I was going through reddit and I came across a post in which a bunch of old WOW players were talking about the "good old days" for the game. After a bit of scanning through and reading what they said about the game 'back then' vs the current version of it, one thing struck me that seemed almost too simple.
More or less, the old content used to require you to work with other people because it was near impossible to do everything completely by yourself. However, over the years, WOW held the player's hand more and gave them tools to make things easier (Dungeon Finder, Quest Tracker, Etc.). Some of the things originally required, like the need for group finding, the challenge of the content, and the feelings of accomplishment, all faded away and made the game very impersonal. This helped to kill the guilds and other social systems pretty quickly. Nowadays, WOW is a shadow of what it used to be, in part due to these social issues.
So, here's what I would like to say to the devs:
-Put a good amount of focus on maintaining a good, user-friendly chat interface. Most of the stories that people have of CoH and other old games they played usually involve their Guild/SuperGroup, Friends, or groups they invested a good deal of time, effort, and emotion in. A good chat interface enables all of these connections. Plus, enjoying a game with friends is just always more fun than doing it solo.
-Don't hold our hands too much, let us figure out some of the details and content by ourselves or with the help of others (that we find); It lets us build friendships and connections in the game, which keeps people coming back to the game for more. My favorite example of content like this is the Clone Factory arc on Redside in CoH; getting a huge group for the 'Army of Me' badge on almost all of my redside toons. I ended up making a good deal of friends with just this arc and I wound up doing missions regularly with these people as we leveled our toons.
Nothing too heavy, but I felt like throwing my hat in. Appreciate the great work you all have done so far, and I am looking forward to the game's release! =D
-Felphon
I think the CoT devs know well the importance of community and teamwork in a game like this. They seem to have learned the lessons of CoH in a way that some at Cryptic did not - or at least considering how Champions Online turned out that seems to be the case. Then again many of the great things about CoH were "happy accidents".
This touches on the classic debate about how much content should be "soloable" in a MMORPG. A game like CoT is going to have to find the proper balance between "forcing" people to team versus making things so easy that you could sail through the entire game solo.
There'll always be a few strict anti-social diehards who'll want to be able to do everything 100% solo. A game like CoT will never make those few people completely happy and it shouldn't go too far out of its way to try. On the other hand most of the time when people say they "hate to team" it isn't because they hate other people as much as they hate how hard it is to get a workable team together in the first place. Having good chat and team finder tools are essential to making the teaming experience fun.
I tend to think that a game like CoT should have its content divided into three rough categories: There should be about 1/3 of it that's easily soloable by almost anyone, another 1/3 that's soloable by dedicated soloists who are willing to min/max their characters to overcome the challenge and the final 1/3 that really needs a team to succeed. I don't think its unreasonable to "force" at least a few team play situations in a MMO - otherwise it might as well be a single player game.
But again having the proper team finding/building tools are essential for that. I firmly believe most of the people who say they "hate" to team say that mostly because they hate the process you have to go through to get teams built in the first place. They don't hate the gameplay; they hate the hassle of getting the teams ready to go.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Yes, devs know about the necessity to have a real community and take care about it.
But it's a good think to keep in mind that we want content with a huge part of group because solo game, it's not MMO.
So, it's nice to remind it
I'm not sure I agree with Lothic on the relative percentages, but I agree with the idea of making some content (like task forces, trials, and raids) not soloable, at all, by design and to gate them as such. Like the Hamidon, the Rikti Mothership, TFs with required minimums to start them, etc.
