If I land on the same server as some of the people that are followers of the game on this site, yes the community will be aight. Hopefully the bad apples with an attention span of a ferrett end up elsewhere or try it and move on.
Well the game is already one of, if not the most, hyped MMOs right now. Add in the fact that it's B2P which means you're going to have a pretty broad audience of MMO players from all kinds of different games. As far as chat channels go, I'm sure we can count on those kids that can't shut up about WoW, you'll have the trolls, etc. Your best bet is to turn off global chat in that regard.
But as far as gameplay goes, Anet really seems to be trying hard to make a game that brings people together as a community. In most other MMOs, whenever another player comes around your questing area, you get that feeling like "Oh great. Now I'm gonna have to fight this douchebag over mobs." Or whatever. In GW2 though, with the DE system, having other players around has the potential to be really good for you as well.
Since content scales up in accordance to the number of players actively participating in events it can give you better rewards and provide more challenging experiences. Also, not only does the content scale, but so do the player levels in accordance to the content. So you don't have to worry about a level 20 player coming to the level 2 area and killing everything in site so the low guys can't get contribution. Their level will scale down to the content.
But then you have to think about the PvP. On one hand, you have the world v world PvP, which is 3 servers all going against each other to control zones and keeps and stuff. I think this type of content has the potential to really bring the people on a single server together. To work together to complete objectives and try to dominate against the other servers.
On the other hand, the game will have PvP "battlegrounds" for players to participate in. Now I'm not sure if they said anything about these being cross server, like 5 people from one server against 5 people from another server. But if it's all people on the same server going against each other, you can expect things to get ugly sometimes since PvP can bring out the worst in people.
I don't know, it's really hard to say either way. It's one of those things where you just have to wait and see. You're always going to have some kind of douchebags, or whiners, or players and/or guilds that think they're top shit because of their "accomplishments" in whatever other games they played that think they're the only ones on "their" server worthy of anything. These games attract all types of personalities. Your best bet is to watch closely towards launch when they announce the server names and see which people and guilds will be rolling where.
I'm sure if it's popular it will have all sorts of ppl playing, then it follows that a large spread of appeal to all sorts including your alluded to "riff-raff" will follow. Guess GW2 will have lots of other types of players that are a) easy to find b) share an interest/like-minded too eg PvP, Lore, PvE, RP etc.. eg millions of players if successful.
That said, for community-building probably mmos with higher barrier to entry, smaller/narrower appeal and more sandbox style player-run design might see a better grounds for finding a dedicated close-knit community in it for the long term??
Itll be a mix of all kinds of ppl. If you want to search for a specific type, you probably will be able to find it. So people's prejudices will become true like always
What, you'd institute a "niceness police" that would ban and censor people (who pay as much as you do) for not being "nice" according to your own definition of what "nice" is?
Lol, this is how fascism gets born. Lol lol lol...
Jeez...
If you can't stand interacting with the general human population then play single player or co-op games with your friends (the "nice" ones). or simply get off your back end and grow some kind of a character armor. "Mommy, mommy, that man said some BAD things to me!!!"
A mmo is a society and in a society you get all sorts of people. That's what makes mmos so appealing. A good mmo should have a bunch of safeguards for players to protect themselves from being griefed by other players (what's wrong with an "ignore" button lol?) but calling for a mmo thought police which would ban players for telling droll Chuck Norris jokes is just ridiculous.
What, you'd institute a "niceness police" that would ban and censor people (who pay as much as you do) for not being "nice" according to your own definition of what "nice" is?
Lol, this is how fascism gets born. Lol lol lol...
Jeez...
If you can't stand interacting with the general human population then play single player or co-op games with your friends (the "nice" ones). or simply get off your back end and grow some kind of a character armor. "Mommy, mommy, that man said some BAD things to me!!!"
A mmo is a society and in a society you get all sorts of people. That's what makes mmos so appealing. A good mmo should have a bunch of safeguards for players to protect themselves from being griefed by other players (what's wrong with an "ignore" button lol?) but calling for a mmo thought police which would ban players for telling droll Chuck Norris jokes is just ridiculous.
Read the thread please. Like several previous posters you completely miss the mark on this. Fascism? Overly dramatic I think.
