The solo gamer problem and what games can do to make PUG less of a dirty word. (thought dump)

[Smooth Operator]

That being said at least in mmos, i think the guild system kinda does that already. I mean of you are going to purposely gimp youself by not joining or CREATING your own guild then it's your own fault.

Guilds are extremely gated communities, not only by gameplay design but even more by social limits they impose.
There are huge waiting times to go in and out of guilds, only allowed one guild, instantly get your forehead branded which brings all enemies/expectations of the guild on your neck, member limits require picking only specific members, meaning applications, demands for levels, money, progress, play time, skill, classes, equipment,... and ultimately because it's such a high stakes entry you are stuck with the same assholes all the same.

Guilds are a completely inflexible system, you are either devoting your life to the game/guild or you roam on your own. There are better ways to do this.

 

[J.McMillen]

...great, an entire essay to make me miss City of Heroes all that much more. They didn't have a player rating system, far as I know (and that honestly sounds ripe for abuse), but they did have the easy LFG labels, and I knew of no game that made PUGs easier to form or more rewarding, without necessarily needing Supergroups.

You're not the only one who misses it. If someone got the rights to get it running again, I would join in a heartbeat.

 

[HardkorSB]

Why wouldn't PUG be a dirty word?
I mean, just look how disgusting is this:

Spoiler

 

[NoeL]

I write the same thing to you: People won't use positive labels. LoL has it and even if you're the nicest guy, helping everyone and leading your team to victory you usually get 1 tag every 2 or 3 games. That's 1 / 27 possible tags.

People don't give a shit about others unless they're interested in playing more often with them. They will leave the dungeon and either a.) Flame everyone because something went wrong b.) be happy about the loot, leave the grp and join the next one for more loot.
Do you really think they pause for a second and evaluate the performance of the other +4 (up to 25) players in their group?

A potential solution is to incentivise reporting. Make it worth people's time to rate the performance of others, but not so much that it punishes people for not doing so.

Anyway, I think OP has a pretty good idea, and I like that it's getting further refined to the point where it could be viable through discussions like this.

 

[Aetrion]

I think the essential thing to keep in mind is that this is supposed to be a tool that allows the more organized players to draft unaffiliated players into groups. The idea is to create a tool for the people who do put in the time to organize and coordinate groups in MMOs to build groups quickly and frequently, rather than having to rely on the rigid and exclusionary structure of guilds/clans to maintain a pool of trusted people.

Positive tagging becomes a tool for your own purpose. One of the biggest things that will make you want to draft someone might simply be seeing that you yourself tagged that person as competent before.

A tagging tool like that wouldn't work to categorize people you got stuck with by a matchmaker, but I think group leaders would be much more willing to give positive tags if they hand picked the people.


I could be wrong, but I don't believe it can be discounted without ever having been tried. I think that people not throwing positive tags on people in League of Legends is largely due to the fact that when you use a matchmaker nobody agrees to be in a team together, nobody says "I want you to come" and nobody says "I want to follow you", and that makes people indifferent to each other. Games that don't have matchmakers have an entirely different, and IMO much better social climate. It's just that games like that often lack tools to facilitate short term organization outside of maybe an LFG channel.

 

[Lufia Erim]

That being said at least in mmos, i think the guild system kinda does that already. I mean of you are going to purposely gimp youself by not joining or CREATING your own guild then it's your own fault.

Guilds are extremely gated communities, not only by gameplay design but even more by social limits they impose.
There are huge waiting times to go in and out of guilds, only allowed one guild, instantly get your forehead branded which brings all enemies/expectations of the guild on your neck, member limits require picking only specific members, meaning applications, demands for levels, money, progress, play time, skill, classes, equipment,... and ultimately because it's such a high stakes entry you are stuck with the same assholes all the same.

Guilds are a completely inflexible system, you are either devoting your life to the game/guild or you roam on your own. There are better ways to do this.

That seems pretty ...dramatic? I don't know what kind of guilds you have been joining, or in what game, but i can assure you they aren't all like that. Unless you want to join the top hardcore raiding guild in your mmos, you can more often than not find guilds that meet your specific needs.

Also, while guild hopping is kind of frowned upon( if you consistently join and leave guilds)no one is going to fault you for leaving a guild that doesn't suite your needs or playstyle.

