I’m doing a little research report on what players think makes for the best social experience in online multiplayer games. Because of how prevalent multiplayer games are becoming I thought it would be useful to have some data on what types of games and gameplay provides the best social experience.
Link to survey
That’s a short survey I’m doing, and I’d really appreciate anyone who provides their input. I’ll be releasing the results of the survey here when it closes in two days so we can all benefit from it.
More generally for this thread though I’d like to ask everybody: what do you think makes for a good social experience in a multiplayer game?
Dedicated servers – don’t give players control over nothing
Basically I want the same experience as I get from single player, but with more challenge/competition. I don’t want to deal with people’s egos and insecurities. I don’t want to be buddy buddy with sniveling weirdos. I don’t want to listen to children talk shit. I don’t want to be annoyed because server issues negate the competition. I do want to be continually playing a game, not sitting in menus. I do want fast respawns to keep the gameplay non-stop unless the natuer of the game is more like elimination and if that is the case, I want to be able to filter who I am playing with – somehow I want a way to ensure I am playing with adults if there is a chance that I could be sitting out for lengths at a time.
Then you better ask on a place where only gamers hang out, like on the steam forum or gaming subreddits.
Data from the Unity forum is essentially worthless for statistics because the demographic is so non-represesntative of average gamers, at least imho.
Here’s a good talk about multiplayer games shaping their community through gamemechanics:
Don’t use peer to peer gaming unless you’re 100% sure it’s working, the amount of times it has completely ruined what could have potentially been a good multiplayer game is ridiculous. If you do insist on peer to peer, make sure to test it thoroughly.
An example of how absolutely not to do multiplayer gaming in my view would be Rainbow Six Siege, I stopped playing it entirely so I don’t know whether they fixed the problems but there were two major problems with that game. You couldn’t join a game in progress to help even out any teams so that option was out the window and there was no auto-balance or team switching so that you could make teams fair if somebody rage quit or lost their connection.
That’s not fair on Rainbow Six Siege though to be honest because as bad as the game was it at least ran properly GTA V is so bad and Rockstar Studios still refuses to fix it you can spend a long time simply waiting at the cloud interface just for the game to load and it’s nothing to do with the game itself their peer to peer system just sucks and then when you finally get into a team based game if the teams are uneven you can’t do a thing about it.
Also, what’s this about games developers not playing games? Heathens! All of you! As some of you probably guessed from my recent posts about isometric RPGs I play games all the time partly to check out how the game mechanics work and get ideas, I encourage everybody else to do the same.
Even if they can be painful to even look at sometimes, there are great examples out there of how not to do a game and any would be games developers here should absolutely take down notes.
Fair enough, because at least in the corporate world there is a distinct difference between what Games Developers think of as a good game and what gamers think is a good game so I get that point.
Paryboat… I’ll go slightly off topic… well not really.
I used to get a lot of “fanmail” and well most of it was from sick kids, people who couldn’t walk, or people just inside a lot for whatever reason… these are the people who most appreciate “games” and “online interaction”… because there are often activities that they cannot get involved in because of a handicap.
so… what makes a good social experience in online games? the player being able to do something they cannot do in actual life…
(for me, it’s strolling through beautiful scenery)
I do consider this a limitation of the study, but most of my other responses have been coming from gaming related forums/discords/etc. Unfortunately lots of these places (like /r/games) have rules forbidding surveys even if they generate discussion, so I need to find responses where I can.
Maybe you meant /r/games? From what I can tell /r/gaming doesn’t really do text-based content or discussion, it’s mostly gifs, screenshots, memes, etc.
