[GW2] The Automatization of the Social
I want to discuss an specific aspect of GW2 which I have seen praised but not enough scrutinized around the blogosphere. The social aspect of it - how it delivers the "massive multiplayer" part of an MMO. It's of course still a beta, and thus some of the initial observations cannot be as accurate as in the real game, but the features are still there, and it is possible to extrapolate a possible trend out of those.
I'll start saying that it is indeed a massive multiplayer game, perhaps the most genuine iteration of this genre. In GW2, for any grand-scale activity to succeed there has to be a contingent of players. PvP sieges, PvE events and I suppose that end-game encounters, they all need a raid-like size number of players. Throughout the game you are encouraged to team up -in the abstract, because no actual grouping is required- to overcome challenges. What is more, there is an inordinate amount of incentives to do so, in almost all of the activities that in previous titles used to demand a traditional group and a particularly helpful personality. In GW2 you can do these social things seamlessly, without the inconvenience of arranging a group. Without the benefits of being forced to group. Yes, you've read right, benefits of being forced. I can put it more lightly so it doesn't sound that ominous: being compelled to group up is a positive thing.
But in GW2 we don't have such compulsion. What we have is an automatized system that rewards "social" activities.
My argument is as follows: by providing incentives for certain social activities, they are no longer indicative of a social attitude. By automatising what used to require an effort -which in turn provided an equivalent satisfaction-, no links are formed between the players partaking in said activity; that is regarding grouping. Regarding other social gestures, such as resurrecting a comrade or helping her through a hard pull, the social aspect is muddled up by the incentives that they provide.
It's much easier to explain through examples. Let's see. Regarding grouping: I haven't played the GW2 beta, but I have tried Rift for a few weeks, to check out those dynamic events. For what I've seen, they are pretty similar in concept, although the delivery of the older game might not be as innovative. Both in Rift and GW2, you step into a zone which has an event, and you can participate in it along with everybody who is around. In the former you'd get into a "public" group by just clicking on a panel, if I remember correctly. No strings attached, no fooling around asking to get into the group. In GW2, they've accelerated the process even more - there is no such thing as a group, you just contribute and get your portion of the cake. In Rift, after the event was over, everybody parted ways. Sometimes it would be less alienating when the group was having a hard time, and some actual conversation was required to strategise. I don't know how it will be in GW2. Not having any clear roles established may end up being even more of a zerg-fest where the numbers and common-out-of-the-fire sense will prevail. I know Doone has more faith in this role-less system than I do ;).
On the other hand, we have the tradition of grouping for elite quests, dungeons and the like. I'm going back to the EQ, pre-LFG WoW times, which is what I'm now playing. By the way, I'm happy as a lark :). Well, grandma Milady in TBC has been doing some elite chain quests with random people, and ended up adding one or two of them to the friends list. Not just necessarily through elite quests, I had also stumbled upon a mage who was going to kill the same mobs as me, and grouped up to speed up the process and not trampling on each other's progress. We ended up farming the spot for reputation items, then grouped for a while, then added on friends, and finally we reach each other out when we need help or just want to talk for a while. I had to give up some comfort (playing alone, at my rhythm, not having to make conversation), to group up with an stranger that perhaps would have been not as nice as he turned out to be. There's always the risk. But I am glad I took it. Now, if in GW2 my loot is independent of the group I'm in, and I don't need to talk to that stranger to play with him, I will not meet this person. I wouldn't have met this nice lad.
As for the other social gestures, such as untagged mobs for all to attack, I argue that they are not social at all. If my neighbour is playing alongside me, helping me with my mobs, in TBC WoW I know that she is actually helping me out. In GW2, she might as well be just doing her objectives, looting her mobs, with coincidentally are yours too. Getting resurrected is always nice, but it is nicer when the caster doesn't have anything to gain from it. I am able to appreciate much more the gestures that are not done out of personal interest (getting an achievement or whatever the incentive was). Despite this wariness of mine, there's at least one feature which I regarded as very positive, as Dusty Monk reported: "Additionally, the big thing is any time a player dies, a marker goes over their head and a marker appears on the minimap. And any player at all can go over and revive that player. And because you see them on the minimap, it makes them easy to find. It's hard to describe just what a huge thing this is. But more than any other MMO I've played in, you are encouraged to help each other out". As for the other features - the area buffs that reach everybody, the lack of "penalization" for working together, etc, I regard them with suspicion. They are not working together as in group-together, they're all there, doing the same things, but they don't talk to each other. Well, some of them might; they haven't sworn a vow of silence. But if they are not even grouped together, there is no need to reach out to each other. They might as well be playing with bots.
