"Traditionally, massively multiplier online games have been about three basic gameplay pillars combat, exploration and character progression. In Alganon, in addition to these we've added the fourth pillar to the equation: Copy & Paste."
Best: Honest to god, all communities has flaws, whether it's EVE online's idiotic gankers that lure people out to 0.0 space, or Vanguard players that scam you - or atleast try to. I must say, the EASIEST game to find a server with a great community, must be Lotro.
Worst is by far: Darkfall and Eve Online, perhaps Runes Of Magic aswell.
So far my best experience was Asherons call 2 by far best ever.
Second also very good was Ryzom
Worse those where i saw mainly adds for buying gold or items and could almost not ask something or chat in general chat.
Also FFXI was not realy nice game as community back in days on japanese servers.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009..... In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Most players in Darkfall are friendly in every game you have some jerks and help and chat is not realy terible comepare to some other games.
Maybe you only say this becouse its a harsh game and when ganked or pked you nerdrage and quit and then multiply community is worse by factor 10 becouse you hated been killed in free for all full loot pvp game lol.
And those who claim Darkfall was worse play mainly themeparks i serieusly doub you guys have ever played Darkfall becouse its not so bad as you claim it to be.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009..... In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
EQ2: Helpful people, except for the occasional guild drama; some people also got incredibly bitter after WoW drained their servers of other players.
WoW: Yes WoW, in vanilla times before cross-server matchmaking or battlegrounds that is, we had an awesome server community going on.
Worst:
Aion: Never before have I seen a worse bunch of players running around like headless chickens thinking they're something special because they play a grinder.
Perfect World / various F2P
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
Best:: I really dont know, but i acually really liked the Darkfall community, most of the people i met was really helpful, and people acually did help eachother out in the forums and ingame from what i saw. i really dont get why people thought the Darkfall community was that bad, most of the time someone asked a question in the racial chat, they acually did get good awnsers, and most questions on the forums was awnsered too.
Worst: World of Warcraft, seriously, like 90% of all the people on there have been like "omfg noob low gs" etc etc. Vanilla WoW and TBC was ALOT better tho, before that fucking piece of shit dungeon finder tool, the server i was on acually had a pretty good community.
I honestly don't mind the WoW community's chat, at least there's people socializing. A bad community to me is one where nobody talks
yeah but after the dungeon finder tool came thats exactly what WoW is like now. No one talks, and when they do its usually just to tell you/someone else how noobish they are and how they suck because of low GS.
Worst: Had some bad experiences with Lineage 2 and RF but met soem cool people in them as well. Big difference between RF back when it was P2P and now that it is F2P. At least when the community overall sucked it was still close.
I like close communities that small games have, even when I don't care for everyone there it's nice seeing the same guys while you play.
Best: For me.....EQ2, LotRO (that won't last, I'm betting), and Fallen Earth - extremely helpful people in all 3 of those games
Worst: For ME.....WoW wins this one hands down.
I have never played any other game in all my life that had such an inordinately large number of asshats "per capita," so to speak. I would go so far as to say that almost 50% of the game population (at least on the two primary servers I played on, Lothar and Tanaris) were completely rude, crude, and socially unacceptable little dweebs. And yes...I DO think part of the problem is age. Granted, not all 20 year olds are dicks, not all 12 year olds are morons, and not all 40 year olds are thoughtful and considerate, BUT....it did seem that the "20-somethings" that occupy that game....are far worse than any of the tweens I ran into. They ALMOST have a monopoly on jerk-like behavior. It makes you wonder if they've had any parenting at ALL.
Most players in Darkfall are friendly in every game you have some jerks and help and chat is not realy terible comepare to some other games.
Maybe you only say this becouse its a harsh game and when ganked or pked you nerdrage and quit and then multiply community is worse by factor 10 becouse you hated been killed in free for all full loot pvp game lol.
And those who claim Darkfall was worse play mainly themeparks i serieusly doub you guys have ever played Darkfall becouse its not so bad as you claim it to be.
You really can't be saying that with a straight face. Not to be rude but i've seen from your various posts that you defend that game a lot whenever someone says anything bad about it, so i wont argue with you because it'd be a pointless debate. I also admit the community had improved a lot since those horrible beta days but even now it isnt THAT great.
