At last, back online! Predictably enough, it turned out that online gaming in reality wasn’t nearly as good as online gaming in anticipation, but on the whole it was okay, with most of the weekend spent sending ‘Hey! I’m not dead!’ tells and catching up with those few online friendships that do survive my fickle interests and innate unwillingness to form lasting attachments.
I blame a lot of it on levels – your best friend in the whole game one week, may end up a busy powerful end-game raid leader the next, and the relationship turns to one of occasional chat-text only. They’d one-hit any mobs you can fight, and you’d get one-hitted by anything they can. The relationship becomes poisoned by an arbitrarily imposed social order based on how many monsters killed, and quests done – in effect, available playing hours, and you’re left with the impression that your now high-levelled friend has better things they could be doing, which is indeed the case. Time spent with lowbie friends then becomes purely a social thing, and not really ‘playing together’ in the game sense. That golden fortnight has passed, and is unlikely to come again.
Several ways to deal with this exist. Some are game-based, for this problem is one that’s existed ever since there were ‘levels’ in an online game; technical solutions, such as EQ2’s Mentoring, or the Spirit Shroud things in the new EQ1 Expansion. Other games merely try all sorts of very complicated grouping rules, and many simply ignore the problem altogether. After all, if Player A plays more than Player B, Player A should be rewarded more, and to be frank, for while I do play a lot, I am lazy when it comes to 'work' in them, and I often lose interest in these games suddenly; other people shouldn’t suffer for my faults. Varying levels of progression are complicated even further if any of the players concerned are into more than one game at a time.
Players can self-regulate of course – groups of players agreeing to only level so far, or only do quests together, but in worlds where almost everything generates xp, even self-defence from wandering animals, it becomes difficult to hold still, and yet still play when the others aren’t there. I laughed at the idea of EQ2’s ‘Turn off XP’ feature until I thought about it in this context, where it makes quite a bit of sense. Add more than one friend to the list, and the problem compounds exponetialy, with three people all trying to keep together somehow.
One way to cope, is to join a guild so indiscriminate and huge that there is always someone around at all possible levels. Personal attachments become rare, but at least you’ve all got something in common.
My own way of dealing with it is a tad more bleak; I simply don’t make lasting friends. Don’t get me wrong; I’m polite, civilised, and take a great deal of pride in being a competent pick-up group member. I’m practised, professional and always more than fair with looting. I even banter and joke along the way. But I know that I’ll probably never see any of those people again, and if I do, they’ll either be somewhere I've long since grown out of, or be some kind of visibly glowing godling busy on a totally different continent, and in either case, I’ll be no use to them anymore. Single-serving Friends.
Still, there was one game I revisited this weekend where I found nothing of this; Planetside. The ‘levels’ there are so irrelevant to gameplay that this whole problem simply never comes up, especially with their recent re-jigging of Cert point awards. I joined the Outfit Squad and had a very satisfying session, finishing positive on Kills/Deaths, which is not bad considering I’d not played in a few months. It felt good to be back…
Incidentally, Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day, ya land-lubbing scurvy-dogs! Yarrr!