I am aware that WoW has a certain reputation of "pitting players against each other". Dee even states that "Players are scum. WoW taught us that, and we turned insular." But I believe that this was the last generation problem of WoW (post-LFG), when server community became inconsequential, and the game became easier and more accessible to certain types of players which no longer had to behave themselves (pre-LFG, you wouldn't go very far in group-content/dungeons if you had a reputation of ninja or jerk). Nevertheless, there are douchebags everywhere. What GW2 does is hiding them behind a veneer of incentivized cooperation. I prefer to take my chances with people behaving their own way.
I am also aware that traditional group-content is a manner of forcing an attitude. Psychochild had commented on a previous post that he believed in "forced" social interaction. But this is exactly the difference between GW2 and older models where this worked: doing an event along with other players can be thought of as interaction, but it is not social, as nothing occurs on a personal level. Nothing is gained, except virtual currency. I also believe that unless you "force" people to group up, their deeply rooted social shyness will prevent them from interacting with their neighbour. In a society where talking to strangers is almost a sin, where only individual success is lauded, we develop a certain mindset that carries on to our games. We set up a barrier which, when we are conscious of it, we often desire to lower down, so we can reach to other people. I'm not talking just philosophy here, I believe that MMOs can be a vehicle through which a community may thrive, a way to overcoming our barriers.
You have to give players the opportunity to behave socially, or unsocially if they wish so. If you completely remove the choice, the system that you create is an artificial construct of apparent cooperation, where everybody is still going on their own, playing alone together more than ever. Oh, it is much more comfortable, indeed. Dealing with people is such a hassle. But what are MMOs for, then?
Eliminating the competition factor seems beautiful at a first glance, it is one of the few things that ought not be that outrageous. Still, it forfeits the possibility of behaving socially for real. I have competed for veins a lot of times, but I have also stepped out for a low-level character to get her skill up. I have at times competed for a mob, at others I have teamed up and ended up questing with a prospective friend. I still need the system to force me at times to get into groups, but I do not abhor the system, I am usually grateful for the opportunity it grants me.
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The truth is, you’re correct I think in your observations. I tend to agree that just because GW2 is making it easier to group by not requiring the traditional LFG or chat spam activities, doesn’t mean that these features aren’t anti-social in other ways.
That said, what can we do? I’d really like to hear other ideas.
I know that there must exist alternatives. I also know that this sort of group “formation” that GW2 is headed towards is pretty awesome; we can’t turn things back to the way they were in 2007 with TBC and I’m not in favor of it even though I LOVED that experience. I think things are trending forward and socially, that means contact with people while being insulated from contact with people. Grouping with players without having to say a word to them; participating in raids without so much as an invitation from a raiding party; running around a virtual world full of people and have only a vague sort of interaction by killing monsters near each other …just not quite *with* each other. It’s very weird. Yet, as you point out, this is the state of socialization in the global community. Globalization hasn’t really brought more people together, it’s just made interacting with distant people distant in other ways. Very strange.
I think what GW2 is aiming for is to not force socialization, which I tend to believe is a good move. All game play should be voluntary …yet I believe as you do that there should be reasons and incentives to interact with other players. GW2 isn’t likely to be good at creating those incentives. I still believe the system will work very well despite that.
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Globalization hasn’t really brought more people together, it’s just made interacting with distant people distant in other ways. Very strange.
I think the simple answer is “bandwidth.” You can have 5 really good, life-long friends. You cannot have 500 really good, life-long friends. The average person probably couldn’t even say they met 500 people ~30 years ago. So as social media expands our “reach,” each of those peripheral relationships takes it toll on our still-finite time.
A decade ago, I really enjoyed keeping up-to-date with the news, be it political, local, or worldwide. Nowadays? I just read the political blogs I enjoy, relying on them to tell me if anything interesting is happening. There has never been a time when more information has existed in the world, but that very same crushing press of information has made my world smaller, not larger.
I believe the same thing happens socially.
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A point I agree with. But globalization isn’t a matter of having 500 friends, but making personal and interactive connections using media. Games don’t ask players to connect anymore.
