Loners playing Team Games.

I’ve always considered myself a little strange in my choice of favored games. I love games that involve in depth teamwork. Obvious ideal games would be MMOs for raiding or tactical FPS’s that have a core around skill base rather than spreadsheet dispersions, culminating in a focus on team tactics for superiority in most situations.

What makes this strange is the fact that I dislike grouping with people in online environments. I often prefer to go do my own set tasks at my leisure, unless it’s absolutely impossible to accomplish the task without group members, and often I’d just wait for guild members to log on that also need to complete the task rather than pursuing a pick up group.

So what draws me to games that are often very socially dependent when I more than often prefer to play alone? It’s a strange trend I’ve noticed with a lot of other mmo players as well. Avoid the partying up until absolutely necessary.

So where do players like myself come from? We enjoy social aspects of games, but don’t want to commit to them. We enjoy the challenge that a group dynamic can provide, but dislike teaming up in the first place.

For myself, there are a couple of reasons that I dislike partying in an MMO or otherwise.

Player competency: I’ve never expected people to do more than I would in a game; I still have high expectations for myself. If we are doing new content, I’d want to read up on it before we’d go there so it wasn’t a blind shoot and wasting many other peoples time.  On the other hand, I cannot expect some players to have as much time set around a game as myself, and ultimately can be lead to disappointment.  I feel rather than go through those hoops, I’d rather just make my time in-game as efficient as possible towards character improvement, and as such, stay alone.

Task Balance:  Often in MMO’s, there are quest lines.  Rather than a quest that has you perform one task, and reap a reward, you must complete a chain of quests in an often grander scope for a generally grander prize at the end.  Often though, players may offer you help on a portion of a quest such as this, but then ask for your help to catch up first.

Polar Play styles:  Sometimes I’ll group up with people, and my play style is simply the opposite of someone else to the point that it makes my game play experience intolerable.

I believe this comes down to the “My character did this…” and “I did this in…” element.

Theories have been made concerning the simple fact that more often than not, a person will indicate themselves as the performing character when talking about a game play experience, not their character.  I believe some people, this extends much further along in their personal expectations for game performance.

Perhaps this is due to personal goals, sheer competitiveness, or downright lack of friends; in any case the duties of a group feel brought down to their purest form when the player focuses just on their part of contribution.

Often in a group setting a players role as support may gray what they contributed to the overall sum, especially in days of percentile difference stats in MMOs, etc.  If a player removes the situation of a team they depend on, and throws themselves in as a player with no real side (still fighting for one team or another of course), they can better gauge exactly how much their affect on a game truly was.

A strong example for me has been Halo 3 ranked matches.  In ranked Team Slayer, I managed to get a rank up to 37ish.  At this point, I stalled out and could not get any further in rankings due to the amount of opposite teams that worked together in unison compared to a pick up group.  I moved over to Ranked Lone Wolves, and in the same amount of time managed to get up to 44.  This showed me that my private actions in a scenario often brought me ahead of a group, but in a group setting I was not contributing as much as I should.

Often it is hard to tell truly how much a player contributes to their team with 32 or 64 player games going on at any time.  Stats like “Support damage done” for kills a player does not actually get, but contributed, help.  But they do not indicate how well a player actually is at their roll to another.

Right now, I believe, the only way for a person to truly gauge how good a player is against other players, is to separate themselves from the team they are randomly placed with, ignore the situations the group may be in unless immediate (formulating a plan would not help this process), and see how well the individual can perform by themselves in a group cohesion environment.

Through this way, the player is capable of gauging their “true skill”.

Plus, it feels pretty good to take on a whole team by yourself and win sometimes.