Worst: The majority of MMOs since '04, or '05. When I left SWG due to the NGE debacle and toyed around with more MMORPGs, I was actually disturbed by how frequently less grouping occured, and when they DO occur, they abruptly get disbanded or members leave without so much as a "Later dudes!" MMORPG player communities are at a point where as soon as the quest is done and your back in a relatively safe area, the members disberse with out even a "Bye." Quite oftenly, people don't say s**t the entire time. That doesn't build a good community, IMO.
Best: Easily, hands down Pre-NGE SWG. The playerbase was good in Pre-WoW standards and respectable numbers even in contrast for today (best it had I think was 200k I think). The community in the differing servers in general were spectacular, partly because of the people and partly because of the game mechanics. My justifications:
* You get a bonus in XP's if adventuring together. In contrast to alot of games these days where you are penalized in XPs because you are in a group.
* Group sizes in Pre-NGE SWG used to allow alot of members. I think it used to allow 10? It's been a while, but you could have alot of names to the left of the screen. Shame SOE nerfed the group sizes.
* There was no tired, old Class + Level System. The Skillpoint / Template system allowed freedom of character builds and skills, but even finalized, you could not retain mastery in everything. That being said, regardless of how specialized or generalized you tried to be, you needed other players for something. Someone else will have a skillset that you lack and would be quite nice to have.
* Pre-NGE SWG used to offer enticing gameplay that WASN'T solely focused on combat. Believe it or not, there were quite a number of people who loved these aspects of the game and did not or barely got into combat at all. A number didn't even put any skillpoints to the most basic combat abilities. Onto the next 2 points:
* Pre-NGE SWG has been the only MMORPG that I have ever come across where there were professions absolutely and totally being Social in nature. Entertainers for example being one. Some can alter the appearance of your character. Some can be Dancers or Musicians, and if you watch / listen to them while they perform, combat players slowly remove "Fatigue" and "Mind Wounds" that they accrued from constrant combat. Cantinas (bars / clubs) in a number of the towns used to be packed with players. There were Entertainers doing their thing, and the Cantina would be filled with visitors hanging out, talking. If you can imagine the most packed Night Club you've visited IRL, that's how it was in a few of these Cantinas. The ones at Coronet, Theed, Bestine, and Mos Eisley were great examples, but Coronet back in the day was by far the most packed on most occasions.
* Crafting in SWG used to be as deep in gameplay as combat, because a certain item will have different stats depending on the crafter's resources, resource quality, tools, character skills, and knowing the in's and out's of the system. There were many players in SWG that were, just like Entertainers, absolutely and totally dedicated to Crafting and being a Merchant. Sometimes, to gather resources at a far flung harvester at a dangerous location, they'd hire combat players to act as escorts.
* Pre-NGE SWG also had a player based economy, not the loot-based travesty it later became due to the NGE. Simply because everything you could possibly need was player crafteable, and there were no loot rewards to speak of. Items also "Decayed" in their condition, and once an item got to zero, it was useless. Stats went down with lower condition. What does this mean as far as community goes? It meant that Crafters were absolutely as essential as anyone in the game. THEY provided for your needs. You visit their shops. In those days you can regularly talk to them and do some wheeling and dealing, even as a combat oriented character. Lots of merchants were around and competition was fierce. This meant fair and competitive pricing. And us combat oriented players got favorite crafters that we eventually came back to for new, replacement gear.
* I also need to stress again how social SWG used to be. Not only were groups the norm (the gameplay didn't FORCE you to group, but we just naturally fell into groups), but they easily last for a long game session. Members TALKED with each other. After achieving a goal / mission, the group didn't disperse into the 4 winds. Quite frequently we stayed together and figured something to do. Usually somebody had something tough or long to do, and we helped each other out. I still recall after years the big hunting groups on the deathworld of Dathomir. Filled with dangerous, big creatures. You'd fly into one of the very few spaceports on the planet, see a bunch of people LFG'ing. "Enraged Rancor grp forming. PST if interested!" You'd go out with that group, lay waste to an area. After a while, you need to rest a bit (bio, listen / watch an entertainer in a group), and a member would build a camp to rest in. The funny part was that sometimes the "rest" can take forever because the group would be sitting there talking to each other for quite possibly a long time, until someone remembers again what you came out for! And BTW, these are PUGs I'm talking about in the old days of SWG.
