The Paradox of MMORPGs 

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"I like to play with myself where others can see" Forgot who said this, but pretty much how I feel about MMOs

"I didn't mean to put you on a SECOND spectrum" killed me

Something that has been happening in MMOs is that you must join someone's Discord server to access high level group content, which is simply unacceptable to me

That second spectrum joke was Excellent

Why I play MMO solo: because I find it very hard to find people that want to play the same game I want to play, at the same time and in the same manner. I enjoy some multiplayer aspects of a game but they are usually things that are risk-free and that doesn't rely on me having good reflexes or being a hardcore player because I never had any interest on that. (ffs, I play most game in the Story Mode difficulty because I enjoy more the story and exploration rather then combat)

I haven't really seen you talk about doing solo content to aid the multiplayer experience. I'm talking crafting, baby! Mining, smithing, cooking. Farming rare items, or just coin. Selling your stuff to an Auction House or Grand Exchange. You play solo content, but you help another person doing group content progress. That dungeoneering or raiding person doesn't have to search for the Blue Rose and create a rare potion that increases their effectiveness. You can look for the flower and create that potion for them. This is content that you can't do in a single player roleplaying game. You can sell items to NPCs in a game of Skyrim, but it's never going to be as wholesome as knowing you helped out someone else playing the same game on the other side of the world by doing solo content.

I like to be alone in a crowd that’s why I play (mostly) solo.

i have always prefer to play alone, but at the same time i play support characters...it is weird, but there is a very satisfying feeling about being able to help someone at random in an MMO and not have to know them at all...also... that feeling of "you are alive because i decide to heal you, deal with these monsters for me"

I enjoy playing solo most of the time, but part of that enjoyment comes from the fact that I'm one person among many in the ongoing environment of the game. I loved walking through Stormwind or Orgrimmar and seeing other people running around all over the city doing whatever they needed to do (back when that happened). Having the option to start being social at any time is a huge part of the atmosphere for me, because there are times where I want to do group content. I enjoy doing 5-man content, but I hate raiding.

dead mmos would be neat if they tried to sell them as full games for offiline use once they die

"centuries, or even years" already earned you a like, good sir.

I play MMORPGs solo. When I play I want to have fun and play "MY Story". When you join a guild, you are no longer playing your story, you are playing the guilds story. When you join a guild you are no longer playing "The Game", you are now working a new job. Plus you must now put up with all the B-S krap from other guild members.

As an avid ff14 player, it's worth noting that the new Trust system allows for almost every content to be done solo. They still make you join groups for some required mini-raid like encounters but it's a neat option. There's also new Variant Dungeons that actively scale with how many people you queued with. I just like ff14 idk

Thank you Mr. President.

Personally my favourite part of MMOs is 'offline' multiplaying as in playing alongside (irl with my bf in the room on his computer or through discord/etc with friends) and playing solo doing our own things like skilling/quests/etc but knowing they are also in the world doing their own thing at the same time as me. I don't think I've ever done content IN game w my bf on OSRS but we frequently play together and that's how we like our MMO games 😎

Playing an MMO solo is like going out in public without a group of friends: it's perfectly okay to go out alone and a lot of times it's even easier that way

Babe wake up, a new Idyl vid just dropped!

This is why the Event or Meta-Event system in Guild Wars 2 really captured me as a solo player. It's a system where the objectives of this Event (dynamic multiplayer quest) are displayed throughout its course depending on the vicinity of the Event or sub-events of a Meta-Event you're in, giving you enough information to contribute. This allows for you to play with a massive group of people, without the need for a lot of communication. Eventually in expansions these Events became harder and more complex, sometimes you were in need of splitting the player pool on the map into 3 squads and tackle 3 lanes separately before encountering the big bad boss. While those Events became harder, the need for communication also increased, almost tricking players into taking the lead, instruct other players or just communicate.

If you find a cool item in a single player game, you’ll never be able to trade it or be able to show it off to other players online. And it’s nice that all your characters are saved on their servers online. Even if a player decides to play mostly solo, it’s good to know that they have the power to play with other people any time they want.

