What's the point of multi-player games?

[Boomer]

Little rant... I'll try and be concise.

I was thinking about picking up Arma 2 so I could try out the DayZ mod. I watched a few let's play videos on youtube to get a feel of the world and how the player interactions were. What I saw really depressed me. Then I watched some other Arma 2 let's plays centered around various other mods. Same thing each time. Unless the game was being played by a group of friends who already knew each other, there was hardly ever any friendly cooperation, and in DayZ the game play usually consisted of a whole bunch of lone wolf ass clowns running around killing each other for loot and laughing at the very idea of teamwork or cooperation. So what you end up with is servers full of blood thirsty jerks ruining the concept of the trust/buddy system and putting everyone at odds with each other to the point where no one trusts anyone else. So, if that's the case with a lot of these MMOs and game worlds like in Dayz, what exactly is the point of multi-player at all? If I just want to run around by myself and kill enemies, I can play... well, pretty much any single-player shooter or action game on the market. Online gaming with open worlds that encourage teamwork are so rare, you'd think that one like Dayz, where zombies are such a persistent menace, that people would try and work together to fulfill goals and survive. From the videos I watched, the most fun people seemed to have was when they worked together, so why isn't this the case more often?

I see this more often than not in modern games. It seems like the odds run about 70-80% jerks to the minority of people who are trying to have fun and work together. I used to play death matches in Doom and Duke Nuke'em years ago, and back then the majority of gamers seemed to have an understanding that everyone benefited towards surviving and winning if they all got along. Now it just seems like the lowest common denominator has taken over and it has become a lawless world of every man for himself. If that is the way of things now, then I really am glad I gave up online gaming so long ago. Doesn't look like I missed much. Sad to see humanity go that way. Everyone wants to be a cold heartless bastard, and the same tired excuse gets used every time, 'if I don't shoot them first, they'll kill me first, and surviving however you can is the only rule.' Ruthless, inhuman... and not fun. Who wants to lag out on a server full of assholes who'd rather shoot you in the back than know your name?

I swear, every time I log into the world wide web and check out something new my faith in humanity gets beaten down just a little bit more.

[Carnium]

I was playing World of Tanks and World of Warplanes a bit and both games are full of .. khm .. imbeciles too. People only caring about their own success, people "committing" suicide because they are not happy about the map and team etc.
This is a bit of a shock for us, a bit older gamers, but.... this is the world of gaming nowadays and it is only getting worse and worse as gaming companies only care that players keep paying for (idiotic) fun.

[Franciscus]

Worse yet, I feel that what you describe online is a mirror of the selfish and egotistic real world that we are building - or letting other build while we watch...

[Citizen X]

Not restricted to MMOs though.

[Hobbes]

The first online game I played was Age of Empires. I remember being down to one last man and called for help. A few minutes later a ship appeared and a lady said to me to get in. I was wowed. My first experience in Dark Age of Camelot was another fine young lady taking me on a hunting expedition for half an hour to show me the ropes - we stayed friends in the game for the next few years. She was far higher than me but would occasionally visit me to help me out and see how I was getting on. I have many other memories of people I met like this and very few bad ones. I've not played online games for 6 or 7 years though - hopefully it's not all bad.

[Boomer]

Yeah, it just seems like it's all one big pissing contest now. Who has the most powerful wizard, who has the most loot, etc etc... games should be about entertainment, but there's always that social experiment and education going on in the background. If I was a sociologist and I was studying human behavior in these online games, I would probably resign my position and go live on an island somewhere.

[ERISS]

about picking up Arma 2 so I could try out the DayZ mod. the game play usually consisted of a whole bunch of lone wolf ass clowns running around killing each other for loot and laughing at the very idea of teamwork or cooperation. servers full of blood thirsty jerks ruining the concept of the trust/buddy system and putting everyone at odds with each other to the point where no one trusts anyone else. you'd think that one like Dayz, where zombies are such a persistent menace, that people would try and work together to fulfill goals and survive.

