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What can developers do when making a MMO to improve the community?
MMOExposed
Member RarePosts: 7,400
What can developers do to improve the community?
The game I hear about most for having a bad community is World of Warcraft.
But is that really the developers or games fault?
Seem more like the community itself and alone. What's stopping another game from also having the same community or a worst community?
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Comments
Best option?
Hire a number of qualified Behavioral Psychologists during the conception phase of the game development and listen to them on how to introduce positive reinforcement for good behaviour and negative consequences for bad behaviour.
General chat is a big negative to community imo. Most of the real ass hats are just looking for an audiance. The bigger the better. It may have started as a way for all people to chat to each other but like everything on the internet, without constant moderation it quickly becomes the lowest common denominator that decides what everyone gets to read.
As for game features, anything that gets large numbers of people working together tends to create community as well as strife. How they're able to fight it out normally decides if it remains friendly or not.
Player ecconomies seem to be a thing of the past but in swg the crafter community was all very good on my server. Crafting in general was always good at creating a positive communty when it forced people to rely on others to get things done. The wow style where everyone has one of everything and it's all junk may as well not even bother imo.
You wanna know how to make a comunity?
Have players need each other. Thats the only thing needed nothing fancy.
Cant have GW2 massive zerg troughout the game. people don't need eachother so no community will be formed.
Same for WoW you can just que up to anything faceroll your keyboard and be done with the whole ordeal not a word has to be said.
People don't need one another to play MMO's anymore so therefore there will be no tight community, just a whole lot of random people doing their own thing.
edit: And if we talk about chat, people are pretty rude by default especially when the other guy can't even see you. If we would have needed eachothers support to play the game people would be nicer towards eachother.
Smile
Isolate them in instances and take away general chat. Sometimes no community is better than a bad one.
No auction house - peddle your wares
Coop required content - does not have to be combat oriented
Coop crafting - best things come from shared minds
No mini map - need help finding something, find a guide
No instant travel - time to group up, safety in numbers and all that
No global chat - localized chat okay, clan chat better
No mini games - here is a big bueatiful world, go play in a cage
Harsher downtime - nothing like a "OOM" break get get to know your fellowship better
Dangerous world - Maybe the most needed ingridient. If content can be solo'd it will be by most
Community goals - stronger community opens up content in area, work together for better personal progression
None of this is difficult to acheive, just unappealing to the grind for gear players
Notice how it's all pretty much the same thing. As games become more and more solo friendly the community suffers for it. People become no better than NPCs and are often just something in your way.
The old mmos required you to play with other people and had better communities. Maybe it was just because solo ppl wouldn't play them and they are the ones who are ruining mmos communities today.
No "Double XP" weekends.
What the developers are doing here is:
+1
Voice of reason in all of this nonsense. Hire a professional to enforce behavior.
I played WoW up until WotLK, played RoM for 2 years and now Rift.
I am F2P player. I support games when I feel they deserve my money and I want the items enough.
I don't troll, and I don't take kindly to trolls.
Well not enforce but to encourage and reinforce postive behaviour patterns.
I laughed when I read enforce. +1 for not really getting your point! :P
General chat is the guild chat for people who keep getting kicked out of guilds.
Hire a group that actually investigates tickets created for chat issues and actually BAN people that abuse chat.
I was able to create a plug-in for WoW that auto-blocked Chuck Norris jokes...so im sure they can create an auto-ban program that kicks people for using piss poor internet memes.
As for the last comment. Tera makes WoW look like a mature audience, its even worse now that its gone F2P, which is simple AMAZING.
I hope we shall crush...in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." ~Thomes Jefferson
OOoh, like secret goon squads that come to the home of anti-social jerks and kick the snot out of them?
Sounds like a great idea, in fact, I'll do it for cheap.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
With respect to the "negative consequences" part, hopefully the BP group would have more clout within the coorporation than the marketting and sales guys whose main concern is being all-inclusive and not alienating even the ones who would need to be banned for caustic behavior.
Some developers are already very good about policing chat and stamping out cheats and griefing: Turbine with LOTRO comes to mind, at least it was this way for the 1st year after release...idk now that it's F2P. Other developers don't seem to give much of a crap about moderating anything that doesn't impact their bottom line. I won't name names but I'm talking about the ones with item malls who vigourously go after gold sellers but let anything go in chat and allow cheaters to exploit month after month.
There are unpleasant selfish people everywhere who screw-up community events of every type--electronic or not--the only way to prevent their disruptions is to exclude them. In RL there are jails for the worst offenders and private clubs to try to control the mix of people even more.
Of course, strict policing and bans will lead to even more posts here about alledgedly being banned for no reason at all...
Some developers have already taken measures to minimize some of the aspects of game play that create the hyper-competitive environments that makes the problem worse. Arenanet's phased resource nodes so everyone can get it and cooperative kills with full exp and loot for all participants are good examples of stamping out irritants that often lead to nerd-rage outbursts.
What I'm not aware of anyone ever doing though is to provide real tangible benefits for demonstarted good citizenship... a.k.a. positive reinforcement.