One of the design decisions of GW2 that I really like is making it so that there is no "mob tagging" in the game. This means that if you hit a mob, you get rewarded with xp/loot when it does, whether there was already someone else fighting it or not. I would love to see this design implemented in more MMOs, especially ones that use trinity class design. This would allow players to work together on overworld content with practically no friction. You don't have to form a group, you don't have to talk to eachother, there's no pressure to stick together past the content that you're currently working on together. But, it allows you to properly play to your role in a multiplayer environment in a way that you don't really get to do if you're entirely playing solo. This also helps solve the issue of players fighting over quest mobs which always always always sucks. I think for this to work you would have up balance overworld mobs so that they aren't too easy to kill, but they can be killed solo if you're very careful. Something like how classic WoW was balanced. You can generally take on one, maybe two, mobs at a time and get through ok, but it would be a lot quicker and easier if someone else was there helping you.

Ok but to be fair Rumours by Fleetwood Mac is a fire album. Also yeah, solo MMOs and stuff

I think great mmos have a good blend where the solo and multi build on eachother in tandem. Force example making a bunch of personal upgrades during the week and showing off how powerful you’ve become since friends last saw you in a dungeon or raid. Great video as always!

Holy, the FlyFF music at 18:00 brings me back. Good times, I miss that game. I'm so old.

Runescape Classic was practically Ironman Mode. You went away from a bank to fight and skill and collect loot, then returned to the town to show off what you did all by yourself.

Nice video, just a quick note, in FFXIV you can solo all MSQ dungeons using NPCs, only trials are required to group

Escapism. That's usually why

Its the "go go go" mentality that i cant do anymore. I cant keep up, no one wants to slow down, and i don't want to ruin someone else's fun, or deal with the toxicity when i dont play the speed they do.

I appreciate it when an MMO lets you take on everything solo, but still has strong incentive to take things on in groups. It's a difficult balance, but if they get it right it's great! The ability to solo something is great because then even if your scheduling with friends fall through, you can still attempt the content you wanted to do! Doing things solo usually means there's less room for error as if you alone die, there's no one to carry you through to the end and you probably have to start over the raid/dungeon or such. But if you're taking on something in a group there's different challenges like communication and coordination. Theatre of Blood in Old School Runescape has a decent ratio of scaling monsters based on how many players there are (ignore the fact mechanics themselves make it significantly harder for someone to solo, the scaling is what I wanna focus on) Enemies have 100% health if you're 1 person, 190% health if you're 2 people, 270% if you're 3, 340% if you're 4 and 400% if you're 5 people. You get faster kills along with a bunch of benefits for having more people like the ability to let someone carry, more efficiently lower enemies' defences and give people roles for specific bosses where that's good. And while it's way more difficult it would still be reasonable to solo if you're skilled enough to take on all necessary roles and have good enough gear and resources to deal with the longer fights.

I know very little about MMOs, and most of what i know is from your videos. This Runescape game sure does seem pretty great

I felt part 4 the most, it's something I've echoed many many many times. The MMORPG formula was figured out decades ago and there is value in remembering what actually worked in the past... It shouldn't be a revelation to remind decision making devs that a game shouldn't be all one thing or another. Variety is the spice of life. I don't want an all solo game just as I don't want an all multiplayer game in the same respect that I don't want an overly complex game or a brain-dead simple game. For example: I don't want the PoE talent tree as much as I don't want WoW's Legion or BFA skill trees.

I have two issues with non-solo gameplay in MMOs. The first is that most players tend to be either at the beginning or end of the game, especially if said MMO has paywalls. Secondly, if I find one or a group of people to play with, I have to go at their speed and then I never see them again when we log off. I have to skip dialog I might've wanted to read if I want to stay at their speed most of the time (I prefer to read main story dialog if it's my first time through). One MMO I play has a few forced sections that basically require you to team up with people who actually know what they're doing, where failure is actually really bad (it will ruin the entire run, which can sometimes be long). These forced dungeons have really good loot that everyone should farm for, but it's hard to find people to team up with in the first place when it's now mid-game content (when end-game content stops being end-game). Then, among the people you do find, half of them are only there to farm a portion of the dungeon rather than the whole thing, so they just leave early. They don't even tell anyone that they're leaving early or else they won't find people to team up with either. I'm not sure what the fix for this is, but I definitely don't want these types of dungeons forced into the main story. I do actually enjoy these types of dungeons when there are actively other players, and I seem to find it the best with optional dungeons, so maybe that should be the path forward.

