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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

> If you play social games like MMOs you're pretty much forced to interact with others

That maybe was the case with the oldschool MMOs (Everquest for example) where you could do not do anything alone but nowdays you can pretty much play them as a single player game. FFXIV, WoW, GW2 etc. are incredibly solo friendly. You don't even need to join a guild or such there is automated matchmaking for most group content. You can play these games without ever interacting with any other players. And a lot of people do that because they care more about the world or story or things that don't need other players (see crafting, gathering etc.)

Heck even FFXI which soon will be 20 years old is solo friendly thanks to the NPC party members they introduced some years ago.

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Not to mention the 'lobby' system in many games these days; unless you make friends by chance with people already playing online games, you effectively play with random people on your team, and random people on the other team.

Gone are the days where games in which you can join a regular server, where you see your friends, join a clan, etc. are the norm. Now you have to send friend requests to people and hope they accept, and even then, you can't play against your friends in casual play, only with them.

Recently I showed my little brother of an online FPS game from 2003, showing someone at a high skill level doing the map objective without help. The player killed everyone in sight with ease. My brother commented, "How the hell was that guy placed in a lobby with all these bad players?". To him, the only way that online FPS games work is that you queue in a lobby to be placed with people of a similar skill level. It didn't occur to him that you used to be able to join a server at a particular IP address and play with regulars and crack jokes with people you've known for years.

On the other hand I don't miss self-hosted lobbies "that" much. I used to play a lot of Dota, the original WC3 mod, and I don't weep for it. The host always had an enormous advantage, there was no penalty if someone left etc. But the community self-moderation was really strong, so leavers and such were weeded out after a time. But today? You just make a new account if you got banned or suspended, penalties are meaningless.

Ah, I understand that frustration; I suppose I had in mind more casual games, that is, no fixed size on teams (anyone can just join and play so long as you're not over the server-set limit of players), and unranked.

In ranked games (or games where the objective of winning is more important than just having fun) the lobby system does work better, because you're not really looking for community in that case. If modern games like Overwatch had both systems (join a server with regulars and make friends as 'quick play'; matchmaking for competitive), I think things would be better.

The only time I get properly annoyed in a game is when team sizes are fixed, and people are trolling or not pulling their weight. But on a server where anyone can join and you're chatting between spawns? That's fun. Sure, you care about the map objectives, it's not serious. If you lose you just stick around for the next map in the server's rotation and play more.

> If modern games like Overwatch had both systems (join a server with regulars and make friends as 'quick play'; matchmaking for competitive), I think things would be better.

afaik you can actually make lobbies in OW (game browser > create).

>I suppose I had in mind more casual games, that is, no fixed size on teams (anyone can just join and play so long as you're not over the server-set limit of players), and unranked.

This is my problem with survival games like Rust or DayZ. Really good concept, can be played casually, but somehow ends up ultra competitive if you play with randoms :D

But not being in a guild doesn't mean you're lonely. Maybe the random group finder and other pick up groups are enough to give you social interactions against loneliness?

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