 

[Fdzzaigl]

I don't thinkg handing out the ability to add negative tags is a good idea. You don't just have reasonable group leaders after all, there's bound to be a fair share of trolls, griefers and idiots as well. It wouldn't be cool if you got tagged with "rude, defiant, unskilled", just "fer the lulz".

The big thing is just having a group leader again, the voting system used in most group finders is stupid. Usually ninjas and idiots can just get away with whatever they're doing because the other members want to get it over with and don't want to wait for another player.

Having a group leader who just kicks out the ninjas and idiots immediately is a requirement for a good group.

 

[SmugFrog]

PUG is practically a dirty word these days, since groups of solo players who got together via a matchmaker rarely ever perform well.

I have no idea what PUG means - if you use an acronym you should at least define it in case someone doesn't know. I thought you were insulting my dog.

Spoiler: He's so happy - click to see

As for pugs, well it stands for pick up group.

Thank you. It seems like a lot of PUGs, especially when forced in some strategy games, results in your failure if you're playing against an organized team. There's always the chance to get that guy who has no idea what he's doing or just sucks at the game, and that can be the difference between winning and losing. I can't remember which game it is but I was talking about this with a friend recently about a game that has online matchmaking where it puts you in a team with other players. I do not have a lot of time to play and my schedule is hard to sync up with that of my friends; hence, I avoid those kinds of games. Even though I really want to play them, in the end the frustration during those small amounts of playtime is just overwhelming.

I don't think PUGs are always a bad thing. I have fond memories of Anarchy Online (futuristic MMORPG) where I played a healer and could always find groups getting together in areas - and yes there were the good and bad groups, but it just feels more fitting in a game like WoW as opposed to World in Conflict, Wargame, or other types of strategy games where PvP is an issue and the PUG is facing off against an organized one.

 

[Aetrion]

I don't thinkg handing out the ability to add negative tags is a good idea. You don't just have reasonable group leaders after all, there's bound to be a fair share of trolls, griefers and idiots as well. It wouldn't be cool if you got tagged with "rude, defiant, unskilled", just "fer the lulz".

Maybe people can also see what tags the person doing the invite hands out most often.

I have no idea what PUG means - if you use an acronym you should at least define it in case someone doesn't know.

It actually surprised me quite a bit that so many people don't know what it means. I mean, there are a lot of acronyms that are thrown around without explaining them every time, like MMO, FPS, DLC etc. I guess the usage wasn't as common as I thought.

I did explain it a few posts up when someone asked though.


Your experience with competitive games where getting into random groups is frustrating is pretty common I think, and part of the reason I'm musing about this topic. In older MMOs that didn't have matchmakers and designated group content it was a lot more common for people to organize independently. Today most MMOs just teleport you into the dungeons with a few strangers and everyone has run them so many times that the expectation is that everyone knows what to do already. In many ways this is faster and more convenient than what games used to be, but it also in my oppinion really eroded the social aspect of games.

Way back in the day I played Ultima Online, and in that game you didn't even have a global channel, friends list or a group system. You could only talk to the people who were in your vicinity in the game. That would of course never fly today for lack of convenience, but it meant that you were playing with the people who were actually near you. In that game you had a much stronger sense of meeting a lot of different people, because just the way the game worked made you talk to new people all the time, instead of quickly establishing your own circle of friends and ignoring everyone else.

 

[happyninja42]

Yes this type system would be nice for gaming, but another thing I think would be helpful is to provide "solo" objectives for various group missions.

Example: I'm going to use the events in Mass Effect 2's final fight, where you send someone into the tube to open up doors, while the rest of the party fought it out in the main chamber. I think, if they added objectives similar to the "tube thing", where 1 player has to go off and accomplish an objective on their own, to support the larger goal, it might encourage solo players to contribute more.

If you are using the term "solo" player in the strict context of multiplayer games, then I wouldn't be a solo player. I do prefer single player games though, so in that context I would likely be a "solo" player, but if the game allows for team play, I'm a big fan of it. I think the biggest problem with PUG's, and multiplayer in general, is the need for leadership, without necessarily having someone capable of leadership, or a couple of rival alpha-males, arguing over which strategy to take, because they both want to be in charge. I can't count the number of times a group that started out perfectly fine, devolved into a flame war in mere moments because 2 people decided to waste their time and energy on arguing, instead of just playing the game. And those type people are most likely the ones who will be forming these groups that you mention, looking for solos. And those are the type of people that discourage solos from taking part. "Is this group leader going to be a complete asshole and fuckwit? Or is he going to be relatively level headed? If you, as the solo player, are joining other people's groups, you are still going to keep running into this issue. These type players are less likely to start their own groups, because that would imply that they are now in charge, and they don't want to be in charge.