* Also, the game was, in those days, very newbie friendly. Pre-CU/NGE SWG had quite a bit of a learning curve. The manual was utterly useless, despite it actually being pretty thick (I had the Collector's Ed). I recall having a really tough start, getting incapped / killed frequently as a newbie out in Doerba Goefel, Corellia. When I was out in a nice valley NW of the small town, having a tough time fighting the critters there, a passing by player on a swoop bike saved me from another demise. Afterwards, he talked to me a bit and gave me a few pointers as to how to fight. I also wanted to join the Empire, so he told me Corellia isn't the place for it. Go to Naboo or better yet, Bestine, Tatooine. After much advice, he gave me a nice DL44 pistol and wished me luck... Later when I got better, I'd also in turn help out newbies at Mos Eisley. Other veterans would go out of their way to help them out. Once I got further into the Empire, I used to don my Stormtrooper Armor and go out to Mos Eisley and help out the newbies. New players got a real kick out of seeing a Stormtrooper hep them out. For one, it gave them a hand in learning the game. Secondly, seeing a Stormtrooper screams as much Star Wars as a Lightsaber does.
* RP'ers helped bring some "Star Wars" into the game. I was never a RPer. The game did have hardcore RP servers, but RP guilds were scattered about in regular servers also. A great example on what kind of an experience they brought into the game were some of the more faction oriented RP guilds. There were some Imperial Trooper guilds where while adventuring / "On duty" they can only use Imperial armor or uniforms. Very uniform in appearance, and it was great when these guys rolled into town totally decked out in Stormtrooper Armor. They'd do patrols in Mos Eisley or manning checkpoints. There'd be an event with some of the Rebel RP guilds too.
Pre-NGE SWG's community was the best I ever saw. Due to how the gameplay mechanics were and the people that were there. My friends list in that game was huge and you'd always say what's up when one of your buddies log in. My list in there was easily the largest compared to every MMORPG I have played. Once SOE destroyed the community and I left the game, I have never found another MMORPG that had the same level or better community experience as I had with old school SWG. Even LOTRO, with its community having a good and mature reputation, did not come close to half that experience.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Dark Age of Camelot: Met some of the greatest people ever while battling against some of the best strategists ever. I'd be in a foxhole with any of these guys.
Lotro (Alpha, Beta, Open): I can still see people play their music outside the Prancing Pony and actually try to roleplay a complicated story.
Worst:
Eve: I've never met so many pretentious people...well outside of a campus coffee shop.
WoW: To be fair it wasn't all bad. It has mass appeal. It just so happens that people are jerks in mass.
Most players in Darkfall are friendly in every game you have some jerks and help and chat is not realy terible comepare to some other games.
Maybe you only say this becouse its a harsh game and when ganked or pked you nerdrage and quit and then multiply community is worse by factor 10 becouse you hated been killed in free for all full loot pvp game lol.
And those who claim Darkfall was worse play mainly themeparks i serieusly doub you guys have ever played Darkfall becouse its not so bad as you claim it to be.
You really can't be saying that with a straight face. Not to be rude but i've seen from your various posts that you defend that game a lot whenever someone says anything bad about it, so i wont argue with you because it'd be a pointless debate. I also admit the community had improved a lot since those horrible beta days but even now it isnt THAT great.
PvP really tends to bring out the worst in most people. It's an empowering thing...
PvP games have the worst communities. They attract the types who like to talk trash.
.
WoW has more children. Kids are kids. WoW also has more females which is good.
.
I think the big culprit for making a bad community is a game with global chat. You get a channel with a couple of hundred people in it and it's bound to have four or five jerks.
.
LotRO had a rep for having a good community but it had no global chat channels. But on at least one server the players had their looking for group channel, /glff and it was every bit as bad as a WoW's /trade.
.
Games like ryzom can have good communities, but the community is small and clicish.
I have found the complete opposite, and its not even close.
I found that Warhammer, (especially) Dark Age of Camelot, and surprisingly UO, were some of the best communities I have ever experienced.
In UO you had to find gamers with similiar interests. At the time I played mostly with some anti-pks, that used to go to a lot of player made towns. There were obviously a ton of RPers there as well. Yes there were the reds that were behind every tree that killed you after every 5 steps you took in game, then took all your stuff as well.... but the RP community and those not red were absolutely fantastic.
PvE games, where the only object of the game is to get your character more gear to progress... Those for me have been the worst communities I have ever played with without question.
Worse: The games I play now and probably the games I'll be playing next.
Game communities differ from server to server and experiences vary from group to group but the only common trend I can observe is a gradual deterioration of communities.
