I was playing Marvel Heroes the other day and chuckling to myself that the Maggia goon I was fighting (that’s right, the Maggia, in no way shape or form associated with or resembling the Mafia) yelled out “Waste ‘dese guys!” to his comrades while firing his dual machine guns at a lone Thor (I guess it’s the royal plural?), when suddenly I realized that the developers probably chose to use the plural because they assumed that people would be playing this Massively Multiplayer Online game together. The fact is, I play a lot of MMOs, but I almost always play them like a single player game with a chat/trade function. Even when I do partake in the multiplayer aspects of MMOs, I still like to avoid people as much as possible. I like being in a guild, but I get annoyed if they’re too chatty. I like doing group content, but mostly 5- or 6-man dungeons dungeons, not big WoW-style raids or GW2-style open world zergs. I’ve been branching out into PvP, but always in pickup groups. I’m a huge introvert, so this really isn’t a surprise, but of course this begs the obvious question: why play a multiplayer game at all if you’re going to play by yourself 95% of the time?

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