I’ve only played Guild Wars, so it was a huge surprise to me to hear that other MMORPGs had a lot of problems with getting players to co-operate. From this article, it’s clear that Guild Wars 2 will have the same useful mechanism to encourage co-operative play:
In Guild Wars 2 we’re fully committed to the concept of rewarding players individually. This is more or less a quick way of saying that we don’t want to design a system where players argue over loot settings, turn to external “out of game” systems to decide who gets what upon downing a boss, or risk spending hours in a dungeon with nothing to show for it due to bad rolls or a ninja looter that hijacked all their treasure.
In the case of distributing general monster loot or opening dungeon end-chests, this principle means that each player gets their own roll, so it’s alright if you are soloing and someone begins fighting alongside you. This won’t cause the loot you would receive to degrade in any way, as long as you actively participate in that combat. Likewise, when you get to the end of that big dungeon with your group, you each get to individually open the chest and receive your own personal reward.
In the case of gathering materials from things like ore nodes, plants, and the like, this means that when you gather from that resource you use it up for yourself, but not for others. In Guild Wars 2 there is no need to race to beat other people to the same resource node. Take your time ripping that bear’s head off, because no one can walk up and steal that copper node in the back of its cave from you. You may be helping others in your world reach that copper safely, but rest assured that you’re not just clearing a path for a node ganker.
I could go on and on with the examples of how we employ this philosophy, but really what I’m getting at is that our overall goal is for players in your world to be seen as a boon to you to help you overcome bigger challenges and larger foes, and therefore earn greater spoils for your time spent in the game. We’d much rather that everyone in the same world felt a common bond in their shared land and saw each other as potential allies. If players find themselves with leftover aggression that they would normally take out on node gankers or ninja looters, we’d recommend they step into World vs. World and kick themselves some otherworldly player butt.