So I like the idea of a rating system for the players, with multiple characteristics to rate them for, as I think, if the information was made public, it could potentially help a lot. It won't fix everything, but definitely a step in the right direction.

 

[NeutralStasis]

The proposed system has too many ways to hijack it. I have played in a lot of different MMOs, and it is not all that hard to find a group of friends or guild if you really want. You just have to get out there are start the ball rolling, look at guild request boards (many games have such recruiting tools) and make some friends. This used to be a whole lot harder back in the early years of MMOs, but these new tools have made a difference.

 

[happyninja42]

I don't thinkg handing out the ability to add negative tags is a good idea. You don't just have reasonable group leaders after all, there's bound to be a fair share of trolls, griefers and idiots as well. It wouldn't be cool if you got tagged with "rude, defiant, unskilled", just "fer the lulz".

Well, League of Legends does this, and for the most part it works just fine. I don't know the actual numbers, but I'm pretty sure that the trolls out there are probably in the minority of players, so if you are playing like a nice person, the majority of your ratings will be positive. I seem to recall some game like LoL, that had metrics in place to track if a player is consistently putting out nothing but negative votes, behavior most likeley that of a troll being a jerk. If the game system had something similar in place to say "Hmm, let's see, Mr. MahNutzonYurChin seems to do nothing but slap negative ratings on almost everyone he groups with, and he seems to consistently get negative reviews himself, I think we have a problem with this guy." It could help greatly. It's all about the aggregate score of your behavior, not the individual ratings. In LoL, I know for a fact I got down ranked by some people because they were just simply assholes, and were in fact, the source of our teams problems. but hey, they lashed out and gave us all negs at the end of the match. I still got enough positive ratings to get the "good player" little reward things they did.

I mean think about it. You're in a group of 4 other people. You get 1 neg vote (from a troll in this example), and the others are all positive. In the end, you would still get a net result of positive. Maybe the neg vote is accurate though, because maybe you are a bit of a rude guy. But you are also competent at playing. So, like the OP said, you develop a ranking of "Skilled but Rude". Ok well that's fine, that's the point of this system. Then people who are like "I don't care if he's an asshole, I just need someone who knows what they are doing", can still recruit you. And there are plenty of people like that who play. You are just a cog in their great gaming machine. As long as you function properly, they don't care if you make noise or not.

 

[Aetrion]

I have played in a lot of different MMOs, and it is not all that hard to find a group of friends or guild if you really want. You just have to get out there are start the ball rolling, look at guild request boards (many games have such recruiting tools) and make some friends. This used to be a whole lot harder back in the early years of MMOs, but these new tools have made a difference.

The core of the idea is more that people who play infrequently usually have problems enjoying group focused games because they have so many features that are built around long term association with people rather than getting together with people you might like in the moment. To someone who only gets into the game every other weekend the prospect of joining a guild of highly active and organized players just isn't appealing. Even if they let you stick around, you never really feel like you belong. If the whole guild plays inconsistently it also doesn't help you get into game content that requires more organization, they might not be around when you are around.

The queue features for dungeons or battlegrounds in games like WoW or the public matches in games like World of Tanks or League of Legends are the standard experience for many players because of this, and that experience simply isn't very good. PvE content is often "dumbed down" because the devs assume people don't coordinate or organize willingly, and PvP content is usually a crap shoot, with your chances of victory or defeat hinging entirely on who you were put together with and who the other team is.

Basically there is a void in the way the social aspect of MMOs is designed between "Just put me together with anyone, I want to play group content right this instant!" and "I want a clearly defined permanent social group to do all activities with in this game." The former doesn't provide the depth of interaction that makes multiplayer interesting to begin with. For the latter to be useful it requires that the group has such a high commitment to the game that they are always there for you, which makes you feel like an outsider, or flat out unwelcome if you can't always be there for them.