Idk why but your little bits on people's personal lives like Damien's tweets and roasting companies is always funny. It's kinda like reading the controvesy section for a beloved celebrity.

"I didn't mean to put you on a SECOND spectrum". Bold of you to assume most of us were only on one spectrum before now.

This is the other side of the coin to the "abundance of solo activities is draining the multiplayer aspect out of the (m)morpg" discussion.

i only play MMOs solo because i hate team play and i love the challenge of doing bosses alone

That is actually a very interesting concept… maybe there is potential to take an open world rpg type game, but marry it to the community aspects of mmo’s such as a market place or leader boards…. I’d dig it…

As a solo MMO player myself, my biggest issue with group content is when making a group is required rather than auto matchmaking. In something like OSRS some of my favorite multiplayer content are things like Nex, Zalcano, and Barbarian Assault as they are all bosses where there is a dedicated world that has auto teams where you simply show up to the world and get into multiplayer within a minute. If wanting something more serious, can easily just branch out from the main group into a more dedicated group. Raids 1, 2, and 3 in OSRS however are not anything like that. You can't simply just show up and have a competent team within a minute. It could take more time to find a team than to do a raid. Can't simply just go to a world, say nothing, and be in a raid within minutes.

Best moments of MMORPG I've had where when I was alone playing and found a random, did a quick dungeon or raid, had a blast, befriend him, never seen him online again in my life. I still remember you XxDevKnightxX

The quest system did it for me, when you had to grind XP by farming kills, it made sense to group and camp spawns. (Everquest, EQOA, EQ2, FFXI). Then you're playing wow, finally grouped your NELF with your Human friend in westfall, you do some quests, one of you logs, one of you does a few more, your quests are no longer in sync. For very rare and brief periods did I find people to group with and level on my first tune, but let's be honest, the most efficient way to grind levels in most MMOs is Solo play.

SWTOR's story is so damn good it works fine as a solo game. Like holy shit, I have never felt the need to do raids. The story is just too interesting. I mean you can be a good guy Sith!❤😂

FFXIV can be solo'd with NPCs now except I think the last trial of Endwalker which is like 300 hours into the game.

I did not expect to see Idyl topless in this video... but then again, it's an Idyl video.

Great work on this video! Keep it up!

Ask any married father why they play alone and you’ll get the realest answer. You might get on at noon one day, midnight another, 8pm, 6am, etc. There is no way to join any planned raids or hard core guilds so we do our own thing with the dream of one day making a come back to raiding, but alas that day never seems to come. It’s ye hope that keeps us going though

"I did not mean to put you on a second spectrum" That joke was so savage. And also true.

You are probably the only content creator which I don't skip sponsors. You are that good. Thanks for all the fun.

17:44 was a very pleasant surprise. I salute.

I remember in WoW when it came out there were elite monsters just wandering around, and you needed a party to take them down.

Playing online games solo somehow feels different from playing single player. Even if you never going to see another person through hours and hours of gameplay, just existing in same world with other people makes all the difference.

The "problem" with Classic WoW is that a lot of the quest lines end in dungeons. So while you're not "forced" to do them, the story of the zone kind of abruptly ends if you don't. Deadmines is actually the perfect example of what I'm talking about. It's part of a long quest chain that you're basically cut off from if you don't do it.

It always amazes me how Classic WoW solved so many problems current MMOs have and struggle with. It was one of the first real big ones and they nailed the genre for decades.

