Number one reason grouping sucks and/or blows in any MMORPG: people.
Number two reason grouping sucks and/or blows in any MMORPG: developers.
What’s that you say? It’s not the developer’s fault that people in general have a hard time grouping? Really? Well, you’re plain wrong. Let me explain why:
MMORPG players, in general, are broken. We all know it, we all complain about it, we all suffer from it. Why is that? Because developers keep expecting people to act better. To act fairly, to not take advantage of others, to not run off and be retarded, etc. Do the developers do anything to further these ideas? Do positively reinforce any of these good behaviors? No. And that’s the problem. We get all kinds of negative reinforcement if someone in the group/raid/etc is a jackass (LEEEEEEROOOOOY), but what happens if everyone works together and gets the job done? Nothing but getting the job done.
Sure, that should be reward enough on its own. I agree completely. But apparently, it’s not. People are still figuring out how to group, they are still doing retarded things, mean things, dishonest ninja-like things, etc. So I propose the following:
1) Reward people for grouping. Not just the normal reward of not dying, but a bigger reward. Maybe the longer you are grouped, after a certain amount of experience with the same group (which could be tracked over time), or mostly the same group, you get additional experience. Or your healing spells work better. Or your defense automatically goes up. Something that says, “damn fine job with that group, friends”. Tracking this beyond the current grouping would help with casual players being able to take advantage of the same benefits.
2) Train people how to group. Sure, a lot of people aren’t going to listen/read/play whatever it is that trains them, but enough will do it to make it worthwhile. Remember those tooltips that WoW, and many others, have now? How about filling those in with such things as group etiquette, how looting should work, etc.
3) Rating of players. A global rating if at all possible (though any global rating system has too much room for exploits to really make them worthwhile), but a local rating system would be really helpful. I could group with said 4 other people, and if I really liked them, I could change their ratings with a simple right click, select rating. Then, whenever I was looking for a group, I could check my find group tab and see if anyone I have rated high is available and interested. Maybe even extend it similar to what XFire does. When looking said imaginary Find Group interface, you could see not only the people you rated highly, but check an option to see the people they rated highly. The grouping system would automatically expand itself as time went on.
4) Have all social and grouping system that encourage the right behavior in place at launch. Train people from the very beginning how to play. Don’t just put the game out and expect people to know how to play, assume they don’t and train them, with positive reinforcement, on how to play.
As I’m sure you know, I have no professional MMORPG development experience, but damn me if some of those ideas or other ideas couldn’t be implemented to make grouping better. The population needs to be trained, rewarded and to recycle groups. If those things could be done, we’d all benefit immensely.