Very few online games have had good communities, and they tend to be obscure, dead games as well. One example is Myst Online: Uru - brilliant community, but mostly because it's a game about socialising, puzzles, thinking, and wandering through pretty alien worlds. Uru just doesn't attract the average gamer. Nothing to kill, you see? Then you have Istaria, in which the primary draw is dragons, and the people who play the dragons tend to be simply amazing. It's their eccentricity that does it, some of them are old, and many of them are simply tired of hate. I know how that feels.
But the problem is is that of all Internet subcultures, gaming tends to lean itself more toward psychopathic misanthropy and xenophobia than any other. In no other Internet subculture will you hear ethnic slurs and lifestyle insults flung around, and some of the sites that have popped up because of the gaming subculture (Something Awful, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and so on) are simply a testament to the sheer amount of hate you'll find here. There are good gamers, yes, but gaming does seem to be a breeding ground for this sort of sentiment.
I mentioned this in another thread and there were butt-hurt, kneejerk, defensive replies. This is because there's no defence. See, anyone who's been a part of the gaming subculture as I have, having started off on the BBC Micro or even earlier than that, the sort of people who remember pong, are people old enough to be sick and tired of the hate that's so prominent amongst gamers. Especially the no-life gamers that tend to give themselves to a game; Education and work be damned. But more importantly is that they take that attitude toward having a social life, too.
Many gamers these days seem to have had little contact with real people, so they don't know how their hate can actually hurt other people, it doesn't matter to them. The only thing that matters is their own misanthropy and entertainment. And you just won't get away from that. You won't until the games themselves start educating the gamers to stop being so psychopathically misanthropic. But as I've mentioned, there are too many games out there that encourage it, so that might take a while. However, Guild Wars 2 encourages people to work together, to be friends, to help each other out, and to be social.
I see hope in Guild Wars 2 because it's teaching a lot of good lessons. Will it have a good community? I don't know, but I think it'll educate the people who play it to at least be decent to their fellow gamer, so... who knows? It might. I think it has a better chance for a good community than any other non-obscure MMORPG out there. It could all go south, we could still see the same kind of hate bouncing around, and for a while we probably will. But due to how people have to work together in GW2, that might be a game-changer.
I can't tell you for sure.
But the problem itself isn't the game, and it's not something a game can cure, it's how many people in the gaming subculture lean toward psychopathic misanthropy without even thinking about it. I mean, some of the things I've heard people say in competitive and even co-op games would be a hate crime if they were said aloud in many places of the modern world, and it's something that many non-gamers would frown at.
Perhaps the best way that Guild Wars 2 could succeed at having a good community is by bringing in people who don't normally play games.
people are different and you can't ban someone for acting like an idiot (how do you know he can help it or not ? ). You can't just ban or punish someone for saying something you don't like, even for insults ppl get warned few times, then baned for a shor period of time which then increases (usually).
But why not being positive about the community? GW has AWESOME community, it's one of the best community I've ever been a part of in mmo world.
I remmember 1 guy asked the developers, in some conference, about the community and what do they expect of it... They said they're trying to create one good and friendly community, so why not just sit and wait... With every GW1 player a lot of community culture will transfer with them to GW2 so it should be just fine
tho I'm hoping they've made the game challenging enough so it can keep the 12 year olds away as they really are annoying. (dunno about the other people but from my xp they're HORRIBLE!)
I agree with you about banning farmers/gold sellers and those alike... ruining the game completley...
I love this post. I agree with most of it. I will say, however, that most of the "12 year olds" you refer to are actually 20-something year olds that ACT like badly behaved 12 year olds. Most of the ACTUAL preteens I have played with in games have been decent young people with manners and not NEAR as prone to asshatery as the 20-something set.
Otherwise....I love your positive attitude and the "let's just wait and see" mentality. ANet has the intention of building the foundation for a good community. Let's see what they can do.
@TC: No, Guild Wars 2 will not have a good community. In fact, no MMORPG will ever have another good community for as long as we all shall live. There are just too many ignorants being let wander about to troll as they please these days. Better community than Blizzard, however? Yes.
people are different and you can't ban someone for acting like an idiot (how do you know he can help it or not ? ). You can't just ban or punish someone for saying something you don't like, even for insults ppl get warned few times, then baned for a shor period of time which then increases (usually).
But why not being positive about the community? GW has AWESOME community, it's one of the best community I've ever been a part of in mmo world.
I remmember 1 guy asked the developers, in some conference, about the community and what do they expect of it... They said they're trying to create one good and friendly community, so why not just sit and wait... With every GW1 player a lot of community culture will transfer with them to GW2 so it should be just fine
tho I'm hoping they've made the game challenging enough so it can keep the 12 year olds away as they really are annoying. (dunno about the other people but from my xp they're HORRIBLE!)
