "go(ing) against" an idea) and only care if they put in anti-solo mechanisms. Quest designs that encourage grouping by making it anti-solo is lazy, un-imaginative and just plain bad form! It's a practice that SSG hasn't done much of lately - but early DDO embraced this philosophy in spades and made some of the most popular quests of that time have some anti-solo mechanism in it that was supposed to "encourage" grouping, but only discouraged solo play.

Soloers already accept that there are parts of this game that they will never be a part of (Raids and Raid gear and Raid crafting and Raid rewards) that is your grouping platform and that is where grouping decisions should end - the rest of the game is for all styles of playing, from perma-death to role players to soloers to groupers or any other style of playing, including the 3 people who want to PvP. We all spend the same time and effort in this game and spend the same color of money and we all should be a part of the decisions made for the general game to the extent that SSG lets any of us participate in.

Marginalizing and devaluing player participation by promoting exclusion based on playstyle preference just comes across as more leet snobbery

I see you groupers - I've spent the last 13 years watching you guys call for Turbin/WB/SSG to "give you a reason" to group or "provide an incentive" to run a dungeon or make it "easier to find groups" You get buddy XP bonuses, you get all the best gear, you have less grind as matts and gear drop more in grouper runs and its still not enough for some of you and sometimes some of you believe the Devs should FORCE players to group with you so you can fulfill your agenda easier... meanwhile many of us solo'ers are happily running quests just for the fun and challenge of it (it certainly isn't for the gear or XP or efficiency) and many of us really don't understand why you need us to play your game.

Now having gotten that /rant of my chest, I realize that it's a generalization and does not apply to all groupers- or soloist either for that matter - so i'm not talking about you - personally - I'm talking about the guy standing next to you... and he's kind of a spoiled rotten jerk, I imagine he didn't get much discipline in his youth and recieved many participation trophies for having special farts or something.

anyway suzy - don't fear me or the reaper - fear is the mind killer.

Funny, when reaper was introduced, it was done to promote grouping, as a solo-er, i couldn't care less, i knew the elite vets would only run with themselves anyway. Channels and discord is what they use over the lfm.
Its the people below that that temperarely saw an increase, untill players started leaving after checking out the latest gimmick (new content/reaper/ etc)
Now that those vets gor their reaper wings 3monts into ravenloft, grouping is rarely needed for reaper, dedicated reaper builds that trivialise the content and channel/discord did the rest.

[Question2005]

Let's not forget the people who solo because they detest playing with others. Including those who only play with others when they absolutely have to like in raids. Easy to tell who they are...they only talk to or play with 5 people or less in the whole server and nobody else has any idea who they are, including the rest of their guild.

Theres already a mechanic ingame to balance between solo and large groups, the problem is the difference on elite and above is minimal between solo and a full group. Go into something like slavers, dragonblood prophecy or disciples of rage solo and its still 6+ mobs per pack, a full group doesn't even cause it to scale up to 3x the mobs.

AOE spam builds like warlocks and sorcs obviously dont mind, since they kill 6 mobs at the same speed as 1. But any non AOE build gets unfairly penalized by dungeon scaling.

Dungeon scaling should scale the hp and number of mobs, not just the number of mobs, because the latter just benefits AOE builds only.

As it is people solo because they can easily do everything by themselves and additional party members are often just a hindrance since you are expected to heal, res them and guide them to the objectives. Warlock with UMD + 1 trapper level can easily AOE everything by themselves, 6 mobs vs 8 mobs via dungeon scaling makes no difference since its AOE damage. Have high UMD to spam heal scrolls early and can do traps if they want. Who needs melee when leveling 1-29 when you can kill everything before they touch you? Dont need anyone to tank when you have 50+ reaper AP and 12+ EPLs in heroics either.

And devs refuse to implement a permanent buddy bonus to encourage grouping because they are afraid it will discourage sales of xp pots or something.

[lyrecono]

Let's not forget the people who solo because they detest playing with others. Including those who only play with others when they absolutely have to like in raids. Easy to tell who they are...they only talk to or play with 5 people or less in the whole server and nobody else has any idea who they are, including the rest of their guild.

Theres already a mechanic ingame to balance between solo and large groups, the problem is the difference on elite and above is minimal between solo and a full group. Go into something like slavers, dragonblood prophecy or disciples of rage solo and its still 6+ mobs per pack, a full group doesn't even cause it to scale up to 3x the mobs.

AOE spam builds like warlocks and sorcs obviously dont mind, since they kill 6 mobs at the same speed as 1. But any non AOE build gets unfairly penalized by dungeon scaling.

Dungeon scaling should scale the hp and number of mobs, not just the number of mobs, because the latter just benefits AOE builds only.

