Designing massively multiplayer games for multiple players

[rob]

This article sums up much of how I feel about traditional MMO design.

[amitp]

And the comments match my experiences with GW2. I don't know of a good solution that tackles both the difficulty curve and the desire to have more players.

[sirnull]

on the flip side(from the comments on that post):

Redwolf said:

Good points, though I find myself wondering if there's some better middle ground when playing Guild Wars 2. The shared credit mechanisms there avoid most of what the post describes. On the other hand, you end up with informally-gathered groups of people running around a zone "zerging" events in sequence. It's efficient, but it is also (at least in my opinion) incredibly boring and subjects individuals to ridicule if they do their own thing and finish an event out of order.

[rob]

One thing we've had a little success with is putting area-effect attacks on enemies, so that the amount of aggregate damage an enemy can dish out increases with the number of players. We could take it even further and have the enemy shoot N lasers if there are N players around.

Overall, we're going for "the more the merrier" -- it should always be better to group up than go solo, and nobody should be able to negatively affect your gameplay experience in any way. Obviously we'll never reach this ideal, but this is what we shoot for.