Solo vs Grouping, yes it can be a issue can’t it. Lets face it, in games where a group is required and you may not belong to a guild with a ready supply of intelligent, mature players who are eagre to complete the task at hand, grouping means finding a public group which often means dealing with players who have the maturity of a 10 year old and inevitably do something to screw up the outcome of the mission. Or even worse, half the group drops out of the mission as they only needed item X and were farming it but didn’t care to tell you. Ahh yes the joys of grouping.

For me the telling issue with AoC was that so much of the content required a sizable group to access. At the end of the day I just got fed up with not being able to complete significant parts of the game unless I was in a group. Of course any complaint about this led to the inevitable comment, “Join a Guild” but really, I didn’t want to join some guild just to access part of the game. I resented the fact that this was expected. Gamers play how they want to play, not how Developers think they ought to play.

I live in Australia, most MMO’s do not allow us a server of our own and it is often a struggle just to get Devs to nominate a server for Australasian/Oceanic purposes. Accordingly when we play there are fewer players online. Finding a group becomes more difficult. Finding a guild you actually want to be part of is no easy task specially if you are not comfortable whoring yourself to just any guild.

As a result I play with my friends, a few select people who I know in real life who MMO with me. One is my spouse, which mean I either play solo or duo or in a small group. We usually form a little guild that has all the feeling of a group of close friends sharing an activity together should. Why then must we be forced into a large group to access parts of the game? We pay our subscription fee like anyone else, so naturally if we learn that significant parts of the game are not accessible to solo/small groups then that will very much be a determining factor in wether we elect to play any given title.

For my friends and I, we play with who we are comfortable playing with, perhaps this is a result our age and past experiences but it’s how we play and I suspect it is how a lot of players prefer to play MMO’s