Most of us have been there. We have real life friends who play the game. Maybe they picked it up on their own, maybe we pressured them into picking up the game so they could spend time with us. Maybe you didn’t realize they played the game, and both of you have toons on different servers.

Hearts filled with happiness, you transfer a toon, you reroll, you (both of you) do whatever you can so that you can play together. You imagine how much fun it’s going to be, to play with your friends. No more loot whores, no more drama, no more dying on solo quests. Together, you will make an invincible team, and your enemies shall be crushed before your might.

…and then everything goes wrong.

Why? Why does it -always- seem to go wrong? You get along so well in real life, why should the game be any different?

Disgruntled, disappointed, and demoralized, you stop playing together. Sometimes you stop being friends, and sometimes you stop playing the game.

I’ve played WoW for a very long time, and I’ve been in this situation more times than I care to remember. As a result, I’ve had a lot of time to think about why it fails so very often, and also why sometimes, almost miraculously, it works.

There are three elements to finding a good playing buddy. I’m not necessarily talking about guilds here, although the general ideas can be applied on that level as well. Here, I’m talking more about the people you play with. The people you quest with, the people you instance with.

(1) Play Times
Play times are incredibly important. You can love someone forever, but if the two of you are never online at the same time, and for a long enough period to achieve your goals, then it doesn’t matter. The gaming relationship won’t work.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve rolled a new toon to play with a friend, only to log on two days later and find that they’d leveled their character so far past me that there was no way I could catch up. I’ve also rolled a new toon to play with a friend, and they didn’t log on for another week, leaving me standing there, wanting desperately to play, but not certain if they’d log on at all.

My current group of play-companions is fairly stable. We all tend to log on around the same time, and we tend to log off around the same times. Those who are able to log more often will play other characters until the rest of us get home from work and start playing.

There are ways to work around this requirement. You can create a set of toons that you ONLY log on when the other person is online. Both of you have two sets of toons, and if you want to play but the other person isn’t online, you play the other character, easy as that.

If the playtime is drastically different enough, this will become frustrating to both of you and you’ll end up wanting to play the shared characters far more often, and you may even end up with your “alt” characters pushing 70 before the “main” characters reach Stranglethorn.

If you know the person well enough, you can always call each other and find out if the other wants to play, to keep yourself from standing around twiddling your thumbs and wondering if they’re going to log on. That can get annoying, especially if they’re gone because they’re spending time with their family.

You can also schedule a specific time/day where you get on and play with your friends. Everyone (and I do mean everyone) has to be dedicated to this, however. If you’re going to play together, you need to make sure that nobody logs on outside of that time period and completes “just a few” quests. You need to make sure that everyone logs on during the time period - if one person doesn’t make it, they fall behind.

It’s very difficult to play with people who aren’t there, though, and this requirement is a difficult one to work around.

(2) Play Philosophy
Why are you playing the game? Do you dream of Black Temple? Of raiding the hard content, seeing the things that only a fraction of the WoW gaming population may ever see? Or do you play to spend time with your friends? Play to hang out, to help people? Maybe roleplay is your calling, you feel more fulfilled after a chance meeting in Stormwind with your Brown Linen Dress on than an entire evening spent killing gnolls.

You and your friend have to have the same philosophy about this game. The game itself is, much like life, open to be played however the player wants. If you feel a burning need to advance and raid, but your friend wants to spend a half hour trying on dresses from the Auction House, you’re going to run into problems.

The people you play with have to feel the same way about loot and progression as you do. Or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. I love to instance, and I enjoy raiding. But my friends LOVE raiding. It’s easy enough to slightly modify my desires as I play the game so that we all get to raid together. It would be much more difficult for me to raid if I’d rather just hang out in Shattrath and spend time in guild chat. Small modifications can be made, but any large changes made in play philosophy for the sole purpose of playing with someone else is going to end in regret.

(3) Play Style
Similar to the play philosophy, play style goes deeper. Assuming you have matching play philosophies, your play STYLES can still be drastically different. Maybe you’re a theorycrafter. You’ve got spreadsheets, you’ve done the math, you know exactly what gear you want, and what cast or shot sequence to use in order to maximize your dps…

…if your friend really just wants to hang out, isn’t concerned about what his gear is like, so long as he can complete his quests, what difference does it make to him?

