City of Mall Cops

I'm annoyed.

Not just with one particular game, but with most of the MMO games out there. I'm not annoyed at the constant downward spiral of your character's effectiveness that happens as the devs pile up more and more nerfs to slow the advancement rate of their player base. I'm not annoyed at the inevitable bugs that cause things to not work right, or let other people leapfrog ahead of you because they find (and abuse) and exploit before you ever hear of it. I'm not even annoyed at the hours of grinding that every one of these games requires to become something more than a Level 1 Toilet Scrubber.

I'm annoyed at the forced grouping mindset.

I'm not a hardcore anti-social bigot who'd rather cut off me own hand than deign to group with people kind of player... but neither am I the log in and look for a group after 5 seconds kind. I group with friends (if they're on when I am), and I sometimes feel like grouping just to be different.

I RESENT the game designers who promise that their game will be playable solo, and then proceed to adjust the level of everything to assume you're in a group. Oh yes, you *might* be able to solo things in City of Heroes/Villians... if you're willing to leave your mission difficulty set at the easiest level, and thus spend weeks grinding through things.

I wouldn't be so upset if it had always been like this. But when I started playing CoH, you really could solo. Yes, people who grouped would level quicker than you did... but you never hit the brick wall of needing a group to get through a few missions. Each set of patches has made it progressivly harder to solo, to the point that once you find that particular kind of foe that slaughters you with ease... you have to group, or avoid any content that might include those mobs. Ever.

At least Blizzard came out and said, right at the start, that if you wanted to do the higher end dungones, you'd need to group. They didn't mention that to PvP effectively, you'd also have to group, since you can't get the high-end gear any other way... but that's ok. You could always join a PvE server and avoid that too.

It just feels like those old "role playing" games where you died, over and over and over, until you found the one right word, or the right object to give the NPC, and then it'd let you pass as if you were best buddies. I don't mind being overpowered, but I hate the feeling that if I had just chosen one power differently, or carried the right item, I would have won easily.

*sigh*