so, I'm bored, it's a slow night at work, and several different posts I've read since the beta forums, have had me thinking about a larger, overall question - namely, the title - The endless battle between the immortal desire to have a rich and exciting Single-Player experience in a video game, and the time-honored desire to have a varied and unpredictable, living world experience by interacting with real (we assume) human beings in an MMO.

and I have a feeling these two issue will *always* be at war, not because they're mutually exclusive, but because while there is a happy crossover between them at some levels, at the extremes of one end or another, they DO conflict, and conflict with extreme prejudice.

Here are some of the key features desired by people that want a rich, single player experience...
1 - great story writing that feels immersive
2 - character design that allows you to play PRECISELY the type of character you enjoy
3 - ample resources for your logistical pursuits (crafting and gear and experience and quest-specific monsters and such)
4 - no *** - I.E. not having to deal with people you don't like
5 - the ability to play at your own pace, whatever that pace may be at any given moment...

and so on - those are just a few of the key features...now, what do people want from the Multi-player side of an MMO?
1 - "real", more imaginative (you hope), less predictable responses from other characters (players) in the world from an RP perspective
2 - more challenging combat against "real" humans (mostly a pvp thing, but *could* easily be extended into more reactive monster mobs if you had them played by other players...and so on)
3 - a dynamic and "realistically" manipulatable living economy
4 - cooperative battles against foes you can't reasonably defeat on your own (builds a sense of teamwork and cameraderie, as well as being used to feed some people's egos)

and so on. Again, those are only a *few* of the features that people want/expect from interacting with other human beings.

You'll notice I used the word "real" and "realistic" fairly frequently with the human-side of MMO's - some people find AI-programmed bot monsters and pre-scripted dramatic NPC's to be stale and predictable, and they often find the "human" element to be more "realistic", although I would argue that "realism" isn't necessarily an all-encompassing good point, especially in a world with magic and demons and large crabs that seem to follow you around instinctively.


Now, on these forums particularly, but with MMO forums in general, you get at least 3 very distinctive camps on this issue (there might be more, but I think the following three are the most obvious ones)

The "I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO SUFFER OTHER PEOPLE IN A GAME I PAYED FOR IF I DON'T WANT TO" crowd

The "I WANT TO BE ABLE TO PLAY WITH PEOPLE RIGHT UP UNTIL I DON'T, AND THEN I WANT A GOOD SOLO GAME TOO"

and The "YOU SHOULDN'T PLAY AN MMO IF YOU DON'T WANT TO PLAY WITH REAL PEOPLE" crowd

Honestly, MOST players are less...obnoxious, about their stance, but the above are the ones you HEAR about most in the forums, and the above kinda sums up the general feeling, even if it isn't necessarily the most polite expression of it.

And the kooky thing is, they're all kinda right. I play elder scrolls Online, and I enjoy it, but sometimes other people really DO get in the way of me enjoying the game. On other occasions, other people MAKE the game so much better than it would be if I played it alone all the time.

And I'm not the only one. In fact, the programmers and developers at Zenimax Online agree to a certain extent, because they've *created* the mechanics of ESO in such a way that there is a strong SOLO experience as well as strong Multi-player content.

The problem I've been having lately with ESO, myself, is that I think the mechanics they created to encourage SOLO play turn out to be mostly at war with the multi-player experience. This does not include cyrodiill, because I haven't played the pvp side yet...

The in game features for playing solo, namely, the phased quests, are really nice for the solo experience. In this way, you can play the game, and your actions in the world can create changes in the world. This is awesome, and several games are using it.

The problem is, the way phasing is currently implemented, creates huge problems with coordinating with other people if that's your desire. If you and your pals can coordinate all your questing at the same time, and all your decisions along the same lines, and pursue all your quests in the same order then, assuming the phasing system doesn't wonk out on you, should work just fine. But precisely because it's an MMO, and people play at different times, and precisely because the game has created lots of moral and dramatic choices which even close friends may choose to answer differently, this feature often turns out to be more of a barrier to group play, even if it is a rather satisfying single player feature.

Then, it turns out, that the MMO features of the game, like non-phased dungeons and open world resource nodes, means that any single player, or tight-knit friend group, now has to compete with and otherwise "share" their experiences, loots, resources and even combats with other people - sometimes even obnoxious people.

So, rather than the solo experience cooperating with the multi-player experience, they've designed a system that effectively seems to set them at each other's throats.

same thing could be said to be happening with guild-only auction houses, forcing solo players to join up with people to participate in the crafting economy, while simultaneously preventing the WHOLE community from working with each other without barriers, fragmenting the group-minded players.

And so on, and so forth

it's not an answer to the situation, just more of a question - I think that right now, Multi-player tools in ESO, and solo mechanics in ESO, are not cooperatively built. It goes on and on, with class balances having to be balanced for a solo experience vs a group experience, with monster skills being balanced or unbalanced to account for random crews of many people making what was supposed to be a big battle a cakewalk, and so on...

I'd be interested to see if the community, rather than the mp folk berating the solo folk, and the solo folk berating the mp folk, could come up with a better system for balancing the existing game mechanics to make the solo experience make the mp experience better, and vice versa - dunno how we'd do that, but I'm certainly interested to watch the process

I'm almost as equally curious to get a count on how many people made it all the way through this post - I'll be impressed if it even gets close to 50%.