Antisocial Social Multiplayer Games | Feature Creep By Tarmack

Channel:

Tarmack

Subscribers:

23,200

Published on November 17, 2013 6:28:38 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvdroQG3KlA

Game:

World of WarCraft (2004)

Duration: 3:25

1,142 views

31

In the early days of MMO titles like Ultima Online, Everquest and even vanilla World of Warcraft you needed to socialize with other people in order to do well in the games. Yes there were significant aspects of what felt like little more than single player grinds but when it came down to brass tacks you needed other people in order to get some things done. This, combined with the lack of any kind of real support from the game spawned huge numbers of small communities within the games. Guilds sprung up whether support for them existed or not, chat channels with a constant stream of questions and answers were the norm. And people weren't afraid to send messages to others asking for help.

But then that began to change. World of Warcraft instituted the Looking for Group and Looking for Raid systems which took the group building out of the players hands. Sure you could still do it if you wanted to, but there were additional rewards for those who used the LFG system. Blizzard had incentivized anti-social behavior within their social game and the game noticeably suffered as a result turning many people off of playing and even killing guilds by making it easier to just get a group with the match making system.

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