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You’ve given me much food for thought. Given the short beta event, I think people grouped with their friends more often than not which lead to naturally to many complaints about overflow system being needing more work. Somehow, I wonder how people will form their own networks after release, and how the server communities will be developed.
There will be a LFG system in the full game, for the dungeon content. I think most of the ‘true’ socialization in the game will revolve around PvP teams and people running dungeon groups. Since dungeons are optional in GW2, there will be a certain subset of people who are really into it and who will most likely form their own subcommunity.
I just appreciate the fact that in GW2 I don’t have to view other players on the same quest as me as potential threats. I am also the sort of person who likes to rez and help strangers regardless of whether I’m getting exp for it or not.
Most of my friends and groupmates in MMOs have been my guildies… I’ve only made a handful of ‘real’ game friends from outside that social circle. Sometimes you find a cool person out and about while questing and you add them to your list, but overall I’m happy to not have to pay attention to most of the other people in the zone with me.
I have played the beta and I personally felt that GW2 was the least social MMO I have ever played. Because you can so seamlessly play with others, there is no real need for any interaction. It is a very very quiet game.
I do like that people don’t tag mobs and share resources but on the other hand that’s all the same kind of crutch that LFD introduced in WoW. The only MMO I am playing that forces interaction is SWTOR, in order to play Flashpoints and heroic quests. For as long that will last, as the automated social tool is already on its way.
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To a victim of antisocial behavior such as ganking, griefing, ninja-looting or harassment, it doesn’t matter whether his attacker was motivated by external rewards (be it honor points, kill-mails, better gear or just really cool death animation) or genuine internal sociopathy.
Why, then, should this distinction be relevant to the recipient of random acts of kindness?
Well, this type of behaviour is useful in that it indicates the kind of person you are playing with. If you eliminate it completely, you can no longer know your mates, and can no longer judge whether you want them in your group or not. Of course nobody wants to be the victim of anti-social acts, and eliminating them would seem like a great idea, but I would rather take my chances with people acting how they want, naturally, than being incentivized into a different behaviour than their own. If somebody helps me, I expect it to be out of kindness. I expect it because I form an idea of this person after this act of kindness, and I can assess her based on that. If you remove selfless kindness, you can no longer consider your fellow player as acting on his behalf or yours, and your image of her is less accurate. Also, performing selfless acts calls the recipient’s attention to the player who performed it, creating a potential for interaction which is missed in an incentivized act.
What a false equivalance!
I’ll give you a short answer: positive acts are enjoyable and reinforce good behavior. The distinction between encouraging all behavior, bad behavior, or good behavior should be extremely obvious.
If the game could make this distinction, that would be an extremely rewarding game to play. I think it’s important to make rewards and incentives clear. It’s how we read the behavior of others and it’s what helps form our experiences.
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I think in general you need to be careful about not confusing forced cooperation with the social bonds that may or may not occur as a result of the cooperation. it’s very good point that social behavior and cooperation are not the same thing; I am in fact myself a little skeptical about how things will turn out in GW2 eventually.
However, to take WoW as an example: the forced cooperation there did not automatically create social behavior. it is not social to invite a tank and healer because your group setup dictates it. or a level 85 because that’s again what you require. the forced grouping in WoW is a setup dictation, not a socially inspired act. LFG was in a way a very honest culmination of this: the fastest way to ‘complete your roster’. people might as well be role robots.
still, the forced grouping sets a stage for people to get to know each other (x-server LFG doesn’t) – and that’s where I agree with you: FFA, dynamic grouping is so automatic and wild, that it does not set the stage for interaction and chat in the same way as consensual, active group invites ‘may’. there is one more factor to consider here though: difficulty. only as long as the content is simple and easy will groups get away with not communicating and zerging. I think it’s a misconception that GW2′s scaling mechanics allow to zerg-rush anything; the combat we’ve seen in the beta was highly inefficient, with many deaths (also in PvP I’ve not seen any coordination). we’ve also not experienced the challenge of the story-mode dungeons.
the factor that really inspires social behavior is difficulty in my opinion. that’s when cooperation, be it in a WoW 5man or a FFA group becomes more than a joint venture. it’s hardship that drives human beings to act in a coordinated and supportive way and brings people together. our real world is a perfect example of this. and there’s no reason why GW2 should not feature encounters hard enough to inspire both cooperation and social behavior – and bonds from there. play better or wipe is usually enough reason.
