World of Warcraft

[A Black Falcon]

That question seems to come up all the time... the answer for WoW is that you don't have to interact much at all with others if you don't want. Ignore the chatbox and do your thing (and don't play in a PvP server) and you can mostly ignore the others. Sure you'll deal with things I described about queues for killing monsters, people being in mines so that you don't always have as hard an experience as it's supposed to be (and don't fight as many enemies), etc, but if you don't want to socialize a game like WoW is quite receptive to it (especially when combined with the auction houses for trading). Diablo II of course is fundamentally a single player game. Guild Wars however is different... most characters really cannot function alone. However, that's where the people who really don't like playing with humans can use the henchmen to fill out a party and do it that way... so even there you aren't required to party if you don't want to... now yes there are problems with trading right now in the game, but it's not out yet so that's okay. I'm sure they'll fix that and implement a good trading system.

Now, there is one exception in GW, that is a game mode where you must play with others... the random-team PvP arena. You could just ignore it of course, but it doesn't really ask for much teamwork or anything because all the teams are random so you don't exactly have the time to form a strong group... this minimizes the impact of any of those team members being idiots. Where it does come up is in the cooperative missions if you're playing with humans instead of computers, but I just take that is one of the possible downsides of playing and will hope for a better group next time I go.