That's the point of the Romero movies: The worst threat are not the undead: that's the unliving.

Online gaming with open worlds that encourage teamwork are so rare,
From the videos I watched, the most fun people seemed to have was when they worked together, so why isn't this the case more often?

Take a multiplayer game without friendly fire, many MMOs don't allow PvP if you don't want it.

So, if that's the case with a lot of these MMOs and game worlds like in Dayz, what exactly is the point of multi-player at all?
I used to play death matches in Doom and Duke Nuke'em years ago, and back then the majority of gamers seemed to have an understanding that everyone benefited towards surviving and winning if they all got along.

30 years ago, multiplayer was rare, so few players spoiled it or could be bore with.

[Franciscus]

That's the point of the Romero movies: The worst threat are not the undead: that's the unliving.

Good point, Eriss.

And that is IMHO amazingly well depicted in the fabulous TV series "The Walking Dead". The "zombies" are not the real menace, but the other "normal", egoistical humans.

As Sartre so well said, "L'enfer, c'est les autres"...

apy:

[Jim-NC]

Unfortanately, even 20ish years ago there were the little jerks. I remember playing MUDs back then (completely text based games for those who don't know). Most of the people were OK, they were trying to make their way in the world. But there was always that group that wanted nothing more than to kill anyone else they came across. They always picked on the people who were lower then them. Always had to try to ruin it for someone else. I gave those games up due to them (had my character assisinated, removing so much XP, it wasn't worth continuing that game, then that was repeated a couple of more times)

Nothing's changed, but the 10-15 year old jerks are now 30-35 year old jerks, and they have been teaching bad manners to those who are younger then them.

[Boomer]

Worse yet, I feel that what you describe online is a mirror of the selfish and egotistic real world that we are building - or letting other build while we watch...

I think that's it in a nutshell. The gaming world is very much a reflection of our own larger outer world. The way we treat each other in Second Life or WOW has a lot dependent on our real world social skills and behaviors. So to see people treat each other in this way who in real life are teachers, police, military, or just parents of children is really sad. I was in the Boy Scouts as a kid, was taught right from wrong from all my elders, and there's no way I could relinquish those ethics in a gaming world. I guess others don't feel the same way. But at least it's good to see just how easily people's morals get shot when things get put under pressure. If people treat each other that way while threatened by video game zombies, it's a bit scary to think of how they'd treat each other if threatened by real ones.

I heard one players in DayZ make the argument that he had to kill a group of wandering players because he needed their stuff and in the real world he do the same to survive. He then laughed off people who had criticized him for his actions by saying that people should just relax because it was just a video game. Seems that young man had gotten his wires crossed and forgot which was which. Is it a simulation of reality or is it just a game? Can't be both. But his actions certainly demonstrated his motives.

[Boomer]

Well, I took the dive and have been playing around with DayZ. Actually, the atmosphere, the gameplay, the tension, everything is superb.

There's just one problem... the people. I was on a server last night that had two kids, one a European, the other an American, both fighting with each other over global chat with their mics as swords. So in this intense game, where every move counts and every sound you hear could be your last... I had to listen to these two immature punk kids arguing over who had more kills or who was the better bandit. Ahhh....

So yeah, the game is great and there are moments when the PVP stuff can add to the immersion, but overall I still give multiplayer gaming 1 thrown microphone out of 5.

[anjou]

Dayz is not what it used to be.

[Boomer]

I wish I had checked it out when it first went alpha. Eh, it can still be fun. You just have to basically ignore the bad elements and hackers and whatnot. What's the old saying, 'when life gives you lemons, you turn them into hand grenades.'

I was sneaking around at a grocery market in Cherno this morning looking for some food and drinks before heading back off into the hills and got sniped by a bandit at close range while grabbing the loot. Hell, even dying in that intense moment was kind of fun. MP is such a mixed bag anymore.

[Kensai]

I see this more often than not in modern games. It seems like the odds run about 70-80% jerks to the minority of people who are trying to have fun and work together.