Some dedicated soloists have, in the past on these forums, demanded a 100% soloable game, including the right to try to do content that was never intended to be soloed and is for all intents and purposes impossible to do solo, and to that I think the answer should be "No." Requiring a team to be allowed to do certain content should definitely be "in play" as far as I'm concerned. It puts the "multiplayer" in MMO, as people have said, and I don't want to lose that just because some people don't like teaming up and want to be able to do everything there is in the game by themselves.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
If we can make the hypothetical assumption that 20-30% of the overall total content of CoT will be made up of Trials/TFs (that as you say require teams by design) then you might be able to pretty much agree with my ballpark soloable versus unsoloable percentages. As I said I would expect roughly 70-80% of the game to be soloable (to one degree or another) and the rest not. Obviously that's give or take 5 or 10% since there was no need to be hyper-accurate with the numbers here since everything's a guesstimate at this point. *shrugs*
Yes I pretty much asserted that the relatively small minority who'd want to be able to solo 100% of the game should NOT be catered to. If they want a 100% soloable game they should play a SINGLE player game.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I'm perfectly willing to let the die-hard soloist [i]try[/i] to solo the 'requires a team' content. In no way does this mean that said content has to be possible to solo. >:)
I agree that a "perfect" game would technically allow anybody to try anything even if say 20% of the total content would cause effectively anyone trying to play it solo to constantly faceplant. Let the individual player decide how masochistic they want to be. ;)
The idea of having "artificial" teaming requirements are just that - artificial. I fully understand and accept that CoT will probably still have strict requirements along the lines of "you must have 4+ teammates to play Trial XYZ". But those are just semi-lazy metagame restrictions that, again in a perfect game, could be enforced in some better, more lore friendly way. I realize the Devs don't always have the luxury to figure out a better way to do things so having enforced teamplay is the workable (if not fully desirable) solution to this.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I'm in favor of having a metagame comment on the mission saying something like '4 players are recommended to run this mission'. If you want to override the suggestion and run it with 3, good luck to you. Now, if there's something in the mission that [b]requires[/b] a certain number of people, like one player activating Device A while another triggers Switch B, then you have the 'No, you gotta have two' requirement. While it may be possible to design the missions in such a way that even those requirements can shift depending on the number of people in the mission (Cavern of Transcendence and you only have 6 people? Then we have 6 pillars!), that's extra effort for the devs.
I sway in the wind on this one. I'm not sure I agree with gating content for a minimum number of players. If you are a bit depressive/anxious like myself and teaming makes you feel weird on a particular day then I'd like to see the content scale. Especially if that content is related to character progression. (meaning unlocking new power like incarnates) at the same time I believe that this is an MMO and you can't make everything fit for everyone all the time. In COH it'd have been nice if there was a TF lite option that allowed me to do missions and take in the story at my own pace, rather than worrying about holding up the team while I read this through the dialog sequence. Or allowing a duo to do what a full team normally would. I'm not a fan of hard lines in the sand. Make it full of gray areas and mushy.
Anyway. I think the devs have a pretty good grasp on what made the game and their two points of emphasis in the kickstarter were the character creator and the chat. Things they planned to have running before the game IIRC. COH's chat setup is still one of the best I've ever used.
Second Chance: https://store.missingworldsmedia.com/CityOfTitans/SecondChance/
Dev Tracker: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/fixing-dev-digest
Dev Comments: https://cityoftitans.com/forum/dev-comments
Maybe something the Devs could consider is having all the text/lore of certain important trials be unlockable and accessible in some kind of in-game "logbook" or some-such. The idea is that as you race through the trial the game would unlock chunks of the text at key points so that you can go back and re-read it all whenever you want sort of like a text-based souvenir of your experience. That way if you happen to be with a team that doesn't care to slow down to "enjoy the story" you'll be able to review all that stuff after the trial.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
That's something that I would have liked in CoX, too. I always thought that it'd be nice to have a recap of the TF available to review. Maybe as a description on the souvenirs you'd sometimes get.
Considering how Star Trek Online is going, Cryptic is pretty resolutely set AGAINST learning anything from City of Heroes.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Different Reward Structure?
I don't have a concrete proposal, but what if a particular missions or TFs or Arcs or whathaveyou, required you to team to get the Primary or Maximum Reward? But allowed you to do a scaled down solo version for a simple XP or something? Likewise, just to be fair, certain missions could require you to complete them solo for the Maximum Reward. That way you could experience the story either way and adjust the experience you have to your liking. But if you're in it for the Ultimate Gear you need to jump through the hoop.
That's kind of the direction I was going with the TFlite idea. Lower difficulty, scaled as the user likes, with EB's instead of AV's or GMs with a matching reward.
Second Chance: https://store.missingworldsmedia.com/CityOfTitans/SecondChance/
Dev Tracker: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/fixing-dev-digest
Dev Comments: https://cityoftitans.com/forum/dev-comments
Ah, I only got the 'store the mission dialogs for later' part, which is also a great idea.