I agree with you about banning farmers/gold sellers and those alike... ruining the game completley...
I love this post. I agree with most of it. I will say, however, that most of the "12 year olds" you refer to are actually 20-something year olds that ACT like badly behaved 12 year olds. Most of the ACTUAL preteens I have played with in games have been decent young people with manners and not NEAR as prone to asshatery as the 20-something set.
Otherwise....I love your positive attitude and the "let's just wait and see" mentality. ANet has the intention of building the foundation for a good community. Let's see what they can do.
*Thumbs up* )
"Happiness is not a destination. It is a method of life." -------------------------------
Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World are probably going to be my last two attempts at MMOs. After over a decade of gaming, if neither of these games does it for me, I think I'm done. And it's in large part because of the decline in community. I can tolerate some silliness and even some bratty behavior, but if these two games are drenched in douchebaggery, then no matter how wonderful the game worlds, no matter how fantastic and fun the gameplay is, I don't think I'll be able to feel as immersed as I need to in order to enjoy playing.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
Comments
If I land on the same server as some of the people that are followers of the game on this site, yes the community will be aight. Hopefully the bad apples with an attention span of a ferrett end up elsewhere or try it and move on.
RIP Jimmy "The Rev" Sullivan and Paul Gray.
of course it will have a great community, its got most of the mmorpg forumers buying it
and these people are legends 
Well the game is already one of, if not the most, hyped MMOs right now. Add in the fact that it's B2P which means you're going to have a pretty broad audience of MMO players from all kinds of different games. As far as chat channels go, I'm sure we can count on those kids that can't shut up about WoW, you'll have the trolls, etc. Your best bet is to turn off global chat in that regard.
But as far as gameplay goes, Anet really seems to be trying hard to make a game that brings people together as a community. In most other MMOs, whenever another player comes around your questing area, you get that feeling like "Oh great. Now I'm gonna have to fight this douchebag over mobs." Or whatever. In GW2 though, with the DE system, having other players around has the potential to be really good for you as well.
Since content scales up in accordance to the number of players actively participating in events it can give you better rewards and provide more challenging experiences. Also, not only does the content scale, but so do the player levels in accordance to the content. So you don't have to worry about a level 20 player coming to the level 2 area and killing everything in site so the low guys can't get contribution. Their level will scale down to the content.
But then you have to think about the PvP. On one hand, you have the world v world PvP, which is 3 servers all going against each other to control zones and keeps and stuff. I think this type of content has the potential to really bring the people on a single server together. To work together to complete objectives and try to dominate against the other servers.
On the other hand, the game will have PvP "battlegrounds" for players to participate in. Now I'm not sure if they said anything about these being cross server, like 5 people from one server against 5 people from another server. But if it's all people on the same server going against each other, you can expect things to get ugly sometimes since PvP can bring out the worst in people.
I don't know, it's really hard to say either way. It's one of those things where you just have to wait and see. You're always going to have some kind of douchebags, or whiners, or players and/or guilds that think they're top shit because of their "accomplishments" in whatever other games they played that think they're the only ones on "their" server worthy of anything. These games attract all types of personalities. Your best bet is to watch closely towards launch when they announce the server names and see which people and guilds will be rolling where.
I'm sure if it's popular it will have all sorts of ppl playing, then it follows that a large spread of appeal to all sorts including your alluded to "riff-raff" will follow. Guess GW2 will have lots of other types of players that are a) easy to find b) share an interest/like-minded too eg PvP, Lore, PvE, RP etc.. eg millions of players if successful.
That said, for community-building probably mmos with higher barrier to entry, smaller/narrower appeal and more sandbox style player-run design might see a better grounds for finding a dedicated close-knit community in it for the long term??
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
Itll be a mix of all kinds of ppl. If you want to search for a specific type, you probably will be able to find it. So people's prejudices will become true like always
I don't expect any new shiny game to have a nice community.
They don't tend to form, if at all, until the fickle hype followers and curious casuals have moved on to the next big thing
To OP.
What, you'd institute a "niceness police" that would ban and censor people (who pay as much as you do) for not being "nice" according to your own definition of what "nice" is?
Lol, this is how fascism gets born. Lol lol lol...
Jeez...
