Does anyone group in this game anymore?

You don't change the playerbase by sitting on your arse. I help EVERYONE in game, last 4 days I spent explaining how you can get Crimson Rakling Pet or helping others in Heroics on Tatooine or even helping to find DNA vendor while farming some DNA samples. There are some casuals, some douchebags and I've meet few very nice random people that afterwards were sitting on my ingame friendlist. Douches are everywhere - and it's not by any means faulty of 2012 gamers. Well it maybe it is, because gaming went mainstream... so all kind of people got here too. From the good sides - for my effort I've actually received an free Aldoraan Unusuall Egg and few other things just because of my willing to help people.

On the other side what can be expected from community where people pick PVP server and then complain about being ganked (lolwutwtf?). I could understand those who pick PVE and don't want to bother with crappy autoflag system but there are so many riddiculous statements that can be covered only with silence...

Get rid of the tank and healer class, problem solved.

This is same issue that blizzard ran into when developing WoW ages ago, when they FIRST added BC they realized that most people either dislike grouping or, tend to only do it because they have to. This means that ALOT of group quests either get skipped, avoided, or done because the player HAS to in order to hit max level.

while you can hit max level in TOR with out touching any group content while leveling its is the general player philosophy in mmo's that grouping should be very minimal in leveling game, and most players will typically group on the first play through, but after that they do tend to avoid it. I forsee bioware doing away with most of group content come the first big expansion, but tbh what i'd RATHER see is them develop a system that scales the indoor missions to the group your in... that said... i personally avoid most group missions atm SIMPLY because they slow me down, and when i am leveling an alt to reach end game and i've seen story line already i really just want to reach 50.

Group stuff is fun but as far as finding groups is very server based. On helm of G when i play typically dont see much of grouping(1.2 did help some) on jung ma, on other hand chat is always active and i could probably find any group i wanted! still big issue i have is that...

1: if you skip group stuff you will have to do all bonuses, and are STILL spots you'll hit you are to low level and have to sub in space combat or pvp

2: miss alot of nice blue and modable gear parts by skipping these

3:This could easily be done if companions tank/healers could be subbed in for 2+ and 4 mans unfortunatly, you nerfed companion tanks and healers so bad that its a joke trying to tank or heal with a companion.... mean was ONE of huge selling points of companions to begin with! don't have a healer? USE a companion! don't have a tank? sub in your companion! let us be PERFECTLY honest here... 90% of OP's gripes could be fixed if they simply made companions better!

Game still needs work but still fairly good in my book.

Then what's the point to pay monthly for a solo game?

EQ forced you to group and it had no solo content. WoW killed that and and now you know the rest of the story.

I would group if there were more than 9 people on my server

We're looking at several problems actually.

I don't really think any of them are Bioware's fault though. As many have pointed out- the reason Bioware designs the quests to make grouping *optional* is because they're aware that a significant amount of the playerbase either a) don't group, b) rarely group, or c) group sometimes but certainly don't want to have to group to progress their story.

Is that a problem? That's surely subjective.

One problem, though, is people whose response to not being able to find a group is to curse others for not wanting to group, and to take the stance that Bioware is wrong for giving them the option.

If your scenario is that you, Darth Bert, want to run Black Talon, and there are three other players nearby, all trying to do their class story. Now, Darth Bert the 'Everyone should group because its an MMO' player seems to have the attitude that all content should be harder, companions removed from the game, etc, so that those three players are forced to group up with Darth Bert, on a "We'll do black talon with you, if you then do our story missions with us" basis.

Problem here is... that's not going to happen, because Darth Bert's not always around, and those three players neither necessarily know, nor indeed *trust* Darth Bert, or each other. So... on finding it's *impossible* to do their class missions and advance their story without forming a group for a 'normal' quest... they'll log out, unsub, and go find a game with a more realistic difficulty level. Darth Bert, when he logs in, will still be left without a group for Black Talon.