Comments
Best: Rubies of Eventide
Worst: WoW
"Traditionally, massively multiplier online games have been about three basic gameplay pillars combat, exploration and character progression. In Alganon, in addition to these we've added the fourth pillar to the equation: Copy & Paste."
best: Vanguard
worst: WoW / each and every F2P game
Best to me was warhammer. Mainly because everyone knows everyone. It's an RvR game after all. And people run around flipping BO...
I basically know every guilds, who's their leader, hop on different guild's vent from time to time... etc etc.
Best: Honest to god, all communities has flaws, whether it's EVE online's idiotic gankers that lure people out to 0.0 space, or Vanguard players that scam you - or atleast try to. I must say, the EASIEST game to find a server with a great community, must be Lotro.
Worst is by far: Darkfall and Eve Online, perhaps Runes Of Magic aswell.
Worst: Ijji.com in general.
If you like constant "preteen" drama that's the place for it, even though according to some polls most people there are over 20.
So far my best experience was Asherons call 2 by far best ever.
Second also very good was Ryzom
Worse those where i saw mainly adds for buying gold or items and could almost not ask something or chat in general chat.
Also FFXI was not realy nice game as community back in days on japanese servers.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Best would be eq2, alway folks willing to help out new players.
Worst comunity would be wow, ever watch barrens chat, enough said.
I see some claim Darkfall is worse but why?
Most players in Darkfall are friendly in every game you have some jerks and help and chat is not realy terible comepare to some other games.
Maybe you only say this becouse its a harsh game and when ganked or pked you nerdrage and quit and then multiply community is worse by factor 10 becouse you hated been killed in free for all full loot pvp game lol.
And those who claim Darkfall was worse play mainly themeparks i serieusly doub you guys have ever played Darkfall becouse its not so bad as you claim it to be.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Best:
EQ2: Helpful people, except for the occasional guild drama; some people also got incredibly bitter after WoW drained their servers of other players.
WoW: Yes WoW, in vanilla times before cross-server matchmaking or battlegrounds that is, we had an awesome server community going on.
Worst:
Aion: Never before have I seen a worse bunch of players running around like headless chickens thinking they're something special because they play a grinder.
Perfect World / various F2P
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
Best : roleplay servers of P2P games
Worst : F2P PvP games
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Best:: I really dont know, but i acually really liked the Darkfall community, most of the people i met was really helpful, and people acually did help eachother out in the forums and ingame from what i saw. i really dont get why people thought the Darkfall community was that bad, most of the time someone asked a question in the racial chat, they acually did get good awnsers, and most questions on the forums was awnsered too.
Worst: World of Warcraft, seriously, like 90% of all the people on there have been like "omfg noob low gs" etc etc. Vanilla WoW and TBC was ALOT better tho, before that fucking piece of shit dungeon finder tool, the server i was on acually had a pretty good community.
I honestly don't mind the WoW community's chat, at least there's people socializing. A bad community to me is one where nobody talks
yeah but after the dungeon finder tool came thats exactly what WoW is like now. No one talks, and when they do its usually just to tell you/someone else how noobish they are and how they suck because of low GS.
Best: Istaria, but it is very small and close
Worst: Had some bad experiences with Lineage 2 and RF but met soem cool people in them as well. Big difference between RF back when it was P2P and now that it is F2P. At least when the community overall sucked it was still close.
I like close communities that small games have, even when I don't care for everyone there it's nice seeing the same guys while you play.
Make games you want to play.
http://www.youtube.com/user/RavikAztar
Best: SWG Pre-NGE
Worst: STO due to lifers demanding special privileges over the rest of the community.
Best: For me.....EQ2, LotRO (that won't last, I'm betting), and Fallen Earth - extremely helpful people in all 3 of those games
Worst: For ME.....WoW wins this one hands down.
I have never played any other game in all my life that had such an inordinately large number of asshats "per capita," so to speak. I would go so far as to say that almost 50% of the game population (at least on the two primary servers I played on, Lothar and Tanaris) were completely rude, crude, and socially unacceptable little dweebs. And yes...I DO think part of the problem is age. Granted, not all 20 year olds are dicks, not all 12 year olds are morons, and not all 40 year olds are thoughtful and considerate, BUT....it did seem that the "20-somethings" that occupy that game....are far worse than any of the tweens I ran into. They ALMOST have a monopoly on jerk-like behavior. It makes you wonder if they've had any parenting at ALL.
Just one opinion.
The best is easy
Middle Earth Online community, pre LotRO NGE by Turbine.