I'd still like to encourage players to dip their toes into other styles of gameplay, while giving them an alternative if the aftertaste is too unpleasant. So this gives an incentive to introverts and diehard individualists to try a team, and conversely, if you've only ever leaned on teammates, to strike out on your own now and then.
Agreed. I like the idea of having both options. Well...because I liked having options with CoH.
I might be in the mood to solo things for a lot of reasons:
[list]
[*]Playing at odd hours when there are few players online
[*]Playing my AR/Dev Blaster which by design was more fun to take at a slow pace to figure out how to get through missions without dying by using strategy
[*]Playing my Fire Controller to just wreak glorious havoc and see what kind of drops I could get
[/list]
Then there were the times I was in the mood to team:
[list]
[*]Hami raids!
[*]Various TF's
[*]All Controller teams (omg I loved those!)
[*]Newspaper mish teams
[*]AV mish teams
[/list]
I played on Freedom so I could have more options on that. I knows others played on less populated servers where teaming may have been less of an option.
I understand how some may not have enjoyed building a team too. I liked it. As you said, CoH had the tools for that. The search function was great and I would send out polite tells explaining what I was doing. I can see how that would not be for everyone since not everyone has that kind of personality. You also usually have to replace members along the way since people tend to come and go. You can almost hear the clock ticking if it takes more than a minute to find a replacement. I hate keeping people waiting. As team leader, you've got to juggle keeping everyone happy by doing their missions too. That's pressure not everyone would want to deal with. And with something like a STF you really need to build the team right. I could definitely see some players not feeling comfortable with that since I didn't feel that comfortable with it either.
So it's easy to just say "Form your own team", but not everyone is built that way so having that solo option for them is pretty important. I'm not sure how that sort of thing could be made less intimidating, but if that's possible, it could help.
I love this idea. I rarely read anything in CoH because I always hated to make people wait on me.
If the intended-for-groups content, e.g. the Task Forces have a minimum number needed to start, like CoX, but then you could try to bypass that regulation somehow, like making the team vote on it and if the vote is unanimous, letting them try, then I'd be okay with that. That said, I would NOT want the game to scale the TF content down any farther than whatever the intended team minimum size would be, like ever. Part of the the fun and challenge of the Task Force is to form a reasonably good team and keep it together long enough to finish the content. That is the function that such content serves. If they avoid making TFs take 2+hours like some of the CoX ones, then I think this will be alright. I predict that people who consider soloing their "preferred play style" will complain that these TFs are too hard to do solo and ask that they be scaled down for the smaller team/soloist to be able to actually finish them. I would take a hard line stance against ever doing that, and inform the players publicly that such content is INTENDED to get people to team up into groups of at least the stated minimum size.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Positron's TF was considered the Longest, so they split it.
MWM can do something like that as well... and as time goes on, add a 3rd, or 4th parts... all suited for different level ranges, of course. ;)
On a technical level there are practically zero reasons in forced minimum team size on something akin to a "task force". As far as a game balance issue, the key is in developing a proper dynamic scaling on both encounter, maps, obectives, and reward metrics.
In this way, as I've mentioned elseshwere on the topic, we don't end up making players jump through hoops which history has proven to be both circumventable and also prohibitve in other ways for grouping situations.
Most people who want to solo this type of content are usually in it for the challenge, not to seeking to make it play like regualr content. A simple warning of the higher base difficulty serves the purpose of letting the player know upfront what they're about to get into.
To incentivize teaming, the dubamic scaling would yield better reward rates, different challenges (which unlock achievements) which yield rewards. Even something as simple as a different badge for completion based on solo and team performance plays a role in this function.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
I'm not against the "more rewards per person if you do it with a larger team, and thus face a stiffer challenge" idea. But that raises another question in my mind: in CoX, you had to have the minimum size to start with then everyone could just drop, leaving the last toon to try to do the thing solo. Are we going to allow people to come and go from TFs in CoT? And by TFs I mean "repeatable, multi-mission content sets with an end boss and the promise of better than usual rewards at the end for success" whatever they end up being called.
