A lot of games these days are struggling with making solo players feel like they can accomplish anything in the game. PUG is practically a dirty word these days, since groups of solo players who got together via a matchmaker rarely ever perform well. Whether you play League of Legends or World of Tanks, most of the interesting parts of the game are only really accessible to organized clans and teams. This of course costs a lot of games players, because many people are solo gamers, but aren't interested in being eternally banished to the kids table.
I think that the big problem that games run into with being accessible to solo players is that "solo player" is a really bad definition for people who don't join clans because it assumes they do not like playing with other people.
Solo players are in actually not opposed to joining groups, or to following orders, or organization, what they are generally opposed to is long term commitment to a group or leader. Someone who doesn't play a certain game every day for example isn't likely to be comfortable sporadically popping into a tight knit group of people who hang out in the game every day.
What devs can do to help make solo gamers feel more welcome and letting people participate in their game fully is to create systems that let the players who organize make use of the available solo players more effectively. Drafting a player who can do what you need from a pool of available players is a very powerful tool for putting together groups that has gotten lost in many recent games.
This is something I remember from old MMOs like Dark Ages of Camelot. Oftentimes if you wanted to build a group for a certain activity you went to the /who list and started whispering people. No matter what class you played, you would periodically get whispers of people asking if you had time to fill a group spot. This got replaced by matchmakers in recent games, which made getting into a group faster, but it also created PUGs without any leadership. If you joined a group in those old games because someone invited you, you implicitly agreed to follow that person, and that person could remove you from the group if you were not working out for them.
This kind of system has unfortunately fallen completely by the wayside instead of being refined and expanded over the years. With the amount of data and statistics that games make available to players these days there could be incredibly powerful systems for finding players to draft to your team. Players could tag themselves with what role they like playing best, or what their experience level is to give additional information. The game could convey how well the player plays through statistics, and group leaders could give people they draft a rating after the match to generate a metric of how that person interacts with others.
Rating other players wouldn't have to happen on a "good or bad" system either. For example, the leader of a group could have the power to tag the player with things like "knowledgeable" "skilled" "easy going" "follows orders", but also tags like "rude" or "defiant". You would be able to see the rating of a player in these attributes to get an idea of who they are. Group leaders might not have a problem inviting someone who is both rude and skilled, others might be more interested in inviting players who have a lot of easy going tags than inviting those who have high stats.
Overall there is a lot games could do to pull more people into high level play by adding features like this. There is no lack of interest from more casual, or solo players to join the group oriented content. They are perfectly willing to follow, learn, and perform their best for a chance to experience the deeper layers of a game. What games lack is the ability for people who organize groups and build teams to get in touch with those people and draft them when needed.
I think that the big problem that games run into with being accessible to solo players is that "solo player" is a really bad definition for people who don't join clans because it assumes they do not like playing with other people.
Solo players are in actually not opposed to joining groups, or to following orders, or organization, what they are generally opposed to is long term commitment to a group or leader. Someone who doesn't play a certain game every day for example isn't likely to be comfortable sporadically popping into a tight knit group of people who hang out in the game every day.
What devs can do to help make solo gamers feel more welcome and letting people participate in their game fully is to create systems that let the players who organize make use of the available solo players more effectively. Drafting a player who can do what you need from a pool of available players is a very powerful tool for putting together groups that has gotten lost in many recent games.
This is something I remember from old MMOs like Dark Ages of Camelot. Oftentimes if you wanted to build a group for a certain activity you went to the /who list and started whispering people. No matter what class you played, you would periodically get whispers of people asking if you had time to fill a group spot. This got replaced by matchmakers in recent games, which made getting into a group faster, but it also created PUGs without any leadership. If you joined a group in those old games because someone invited you, you implicitly agreed to follow that person, and that person could remove you from the group if you were not working out for them.
This kind of system has unfortunately fallen completely by the wayside instead of being refined and expanded over the years. With the amount of data and statistics that games make available to players these days there could be incredibly powerful systems for finding players to draft to your team. Players could tag themselves with what role they like playing best, or what their experience level is to give additional information. The game could convey how well the player plays through statistics, and group leaders could give people they draft a rating after the match to generate a metric of how that person interacts with others.
Rating other players wouldn't have to happen on a "good or bad" system either. For example, the leader of a group could have the power to tag the player with things like "knowledgeable" "skilled" "easy going" "follows orders", but also tags like "rude" or "defiant". You would be able to see the rating of a player in these attributes to get an idea of who they are. Group leaders might not have a problem inviting someone who is both rude and skilled, others might be more interested in inviting players who have a lot of easy going tags than inviting those who have high stats.
Overall there is a lot games could do to pull more people into high level play by adding features like this. There is no lack of interest from more casual, or solo players to join the group oriented content. They are perfectly willing to follow, learn, and perform their best for a chance to experience the deeper layers of a game. What games lack is the ability for people who organize groups and build teams to get in touch with those people and draft them when needed.