….if you really want to call anything more or less ‘social behavior’, anyway. to me all behavior is self-serving one way or another and there is no such thing as ‘selfless kindness’. not even where somebody genuinely believes he is selfless; there is still a gain to him, maybe not a material gain and not a tit-for-tat gain, but an individual benefit nonetheless. there is always a drive and motivation and ultimately it is tied to our own image of ourselves and how we would like to be seen or feel about ourselves. even our best acts are incentivized. :) an ingame reward is just a very blunt variation of this. maybe we need to stop seeing social acts as diminished just because they are also self-serving.
p.s. I am much more worried about how the guest system affects server community and social control in GW2. that may be a topic for another post.
That what you said is very interesting indeed. Difficulty as encouraging cooperation and in turn bonding.
“However, to take WoW as an example: the forced cooperation there did not automatically create social behavior. it is not social to invite a tank and healer because your group setup dictates it. (…)” It is not social per se, it is an act full of potentialities, some of them being social. If you remove the possibility (or the compulsion) of grouping, you lose these potentialities. If dungeons in GW2 work the same way they did in pre-LFG WoW (not automatized, requiring communication), there may still be a chance of people behaving socially, because they would have a community to back them up. There will still be room for socialising, in the guild ambit or maybe in PvP, but the server community would suffer.
Despite what you said, that there is no such thing as a selfless act, a statement with which I agree, I still consider that degrees are to be taken into consideration. A system-enforced, blunt incentive as in GW2 is not the same as an internal incentive, such as gaining a friend with a kind act.
“p.s. I am much more worried about how the guest system affects server community and social control in GW2. that may be a topic for another post.” I’d like to hear about that, care to make an analysis? :)
One point I’d like to clarify is that Milady wrote, “Psychochild had commented on a previous post that he believed in ‘forced’ social interaction.” I put “forced” into quotes because this is how critics see it, not because that’s what I think it should be. I’d like to give people more opportunities to be social and interact. Part of that is easing the cost of cooperation between players, but also in setting the pace of the game to let people interact if they want. There shouldn’t be bullshit obstacles to working together in a game, but there should also be small bits of downtime where you get a chance to chat with others.
I think the term Syl uses, “community”, is perhaps a better way to think of things rather than “social”.
Thought-provoking post and comments, though!
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I appreciate this take on the matter, and if I use my imagination I can almost understand the perspective underlying it, but I come at this from a different direction entirely. In my imaginings, I suspect people who feel this way are looking to make friends and forge connections through playing MMOs; but I am the person such people hate: I bring friends to my MMOs and am not looking to make new ones (though if I do happen to, great. It just hasn’t happened for me in 17 years).
I don’t feel I’m being any more antisocial when I say I don’t want people to bother me than I feel I’m being antisocial when I say I don’t want people cutting in line in front of me when I’m at the Post Office. If there were a magical wall that prevented people from cutting, I wouldn’t look down on it just because I no longer knew who was willing to follow the social nicety of not cutting and who was being forced to follow it.
I had what was, for me, an amazing experience over the BWE: while participating in an event that many players were wiping on, I saw an elementalist running around ressing people, including me. I was keen to return the favor as she inevitably went down after drawing mob attention, and we stuck together throughout the remainder of the event, tossing boons one another’s way even amidst the mob of other players. We separated in time, I was distracted by some shiny or another, but I ran into this elementalist no less than three other times over the course of the BWE, in different racial areas and level ranges. Whenever I saw her name I followed, because I knew action was going to happen. Together, we unlocked a skill point, killed Aataxes in the swamp, and participated in other events.
Now, I didn’t bother to get her name, and I never invited her to a party, so I guess by some estimations I failed the social experiment. But in another MMO I wouldn’t have done those things, either. I would have just run in another direction because maybe she was going to tag the mobs I wanted, or mine the node I needed, or get the NPC I was escorting killed, or, or. In other MMOs I’ve grouped to share a boss kill, I’ve politely stood in line waiting for a boss to spawn, I’ve /bowed at people who threw buffs on me. But I’ve never looked forward to just seeing someone in the wild and thinking, “this means something fun and exciting is going to happen, just because I tagged along.” Especially given that I never had to think about what class I was and whether I could help if they died and what harvesting profession they might have and whether, if I ran into them tomorrow, they’d be five levels above or below me and we wouldn’t be able to group anymore.