This is why I love RuneScape. I can play with friends and when I don’t feel like talking just turn off chat and play by myself

The best example from vanilla wow, i think, are cave quests. Quests where your goal is in a cave. You can technically solo these quests, but you have to work very carefully and quickly. One mistake and you die and have to deal with respawns. But if you run into someone else doing the same quest, it doesn't matter how much of a solo player you are, grouping up with them is your least bad option. The vanilla wow questing experience was hundreds of these tiny implicitly incentivized interactions with other players that all created opportunities for communal growth. Combined with static server populations (no layers or shards), you started to recognize people around the server. The quests themselves were objectively not fun (which is a problem), but they fostered socialization in the best way. No MMO since has ever tried to capture that again.

RuneScape and SWTOR got it right: You can play them almost entirely fully solo; but they also fulfill the role of lively third places w/ other humans, the MMO part WoW is also catering to this by adding bot followers for dungeons, similar to Guild Wars 1 heroes & henchmen

I really appreciated the way you tackled your sponsor in the video. It gave me a good laugh. I appreciate that you made it fun lol. For once i didnt fast forward through that section

I just wish there were more cases where a big event happens and others could join in. That was like, my favorite thing ever in any MMO I played

I appreciate you bringing up the lack of time aspect of things. When I was younger I moved around a lot so video games were a good way to stay in contact with people and get me through the lonely points. Now I’ve got two kids and I barely can get 10 minutes uninterrupted so I don’t even attempt to be social in game because I just can’t give the game or other players my full attention. So when I do get to play I’m rocking out solo even though I really do miss it.

I'm starting to wonder if my difficulties getting into a MMO's community is mostly just the actual gameplay. I'm one of those people that want to take on challenging content with a group and make friends. But having deathly allergies to rotations and copying meta builds online might be holding me back more than just "MMOs are being more solo friendly".

Remember that part in early (FFXIV) A Realm Reborn when the early main story quest makes you run three dungeon instances in a row? My social anxiety hasn't allowed me to forget.

Always a good day when idyl drops a new video

For what it's worth, FFXIV's story dungeons have the capacity to be played with story NPCs instead of other players. It's only side quest dungeons and raids that *require* multiplayer

Excellent video. Design is the key. Solo play often makes you completely unprepared for coop. You get good at playing your class and then learn that everything you learned to do makes you a complete pariah in cooperative play. Games ideally should provide you with AI teammate options so even if you're playing solo, you can learn team dynamics. In most games, the group is responsible for teaching every new person the basics which serves as a huge gatekeep.

I hear that flyff music ;) Good video Idyl

I like having the option to solo when i feel like it.

As a former social player, I've grown to enjoy solo playing on WoW. It reminds me of a time years ago when I first started the game leveling through dark shore all alone, taking in the music and the atmosphere. And yea, people right now say "Just play a solo game then!" But I want to play wow, the game I fell in love with and still enjoy despite all its problems. I don't want to go back to guilds and raids and having to min-max every peice of gear and having multiple extra addons on my screen to shout at me because Im doing something wrong. I just want to play the game like a game not a job and if tomorrow, Blizzard announced a fully solo server with a companion system baldur's gate 3 style, I'd buy it.

The other issue. When you DO want to play in a group the story segments are designed for solo play and so you can't buy be playing the same super epic story cutscene dungeon.

I do a lot of dungeons in WoW, but I almost never communicate with anything other than a ping. I really like playing MMO healers (I play a healer Sith Sorceress in SWTOR as well), and there's something about that style of play that gets me in a very focused yet comfy headspace, brain releases all the happy chemicals. When I have to communicate it breaks that trance and it is still some fun, but not the most fun.

I actually enjoy Guild Wars 2 group play. You see a map objective, go to it, other people also go there, and you do it together without joining a group etc.

Finally, an Idyl video for me to face a blunt to.

Thank you for speaking up and giving us solo players a voice that we otherwise wouldn't have had, Mr. President.

I loved Ragnarok Online because all the challenging and group content was also solo content, that was the pinnacle of MMOs

Bro your advertisements are the fricken best

I like observing people in the public, that's why I like to play MMORPG in solo

Sometimes you are up for groups, but sometimes your job leaves you with only an hour for a quick play, and you don't want to bother with the hardest content or finding group mates.