 

[AgedGrunt]

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.

Disagreeing hard. As someone that's never really joined or fit with guilds/clans (though I remain interested) yet has played a lot with personal friends, I'd say it has little to do with commitment. In fact, there are a lot of gamers who don't like playing with other people, especially when some games' content is "locked" behind group play.

But by far the biggest reason, which I've seen and felt myself, that a lot of gamers don't fly colors is because once you join a group you really have to sacrifice on things you want to do. To say nothing of things like stupid rules, organization, meetings, forums, recruitment obligations or social drama that comes with the terrain.

To a lot of people, with organized groups comes annoying BS and they just want to play their games. There are laid-back groups doing that, but they're not really the type to compete with dedicated clans for recruitment; they're more interested in being laid-back gamers.

 

[Bad Jim]

I have no idea what PUG means - if you use an acronym you should at least define it in case someone doesn't know. I thought you were insulting my dog.

PUG = Pick Up Group. A group of strangers formed to face a specific challenge, originally by spamming LFG (Looking For Group) into chat until enough people responded, but usually through a matchmaking system. This is in contrast to guild mates or real life friends getting together.

The main problem, really, is that people who are good and/or sociable will tend to find their way into guilds or play with friends. So the average PUG will be drawn from a pool of players who are bad, unsociable or assholes.

 

[Aetrion]

The main problem, really, is that people who are good and/or sociable will tend to find their way into guilds or play with friends. So the average PUG will be drawn from a pool of players who are bad, unsociable or assholes.

That's the perception, but I don't think it's true. There are tons of people who don't join guilds because they just don't play enough to feel like they are really part of any guild that's active enough to be your social horizon for all content.

 

[Vigormortis]

A Pick Up Group. What it means at this point is a group of unaffiliated players that have formed up or been put together by a matchmaker for the purpose of participating in group content in a game. It also gets used to refer to unskilled, unorganized players however, because frequently the groups formed by this method lack leadership, cohesion, or accountability for an individual's actions within it. Sometimes PuG is also used to mean "Public Game", as in, a match in a competitive game that anyone can join.

Uh....are you sure you're not conflating a PUG match with a PUB match?

PUB games are matches hobbled together with an assortment of solo or small-group players via the games matchmaking services. A PUG match is essentially a casual scrim wherein players, usually through some direct or tangential affiliation, form up via collective game invites.

I play PUG matches of L4D2 all the time. Someone'll start a lobby and toss out a few invites to people on their friends list. Those that join will also send out invites to people on their lists, and so on and so forth, until the lobby is filled.

I've never heard of someone playing solo and calling it a PUG match. That's new to me.

 

[Bad Jim]

The main problem, really, is that people who are good and/or sociable will tend to find their way into guilds or play with friends. So the average PUG will be drawn from a pool of players who are bad, unsociable or assholes.

That's the perception, but I don't think it's true. There are tons of people who don't join guilds because they just don't play enough to feel like they are really part of any guild that's active enough to be your social horizon for all content.

That is true, however the proportion of players who are bad, unsociable or assholes is higher than average because the pool of PUG players is the pool of all players with a lot of good/sociable players removed.

Thinking about it though, I can think of another issue. Not having time to communicate effectively when the shit hits the fan. Maybe we should raid with a pause mode, so if something unexpected happens, players can pause and discuss their options. Instead of moaning about a player screwing up, a more experienced player might pause the game and explain the correct course of action while the situation was salvageable. This would permit higher difficulty that required teamwork, and PUGs would not be screwed over because they would be able to work as a team.

Yet another issue is that your strategy for a raid is usually decided by reading the optimal strategy on a wiki rather than actual discussion. Maybe a bit of randomisation would make it necessary to stop and plan based on the situation rather than just do what the wiki says.

 

[Aetrion]

Vigor:

The meaning slightly differs from game to game, and a lot of people use PUB and PUG interchangeably. A lot of terminology from MMORPGs got absorbed into match based MMOs and other games and the meaning and usage starts to twist. The definition of MMO itself has become pretty flexible.

I'd say the term is impossible to define precisely to how it applies in every game at this point. I think the term Pick up Group is actually borrowed sports terminology, so in its root it likely has nothing to do with video games at all. It's the essence of what it means that remains the same: a team that was formed on the spot.

