Brand X wrote:

Though should be said, CoH was able to be played by yourself without teaming rather easily as well.

Sure CoH was a fairly soloable game - teaming wasn't required for a vast majority of it.

I guess the point I was trying to make in my last post was there were plenty of times where I actually "desired" to team in CoH regardless if I strictly "needed" to team or not. For me CoH made teaming an overall enjoyable activity. On the other hand while teaming might be helpful in ESO (for earning XP quicker if nothing else) I have yet to have an overwhelming urge (much less need) to even bother trying to find a team.

It's hard to explain but there just doesn't seem to be any favorable "vibe" towards PvE teaming at all in ESO. Obviously the end-game PvP is geared towards guilds/teaming - I'm just saying the PvE side of it seems depressingly 100% solo-oriented so far.

Gangrel wrote:

I *think* that this is *partly* because of how "open world" games can work though. If you are able to just join up with someone by just being next to them and help them out, without having to go through the process of "invite to team" and then having the person zone into your instance... then I can see as to why people are not so willing to form teams.
Side note: This is why I personally prefer the "no mob tagging" process in MMO's. I feel that everyone should be able to hit on a mob and get loot/XP from it... even if the mob is way low level than you, you should be able to at least get loot from it.
Now, I am not aware of ESO doing Mob Tagging or not., or if there are "team only" buffs that you can give out or not. These are also factors as to why teaming could be more or less present.
It could also be due to the nature of the players as well... although Teaming was handy in CoX, it wasn't required... and on the quieter servers you tended to find it more clique as to if you could get a team or not, even if there were enough players in the mission.
For me, I didn't like that in CoX you had to drop a mission that you were doing, starting *another* mission, and then having to restart yours from scratch (unless it was an outside mission typically). That was a bug bear of mine, and why I would typically not "drop everything" to help someone out immediately. I would tell them to wait.
However, it was annoying being on the receiving end of this from people that I do not know.. but I can understand why it can be annoying.

Nothing's perfect - there were of course some drawbacks to how teaming in CoH worked.

Perhaps I just ultimately liked the general "play paradigm" of CoH as regards to how it approached teaming versus soloing in PvE than in most other games. So far the mostly "open world" scheme of ESO just seems like it's following the boringly "cookie-cutter MMO" model of being a strict solo-player race to level 50 in order to play in a PvP dominated end-game. That's fine if you like that sort of thing - sadly I might just have to wait for CoT before I seriously jump into another game. *shrugs*

Gangrel wrote:

So when you are saying "team up with others", is it having people *actually* in a team, or just having people in the area able to complete the same missions without necessarily having to be in a "team".
Because both of those are different. For me with Guild Wars 2, I rarely "teamed" up with others (ie being in a group with a leader), although I did play with others quite a bit, as they were doing the content as me.
I will state that this is more of a change of general playerbase as well.... I noticed that in the early life of CoX (EU server here), teaming was regular, you would get chit chat in the server zones and a general sense of "server community".
However as time progressed, that declined as well... even amongst the players who had been there for a long time, where they wouldn't team with those necessarily out of those who were not in their circle of friends.
In the end, it ended up with people playing by themselves... CoX really did make it easy to play the game without having to need a team... but this seemed to be aimed at the general player base as well... more soloable content, where teaming was not required (exception being the incarnate stuff.... but that is really a progression of the Taskforce/Strike force requirements).
But in general, the difficulty of the game *declined* from what it was initially... to make it more "accessible" and friendly to others, where teaming was *optional*.
And it wasn't just CoX though... it was practically genre wide in the MMO space.

When I say "teaming" I mean actually joining together (using whatever mechanism the game provides) to ostensibly gain the advantage of faster XP or buffage. I don't really consider random people running around coincidentally attacking the same critters I am in an open world setting to be "teaming" with me, even if we technically follow each other around for a period of time.

I realize that CoH used a relatively large amount of instanced content compared to most MMOs and frankly after 8.5 years of it I kind of got used to it. Even though it appears that ESO avoids "kill stealing" by giving you loot even if you manage to scratch a critter that other people kill I'm still finding it a little off-putting (immersion breaking?) to have to deal with random live munchkins hopping around chaotically in dungeons. Maybe I just got too used to Skyrim (I played a few hundred hours of that) where the entire game world was essentially a "solo instance" experience. ;)

Gangrel wrote:

Lothic wrote:
When I say "teaming" I mean actually joining together (using whatever mechanism the game provides) to ostensibly gain the advantage of faster XP or buffage. I don't really consider random people running around coincidentally attacking the same critters I am in an open world setting to be "teaming" with me, even if we technically follow each other around for a period of time.

Fair enough, the reason why I asked for the clarification is because people complained about the lack of "teaming" in Guild Wars 2 with the exception of the instanced content because you *didn't* have to be teamed up with someone else for them to be able to help you with open world stuff.

I guess my ESO teaming "complaint" (it's more like a mild annoyance) is along the lines of what you were describing with those people in GW2.

For me it just boils down to what I want to do while playing the game. Sometimes I specifically like to solo, other times I specifically like to team. With the "open world" style of play you really have zero control over what other people are doing around you so you basically can't "solo" when you have people randomly flying in killing everything and at the same time you're not really "teaming" either because there's no real tactical coordination going on.

Gangrel wrote:

Quote:
I realize that CoH used a relatively large amount of instanced content compared to most MMOs and frankly after 8.5 years of it I kind of got used to it. Even though it appears that ESO avoids "kill stealing" by giving you loot even if you manage to scratch a critter that other people kill I'm still finding it a little off-putting (immersion breaking?) to have to deal with random live munchkins hopping around chaotically in dungeons. Maybe I just got too used to Skyrim (I played a few hundred hours of that) where the entire game world was essentially a "solo instance" experience. ;)

Yep, I can see why it would be immersion breaking, especially coming from a game IP which has been (up until now) entirely Single Player (Multi player mods excluded of course)
However, for me CoX had "immersion breaking" in that you could enter the same building as someone else, both of you have the same mission, and just because you were not on their team, you never saw them inside the building.
Tis nice though to know that you can still get loot from mobs that you help kill, even if you are not teamed up with someone though.

Yeah I can accept there was a certain amount of "immersion breaking" with CoH's instanced missions as well. The thing that always made me smirk a little was when the "outside" area of the mission didn't match the "inside" map of the mission. For instance you travel to what looks like a cave entrance and when you jump inside you end up in one of the "office building" maps.

The lack of "kill stealing" in ESO is nice. But just last night I saw another example of "camping a MOB" that just never seemed to happen in CoH. I was running through this relatively empty dungeon and suddenly saw like a dozen players just standing in one spot for no instantly apparent reason. I sat there and watched for a few minutes and as it turned out about every 30 seconds a MOB would pop up in the middle of the group and they would insta-kill it in just a couple of seconds. I barely ever saw what it was but it was clear it was some kind of "boss" that was likely dropping some kind of semi-rare loot.

I suppose every game has its own features that ruin immersion one way or the other. Maybe it's just a matter of what you get used to and what you don't.