"Centuries, and even years" really got me 😂

I play alone because most people can't get immersed in a game. They want to play with me and then banter and talk about deep topics and I'm okay with that but their focus is only on that even if they say otherwise. I want people who will get engrossed in the game and want to go on adventures not escape or vent about life. I want to talk about our next mission I want to talk about what we may find I want to talk about our fears of losing in the game.

As someone who plays WoW for more than 15 years now, and at some point I was really hardcore, today I am more of a loner (most of my friends left the game, and many I played with don't have the time to commit as we used to), soloing content, but it would be nice to have a community again ingame, but it is hard to find a new guild that is really a guild.

I think if they expanded on the group quests from classic, with every zone having a boss you have to group for that unlocks a questline to finish the zone and reward you with upgrades for questing. The items could scale and if you do a chain at level 10 you'd get a couple of solid pieces that level with you up until say 19 or maybe even 21. you'd have to design a set of gear that works with each class (easy enough main stat very little secondary) and give half a set every zone or maybe a third of a set and make sure if you do them as grey or very close to the rewards are somewhat capped to the zone level so you can't just cheese them. It'd enable stuff like +hit for classes that really need it, snd i think you'd need to reduce the usefulness of greens and make blues very-VERY rare. You could start to think about making a set for X class that everytime you finish a zone quest you get an upgrade of that gear rather than new gear, so you keep your westfall bracers of strength and maybe upgrade it into a predungeon set, with minor secondary choices based at each upgrade if you want to be a tank or dps or healer.. or one spec doesn't use crit as much as another.. Though i'd make blue/epic and even legendary weapon drops the blues would be bound to player the others can be sellable- but like one in 10 billion chance for the legendary which can be upgraded by consuming other weapons and it'll always be 5% better than the weapon consumed. But like guildwars 2...rather than their system of having skills on the weapons you equip a shield and 1h sword together which gives defense when paired together, two 1h swords pair for haste etc.. you get healing staves, ice fire arcane.. with options to change it with quests, or for more blue/epic weapons you can just take the upgrade and put the old one in the bank to use a new style. If you make it so high levels can't farm them on low level mobs green and below wont drop them at a decent rate.. have some one of a kind per server for each level range as well as a bunch you can get later in the raid at a higher (but still rare) drop chance like thunderfury bindings, i'd also make it if you transfer servers your legendary turns into a default one- and the special one goes back into the wild to avoid a guild just paying to amass them. Legendary shields would equip a legendary 1h sword or mace when the shield is equiped without special skills but still more powerful, daggers similarly main hand legendary dagger only equips an offhand with the stats but MH holds the effect, classes that use two one handers similarly- And i'd just let the unbalance happen.. only nerf if some item/class is doing more than 30% more than the next class.. like wise buff rather than nerf and always in interesting ways. Mini rant over :P

My solo tendencies started because I had pretty awful internet as a kid and I didn't wanna slow other players down. I guess I never grew out of it. Now, why was I playing MMOs when my internet sucked? I was a very lonely child. Yes, this is paradoxical.

I tend toward solo play in MMORPGS. But I like the option of engagement with others when im in the mood also. Oh and I wanted to add, awesome video. I think we may have the exact same psychology when it comes to gaming lol.

With regards to Wow Classic specifically, trying to play such MMOs today as a new player is hell. It feels like saying "Hey, I'd like to get into cycling", and your friends (who've been playing on-and-off since launch) say "You should come ride with us on the weekends". Then you show up and it's the Tour de France. Everyone there has been cycling for decades, knows every twist and turn, and is fully kitted out (although for the purpose of this analogy I'm not specifically referring to in-game gear). Once you start playing, you might say "Oh cool, I'm going to do _____" only to be told that _____ is worthless and you should be doing [thing] instead. Finally, after weeks of playing, and only vomiting once out of anxiety, you finally work up the courage to ask if you can join in on a raid. Immediately you're told to "sign up" for the raid, which then involves learning all the ins-and-outs of the peri-raiding experience. You need to learn about some convoluted loot reservation system that people just throw out without really explaining. Then finally you join the raid, but rather than taking some time to explain what's going on, what the story is behind the raid (because of course they didn't stop to help you do the quests), you just get thrown in the deep end. In the case of BFD, it's literal. You jump down a well, hug a wall, logout for some reason, and now you're somewhere different and you're being attacked by Horde because your friends' friends all wanted to play on PVP servers even though open-world PVP sucks and no one enjoys it (besides Rogues). Gee, I wonder why I prefer to play solo...