That is true, however the proportion of players who are bad, unsociable or assholes is higher than average because the pool of PUG players is the pool of all players with a lot of good/sociable players removed.

Thinking about it though, I can think of another issue. Not having time to communicate effectively when the shit hits the fan. Maybe we should raid with a pause mode, so if something unexpected happens, players can pause and discuss their options. Instead of moaning about a player screwing up, a more experienced player might pause the game and explain the correct course of action while the situation was salvageable. This would permit higher difficulty that required teamwork, and PUGs would not be screwed over because they would be able to work as a team.

Yet another issue is that your strategy for a raid is usually decided by reading the optimal strategy on a wiki rather than actual discussion. Maybe a bit of randomisation would make it necessary to stop and plan based on the situation rather than just do what the wiki says.

I think the ability to pause an MMO would lead to much more trollish behavior than the ability to give someone negative tags. I've seen it in many MMOs that the players will voluntarily pause to explain an upcoming fight though.

And yea, any game is going to have a certain number of players who are just absolutely awful. The irony is that those players would probably be happier playing something else themselves. Unfortunately there is neither a good business plan nor a good customer relations playbook that lets you help those people find the door.

I don't really believe in people who are irredeemable assholes, I think people who act that way do it because they are insecure about their ability to compete, and because of that adopt a stance of "I'm getting my fun doing something completely unproductive". In my experience though this is a defense mechanism, and you can get people like that to actually be perfectly reasonable players if you find a way to correct their mistakes without making them feel like they are under attack.

 

[happyninja42]

The main problem, really, is that people who are good and/or sociable will tend to find their way into guilds or play with friends. So the average PUG will be drawn from a pool of players who are bad, unsociable or assholes.

That's the perception, but I don't think it's true. There are tons of people who don't join guilds because they just don't play enough to feel like they are really part of any guild that's active enough to be your social horizon for all content.

That is true, however the proportion of players who are bad, unsociable or assholes is higher than average because the pool of PUG players is the pool of all players with a lot of good/sociable players removed.

Thinking about it though, I can think of another issue. Not having time to communicate effectively when the shit hits the fan. Maybe we should raid with a pause mode, so if something unexpected happens, players can pause and discuss their options. Instead of moaning about a player screwing up, a more experienced player might pause the game and explain the correct course of action while the situation was salvageable. This would permit higher difficulty that required teamwork, and PUGs would not be screwed over because they would be able to work as a team.

Yet another issue is that your strategy for a raid is usually decided by reading the optimal strategy on a wiki rather than actual discussion. Maybe a bit of randomisation would make it necessary to stop and plan based on the situation rather than just do what the wiki says.

Your statements about the quality of players from PUG's seems a little biased. It implies that they are already less skilled and capable because they aren't already scooped up in a guild/clan. This seems to be a false premise. 1. It assumes that guilds always have more skilled players, and that's just not true. I've played in several guild/clans, and the players weren't very good, they were just a group of friends who played together. And I've seen plenty of solo players who were ridiculously talented. Being anti social, or simply not liking the clan/guild dynamic, (something I don't like all that often), doesn't mean they don't have talent.

Now I will agree that effective communication will make any group effort better, and the lack of it will drastically increase the chance of disaster. But again, that's not something exclusive to being a PUG. If you try and run a guild raid without effective communication, it's going to go just as badly as a PUG doing the same thing.

As to the comment about raid strategies being tailored precisely to some meta build. Yeah that sucks. I hate this aspect of player mentality, and how draconian some people will be if you don't fill that niche perfectly. I hate that crap, it's one of the reasons why I don't raid in guilds. This mindset of "if you don't have X stats, or are this specific build, we don't want you." is a very unwelcoming behavior, and turns off a lot of players. I've been playing MMO's since like...shit which came out first, EQ or Ultima Online? Anyway, a couple decades, and the one thing I've learned is that just about any group makeup can accomplish any objective in the game, if you communicate and work together on a strategy. And feeling like I'm "playing it wrong" if I make my character a different design than the pro-build, puts off a lot of players, and basically makes them say "well fuck you then, I like my build just fine thank you, and I'm not going to change it just to make you happy. But hey, you auto-kicked me once I told you my stats and build, so kiss my ass, I don't need you either." And then they're less inclined to try grouping again.