Because if there is some different way of handling people leaving and coming back, or people who weren't on the original team being added in later, then the dividing line between TFs and just another story arc from a contact gets ever blurrier. Also, if the team size tends to change on the fly like that, and the rewards at the end are based on team size, what team size, specifically, does the rewards table care about? What you started with? What you ended with? What your average team size was overall (however that would get computed)? Are we setting a team size at the beginning of the TF, like a difficulty setting such that the TF spawns mobs based on that size, whatever the team composition ends up being? If so, do we have the ability to ratchet down that stetting if and when people drop? Assuming that is possible, the rewards would re-scale for the new team size, right?
If that's the way you want to do it, and the per-person rewards go up based on team size (as a difficulty setting) then I'm fine with it. I dislike the idea of one toon getting a Synthetic HamiO for soloing a Statesman TF after having had the difficulty watered down to the point where that's possible, but I'm okay with that toon getting rewards comparable to what they'd get for finishing a story arc for an NPC contact.
Then, over time, as power creep sets in, people might actually be able to solo a TF set to "4-person" difficulty. If they can, more power to them, but this also sends a message to the devs that the power creep is becoming a thing and that the rewards and/or difficulties might have to be tweaked.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Maybe for low level TF's it can scale... Even if you're SOLOing it, everyone else left, Minimum still being balanced for 2 players.
And for other TF's, the higher it gets, Minimum goes up as well to match the balance.
TF's aren't light missions to be done on a whimsy. It should be though and preparations, planning, tactics and the like need to be thought through, taking notes from previous encounters, and tweaking your approach for the next pass.
SOLO play of a TF to me is something that should Not be the Norm, but an Anomaly. Especially the higher you are in levels. :[
There were a couple of reasons for the task force mode flag being placed on a character in the old game. It happens in other games too that both lock out others for raids in progress and some that allow people to come and go. When we last broached the subject, we liked the idea of flexiblity for task forces, but also recognize there are some hurdles that need to be overcome in order work within the system we need to deploy for it to work. But just because people can come and go from something like a task force doesn't automatically invalidate the form of content.
Part of the dynamic scaling system would be that there is a base reward rate and type available for even the solo person - because they would be completing content with a higher base difficulty than standard content. Dynamic scaling would adjust for team sizes going up and down to the content's base to the content's maximum. We even discussed, and by the way I must stress that none of this is definitely going to or not going to happen - but we discussed preventing door camping to manipulate the dynamic scaling system so a person could still solo even greater difficulties, of which could still require players to be active due to multiple simultaneous actions being required, to player-tether ranges for the scaling to operate.
As for the concern that power creep setting in, you must first come to accept that it can and will set in. Then you have to accept that players will figure out ways to manipulate and / or break any system you have in place. However, when it comes to performance based systems, you can design them in such a way as in to have a good understanding what the possible maxims of performance are (as well as minimums). The concern of solo players completing tf-like content being the primary causes for possible problems to the game ends up being minor when in comparison to what can happen when you have groups of well built characters working together.
Just because there will be players who get to the point where they are soloing 'task force level content' doesn't also automatically indicate the need for reward rate adjustments either. The rewards obtained may not even be directly of necessity for these players either if 'power creep' is the cause. They may simply do it because they couldn't before. What typically drives the necessity for adjusting rewards is the big picture view of how players in general are successfully completing content in a given metric of time. If the rewards are appearing at a faster rate than intended over all, then we have an indicator that something may need to be changed. I say may because sometimes the rewards at the state of the game may not have a significant negative impact (the impact could even be a positive one!). There are many factors involved.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
The way you worded "task force" made me wonder how much trouble it is for you guys to come up with new names for things. On one hand, I'm sure you want to have things sound similar for CoH players. ...But on the other hand, you don't want to risk it sounding stupid for a player who never played CoH.
So "Trekking Fracas" would give the CoH players their "TF" shorthand, but would sound silly to someone else.
Good to know you guys aren't planning to balance things around the power gamers' capabilities. I was a pretty average player so a game balanced around the uber players would be pretty tough for me to play.
Also, I spent more time min/maxing characters depending upon how I wanted to play them. I had a couple which were pretty tough to kill, which were used for the times when I wanted to feel powerful. Other characters were just built normally for regular play. A balance around my tough characters would destroy the point of them in the first place and make my normal characters into gimps.
Regardless of people's play styles, solo vs cooperative, etc, there are problems with a TF's team size changing during the TF itself, and those will have to be addressed in some way.