My point is, I wasn’t going to be more social in another MMO because it forced me to; I would just be more likely to not play (in part because many of the features that force people to be more social in other MMOs prevent me from playing with the friends I brought with me as easily). But then again, my presence also wouldn’t be missed by someone who passes the forced socialization tests, so I suppose my perspective is… negligible, on that front.
It’s an interesting perspective, indeed. But you pretty much answer to all my concerns and acknowledge how it changes from your point of view, so there’s not much I can add which you didn’t say yourself.
Still, it’s a pity that you don’t take the opportunity to meet new people. Just today I started talking with somebody of my guild about random stuff, and ended up discussing Japanese haiku. You never know what you can learn from those strangers that play with you, or around you :).
It took me forever to really identify what irked me about your post but let me try!
you said that “You have to give players the opportunity to behave socially, or unsocially if they wish so. If you completely remove the choice, the system that you create is an artificial construct of apparent cooperation, where everybody is still going on their own, playing alone together more than ever.”
and
” Still, it forfeits the possibility of behaving socially for real.”
The way its set up here sounds like behavior is binary between 2 values (1:participation,cooperation[social] OR 2:nonparticipation[anti-social])
I think there is much more of spectrum between these 2 things.
The only way I can think to say this right now is to illustrate this through 2 different examples.
During the beta everybody was relatively close to each other in level and more importantly, extremely close to each other in motives and goals (to experience the game and get a feel for it, whether in pvp or pve) In this situation the sentiment of your post makes perfect sense cause everybody is participating in each others events but very little meaningful social interaction is happening in proportion to the cooperation that is taking place.
Then there is another example. You have a level 80 out in level 80 zone making efforts towards a particular armor skin and a level 10 who ask for help on a personal story quest. Helping the level 10 in another mmo would mean a certain amount of travel time and then grouping with the 10 and then facerolling through the content with all the tangible (but almost no intangible rewards) going only to the level 10.
In gw2 you pay some copper to travel to the level 10′s area and then you are scaled down so that there is still a considerable struggle to complete the quest, (intangible rewards) after which you receive material or karma towards your armor skin. (tangible rewards… for the both of you!).
Heres my first point!
Helping the level 10 is obviously not going to be a faster method to obtain the armor skin. But it gives a whole lot more of a reward than what you would get for helping a low level in any other mmo.
I don’t think you can call helping this level 10 a forced cooperation. Further more even if you could call it that: due to scaling, some communication between you might still be required because the content won’t be easy peezy.
And I don’t think you can call it act of pure selflessness either.
This action in my opinion falls in-between in a spectrum social and anti-social activity.
What gw2 has done in my opinion is shifted the entire spectrum itself in the direction of cooperation which is more akin to the direction of real life.
In my beta experience there were alot of “no-brainer” go help with this event now cause you wana get credit for it. But there were also instances where someone in guild made a new character and I had a hell of good time just getting my character to hoelbrack and the quest-leveling ground beyond. The compensation in experience and items was enough to make me feel like I wasn’t wasting a portion of my beta time and I got to help out a friend in the process.
Completely besides this point I feel the need to bring in sociology’s sister anthropology.
socialization is such a high value commodity for us because we are a hyper-social species, and we are a hyper social species because we evolved with language in cooperative groups called tribes.
The point here is that in the time when we were still being more rigorously exposed to natural selection, and thus our gene pool was changing to reflect what was more successful in a human, the majority of the time it made more sense for one human to cooperate with multiple other humans,..err it was evolutionarily stable for people to cooperate with each other. If the activies that people cooperated in were easy enough that no communication was needed between them while doing it then most of early human history might have been this “together alone” and the biology of humans might not have such a strong need for socializng today.
tl;dr
I think in a way its the dificulty of life itself that warrants the social aspects of human experience and not the neccessity or ineccessity of cooperation between humans. After all I can stand to play a game for a really long time by myself as long as I can gripe about it to my friends while I do so.
Agreed, there is no binary in what constitutes a social or unsocial/anti-social activity. We tend to divide acts in such a manner because it is convenient for us to simplify the discussion. And I agree with you that the action you comment does indeed fall in the middle of the spectrum. If I had to choose whether to ascribe said action (helping a level 10, being toned down in level and still getting a reward) to one of the two categories, I would say that it is social. That player had had to reach you, group up with you, and you had to stop your individual task to do something you would have not considered doing, in order to help somebody. You allow a link to be established between the helper and the helped. In that case, I like how they have arranged it.