My advice is: try to get into a clan or "befriend" a single person that you find online with some basic cooperation attempts. If they are ok after 2-3 games, add them to your friend list (Steam, in-game chat, etc) or add them directly and delete them after some "testing rounds". In a couple of weeks you will have some online friends that play and behave the way you do and you can attempt to play with them. Survivability goes really up in all games with cooperation.

I have tried the above in World of Tanks which basically who is gonna win is a flip coin unless you know your team for good.

[ERISS]

in World of Tanks which basically who is gonna win is a flip coin unless you know your team for good.

Without a team, that's why I love Light Tanks: As this game is a hidden camper feast, they miss some scout. Ok I do it!
So I try to boldly advance in enemy lines to their flag, with shells around me. Often they can take me out, but my far camped mates revenge me on the many shooters I enlighted.
So, I play 'alone', but I have 90% victory ratio (or maybe that's just luck as you says?), but too 80% dead lol.

Oh, it reminds me the 'french' Nueve company (mechanized infantry in Leclerc 2nd Armor Division, WW2), always attacking ahead, with their losses but very efficiency too...

[Taillebois]

The first online game I played was Age of Empires. I remember being down to one last man and called for help. A few minutes later a ship appeared and a lady said to me to get in. I was wowed. My first experience in Dark Age of Camelot was another fine young lady taking me on a hunting expedition for half an hour to show me the ropes - we stayed friends in the game for the next few years. She was far higher than me but would occasionally visit me to help me out and see how I was getting on. I have many other memories of people I met like this and very few bad ones. I've not played online games for 6 or 7 years though - hopefully it's not all bad.

Ah Hobbes, so sweet, so romantic.

[Floyd]

I'm a member of a squadron playing Falcon, a flight simulation. People who take this hobby
serious often invest several hundred Euro into their equipment. Every new pilot interested
to join our group gets trained to a level that he can fly on the Sunday flight night or any
inter-squadron events. I think it is not different to clans that play shooters or strategy games:
pick out the people who aren't trolling but willing to learn, handle them with respect and
give them a tip or help them out when needed.

Lone wolfes can seldom make a stand against cooperating players.

[Citizen X]

I play online since many years back. I remember the first days of Unreal Tournament, where the deathmatch servers were overcrowded but few people played on the teambased servers, in capture-the-flag or in assault mode. Of course the game modes were based on teamplay but also it encouraged for a certain kind of gamers to gather. Soon some etiquette was established, so not to make every technically possible move (like spawncamping). Etiquette, that were meant to provide fun to everybody, fueled by the fundamental finding and elightment, that everybody will eventually find himself on the wrong end of the gun. And that eventually none would play with you anymore, if you insisted on ruining other peoples fun. We still tackled as hard as was done in other gamemodes, mind you. But the simple fact that we followed rules and liked to play coop style made us somehow unique. And that's like we felt. Some kind of elite or nobility. We were indeed so few that we got to know each others tags and the playing style that one could expect by a fellow player and their prefered weapon on every map. The rest were sad and nameless figures to us.
I think that those kind of guys are still around in every online game. Only it takes some time to stick around to find them and that's where nowadays a new game comes around the corner at great pace. Before gangs and rulesets are established, the caravan already heads on. But nonetheless they are still there, the gentlemen, the chosen few, the band of brothers.

[Boomer]

DayZ is basically a PVP fest. I thought a game like that would allow gamers to work together to take on the zombies. As it turns out, the zombies are nothing more than an environmental threat that occasionally get in the way of the real action, which is players shooting each other and taking loot off dead players' corpses.

I've had some real fun with it online, but all the problems with other MP games are in DayZ as well so I've kind of given up. Might as just play COD or one of the numerous other military shooters.

But I did find a cool offline version of DayZ called DaiZy which is really the same thing, only you just have zombies and AI bandits to fight. Same map, same weapons, same everything else. If you like the idea of fighting some zombies with the Arma engine, but don't want the hassles of playing online, I definitely recommend looking up DaiZy instead.