1. You get a TF going, then all the sudden, like EVERYONE that's not in that TF team wants to get in it RIGHT before you're done so as to get the end reward for as little work (or as little time spent in the TF) as possible.
2. You get a TF going, then the leader kicks everyone out right before the end so that he alone gets the rewards.
3. You get a TF going with 6 people, two get DCed or have to leave all the sudden right before the end boss keels over, and the TF issues rewards based on the new smaller team size, despite the fact that larger team did 99% of the TF together.
4. The classic case of a loafer that agrees to start the TF with your team, then disappears, then reappears around the time you've dispensed with the scut work and gotten to the end boss.
The reward payouts should be structured to deal with this stuff for as far as this stuff is even possible. The more of that stuff you outright prevent by TF entry/exit rules, the less you have to deal with when the rewards come due. I don't have an answer to this problem or a system that I think works in all cases, so it scares me a little.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
1. Time spent in the task force is a possible metric.
2. This can happen regardless of a strict task force mode flag or not with no dynamic scaling or with. Coding out the reward system to check for team size at the upon completion of the content could help in this regard.
3. Players who are in the tf still obtain higher rewards than having run normal content. Does it suck because the DC happened ar the wrong moment? I'd say those who got DC'd at the worst possible moment are the ones who miss out. If time spent is a metric, and their is a check, having a timer placed on the account-character level in case of a DC where players can rejoin, splitting hairs over a fraction of the total time of the content shouldn't cause significant changes to the reward structure.
4. See number 1. And this can still be gamed by simply going afk for long periods of time with little or no activity inbetween. This is when the team leader needs to make a judgement call on whether or not to boot said loafer. If players can exit / reenter a tf - again it is up to the team leader to allow or not allow someone to join.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
I wonder if Time is the best metric. It might be better to come up with something more involved. IE (power activations)/(total activations by team) whilst in TF instance yields reward tier. This way any player needs to be involved and active to get the full reward. I chose power activations or damage dealt to handle controllers and defender types who might be very active and critical to the teams function without necessarily dealing heavy damage. Even this isn't perfect because any non-instanced event wouldn't count which would be a problem for the massive open world hunts in the DrQ type TFs. Or a player could stand in a corner auto-firing powers via a macro without actually being effective or helpful. In any event a more intelligent metric could be determined rather than just straight time.
As far as calling this content a TF now, it's primarily to prevent confusion. It clearly defines the type of content being discussed. It'll probably continually be referred to as such until just shy of beta.
Second Chance: https://store.missingworldsmedia.com/CityOfTitans/SecondChance/
Dev Tracker: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/fixing-dev-digest
Dev Comments: https://cityoftitans.com/forum/dev-comments
I said a metric, not the metic. Power activations would not be a good metric to use due to the disparity of activity between sets would be too large to apply a unified metric to adequately.
And would still require time as part of its metric because you're looking at a number if activations which equates to a time of activity. If we bring it all the way down to a single power which can be auto-fired in a given unit of time, the gauge could b met wither too easily leaving it open to someone doing very little or too many activatons where a poorer player (for whatever reason they are poorer including a family playing with their handi-capable chlld) not doing enough to hit the threshold (because they didn't auto-fire the right power or something equally unreasonable).
Power activations could also be a metric but with a cery low bar being a sufficient power that could be auto-fired, it would still be a minor part of the larger equations. One that still relies on time.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
I am not on the composition, lore, or writing teams in any way; I speak here only as a fellow fan.
One way to justify teams being critical in stories about supers (and stories in general) is to eventually require splitting up. This is actually a format of RPG which is uniquely suited to such things, as well, since there is no single GM whose attention gets divided. The split groups can genuinely operate in parallel.
Another thing which might require teaming is if multiple parallel tasks are required for various parts of the mission. If you can't get hit even once while doing a stealth-breaking, concentration-intensive task (and if you do get hit, you must start over), then you need one task-doer and at least one person to keep everybody else off of the task-doer. Add several tasks, and this gets more complex.
So there are ways, potentially, to do "forced-team" missions and not have them be purely artificial; failure being assured with too few participants can be a thing without any "cheating" by the developers.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
I don't see any reason to 'force' teaming. Yes, yes, I recognize that there is, was, and should be some content which any sane person would want/need back-up on. There could, certainly be content with multiple vectors of approach or escape, which would need teammates to cover them all. I played missions where the most important asset was Control, failed them, and went shopping for a partner to help me keep the bad-guy from escaping.
