I think Massively.com's article on CO hit the nail on the head with this sentence:

I certianly hope so. I could care less about doing "my" misisons if I can get a close amount of XP/hour by just helping a teammate. This would drastically help teaming in CO.

I'll never forget last September when my 5 man PuG team disbanded. The quote burned into my mind was "I'd love to team with you but it will actually cost me XP to do it"

How's that for a teaming experience?

We're talking about this internally right now. I'll keep you guys posted with new information as I hear it.

Thanks,

Stormshade

I too agree that xp is a big piece of the puzzle, but I know I would take an xp cut for fun team play, which unfortunately is not there yet. The biggest pitfalls I see are a lack of group worthy content outside of the lairs. Missions just don't offer enough of a challenge to warrant scraping a team together. The other challenge I see for teaming is group synergy. With a classless system, which I adore, there are almost no roles -- sure you get a tank here or there, but even a true tank is rarely needed -- so you end up with a group of soloers on the same mission. I rarely feel like i'm playing as part of a team.



oh hey where is my green name =(

Experience comes mostly from quests, and teaming doesn't split that, does it? Regardless, why should the game reward you for grouping for solo content?

Because that "solo content" is all of the non-lair content in the entire game, and this is supposed to be an MMO. A game which has only 5% of it's content designed for multiple players should not be considered a multiplayer game. I am not trying to sound harsh or anti-CO, but I do think that only 5% of the game is designed for multiple players right now.

First of all, I don't think there is any way to make questing as a team worth anybody's time. However, having said that, I think it is possible to get good team play in settings such as lair and public quests, with a little work.

For interesting team play, I think we would need the following:

1) More lairs with compelling boss fights at more level ranges (I'm thinking content between about 20 and 40.) Note that death-zerging bosses is neither interesting or fun.
2) Significant rewards for completing lairs. (No, a green item with bad stats from a one-time quest is not a good reward.)
3) Improved agro mechanics. (Is an agro meter really that hard to implement?)
4) Some value being given to healing in public quests, etc. Currently, all scoring systems in the game treat healing the same as if you were AFK. This is ********.
5) Some sort of auto-grouping for public quests would be useful.
6) A LFG system that both works and that people understand would be very helpful.
7) You can intergrate the game with all the major MP3 players and social networking sites, but there is no way to conveniently pass Ventrilo/TS information? You may want to examine your priorities in this area.

That's all I have just off the top of my head.

If the problem is that most content is built to be done solo, then trying to push players to group for solo content doesn't fix the problem. That just makes the game bad for soloing and for grouping.

If it's desirable to have more grouping, then what needs to be done is to add more content where players have to group to do the content. The game would also need a robust system to find groups, as offering incentives to group without making it practical to actually get a group only makes a disastrous mess of a game. Far too many games basically say "don't solo" by offering huge rewards for grouping, while still leaving it impractical to actually find a group. Telling players simultaneously that they can't solo and also can't group means that they can't play your game at all. That's very, very bad.

I wouldn't be opposed to adding a fair bit of 5-man group content at the level cap in future expansions. But in order for grouping to work well, the content has to be designed to be done by players in a group.

I've said this before, but I don't even care if the rewards go up at all except for shared exp. You can kill more or less twice as fast with 2 people, and there's an exp bonus besides, but shared mission exp being 1/10th of normal, especially in the lower levels, means I'm just straight up wasting my time teaming.

Would be nice to have more scaling to team size as well, but I'm not sure how they can do that for open zones.

"Massively multiplayer" refers only to the amount of simultaneous players the servers can handle, it has nothing to do with content.

Not that I think more group content is a bad thing, just that the name doesn't mean anything.