For a long while after quitting WoW I laboured under the impression that if the Cats were to find a magical One True Game again, we’d all fall back into cooperative group gaming. In my mind this would be raiding, because that’s what I have experience with, but really any kind of group activity would count. What I realized lately, though, is that I’m probably one of the very few people who actually want this again. For the most part, my guildies and friends appear to be tired of what I call Appointment Gaming.
Perhaps it’s getting older, or burning out on MMOs, or just being bored from years of WoW, but whatever the reason most people think in the abstract that they want organized cooperative gaming, but when faced with the actuality of having to be online at a certain time every week they blanche. And while I am kind of ribbing those folks here, I don’t blame them for not being as in to Appointment Gaming now as they once were. Things change, and arguably judging by guildies, friends, game statistics, and fellow bloggers, this change is affecting the majority of MMO players.
However, if in general the MMO community is moving away from Appoinment Gaming, where does this leave guilds? The problem is that people still want socializing and cooperative group activities, but they want it on their schedule and they don’t want activities that require work outside of the activity itself (ie. gear grinding). To have this happen spontaneously, you need a certain number of people online at any given time. You need people to chat with, and people to form groups with, whether it’s for a dungeon or a PvP encounter or whatever.
A guild is going to need a LOT of people to keep this critical mass of folks online who are ready to group at any moment. Back in our 25-man raiding heyday you could find roughly 10 people on during non-raid prime time, and that required about 75 players. And that was when our recruitment was oriented around raiding — it’s a lot more difficult to recruit people with a platform of “we just, like, hang out sometimes and stuff” despite the fact that most people are just looking to hang out sometimes and stuff.
I dunno — it seems to me that non-appointment gaming doesn’t suit the small guild model. It’s hard to recruit for a guild with no organized events, it’s hard to have enough people online waiting to fill a group. It would, however, perfectly suit a game with a huge playerbase, preset events that don’t require much coordination, and a lack of emphasis on guild structure.
Which, upon reflection, is I suppose why I don’t like Guild Wars 2, and others do.
Herding Cats is the blog of Liore, known in the real world as Jessica Cook. She writes mostly about MMOs and RPGs, and believes in 
I think it’s not just gaming. I think you can see the same phenomena in other aspects of life. I wrote a short post about it in 2010:
“Just a random thought, but sometimes it seems like it is a lot harder these days to schedule things, to get people to commit to showing up at a given time in advance. Not just in WoW, but in real life too.
I wonder if it is related to the increasing inter-connectedness of our social lives. Sometimes it seems that everyone wants to leave their options open. To not commit to X, because there’s a small chance that something else more interesting might pop up in the time between now and X. And because of the speed of communication, you might hear about the new thing in plenty of time to go to it.
It just seems like in the past, because it was harder to communicate with people, that people ended up making arrangements earlier, and sticking to the arrangements with more faithfulness.
I’m not really sure which way is better. Ad hoc gives the individual a lot more leeway with what they want to do. But it does make life a lot harder on the people who have to organize events.
And I think there is a strength in scheduling that is often undervalued. To be able to count on people to show up when they say they will show up. I’ve always felt that the single greatest characteristic I would want in a raider is dependability, not raw skill.”
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One of my guildies told me earlier that Appointment Gaming is only for teenagers and college students (gee, thanks guy), but I actually find it easier to work into my “busy adult life”. I know I’m gonna have a raid between 7-9pm every Tuesday, I can arrange things around it.
That’s what I was going to say! People keep talking about how the average MMO audience is supposedly getting older, but wouldn’t that make “appointment gaming” the better fit? I’ve definitely found that as I’m getting older I need to schedule what to do with my free time further in advance, because chances of everyone being available to “hang out sometimes and stuff” decrease rapidly once people get jobs, families etc.
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I’ll say that I don’t miss the days when I felt pressured to chase home after work just to make a raid appointment, or had to decline spontaneous invitations etc. because the guild was waiting for me.
of course you can’t have it both ways; if you’re progression and raid-oriented, you gotta have schedules. but I’ve personally moved away from that as a player and while I still make loose appointments here and there for gaming, they’re not nearly as strict and binding and a no-show on my part doesn’t affect everyone else in a negative, disastrous way (other than my absence being a major loss of good spirits and entertainment ofc! :P). I can’t and don’t want to arrange life around gaming agendas anymore or vice versa; and I’m happy to accept the casual consequences.
I certainly can’t argue with you or anyone playing how you wanna play, but I do have a question for you: do you play with anyone when you play social games like MMOs?
I’m wondering because what you’ve said is fine for solo play, but I find it extremely difficult to play a social game — and I mean anything, from raids to just four people mucking around in Dungeon Defenders — without scheduling it. If there is no schedule, the result is I almost never play games with my friends.
Which is why I’m curious: is one of the casual consequences necessarily playing solo?