As it is people solo because they can easily do everything by themselves and additional party members are often just a hindrance since you are expected to heal, res them and guide them to the objectives. Warlock with UMD + 1 trapper level can easily AOE everything by themselves, 6 mobs vs 8 mobs via dungeon scaling makes no difference since its AOE damage. Have high UMD to spam heal scrolls early and can do traps if they want. Who needs melee when leveling 1-29 when you can kill everything before they touch you? Dont need anyone to tank when you have 50+ reaper AP and 12+ EPLs in heroics either.

And devs refuse to implement a permanent buddy bonus to encourage grouping because they are afraid it will discourage sales of xp pots or something.

So true

[kelavas]

Time to add my two senses.

Here we go.

Whether you group or not doesnt actually change jack ****. If you threw in an AI for healing in any circumstance you'll be fine. I also dont like the attitude of other players. Players dont like my way of completing quests. I get them done though, don't I?
Yeah.. mainly the attitude.

[Chai]

first off nice sig,

now thats out of the way does dungeon scaling not exist anymore?

i think the word dominated is a bit strong, i dont see to many people soloing reaper 10.
now reaper 7 and below fair enough some of us are soloing them but and a big BUT is
the time difference between a solo run and group run is massive. when people are soloing
reaper 10 with the same times or very close to groups then and only then will i agree
with you.

your friend sil

Its only a matter of time. As the temporary reaper only in quest nerfs are mitigated by power creep, it will happen more and more. There was a time when very few were soloing elite, and people posted elite solo completions on the forum too. Just as that was eroded, so too is Reaper becoming the "standard" difficulty setting even for the solo crowd.

The issue with grouping is they need to build in the incentives to do so, if making it too hard to solo is off the table. Soloing has its own already built in incentives. Player isnt tied to what the group wants to do, anyone else's time frame, play quality, play style, etc. They can go at their own pace, start / stop when they want. This is why solo can become the best xp/min when factoring in all minutes logged into DDO. As the power creep allows those soloing R1 to knock off an R2 or R3 quest, more and more will do it, especially if it doesnt take that much longer.

This is before we even begin talking about the cheese soloing happening. Now being a Wisconsin boy and all, I loves me some cheese, but when people are able to enter a quest, kill a minimum required amount of mobs, then complete the quest objective, other group members can even be a hindrance here unless they all subscribe to the same cheese META.

[DaviMOC]

I had some expectations for group playing a couple times when expansions came. Now I understand that grouping is more like a time saver or something people will do when they arent strong enough to solo it. Solo or group, most players/builds are required to be able to be mostly self sufficient . Most mobs have at least one cone/AoE attack, mitigation on D&D and on DDO never been very balanced, or you negate all damage the whole quest or you die on 1-5 swings, requiring expressive self healing capabilities. A glass cannon melee build wont survive enough for any dedicated or not healer to be able to support it and can't benefit from a "tank" party member with so many enemy AoEs that piles up with the challenge for the tank to keep all the aggro on him. Tanking focused character are also very efficient self healers and ends up becoming solo/hybrid builds. Group focused roles as: Tanks, healers or nukers( specially those) see little to no meaning out of raids.

Nowadays every little build/character is a bit of a hybrid or a stone in someone else bag which is sad. And all this grows bigger on every ddo player mind each day. Grouping Pugs usually are a bunch of people that could solo it but want to finish it faster with a couple of other people that cant do anything because everyone is playing and building solo minded.

Increasing enemy powers, numbers, overall challenges or including annoying group puzzles wont change this. True group experience could only be achieved if we had some serious rework on how a player needs another that is beyond a power gap and is NOT about group mandatory puzzles. DDo groups needs a more relevant party synergy factor . Only solution I can see to this would be making the tank role to work, being able to hold aggro of multiple enemies or a boss even during a nuker brust phase as reducing the amount or the power of enemy AoE attacks.Also tanks needs to be truly tanks. Tanking built first life characters usually cant survive more than a 2 lives solo based build character. Tanking and surviving is much more about how much power you got than how much focus and sacrifices you made to be a tank-able character. After that, tweaks to SP consumption and healing power could be done to fit this "meta". But I know all this would be alot to change on how a very old game works and hard to be accepted, however I still have hope for it as a different difficulty mode( something reaper failed to do).

Also, for a dedicated hybrid tree I feel like its a bit pointless when you have 3 classes with at least 3 different trees to choose , so you can build the hybrid character the way you want.

[Pilgrim1]

This is before we even begin talking about the cheese soloing happening. Now being a Wisconsin boy and all, I loves me some cheese, but when people are able to enter a quest, kill a minimum required amount of mobs, then complete the quest objective, other group members can even be a hindrance here unless they all subscribe to the same cheese META.

I know your talking about reaper here... but i want to point out that this play stile is exactly what the stealth play stile seeks to achieve. Thus by this definition stealthy gameplay is cheese. Might want to rephrase this if thats not your intention.