In the MOP comments a few weeks back, a group of our readers debated how MMO gamers would react to seeing other groups in an open dungeon. Quark1020 quipped that gamers would be mad to have their spawns stolen, while Jaymes reminded us that WoW’s shared tagging creates more positive interactions, and Schmidt wished shared tagging in open dungeons were the norm to begin with.

I thought it would make a great jumping off point for Massively Overthinking because my first thought was how insane it is to me that so many PvE MMOs still make our first reaction to seeing other people a negative one, usually because we don’t want competition. It makes much more sense in PvP MMOs, but in PvE… what are we doing?

What’s your first reaction to meeting someone in your main MMORPGs? Why is it like this, what mechanics influence it, and how would you change it – if it needs changing?

Brianna Royce (@nbrianna.bsky.social, blog): I think this feeling, or rather, specifically wanting to avoid the feeling of dread when seeing people in MMOs, is one of the key reasons I keep going back to Guild Wars 2, which long ago mainstreamed a lot of these community-friendly mechanics that arose in smaller games and made them palatable for the likes of WoW to borrow. When I’m fighting something and another person swoops in, I’m freakin’ elated. My chances of winning the fight just went from “decent” to “sure thing” because everyone gets credit for kills, grouped or not. Harvesting is the same and has been since 2012.

I’m always happy to see people entering my shops in Star Wars Galaxies, too, since it means they’re there to buy stuff or at least to look around! I do admit that I always hope they’ll say hi but not stand around to converse for an hour, though. But that’s just me because I rarely have an hour.

I grew up in old-school MMORPGs where you had to fight for every mob, every camp spot, every raid zone, every drop, every scrap of WorldResource_001. I’m really over that. Those early experiences made far too many gamers into suspicious, greedy jerks, and I resent the impact it had on me.

Carlo Lacsina (@UltraMudkipEX, YouTube, Twitch): “Will they actually chat with me?” is my first reaction. I’m pretty chatty, and it’s kind of jarring how people don’t really like to talk. It was never really that way in the old Guild Wars 1 days; folks were willing to chat, and it’s how I made so many friends. These days it feels like folks are talking with me “in character,” and I have difficulty separating the real person and the character.

Anecdotaly, it takes time for folks to warm up to me. When I’m running fates in some faraway map in FFXIV, if there’s an errant player joining me, we kinda just play together without saying much. Maybe after the sixth or seventh FATE, we start emoting or acknowledging each other, and if we go on long enough, we start chatting or something.

I do enjoy the company a lot of the time, especially in GW2 and FFXIV. It’s nice if they match my energy too. Maybe I should put myself out there more, but I don’t know how many people are willing to bite these days

Chris Neal (@wolfyseyes.bsky.social, blog): I mean, back in Ye Olden Dayes, camping for that boss spawn to get the uber drop was a thing. PvE competitiveness has been around for a while now. But the tech has progressed far enough that seeing other folks in a dungeon should be designed as an encouraging sight rather than a frustrating one.

In an ideal world, there would be some manner of stats normalization, easy or passive grouping, and help with tagging and credit to make it so delving a large dungeon would be a communal effort, and none of those things feel as far-fetched today as they did back then. And assuming an MMORPG does have some or all of those features, then yeah, I’m happy to see others around.

Really I just like the cooperative team dynamic, whether it’s directly expressed through chatting up people or just felt by personal performance. And if nobody responds to me saying hello, then that’s fine too. Really what makes grouping the most interesting is a good fight, a fun push into unexplored territory, and maybe even some eventual mastery of the challenges within.

Sam Kash (@[email protected]): When I’m playing a game for the first time and I don’t know how kills are handled, I’m always wary. I’m not someone who likes any sort of controversy or to bother others, so I’m very standoffish.

Similarly, I get pretty worked up if someone jumps right in to kill something I had already tagged. Like, who does this person think they are? Do they think I needed their help? Like I couldn’t handle this on my own? A lot of times I’ll just stop what I was fighting and move on to something else. Avoidance is my super power.

Now in GW2, it’s completely a non issue since everything is shared and drops are specific. So I don’t even think of it. Everyone kills everything, and we don’t really interact at all. We might as well be NPCs to each other.

Tyler Edwards (blog): I think at this point things like shared credit and faster respawns have mostly removed the inconvenience of meeting other players in the open world.

The one thing more I think could be done is making the open world more challenging such that the assistance of another player is more welcome. Not that I think we should be requiring groups or anything, but if mobs weren’t total pushovers having someone else fighting alongside you might start to feel like a genuine boon rather than something that’s value neutral at best.

Every week, join the Massively OP staff for Massively Overthinking column, a multi-writer roundtable in which we discuss the MMO industry topics du jour – and then invite you to join the fray in the comments. Overthinking it is literally the whole point. Your turn!