A particularly over-zealous breed of Darth Bert, at this point, gets defensive and asserts "Good!"- taking the apparent view that, if a player isn't available/interested in grouping with him, then they're a waste of pixels and shouldn't be logged in "because it's an MMO!!!!", and that better they be gone, and someone who'll group with Darth Bert be logged in instead.

Ssso... basically, other people are only of value if you can use them for your own ends, if they're living their lives independently and you might actually have to act to make it worth their while to work with you- or alternatively show patience and wait till you encounter someone whose aims coincide with yours... then they're worthless?

Yes, there's a reason this player is Darth Bert.

As Darth Bert keeps moaning, populations are low. The fact that there are players logged in who aren't grouping with you does *not* in any way *prevent* players who might group with you from being online, so kindly don't blame other players for your inability to find a group, because the argument doesn't hold up.

Next up, server numbers/population sizes.

Again, this isn't really anybody's *fault*. There are good reasons to spread the population out- and those reasons are performance related. Again, remember that for a sizable number of players- "Is the game playable?" is a lot more of a deal-breaker than "Are there lots of other people around?" Other avatars... cause lag. We've probably all experienced freeze-ups caused by some other player doing something particularly graphically intensive in a crowd, and nobody wants to have to sit for ages in a server queue to be able to log in.

So... basically the choices would be a) push up the system requirements to levels that would alienate casual gamers (reduce subs massively) and still wouldn't help with server queues, b) make the game largely unplayable with a crawling FPS through a crowd on overpopulated servers (huge reduction in subs, huge increase in complaints), c) reduce the computer/bandwidth intensity of the game by a large degree just to make more 'room' for player/player interaction/graphical impact (reduce subs from everyone impressed with the look of the game/style/the voice over/cinematic conversations etc, and just satisfy the group MMOers), or d) spread things out to make the game playable, at the expense of making group-finding difficult.

I'm afraid that the truth is, whilst most of the people want to group *some* of the time, and that's *part* of the reason they play MMOs, the truth for probably a majority of players (i.e. a majority of subscriptions) is that 'being able to find other people to play with' is at a lower level on their 'requirements' list than a number of things that would be adversely affected if Bioware made some of the changes mooted in order to coax more people into grouping.

Yeah, same deal. Most of the time I skip Heroic missions on each planet, although now that I'm relatively high up in the tanking tree on my levelling character, I'm thinking of trying to solo some Heroics. But as far as player grouping goes, and as much as I would like it to happen through communication, I think that a group finding tool is needed.

For example, there is a Heroic mission that somebody wants to do, they could do something like "Call to arms", indicating which Heroic it is, which then shows up to all players on the planet as a little notification, saying player such and such wants to do this heroic mission, do you care to join him? With a short countdown to agree (like WZ queueing), for maybe 10-15 seconds, after which it automatically dissolves so that players don't get annoyed by them.
That would make that content much more accessible fr a lot of players.

I haven't grouped since I started playing and probably won't group in the foreseeable future. I really have no need to as neither raiding nor PVP hold any appeal to me. So with neither need nor incentive, why group?

Also, the days of forced grouping a la EQ are long past. If Bioware were to suddenly ramp difficulty up in order to force grouping, then they might as well file preemptive bankruptcy at the money laden casuals bailing.

My thoughts on this have been touched on by others but I will paraphrase...

I haven't grouped with others as much as I normally would because the skill of the MMO community at large has taken a drastic downturn in recent years. Basic group dynamics, such as CC, watching threat level, and common courtesy, have fallen by the wayside. So much in fact, that it is now easier to accomplish group content with the least amount of competent players possible. Having anymore than that makes things more difficult to heal, or hold aggro, because some monkey is pulling mobs for the tank, hitting CC'ed mobs with splash damage, or going afk every 2 minutes.

TL;DR - Most people suck at group content. It's easier to do it by myself, or not at all.