After that, I'd say Vanguard, Fallen Earth.
The Worst
WoW is the easy one, but following that, I'd also add LotRO, as it doesn't have a community because the whole game is single player focused.
You really can't be saying that with a straight face. Not to be rude but i've seen from your various posts that you defend that game a lot whenever someone says anything bad about it, so i wont argue with you because it'd be a pointless debate. I also admit the community had improved a lot since those horrible beta days but even now it isnt THAT great.
Worst: The majority of MMOs since '04, or '05. When I left SWG due to the NGE debacle and toyed around with more MMORPGs, I was actually disturbed by how frequently less grouping occured, and when they DO occur, they abruptly get disbanded or members leave without so much as a "Later dudes!" MMORPG player communities are at a point where as soon as the quest is done and your back in a relatively safe area, the members disberse with out even a "Bye." Quite oftenly, people don't say s**t the entire time. That doesn't build a good community, IMO.
Best: Easily, hands down Pre-NGE SWG. The playerbase was good in Pre-WoW standards and respectable numbers even in contrast for today (best it had I think was 200k I think). The community in the differing servers in general were spectacular, partly because of the people and partly because of the game mechanics. My justifications:
* You get a bonus in XP's if adventuring together. In contrast to alot of games these days where you are penalized in XPs because you are in a group.
* Group sizes in Pre-NGE SWG used to allow alot of members. I think it used to allow 10? It's been a while, but you could have alot of names to the left of the screen. Shame SOE nerfed the group sizes.
* There was no tired, old Class + Level System. The Skillpoint / Template system allowed freedom of character builds and skills, but even finalized, you could not retain mastery in everything. That being said, regardless of how specialized or generalized you tried to be, you needed other players for something. Someone else will have a skillset that you lack and would be quite nice to have.
* Pre-NGE SWG used to offer enticing gameplay that WASN'T solely focused on combat. Believe it or not, there were quite a number of people who loved these aspects of the game and did not or barely got into combat at all. A number didn't even put any skillpoints to the most basic combat abilities. Onto the next 2 points:
* Pre-NGE SWG has been the only MMORPG that I have ever come across where there were professions absolutely and totally being Social in nature. Entertainers for example being one. Some can alter the appearance of your character. Some can be Dancers or Musicians, and if you watch / listen to them while they perform, combat players slowly remove "Fatigue" and "Mind Wounds" that they accrued from constrant combat. Cantinas (bars / clubs) in a number of the towns used to be packed with players. There were Entertainers doing their thing, and the Cantina would be filled with visitors hanging out, talking. If you can imagine the most packed Night Club you've visited IRL, that's how it was in a few of these Cantinas. The ones at Coronet, Theed, Bestine, and Mos Eisley were great examples, but Coronet back in the day was by far the most packed on most occasions.
* Crafting in SWG used to be as deep in gameplay as combat, because a certain item will have different stats depending on the crafter's resources, resource quality, tools, character skills, and knowing the in's and out's of the system. There were many players in SWG that were, just like Entertainers, absolutely and totally dedicated to Crafting and being a Merchant. Sometimes, to gather resources at a far flung harvester at a dangerous location, they'd hire combat players to act as escorts.
* Pre-NGE SWG also had a player based economy, not the loot-based travesty it later became due to the NGE. Simply because everything you could possibly need was player crafteable, and there were no loot rewards to speak of. Items also "Decayed" in their condition, and once an item got to zero, it was useless. Stats went down with lower condition. What does this mean as far as community goes? It meant that Crafters were absolutely as essential as anyone in the game. THEY provided for your needs. You visit their shops. In those days you can regularly talk to them and do some wheeling and dealing, even as a combat oriented character. Lots of merchants were around and competition was fierce. This meant fair and competitive pricing. And us combat oriented players got favorite crafters that we eventually came back to for new, replacement gear.
* I also need to stress again how social SWG used to be. Not only were groups the norm (the gameplay didn't FORCE you to group, but we just naturally fell into groups), but they easily last for a long game session. Members TALKED with each other. After achieving a goal / mission, the group didn't disperse into the 4 winds. Quite frequently we stayed together and figured something to do. Usually somebody had something tough or long to do, and we helped each other out. I still recall after years the big hunting groups on the deathworld of Dathomir. Filled with dangerous, big creatures. You'd fly into one of the very few spaceports on the planet, see a bunch of people LFG'ing. "Enraged Rancor grp forming. PST if interested!" You'd go out with that group, lay waste to an area. After a while, you need to rest a bit (bio, listen / watch an entertainer in a group), and a member would build a camp to rest in. The funny part was that sometimes the "rest" can take forever because the group would be sitting there talking to each other for quite possibly a long time, until someone remembers again what you came out for! And BTW, these are PUGs I'm talking about in the old days of SWG.
