Questing kills grouping

[Hoofhurr]

I'm still of the opinion that this is not the game's fault. Synchronisity is in the hands of the players. Don't play the game like its a single player game if you want the experience of a multi-player game. If you truly want the multi-player experience, I'd argue, you still have to conform to some of the basics of real world social interaction. Online games give us an unprecedented ability to play with people across the world at the same time. What they can't do very well is give us the ability to play with people across space "and" time.

If I log in whenever I have a second and play play play to my hearts content, advancing my character through the game world and advancing my skills as a player, I shouldn't be surprised that I've distanced myself considerably from those players/characters that haven't been playing the game as much. I could try to make the argument that this isn't a good game but I'd have to face the fact that there's something inherently appealing about the advancement model of gaming. In fact, it's the process of advancement itself that's appealing to me and if that's true then I have to accept the trade off that if I advance by myself I will create distance between me and those I would like to play with.

I could choose to play games with people where in-game advancement is minimal and that game would certainly be more accessible to us as a group but we would have to accept the fact that all sense of advancement would probably begin with an individual play session and end with that same play session. We would also have to agree to start at roughly the same time and end at roughly the same time or run the risk of 'gasp' not playing together.

The only thing a game can do to counter the 'time' component is to be sufficiently non-complex enough that you can join whenever you want and instantly know what is going on and join in the fun. FPS games are great for this but there's a reason that so many FPS games have HLstats servers and that so many FPS games form into leagues. It's because many players need advancement and greater complexity from their gaming experience. As accessible as fps games are because there isn't much in-game advancement, if I play more often than my friends I'm likely to become a more skillful player than they are. This creates a distance in and of itself that is hard to overcome and is really unavoidable. Again the game has to be sufficiently simple enough that no matter how much you play, you never really get much better at it than the next guy and that's some sort of extreme form of socialism.