Grouping Folksonomies and Dating Algorithms

runagate

The way Grouping works in an MMO will never, ever make people happy. The reason is that it is limited almost entirely to "role."

This is akin to, in real life, your toilet breaks so you spend 5 hours traveling around the city and hanging out with a plumber.


The opposite is also true. There might be a plumber out there who you'd really enjoy the company of, but the social occasions that arise in-game are few and far between. So if you ask for a plumber, you're unlikely to meet one which you'll enjoy the company of over the cacophony of plumbers who show up at your door, immediately run straight to the toilet and screw it up even worse, and the ones who just stand around shouting irrelevant, racist and misogynistic nonsense at your house and then get into a huge, irrelevant fight, completely forgetting you.

Social interactions tend to gel around places and occasions which appeal to those particular personality types or those with similar interests.


You will never meet a fellow Provisioning enthusiast in ESO, unless you happen to notice that someone else in the middle of a 12-person Trial suddenly stops and looks in every single container they come across... right before you both get kicked out of the group for ruining the Trial time...


There's no place people would naturally meet in-game. Nerds don't meet at the Imperial Library. Belligerents don't meet in the Fighter's Guild. There's no central location, nor any location that there's a more compelling reason to visit than any other. Eyevea is actually pretty nice - reachable from all Alliance zones, has nice portals, crafting locations and vendors... but it's a bit big, and no one goes there.

Riften is slightly less annoying to do all the things one needs to do every day, except for newer players since the Stablemaster is way outside for no reason.



But far more important is that in real life one would not simply mingle with "just anyone" as it is a waste of time. Not all people have much of anything to say to just anyone they come across, which is just as well or we'd never be able to make it down the street.

Can there not be some sort of metatagging of one's account with pertinent info such as "I like to read and hear every line of dialog on quests" or "I never read lorebooks and prefer to rush from goal to goal" or "I don't even like quests, I only grind" or many other metrics that anyone could easily dream up.

Folksonomies (naive User-created, non-canonical metatags) could also be useful, mostly if there were evolutionary algorithms data mining similarities between players' attributes such that the meaning behind the disparate player-chosen labels was discovered, in order to steer like towards like.


Or at least stick me into a layer with only those who would under no circumstances use the term "brah" in a non-ironic sense, and preferably not even thuly.

Malpherian

Most of the individuals reading this will not understand what your talking about.

But you make some good points non the less about grouping and proposition for better "Grouping" mechanics and systems.