If you can't stand interacting with the general human population then play single player or co-op games with your friends (the "nice" ones). or simply get off your back end and grow some kind of a character armor. "Mommy, mommy, that man said some BAD things to me!!!"
A mmo is a society and in a society you get all sorts of people. That's what makes mmos so appealing. A good mmo should have a bunch of safeguards for players to protect themselves from being griefed by other players (what's wrong with an "ignore" button lol?) but calling for a mmo thought police which would ban players for telling droll Chuck Norris jokes is just ridiculous.
Read the thread please. Like several previous posters you completely miss the mark on this. Fascism? Overly dramatic I think.
Very few online games have had good communities, and they tend to be obscure, dead games as well. One example is Myst Online: Uru - brilliant community, but mostly because it's a game about socialising, puzzles, thinking, and wandering through pretty alien worlds. Uru just doesn't attract the average gamer. Nothing to kill, you see? Then you have Istaria, in which the primary draw is dragons, and the people who play the dragons tend to be simply amazing. It's their eccentricity that does it, some of them are old, and many of them are simply tired of hate. I know how that feels.
But the problem is is that of all Internet subcultures, gaming tends to lean itself more toward psychopathic misanthropy and xenophobia than any other. In no other Internet subculture will you hear ethnic slurs and lifestyle insults flung around, and some of the sites that have popped up because of the gaming subculture (Something Awful, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and so on) are simply a testament to the sheer amount of hate you'll find here. There are good gamers, yes, but gaming does seem to be a breeding ground for this sort of sentiment.
I mentioned this in another thread and there were butt-hurt, kneejerk, defensive replies. This is because there's no defence. See, anyone who's been a part of the gaming subculture as I have, having started off on the BBC Micro or even earlier than that, the sort of people who remember pong, are people old enough to be sick and tired of the hate that's so prominent amongst gamers. Especially the no-life gamers that tend to give themselves to a game; Education and work be damned. But more importantly is that they take that attitude toward having a social life, too.
Many gamers these days seem to have had little contact with real people, so they don't know how their hate can actually hurt other people, it doesn't matter to them. The only thing that matters is their own misanthropy and entertainment. And you just won't get away from that. You won't until the games themselves start educating the gamers to stop being so psychopathically misanthropic. But as I've mentioned, there are too many games out there that encourage it, so that might take a while. However, Guild Wars 2 encourages people to work together, to be friends, to help each other out, and to be social.
I see hope in Guild Wars 2 because it's teaching a lot of good lessons. Will it have a good community? I don't know, but I think it'll educate the people who play it to at least be decent to their fellow gamer, so... who knows? It might. I think it has a better chance for a good community than any other non-obscure MMORPG out there. It could all go south, we could still see the same kind of hate bouncing around, and for a while we probably will. But due to how people have to work together in GW2, that might be a game-changer.
I can't tell you for sure.
But the problem itself isn't the game, and it's not something a game can cure, it's how many people in the gaming subculture lean toward psychopathic misanthropy without even thinking about it. I mean, some of the things I've heard people say in competitive and even co-op games would be a hate crime if they were said aloud in many places of the modern world, and it's something that many non-gamers would frown at.
Perhaps the best way that Guild Wars 2 could succeed at having a good community is by bringing in people who don't normally play games.
I love this post. I agree with most of it. I will say, however, that most of the "12 year olds" you refer to are actually 20-something year olds that ACT like badly behaved 12 year olds. Most of the ACTUAL preteens I have played with in games have been decent young people with manners and not NEAR as prone to asshatery as the 20-something set.
Otherwise....I love your positive attitude and the "let's just wait and see" mentality. ANet has the intention of building the foundation for a good community. Let's see what they can do.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
@TC: No, Guild Wars 2 will not have a good community. In fact, no MMORPG will ever have another good community for as long as we all shall live. There are just too many ignorants being let wander about to troll as they please these days. Better community than Blizzard, however? Yes.
*Thumbs up*
)
"Happiness is not a destination. It is a method of life."
-------------------------------
Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World are probably going to be my last two attempts at MMOs. After over a decade of gaming, if neither of these games does it for me, I think I'm done. And it's in large part because of the decline in community. I can tolerate some silliness and even some bratty behavior, but if these two games are drenched in douchebaggery, then no matter how wonderful the game worlds, no matter how fantastic and fun the gameplay is, I don't think I'll be able to feel as immersed as I need to in order to enjoy playing.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
~Albert Einstein
lack of kill steals, and mob tagging and loot stealing is already something that will make community better