I used to be a ve-ry close-circle player; these days I find myself joining up with strangers more which is also why more automatic and less restricted forms of grouping up appeal to me. I do solo, but I also group up for quests when I can and it’s very fluent in a game like GW2 for example that makes it effortless. I know all the bias out there against this, but funny enough (and I’m not the only one reporting it) I find myself interacting a lot more due to less obligation and invitation script there than I ever did in WoW for example where I’d think thrice before bothering to group up with somebody. I don’t consider that soloing and it certainly has potential to also create friendships (not that I did this in the beta).
besides that I hardly ever play alone because my partner usually shares my game time; and we still also coordinate with friends online on skype, only rather than many days in advance we log on and check who is around. since most of our friends are in similar situations, we do end up with a group often.
so, I don’t necessarily meant soloing as a consequence, but I’m fully aware that a more non-commital style of playing and lack of fix play schedule results in progressing slower and being cut off from more competitive content maybe. which I’m okay with and certainly wouldn’t whine about.
Playing with strangers and automated social interaction would definitely help with that. Thanks for the comment!
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about progress or competitive content. I’m talking about playing LoL (5 people) or an MMO dungeon or Dungeon Defenders (4 people). Anything that basically needs more than 2 people.
It’s no different then us adults playing in a recreational sports league or a weekly poker night. By saying “yes, I’ll be there”, they’ve made that commitment to show up at that event and participate.
The reason I say “Maybe, I’ll see if I can” to requests to come out to mini-golf/go-karting/shopping/movies, whatever is that I don’t know if [at that scheduled time] I’m actually in the mood to do it. My guess is why people say “maybe” instead of yes or no is that it gives them a way out in the event they don’t want to do something.
We’ve all had those days where we show up for raid but are too exhausted/pissed/whatever to play. And saying stuff like “Might” gives you both a way in AND a way out. Naturally though, it’s annoying as hell to the coordinator. If I was being counted on to play a goalie, and I said maybe, my team would have to look for a backup goalie in case I couldn’t play which is an extra burden on them.
I guess that’s why tools like LFR, dungeon finder, and other stuff is popular. Because if someone feels like going raiding, they don’t have to login to trade and pray that someone’s forming a run. They can queue in and drop out at any given moment.
As one of my guildies said yesterday in IRC, they just want to kind of log on (a game or Steam) and have a guild group magically waiting for them to do something. The problem is when EVERYONE acts that way, then groups for anything never happen.
This is the problem precisely. Though everyone’s comments on this subject are all correct. Players are loathe to commit and thus nothing gets planned and thus there’s nothing waiting for you when you login and the cycle repeats.
I’m trying to figure out why I do this as well, especially in my daily life. For me, it happens very similarly how Matticus describes it. I think it’s got a lot to do with mood swings.
But then that’s indicative of waiting for something special to come along. Typically, if I set a gaming date I will show up, because i really want to do whatever it is. But if I’m not sure I’m *that* interested in it, I waffle.
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Consider this:
You have 9 other friends and you all love hanging out and having dinner together. You love it so much you want to do it weekly for about two hours every Thursday. The only problem is you can’t hang out together unless there are at least a total of 10 people since the place that you go to won’t accept reservations for less or more than 10 (and this is the only restaurant you can all agree on).
Well you feel like an ass if you can’t go one week because that means everyone can’t go. So you start to get other friends involved so that you can make sure you can go. But then if everyone is available someone can’t go (that stupid max limit) so you start tracking who goes and rotating people in and out so that it’s fair.
Suddenly this well-intentioned desire to hang out with friends became a second job. You enjoy going when you get the chance since you like your friends but now it involves all of this other stuff that you have to do just to hang out. Why can’t it just be like old times when you got together with your friends and it was fun?
Right, I totally get that, and that is often how it goes whether it’s 10 people or 5 people or whatever. And I’m not even talking about progression raiding.. I’m talking about 5 people screwin’ around in LoL or something.
I guess what I am trying to figure out is, using your analogy: If people are against reservations, how will we EVER meet for dinner, even just 2 or 3 of us?
You don’t have a standing order to meet, i.e. weekly, bi-weekly, or whatever. That doesn’t mean you can’t tweet, text, or otherwise to ask if someone wants to hang out. Remember when you were a kid and you called a friend or went over to a friend’s house to see if they could play? If they can, sweet. If not, you called someone else or played by yourself.
The spontaneity of it makes it all the better. Like how a song on the radio is better than when you play the same song from a CD. Because it randomly happened, it’s somehow more fun/enjoyable.
Thanks for all the comments, folks! I think mostly it’s confirmed my suspicions as correct: there is no reason for guilds or other social structures to exist in the appointment-less, “play with strangers” world. That makes me sad.
My reason for wanting to be in a guild isn’t to necessarily to have people to play with, but rather to have people to talk with while I play. Even in a guild where you have 10 or 15 people on at the same time, if it’s an MMO, they are all playing different level toons, doing different things, so generally, even if there are a lot of people on, I can’t play with them. On the other hand, if we are all in Mumble together, I can run a dungeon in LFG with strangers while talking about dystopian YA fiction with occasional asides on the vagaries of PUGs.
