I was just reading the EQ2 forums and came across this discussion. It appears, at least from the perspective of veteran players, that the current mechanics of EQ2 actively discourages grouping when you quest.

I find this design decision in any MMO to be somewhat unfathomable. Endgame is usually all about grouped content, dungeons during leveling require grouping also, so why not *encourage* grouping for open world content? Note my use of encourage there and not ‘require’. I have often solo’ed when leveling, but not so much as to say I prefer this playstyle. Personally I usually duo with my partner or play in static groups of 3 or 4 with some friends along for fun. There are plenty of reasons for people wanting to solo content and I don’t need to repeat them here.

But why successive MMO designers have felt the need to actively punish grouping escapes me, especially when the endgame requires grouping still, there’s no such thing as a solo endgame in most games. LoTRO, EQ2 and WoW all seem to have the mentality of ‘solo to cap then we’ll consider grouping up if you’re good enough’. Rift does break this trend partially with the dynamic content giving ample opportunity to easily group up for a few minutes of frantic battling against planar foes. But, at least when I was still subbed, this had died out almost completely below the endgame area of Ember Isle because as usual everyone was bottlenecked in certain areas. Also up until the cap the usual problem of easily falling out of step level-wise can block you from grouping up for quests or dungeons.

Playing LoTRO again with my nephew and another I was reminded just how much of a pain the traditional questing model can be for group play, regardless of XP penalties or other systems. We met up in the Lowlands near the dwarven city of Thorin’s Hall and easily wasted the first 30-40 minutes of a short session trying to untangle how to unlock quest chains for the three of us so we had something to do together; LoTRO has areas that require groups still at least but the long quest chains can make ‘syncing’ activities a pain.

SWTOR is a bit of an outlier here, the game plays wonderfully in duo or a group of 3 or 4. Even when questing there are some decent challenges with the gold mobs and the heroic areas full of groups of silver mobs. But the game focuses a great deal on alting as a long term strategy for keeping you interested and I have found that you end up having to break group a lot to avoid witnessing the story cut-scenes for other classes. I really dislike spoilers so I had to do this to avoid seeing all the plot developments of my friend’s smuggler. We tried grouping and ungrouping to avoid this but since the class stories are not always in step as you move through zones we ended up having issues keeping the same level.

Playing Vanguard with a friend we at least have challenge even as early as level 5, I’d go so far as to say that solo play isn’t much of an option unless you know the quests and zones well. I really enjoy playing Vanguard duo and I’m thinking the rather unique brotherhood feature will allow us to stay in step XP-wise easily.

I do also hope still that GW2 with it’s auto-mentoring and dynamic public event system may reverse this trend. I’m fortunate enough to have friends who would accept a sub-optimal XP/hour in favour of playing together. Sadly at present we’re split across different games so I’m mostly duo’ing in different combos different games. It’s high time we had a game that didn’t make us wait through weeks or even months of gameplay before we can effectively group together!