There is no right or wrong in this. But knowing this, it will become increasingly frustrating for BOTH of you, as your styles are so drastically different. It will become a point of contention between you, with neither of you understanding the drive (or lack of it) that the other displays.

Much better when both of you enjoy the same thing. If both of you enjoy theorycrafting, you can share your findings with each other, make suggestions, get help with gear choices. A pack of theorycrafters is a terrifying and awesome thing.

There is Always Hope…
If you have two out of these three, and the third is not too drastically different between you, it’s a simple task to find a compromise and make it work. Just because you don’t 100% agree on all three of these criteria doesn’t mean your group is doomed.

But the closer you agree on play times, play philosophy, and play style, the more harmonious your gaming relationship will be.

…Except When There’s Not
If you and your friends disagree sharply on any of these, or even enough on all three, it’s not going to work.

It does NOT mean that your friendship is doomed, or that you must be incompatible friends. As a matter of fact, if you can identify all three of these early on, you can save your REAL relationship from falling prey to the pitfalls of gaming woes.

You can be friends (very GOOD friends) with people who you cannot play with. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

(Okay, there might be if you find out your friend is a ganking loot-whore, but we’ll assume that the problems stemmed from one of the three mentioned above, rather than accidentally learning what a greedy bastard your friend is.)

Nostalgia
I came from the generation of gamers that played EQ. In that game, I was one of the most active people in guild chat, I was friends with everyone, and I was beloved by all. In this game, I rarely even get to see guild chat fly by. This game is MUCH more engaging on a minute-by-minute basis. In Everquest, you would literally spend hours camped on a single spot with a large group of friends, just hoping that a particular mob would spawn. The downtime to regen mana was MUCH higher, as was the downtime between mob spawns.

I spent a large majority of my time with my arse planted firmly in the turf, which led to a lot of time where I had nothing to do except talk to friends.

In a way it was very nice. I felt like I was much more connected to the PEOPLE there. Here, you cannot be both “doing something” and “being social” at the same time. You are either doing something (questing, instancing, raiding) or you are being social (talking to friends, roleplaying, participating in guild chat).

It’s one of the big reasons Ventrilo is so popular. You can be social and talk, using your voice and ears, while still using your hands, mouse, and keyboard to play the game.

The point of telling you this is…I have friends who’ve joined my guild, and I never get to talk to them. Sometimes I see them log off, and I never even realized they were online. And then we pull another group of naga, and I forget about it again.

This game requires a lot of focus if you’re instancing or raiding (or even doing in-depth questing, or herb-gathering…)

And even if you want to stop and talk to them when they log on…if you’re already in a group, what do you do? Tell them “hey, sorry guys, a friend logged on and I want to spend time with them.” ?

That will only happen twice before you’re not invited to instance again. And they’d be right to not ask you. Your Play Philosophy no longer matches theirs. You’ve prioritized talking to friends over finishing instances, and you’re probably hard to replace in the middle of an instance. Thing is, you’re also right to spend time with your friends. And both of you have the right to be irritated at the fact that the other person doesn’t appreciate what you’re doing enough to follow through.

And you’d both be wrong, and you’d both be right.

Summary
Playing just to play with friends fails, and often spectacularly.

The reason generally lies in the three criteria listed above. To have a successful play group, you need to find people that have the same (or nearly the same) play times, philosophy, and style as you do.

And unfortunately, there is no addon to list those out for you. They aren’t easy to find, but there are no wrong answers to the questions. There are simply different ones. Play the game and do what makes YOU happy. I can’t tell you how to find other people that feel the same way, but I can tell you that playing the game using someone else’s answers to those three criteria will make you miserable.

Just because you cannot play with them doesn’t mean you can’t be friends with them. Even friends with a different play style or play times make great conversation about the game when you meet to have some coffee or invite them over for dinner. Even a phone call, for those who live too far away for casual meeting, can provide a platform to continue a friendship, and it’s always fun to have the conversation turn to a game that you both love, even if you can’t play together.

Realizing that you and your friends aren’t compatible in-game isn’t the end of the world, or even of your friendship.

But after you attempt to make it work, and fail, and attempt, and fail, and attempt, and fail…there comes a point where you have to stop bashing your head into the wall repeatedly, and reach out to open the door. There are some battles you not only cannot win, you shouldn’t fight.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 and is filed under General Info, Soapbox, ~ Vonya. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.