If you have friends to play with on the Internet, then playing online is probably pretty fun. That’s how I play whenever I can.
But when you’re stuck playing with strangers, well, that’s when things go bad. Ready to Play is being designed to solve some of this. Mostly people will talk about its chat or matchmaking but what I think really makes it special is the recommended friends broadcasting. That is, you say what kind of gamer you are and it will find other people like you.
My own preferences on gaming are different from say a 13 year old. I was up at my cottage and some friends of the family were there with their 13 year old son who had apparently been banned from L4D. The kid, in real life,is a nice kid. But online, he’s a griefer of the worst kind. I talked to him about his griefing and it became apparent that he just didn’t think about it. No empathy once he gets on that computer about the people behind the screens.
I remember when my 7 year old son and I were playing WoW together. His idea of playing the game was to go and fish and then go to the spawn areas and give people fish. His idea of what the game was about was pretty foreign to me but I thought cute. Cute. But not compatible with what I’d want to have in my Raid party.
A 38 year old father of 3 with very limited amounts of time to play TF2 or Demigod (two of my favorites) and thus has a very different attitude towards what constitutes having a good time than someone who might have more time to play. I could care less about the stats so I want to avoid playing with people who only care about getting that win stat.
So it’ll be interesting to see how this catches on. So far, the biggest winner in internal testing of Ready to Play has been older games whose communities are largely gone with just a few hard core players left who don’t always welcome rusty old players back.