As for Appointment Gaming, I like it, but given a choice between a reliable Appointment and a reliably entertaining guild chat, I will take the guild chat every time.
Oops. That was me being all anonymous.
I think it depends a lot on how you’re defining “a guild.” I don’t think Internet social groups are going anywhere and as social networking gets easier and easier and more interconnected I think they’ll keep growing. But as a single-game, concentrated unit, I think that time has passed only because it will be impossible to have the population to support it.
Before WoW, a million subscriptions was a bonafide phenomenon but now SWTOR’s 700k is considered a disastrous failure. That’s a pretty tremendous shift in worldview in only a handful of years, so it’s only natural to me that the social structure of “a guild” shifts with it. For example, I still consider MCats my guild, even though I don’t technically game with anyone right now.
I think the best way to keep up with decentralized gaming is with decentralized social groups and form your appointments (short term or long) that way.
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Hmm, fair point. The nature of games is changing, so the nature of guilds has to change too. There’s been a definite shift in general from “guild” to “gaming community” in the past couple of years, which makes sense in the face of the changing landscape of MMOs. So I guess now it’s changing again from “gaming community” to, as you say, “Internet social group”.
I just sort of feel like it.. almost precludes actually playing games now. Sure, there’s Twitter and Facebook and IRC and Turntable and websites and stuff but who is actually playing together? (Not the Cats specifically, just in general.) And if we’re not playing things together, then what the heck is all this “social gaming” about, anyway?
I kinda like this; that my circle isn’t limited to the one game anymore. Steam is a brilliant example of how you can meet up and play the same, or also chat while playing side by side. Blizzard also went this way with the cross-game battlenet accounts. so maybe we really need to start thinking of guilds as cross-title and maybe even cross-platform communities. the game forum I used to be very active in worked a little bit like that and people would make spontaneous appointments there for anything, every day.
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Hmm I do think people tend to conflate “my group of players is getting older” with “the MMO population is getting older”. I know I have grown deeply weary of Appointment Gaming as I move through the phases of life. I think Shintar is on to something when she says it isn’t age per se, actually Appointment Gaming works really well for college students and also people in their 20s and perhaps early 30s, that still have lives on schedule. But kids are just random (and intensive) in their demands, and so are careers as you hit late 30s and 40s. And personally I think my interest in Appointment Gaming might well rise again when I am retired, i.e. when I lack structure and rigidity in my daily life, and hence don’t object to it in my gaming life.
You can see this at any golf club (I don’t play but I know people that do), you get people very active in 20s and 30s, then activity collapses for all but the dedicated pros, then activity surges again in the 50s. Personally, I hate golf, but the analogy works.
So it’s natural that “we” all feel that Appointment Gaming is becoming a thing of the past, and that the current batch of MMOs play on that as the big wave of the first MMO (read WoW) generation fall out of love with raiding, which I most certainly have. Me, I’ll try GW2, and see if that works. If not, Halo 4 is out later this year, and you can always get a multiplayer game on consoles. No social interaction per se, admittedly, but I’m not getting a lot of that in MMOs any more anyway :)
I can’t remember if I am one of the guild mates referenced in the posts here, but I definitely recall the conversation about appointment gaming and focus-shifting and the like. It’s definitely something that I’ve been struggling with recently, too – both before and after I gave up WoW raiding.
For me, I think that some of the hesitation is actually an involuntary reaction to the feelings that I had when I stopped raiding in WoW. At that point, I was doing three nights a week (at highly inconvenient times – 6-9pm, essentially giving up my entire night), as well as occasionally jumping in to help out with another “side” raid. AND maintaining a weekly D&D game with local friends. I’d been doing most of that for a couple years in a row, and for a lot of the recent months been doing it on my own – while my wife was occupied with other things or had simply retired earlier on than I had. That basically left us with 2 nights a week where we had any chance to do anything together (sometimes gaming, sometimes things that we actually needed to get done) and put a lot of pressure on our weekends.
Since then, I have basically cut out everything but the D&D game – for which I am now able to be a lot more accommodating in schedule – and the freedom is really nice. I don’t have to worry about the fact that I let other people down because I wanted to watch a couple episodes of Misfits one night. And I think a lot of my current apprehension to scheduling things is that I don’t want to fall into that routine of every night being games-first night. After that, there are just the usual scheduling conflicts, and being in a group that has people from both coasts – or having different weekend vs weekday obligations.
I also tend to feel like I’m falling behind in games these days, since I have been spreading out my playtime across multiple places. Which puts me at a disadvantage in something like RIFT raiding or maintaining pace with a group of LoL fighters or Dungeon Defenders. I think there would be a place to make a commitment to a night a week of “let’s play X game together, and then not touch those characters outside of that cooperative time” among active, working people with lots of other commitments.
I haven’t played WoW in a couple of years, but the way we handled the issue was by fostering alliances with other small guilds. We had our scheduled 10-man raid times and they had theirs if any of us needed roles filled, we’d reach out to the other guilds to see who was online.
Occasionally, we’d team up to do 25 or 40-mans.
I think it worked out quite well.