Filled with sprawling worlds ripe for discovery, teeming with thousands of new people to meet, and capable of sucking up entire months' worth of playtime, massively multiplayer online role-playing games offer one of the modern world's most extreme forms of escapism. Join GameSpy columnist Leif Johnson as he turns a critical eye on the biggest and best of today's MMORPGs and quests for the virtual worlds most worthy of your time.
Whenever I hear someone say that Star Wars: The Old Republic is just a single-player game with some other dudes running around, I want to laugh. While I was leveling my Jedi Guardian, I grouped more as a part of the leveling process than I have in any other MMORPG in recent years. Whether for Flashpoints, finishing the two- or four-man heroic quests scattered throughout each planet, or just by asking someone if they wanted to group up so we wouldn't be competing for the same quest enemies. Some of these people remain on my friends list to this day, and a few even made their way into my guild. And partially thanks to TOR's lack of a cross-server group finder tool, many of us at level 50 now know each other -- and we know who to avoid. In a nutshell, it's my favorite community out of all the MMORPGs I play on a regular basis.
The Galactic Market is a fine place to look for a group -- if you just want to see one.
Even so, it's clear that the player-versus-environment grouping scene at level 50 is different than what you'll find while leveling -- so much so that it threatens to undermine the good aspects of the community that I've come to love. Often, quite frankly, I'm not able to find a group. Since the only way to find a flashpoint group outside of your guild is to advertise your in the general chat channel at your fleet (aside from a rarely used tool that simply marks you as "Looking For Group" to those on your planet), I spend much of my time running laps around Carrick Station or rummaging through the auction house. Occasionally I'll try to start a group of my own, but we usually fail to find anyone who can heal. There's always been some concern that TOR needs a group-finder tool to remedy this issue, but now that it's starting on its first steps toward maturity, those cries have risen to such a pitch that even Obi-Wan Kenobi might be able to sense a disturbance in the Force.
Something's Gotta Give
"There is huge social pressure to not be a jerk that goes away."
BioWare has acknowledged that something needs to change. As
early as January 11, BioWare's Damion Schubert tried to assuage player
concerns in a massive thread on TOR's official forums by
promising that a better way of finding groups is on the way. "We want
this [tool] to be good not just for helping people find Flashpoints and
Operations to run, but also other multiplayer content like heroic
missions," Schubert said. "A key emphasis will be on advertising for
specific role needs (healer, tank, DPS)." Schubert went on to say that
"our design team doesn't philosophically believe that cross-server
Flashpoints are good for the game at this stage in the game's lifespan.
There is huge social pressure to not be a jerk that goes away when the
odds that you will never see these people again is high."TOR has a "Looking For Group" interface, but no one knows where to look for it.
I agree that this social pressure is part of what makes a thriving MMORPG community work so well, and I can see it even now on my own server. To date, I've yet to see a single player ditch a flashpoint without warning because they didn't like the performance of other players, and players tend to coach poorly performing players rather than just insulting them and telling them to "learn to play." Since we're currently anchored to the server without the ability to change our names or transfer off, the community remembers such petty actions, and a tantrum that someone throws on a botched Battle of Ilum run could come back to haunt them when they want in a group for another flashpoint. It's such a switch from the random jerkery I find in World of Warcraft's cross-server Dungeon Finder tool that I find myself reluctant to run my weekly heroics in the latter.
In TOR, "LFG" might as well mean "Looking For Guild."
One player refused to invite me to a Flashpoint last night just because I was a Jedi Guardian and "Jedi Guardians suck."
So far, the lack of a random group finder tool has allowed players to
make names for themselves as good players on my server, to the point
that I'll see people in chat commending someone as a good tank, a good,
healer, or a good DPS (or damage-dealer) when someone else is looking
for more players. Especially on the often-smaller Republic side, the
need to depend on others creates a small-town sense of community. But I
do miss being able to get into a group any time of the day I want, as I
can in WoW. I originally intended to start writing this article after
running a Flashpoint for fresh material and screenshots, but now an
hour's now gone by and I haven't even left the Republic Fleet. All of
the level-50 friends in my guild are offline, and the ones who are
still leveling won't be able to help with the endgame dungeons I wish
to run. Every now and then I'll see someone in the general chat channel
asking for someone to fill a spot, but it's almost always for a
low-level Flashpoint. And in a severe blow to my kumbaya perception of
the server community, one player refused to invite me to a Flashpoint
last night just because I was a Jedi Guardian and "Jedi Guardians
suck." So much for those 120 hours I spent leveling one.My Kingdom for a Group Finder
As it stands, I'm willing to sacrifice some of that server community for a random Flashpoint or group-finding tool just so I can enjoy the four-man content when I wish, with the caveat that it be restricted to the server (at least for now). It's a popular sentiment among the community itself, and it wouldn't even be hard to implement (relatively). TOR already has random group-finding tool that occasionally works in the form of the PvP warzone queue, which you can access by right clicking on a small icon on your minimap that will whisk you away to one of the three warzones within minutes. At the very least, BioWare should implement a game-wide "Looking For Group" channel that players can interact with regardless of which planet they're on. Some servers already sport player-made versions of this, but awareness of them only spreads by word of mouth thanks to the lack of server-specific forums.
What works for PvP might work for PvE.
Still, I often wonder if finding groups under the current system would even be such a problem if BioWare hadn't created such a huge amount of new servers to combat the complaints about the server queues during early access. I cringed at the time, remembering that I'd had a similar experience in Rift that left me on a dead server once the post-launch excitement over the game had faded away. Not long after I posted a column on the subject back in May (which mirrors this one in some ways,) Trion introduced free server transfers and turned both of the servers I played on into trial-only servers because their populations were so laughably low. At this point, I can't help but feel a similar course of action lies in wait for The Old Republic, regardless of the strength of its server communities. If not, they might learn that you don't need a Death Star is to destroy a few worlds -- just a lack of community.
Now if you'll excuse me, it looks like I've finally made my way into a Flashpoint group. What's that? We can't find a healer? Better luck tomorrow, perhaps.