A version of classic WoW that is as group-oriented as EverQuest was sounds incredible.

That personification of anxiety was real. I was getting anxious just watching it

19:58 in case you were searching too: Sonic Frontiers OST - "Undefeatable"

The main problem I have with getting into hardcore group play like pvp, raids, and sometimes dungeons is that it takes so much damn time to find the people, set up a time for these people to play and then gather all these people to whatever location they need to be to do this group activity. To make matters worse we then have to do this extremely difficult activity only for one, two, sometimes everybody messing up all the mechanics forcing everybody to restart. I hate it even when I had all the time in the world I felt like it took too much time and now I have a job so there’s no way in hell I’m doing another raid in my lifetime. Don’t even get me started on the idea that people need to record their dps and record how many times they finished a raid and all the bullshit. When I play a game I play it to have fun not stress over so many dumb details that stops from getting to play the actual game.

One thing people tend to forget is it's significantly more complicated to play an mmo when english isn't your birth language. It took me years to learn it and I still can't right sentenses on the spot in an online game chat. And, of course, there is no way I can speak with a mic, i have an accent.

I swear there was a frame that flashed that said "More farts on my Patreon"

This SWTOR Slander hurts me :( Game is so good honestly it and GW2 will forever be my comfort MMOs

I remember someone trying to party up with me in an mmo, and I ended up making an excuse and going to the other side of the map just to not have to talk with them. They were even being nice, but I just really don't like playing with others in these Massive Multiplayer Online games.

Love the Baldur's Gate 3 soundtrack in the background. :)

Comin in strong with the Papyrus

An MMORPG is a millennial game. Most of its players are now in their 30s, which is why more and more MMO players play solo because of life commitments. I enjoyed grouping when I was younger and playing MMORPGs, but now with 2 kids and 2 jobs, I only get to play at certain times during the day or week. I'm guessing there are other players out there with a similar scenario.

*Raises hand* I am one of these people! In all my time playing WoW, I have not made a single friend. I think it comes down to being very antisocial. I just don't like to rely on others, and most times, I get annoyed when someone swoops in to pick up a quest object while dealing with a mob nearby. Or that people have to wait for me because I want to read the quest instead of rushing. If I could enter a mode where I am the only one in the world for quests, then I would do that! But I still engage in the raids occasionally, just because they are fun to do. So why play? I started at the end of Wrath of the Lich King and just fell for the world and races. I liked the gameplay and the collecting aspect. So, I am thrilled that Blizzard is catering to the casual player with the Warband system, making everything account-wide to make alts easier/better to play, as well as Delves that can be done solo and give end-game rewards.

“If you’re an active MMO player I did not mean to put you on a second spectrum” Coming at me really hard there bro… 😂😂😂

The patron song at the end is perpetually stuck in my head, it has no right being as catchy as it is what the fuck

I am the Lunch at My Desk guy, and I have never been a huge fan of grouping with strangers. I have a few friends I'll connect with every now and then in WoW, but otherwise I play alone. I love all the QoL matchmaking shit they've added. I hope they add more so I never have to fight to get into an M+ group if I want to play when my friends can't. I put in my time shouting LFG in Ironforge in 2004. I've been here since the beginning, baby. I don't have time to dick around anymore.

great video j1mmy

I think content like the Inferno in OSRS is also important - where there are solo challenges that you cannot possibly get carried through. Then the endgame group content feeds into endgame solo content and so on.

tbh most Loners aren't Loners because they want to be, they either have no friends, their friends don't want to play MMO's or the more common: everyone else in the game is so focused on doing max level content they forget about lesser players.