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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cryptos" data-source="post: 4504416" data-attributes="member: 58439">Well, when I was playing MMOs it wasn't for the 'massively multiplayer' part.  It was for the game mechanics and game style, and the open-ended content, primarily.  The multiplayer aspect of it for me was mostly good for unscripted events - whereas in a single player game most things are going to be scripted and similar on replay, in an MMO just having someone else wander past a little too close to your encounter can change things, depending on the game.  I wasn't one of those people who wouldn't group, but one of those people that prefered to explore and 9 times out of 10, grouping kills the opportunity to say, "What's that over there?" and wander off to check it out.  Grouping also makes it tougher to walk away from the game, if you group with people for a specific purpose (quest, item, or to gain a level), either temporarily (ie, I want to take a break and eat) or for the day (ie, I need to do things in real life.)  I wasn't against grouping, just against being constrained by being in a group.I liked being part of a persistent world that would change over time, especially those worlds with wide, open content (or at least, large zones) to explore and lots of options to try out.  It was well worth the subscription price just because the added content and scope of the games kept me from buying tons of single-player games every month or two out of boredom.  I didn't mind being seen, and known, or interacting, but didn't want to be "stuck" with anyone, tied down... probably due to my first experiences in the original Everquest where people would group up and then stand in one place, repeating the same tactic for hours.The level of interaction in MMOs for me, in regards to the the people and ideas you might be exposed to, was roughly equivalent to that of a message board like this one.The social effect can be a negative under some arrangements.  This was the most negative:  Matrix Online had this system where the most powerful and time-invested would influence the storyline, and this resulted in people with no life or sophistication, only interested in accumulating more power and influence in an MMO, taking the whole storyline and community in very stupid directions.  Everyone else would go along with what these people wanted to do because with that degree of time-spent-in-game influence came the opportunity to meet with NPCs from the movies and take part in big events.  Anyone that disagreed with them became literally hounded and hunted.  Some of us, who didn't want to be jerked around by every red herring or bit of false information the power gamers were dumb enough to fall for, still to this day are considered pariahs among a handful of gamers that still care for some reason.  Seriously.I did a google search out of curiousity for my character's name and MXO-related search terms just last year, years after everything that went down, and found that I was being blamed for things that happened even after I stopped playing the game completely.  (Does anyone still play anymore?  Does it still even exist?)  For the sin of disagreeing, I somehow became some kind of traitorous boogeyman.  I wound up in fanfics.  Right up to the end, years after I quit, there were message boards theorizing which character I was playing as and how I was going to sabotage them.  So apparently they went on hounding some other poor players thinking they were me.  It amuses me now, more than anything, that I did so very little (just spoke up often against the conventional "wisdom" and disagreed with the most popular players) but was attributed with doing so much.  But as I thought I had made a few friendly acquaintences in that game it was also a bit disappointing to see how they would regard me after the fact.The whole situation, I feel, was the result of bad social interaction design.  I don't know why they thought MXO players would be any more sophisticated than any other MMO players and make sensible narrative choices rather than gameplay optimized choices.But otherwise, my social interactions in MMOs were relatively bland and forgettable.  There were some whose names I remembered years later, but for the most part my recollections of various players and social events seem to have blended together over time.As for the rest, it never really interfered with my real life when I was playing MMOs but I have seen it do so for many, many gamers.  The relationships, obviously, don't compare.  It absolutely did not affect my speech in real life (I'm also a bit of a language and vocabulary snob, though, and typing out something like ROFL makes me cringe), and I wasn't one of those people that would tell the average person on the street I'd meet about my gaming experiences.</blockquote>

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