So, teaming will happen, or it won't, but I don't see the value in deliberately crafting content for the express purpose of 'making' the players form teams.
Be Well!
Fireheart
I like the challenge of doing content that you can't do alone. I think that some stories, some villains, some encounters can happen such that one hero could never do it all by him or her self, and would know that from the beginning. I mean, that was to some extent the plot of the first Superman movie. Lex Luthor wants to make a killing in real estate, so he launches two nuclear warheads at two different targets on opposite coasts in order to force Superman to save one but not the other, since even he cannot be in two places at one time. Now, if he had someone else helping him, like the Green Lantern, piece of cake. As it was he had to do some totally impossible, made up, non-physics-allowed time travel BS to pull it off.
I mean, I guess what I'm saying is, these encounters and stories which are impossible to succeed with just one toon can happen, theoretically, in the game world, and could exist as missions and so forth in the immersive and roleplay-ish sense. That being the case, I think the game would be missing something if we didn't have that stuff in there in some places. Thus, I think we should let the devs design content like that for that reason. If anything, placing the limitation on the designers that everything MUST be scalable down to one person teams is somewhat unrealistic. Certainly possible to code it up like that, but unrealistic in the immersion and roleplay sense. There are some things a one-person team simply cannot do, and those things could happen, sometimes.
Whether its a hard team size gate like CoX had, or just a strong recommendation by the NPC with a lot of "Are you sure Y/N?" pop up dialog boxes to scare the players into reconsidering is a minor detail, to me. If you want to be allowed to attempt the "Save the world from the TWO nuclear missiles traveling in opposite directions " mission by yourself, the game might allow for that to happen, somehow, but in the roleplay sense, you're demanding to be allowed to try to do something that everyone, including you, knows you'll be unable to actually do, and the fate of the world (or maybe just one person's life) hang's in the balance. Or, maybe, you're agreeing with the NPC giving you the mission that it will require at least two people, but then you're irresponsibly going "Pfffft! I got this, I'ma do it solo. Watch `iss, y'all!" then falling flat on your face and letting the world get destroyed (or the hostage killed) because you prefer to save the world by yourself or not at all, regardless of the outcome.
I think anyone who lists soloing as their preferred play style, and then insists on it to the exclusion of other play styles, should not have the right to expect to be able to actually successfully do every mission, trial, task force, raid, etc in the game. If you want to be allowed to attempt them, okay, but don't complain to me that you failed and got serious dirty looks from the NPC afterward about it. I think that is an unrealistic expectation, given the limitations of being just one person and the fact that some missions are impossible to solo successfully. I think that the team-oriented content in question should either have hard team size gating, or else some kind of in-game consequences for attempting to do it solo when you know you'll fail and then, predictably, failing.
But that's just me.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Easiest example of this kind of thing that I can think of is what essentially amounts to "time gating" specific mission components. Defend McGuffin for 3 minutes kind of stuff. If you have multiples of those, you can set a success bonus for splitting up the Team to do them in parallel, rather than sequentially. So if there's 3 of them and they have to be done in 3 minutes each (can't be shorter) and you set the bonus reward to trigger upon completing all 3 of them in 8 minutes or less ... you basically set up a "split the group to get the bonus" motivation.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Even though I spent more time soloing than teaming I have no objection to creating content that requires a team but I like this idea.
Incentivizing teaming without requiring it is probably the closest we could get to keeping the dedicated soloists and the dedicated teamers happy.
"I don't think you understand the gravity of your situation."
Star Trek Online does this a lot with their structuring of ground missions on Kobali Prime, many of which are open world events. There's the regular timed objective (do X in 15 minutes) but for a lot of them there's a bonus reward for doing everything needed quickly, so you have extra objectives of "do X in 5 minutes" to trigger the bonus event. For some of them, it is literally impossible so solo complete in time for the bonus event, but even with just 1 or 2 other Players around (who work together) you can achieve the bonus event. It makes for a very free form kind of gaming experience, where you have casual pickup teaming (without needing to Team Invite) in order to achieve the bonus event for a particular part of the map.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]