* Also, the game was, in those days, very newbie friendly. Pre-CU/NGE SWG had quite a bit of a learning curve. The manual was utterly useless, despite it actually being pretty thick (I had the Collector's Ed). I recall having a really tough start, getting incapped / killed frequently as a newbie out in Doerba Goefel, Corellia. When I was out in a nice valley NW of the small town, having a tough time fighting the critters there, a passing by player on a swoop bike saved me from another demise. Afterwards, he talked to me a bit and gave me a few pointers as to how to fight. I also wanted to join the Empire, so he told me Corellia isn't the place for it. Go to Naboo or better yet, Bestine, Tatooine. After much advice, he gave me a nice DL44 pistol and wished me luck... Later when I got better, I'd also in turn help out newbies at Mos Eisley. Other veterans would go out of their way to help them out. Once I got further into the Empire, I used to don my Stormtrooper Armor and go out to Mos Eisley and help out the newbies. New players got a real kick out of seeing a Stormtrooper hep them out. For one, it gave them a hand in learning the game. Secondly, seeing a Stormtrooper screams as much Star Wars as a Lightsaber does.
* RP'ers helped bring some "Star Wars" into the game. I was never a RPer. The game did have hardcore RP servers, but RP guilds were scattered about in regular servers also. A great example on what kind of an experience they brought into the game were some of the more faction oriented RP guilds. There were some Imperial Trooper guilds where while adventuring / "On duty" they can only use Imperial armor or uniforms. Very uniform in appearance, and it was great when these guys rolled into town totally decked out in Stormtrooper Armor. They'd do patrols in Mos Eisley or manning checkpoints. There'd be an event with some of the Rebel RP guilds too.
Pre-NGE SWG's community was the best I ever saw. Due to how the gameplay mechanics were and the people that were there. My friends list in that game was huge and you'd always say what's up when one of your buddies log in. My list in there was easily the largest compared to every MMORPG I have played. Once SOE destroyed the community and I left the game, I have never found another MMORPG that had the same level or better community experience as I had with old school SWG. Even LOTRO, with its community having a good and mature reputation, did not come close to half that experience.
"I have only two out of my company and 20 out of some other company. We need support, but it is almost suicide to try to get it here as we are swept by machine gun fire and a constant barrage is on us. I have no one on my left and only a few on my right. I will hold." (First Lieutenant Clifton B. Cates, US Marine Corps, Soissons, 19 July 1918)
Best:
Dark Age of Camelot: Met some of the greatest people ever while battling against some of the best strategists ever. I'd be in a foxhole with any of these guys.
Lotro (Alpha, Beta, Open): I can still see people play their music outside the Prancing Pony and actually try to roleplay a complicated story.
Worst:
Eve: I've never met so many pretentious people...well outside of a campus coffee shop.
WoW: To be fair it wasn't all bad. It has mass appeal. It just so happens that people are jerks in mass.
PvP really tends to bring out the worst in most people. It's an empowering thing...
Best: Vanguard, Monster Hunter Frontier Online (I met really nice people in both)
Worst: Eve (full of poretentious snobs for some reason)
Best: Lotro Landroval server
Worst:none have really been that bad for me,...i will just say WoW to be an ass
March on! - Lets Invade Pekopon
I have found the complete opposite, and its not even close.
I found that Warhammer, (especially) Dark Age of Camelot, and surprisingly UO, were some of the best communities I have ever experienced.
In UO you had to find gamers with similiar interests. At the time I played mostly with some anti-pks, that used to go to a lot of player made towns. There were obviously a ton of RPers there as well. Yes there were the reds that were behind every tree that killed you after every 5 steps you took in game, then took all your stuff as well.... but the RP community and those not red were absolutely fantastic.
PvE games, where the only object of the game is to get your character more gear to progress... Those for me have been the worst communities I have ever played with without question.
Best: The games I used to play
Worse: The games I play now and probably the games I'll be playing next.
Game communities differ from server to server and experiences vary from group to group but the only common trend I can observe is a gradual deterioration of communities.