Not even something as common as seeing another random player in trouble and healing them or helping them kill the too many mobs they pulled, has ever, as far as I know, been acknowledged by anything even as simple as an "achievement." You'll get the player's thanks, you'll have your own satisfaction, you may even make a new friend...but the game itself gives the impression that sitting down and watching him die while you have a snack is of equal value...
Jeez...this got much longer than I planned when I started typing...as ususal lol.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
General chat is one of the biggest abused things in MMOs. and it normally shows how pathetic a community is.
getting rid of that would be a good start.
Easy make MMO's require socialization.
No more questing to level up as it promotes solo play. Make the game revolve around grouping/raiding/other players in general.
If the game requires you to interact and work with other players, the players who give the community a bad name will not make it anywhere as their lack of skill and lack of concern for players will cause them to be unable to succeed in the game, therefore preventing them from enjoying content unless they start over and create a character and give themselves a good reputation.
Eliminate the ability to play all roles. No single class should be able to be the best tank, the best healer nor the best dps by simply switching roles.
Classes need to be well defined with difference revolving around choice of weapons/gear or abilities they use. You should not have for example a paladin in WoW that can be a holy paladin that can heal and also do fairly good dps. Retribution and deal great dps. Or switch to whatever the tank role is called and be a great tank. Players need to know this players is a tank, this is a healer, this is dps, this is CC. Crowd control should not be given to all players. Classes can have multiple roles, but having multiple roles should prevent them from being the best at one specific role.
I disagree with you on one major point.
"No more questing to level up as it promotes solo play. Make the game revolve around grouping/raiding/other players in general. "
Grouping and raiding encourage the formation of 'cliques' this is not conducive to forming a community. Grouping and Raiding can also inhibit community formation if there is a LFG tool particularly a cross server LFG tool as these encourage anonymity.
"Other players in general" works for me though.
Use the forums as an account-deletion gating mechanism.
"Signed on to read the forums?" {sound of dbase "flush" query}
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
The problem with lack of or poor community in MMO games is a fundamental design flaw. Darkfall is the ultimate example of this. If there was ever a game that had a worse cesspool of degenerate, angry, depressed rage-filled people, I would be surprised. Not all Darkfall players are like this, but this game has the highest concentration of angry players that I have seen.
The kind of game you build dictates the kinds of people you are going to attract into the community. If your game is a full loot open world PvP only, where the main focus is just on killing and taking things from people, then your game will attract those kinds of people and repel the kinds of people who are more likely to be friendly, cooperative and interested in community. By the way, that's perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with wanting to design a game like Darkfall and attracting those people to it. However, if you were wondering why that community is generally abrasive, then look no further than the game's design.
Your average themepark these days caters to casual players who just want to run the treadmill of leveling and get to end game in the fastest time possible. Most of these players look at community and social features as an obstacle to accomplishing their goal. Most of them don't understand why anyone would *want* to craft, or hold a social event, or even explore the map. They don't care about or understand anyone who might want to run a virtual shop, entertain other players, play a scientist, get involved in politics, or anything else that doesn't focus on PvE / PvP combat for the sake of leveling. Those are the types of people today's themeparks attract, generally speaking. And that's ok too if you find this fun.
Even though most sandboxes in recent years have been low-budget indie games that have largely failed, all you have to do is spend a little time in one to see how massively different the community in these games is. Building a community is often the first thing sandbox players begin to do upon joining the game. From the time they log in, they are starting to make relationships with other players, finding a place to make a home, figuring out what they can do to help build their guild camp or town, etc. They are often much more focused on cooperation with others than their own goals.
As crappy and problematic as Xsyon was back when I tried it, as soon as I started playing it I started getting some of that old Star Wars Galaxies vibe back. People were gathering, helping each other, trading, going off on adventures, making plans for long term goals and player driven gameplay. Automatically you see many more creative players, politicians, ambitious people who want to build businesses, social players, explorers, support players and all kinds of different of people. This creates a completely different game and a different community than you will ever see in a themepark game no matter how hard you try to make it different. The community is a reflection of the types of people your game attracts.
The short answer, in my opinion, is that you can't fix the community in most of these games by just setting up more rules. You change the community by *including* more types of MMO players whether you enjoy their style of gameplay or not.
A sure sign that you are in an old, dying paradigm/mindset, is when you are scared of new ideas and new technology. Don't feel bad. The world is moving on without you, and you are welcome to yell "Get Off My Lawn!" all you want while it happens. You cannot, however, stop an idea whose time has come.
Thus demonstrating you are, in fact, exactly the kind of anti-social-jerk that should be avoided when playing MMORPGs
Allow them to divide into common-interst groups.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
so.... you made the post about positive behavior but totally failed to see his sarcasum and jumped on him with the typical nasty reply. Should I now blame you as the type of person that makes forums a hostile place to be because you can't tell when someone is trying to be funny and always assume the worst in people ?
Your sarcasm detector is broken. Go to the auction house and buy a new one.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville