Communities and MMO's

TheAnointed

So, this is my first post.  Although I am a frequent visitor to the site, I have never thought to get too involved witht eh forum aspect of it, untill now.

I have been playing MMO's for a while now, played quite a few, from planet side, to eve online and wow.  There has only been one that I have played since release with a 24/7 active subscription, EVE.  I was thinking about why that was the other day, and I came to the conclusion that its because of the community, or at least it was.   The one main thing that eve has to its benefit is the fact that (unless you live in China) no matter what country you play from, or when you started playing, you all play on the same server, creating some rather interesting results.  This also allows for a certain amount of accountability that I dont find in games like WoW, where it really doesnt matter what you do to the other people playing on the server because you can just switch to another server and have a nice name change.  It also means that if you manage to create a positive reputation for yourself, the majority of the 30,000+ players online at any one time will no doubt remember your name.

So, from where I am sitting, Eve's main beneficial factor is its community, and recently that has also been its main problem, recently there has been mud slinging going on, of which I wont go into seeing as the majority of it isnt worth being re typed.  What I will say is that its becoming ever more apparent that a malicious player minority thinks it can ruin a game for other people by creating a smokescreen of lies in order to create bad press for EVE.

To what extent do the communities of MMO's go towards making or breaking the MMO? Can a game exist with a bad community if the game is good enough? Can a community make a bad game good? Is the community of an MMO is beiggest liability at teh same time as being is life blood?

 

-The Anointed ( Yes my in game name, look me up if you want to play eve the way its made to be played.)

 

Anarius

i say the game, because the community can be ignored but some features in a game cannot be.

tunabun

All of the above and more.





All things contribute greatly to the success of an MMO.  Bank on any one explicit area and you are doomed to mediocrity at best.

AshGUTZ

I do believe that communities can make or break a game. Then again, I still believe bad community games can be popular because of the actual game being good. For example, GE (IAH) was a game I fell in love with for awhile -- but the childish community was the first thing to turn me off from it. After realizing the community was bad, the impact of lack of content drove me even crazier. If the community had been one like MMORPG.com's or CoH/CoV, I can assure I would have just delt with the lack of content. Just like WoW is a wonderful game (opinion based) yet the community is pretty awful. The thing with that game though, is that the community is HUGE so you have to expect even more butts than regular smaller based communities. That Flyff game is really fun as well, without lacking that much content (for a F2P), but the community is useless -- another example of community completely pushing me away from a game. Communities are a big thing to me, I enjoy being able to meet and talk with people in my games, and to play with one another. I thought that was the whole point of MMO's, a massive multi-player online game. If a majority of those multiple players are dicks, then I don't want to be there. If a community is so hard to deal with that you don't want to be there, it might as well be another console game.

DrSpanky

I voted the game as well, but I do think the community is a close second.  The community was one of the main reasons I quit WOW.





Ant