In the other example you give about helping a guild member, that would be an altogether different case. You belong together to the same group, you are more likely to socialize and to be helpful to because of the background you two share. There is already a common ground established which invalidates the artificial structures that the game might construct in order to bring you two together (structures such as elite quest, instances, PvP).
Your arguments deepen the discussion, but do not invalidate my observations. Some other bloggers have reported the lack of groups and communication between players, the feelings of playing among bots, etc [Damn, I had another link and I can't find it]. I have already given my reasons for this. There may be instances in which people socialize just fine, due to that person’s particular attitude, or to some eccentric event, but the common experience was that of mute cooperation à la LFD (I just learned today that the tool is not “LFG” but “LFD”, duh!).
“Your arguments deepen the discussion, but do not invalidate my observations. ”
I Truly don’t mean to be disrespectful but you made an argument based on those observations and its that argument I don’t completely agree with.
“My argument is as follows: by providing incentives for certain social activities, they are no longer indicative of a social attitude”
And I was trying to somehow get out that I think alot more things than whether or not an action is incentivised go into indicating any type of attitude.
I used difficulty as an example but the context of any action can have thousands of things that could be affecting how likely people are to be sociable including things like the permanence of the medium under which they are supposed to be cooperating and acting socially. Why form bonds with people if its a beta and the characters and server will be gone in 48 hours for a whole month and then on the games releases you will be on a different server.
Lots of the people had been really looking forward to the game and were particularly engrossed in it.
To add context to my third example the guild had randomly recruited me after helping in a skill quest and I wanted to see what the guild interface was like so I accepted. There were like 400 people in that guild apparently it was just a beta guild where everybody had invite privileges. when someone asked for help on a personal story quest (minutes after I had joined the guild) I had never met or spoken to the person before.
The key to my argument would be that the incentivized activities are not indicative of a social attitude, not that they cannot be social ever. In other words, that if you carry out a particular act such as resurrecting somebody in a game where said act has a reward, you are not communicating through this act your intention of socialising. It might indeed be social because you want it to be, and you carry on to the next step, being amiable to the person you have resurrected, joining in a group with her, going with her questing. But the act itself does not bespeak of any social attitude because it might as well be a “selfish” act, realized just for the incentives. You no longer know just through this action if the person who realizes it is being social.
If the action is devoid of incentives, then there can be no doubt that the person who takes part in it is behaving socially, allowing for a deeper connection through an uncommon act of kindness.
Your example of a guildie who needed help in a quest, to which you answered, does indicate a social attitude, because the incentive is not as strong as to attract people who would do it merely for the reward.
Also keep in my mind that in my second example where the level 80 is on the spectrum completely depends on how big the reward is for the level 80 helping the level 10. If Helping the level 10 gets the armor 99% as fast as the level 80 area how much more likely is he to be acting socially?
Milady,
The gist of what you are saying might be expressed as follows: GW2 rewards good behavior, thus masking behaviors that might enable one to tell if the player is, at heart, a person with whom I’d like to be friends.
If my interpretation of what you are saying is correct, I’d suggest that I’d prefer to have a game which encourages “better” behavior. As I said in the other thread, some games encourage and indeed reward “bad” behavior. Wow looking for dungeon tool made us all into our roles. I became the “tank” or the “healer” depending upon which toon I played. “Pull faster, Tank”, “heal me, healer”. For most of the latter part of WOW I didn’t even have a name, just a role. I cannot recall any group in which I gained a friend or a guildmate. Even in relaxed situations in which we ran a “mostly” guild group and chatted in /party there was little interaction. Older games, such as Everquest enforced social interaction by nature of the wait in those games (waiting for spawns), but they encouraged kill stealing (we are NOT going to wait another 20 hours for a respawn).
Neither of these examples does anything to invalidate your point, but I’ll suggest that the “flaw” was in the game, not the players.
My experience in several GW2 beta’s I’ve been in suggests that your observations are not correct, that social interaction will improve in GW2, not become worse. It suggests that a helpful culture will bring forth better behaviors. We’ll see. We’ve already made friends and guildmates through the beta!!
Today I stumbled across this write-up of a GDC presentation on ‘Designing for Friendship’. I thought it was an interesting perspective on the issue of game mechanics fostering social relationships.
http://www.motivateplay.com/2012/03/gdc-chris-bell-designing-for-friendship-meaningful-relationships/
Thank you for the link, it’s been a great read :)