Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Degeneration Of Gaming Communities Due To The Success Of An MMORPG
Mulsiphix
Member Posts: 37
Is it just me or does it seem like the more popular a game gets the worse the community gets? I remember playing WOW during the first six months and it was awesome. I had a guild that was full mainly of people in their thirties or older. I left WOW and when I returned two years later it was a very different experience.
Players were whining, seemed very immature, and having a good time in general with other people seemed so very hard to find. It would seem as the game gained popularity a very younger audience soon became the majority demographic and immature behavior and outright complaining seemed to be what grouping was all about. Even when not in a group, just sitting around in town, the world chat was bogged down with countless instances of this.
Is it just me or do others notice this? Right now I am trying to decide on whether I want to join Ragnarok Online again, the best online gaming communities I've ever been a part of, or if I want to spent a lot of money to upgrade my computer so I can play Warhammer Online. The one thing that worries me is that Warhammer Online may very well turn out to be like my second experience in WOW. If that is the case I would rather choose a quality community over a cutting edge game.
Your thoughts?
Comments
No success has nothing to do with a bad comunity.
This, to me is just a myth of popular thinking, because most people don't get it.
Bad communities come down to bad game design.
You make a game that is solo-centric, ez mode, quest-grind, casual-lite, with GPS mapping and zero need for investment, then you will make a game with a bad community. It is that simple.
This is based soley on the fact that noone needs anyone else to do anything. It has nothing to do with 'mature content' or 'success', or whatever.
People act like asshats when they have nothing to lose. his is why ubr guilds act like asshats a lot... They are usually self sufficient and don't need anyone else outside of their gang. This is why they get all the hate. You extend that to the whole server, and yo get everyone acting in the most anti-social ways.
On the whole though, social games are self policing, and (used to...) require a good rep and a decent amount of social networking to get fast groups and good guilds.
So, no, the success of a game isn the problem, but the current trend of greedy thinking in system design is.
Btw, I didnt d your poll because it should NEVER be a trade off.. both are essential in game to me, and both are achievable. It should never be a question of which one.
I couldn't agree more. What also helps is designing systems so the idiots and children get left behind, and have their own city or whatever. I find that when you tier off the different levels of gameplay, certain people tend to stay in that area and are incapable or unwilling to leave (see WoW's Barrens or Westfall areas). By removing these people from the population as a whole, the legitimate players are happier.
It's also important to have multiple chat channels, to prevent people from collecting all in a single channel intended for one purpose and using it for whatever they feel like (see WoW's Trade channel).
What an interesting explenation, I actually never thought of it like that before. What you say does make a lot of sense, however I also believe the OP has a point that the more popular a game, the worse the "avrage joe" player gets. Here's a small thought chain from me to ilustrate my point:
When I was 14 I really didn't much like it, I preffered gaming with people twice my age and was usually hanging out with the more elitist crowds in the MMOs I was playing. However, as I thought the game was great, I really wanted to play it with my real world friends as well, obviously they didn't have exactly the same behavior pattern as me, and a lot of them liked to mess around with bad mouthing tells and writing in all caps, but they weren't really that bad. Then they got their friends to play, because they thought the game was pretty cool as well. Some of these people were even worse.. I guess you can see where im going with this.
The problem is really that the least mature players are also the most loud mouther, which makes it seem a lot like the community is filled with more bad blood than is actually there. As another poster said, elite guilds are usually self sufficient and therefore never talk much in the overly spammed channels (Myself I had both general and often also trade chat turned off when I played WoW)
To sum it up, I think you got a very good point in your statement but I also think it's right what the OP is saying.
I am overjoyed with the type of responses I received. Very well thought out and many wonderful points were made that I really had not considered. Given all that has been said I would like to extend another question. Do you think PVP based games, like Warhammer Online, are more prone to loud mouth jerks and asshats than standard PVE games? While Warhammer Online does have PVE it is by far a PVP game at its core and I think that is the target demographic the game was created to attract.
I've also considered playing LOTRO but the fact that there is so little PVP support I am just not sure if it would be worth my time. Some of my fondest memories lie within the BattleGrounds of WOW.
Both sides are right. The OP is right for reasons I will explain in a bit, and the counter is right because certain behavior is allowed to get the bigger crowds. The desire to draw in the largest player base possible means reducing the game to the lowest common denominator.
On the other hand, certain behavior can only manifest once a community reaches a critical mass. To break it down to a basic social level in -any- situation lets look at school. In rural grade schools, you will often have and average of 30 children per class. Out of those 30, you might have 10 followers (easily influenced by other gorups), 5 'populars' (the ones the everyone wants to be), 3 preppies (those that think they are better than everyone else), 6 average Joes (who get along with the other groups), 3 oddballs, and 3 'bad eggs'. A natureal ballance is made in that no clique has enough numbers to be able to exist on their own without making itself an outcast from the others. The exception is sometimes the 'bad eggs', but not always. They will generally try to blend in as well. Given their small numbers in a small group, the bad eggs do not affect the other groups to a large degree.
Now step forward to High School, where many of these smaller groups are thrust together. Instead of your 30, you now have 300 (or far more in most cases). However, the equation does not carry over. The 'populars' find themselves in direct competition with other 'populars', remixing and thrusting the lesser populars into the 'followers'. The preppies mix better, making a larger group that can exist on their own little delusional pedestal, but also cast members into the followers. The oddballs mix somewhat, but some of them will find a place in one of the other groups, reducing their overall percentage. The average Joes merge and break off into smaller groups of friends, taking in oddballs and followers alike, but never become a single unit. Now, the bad eggs, on the other hand, will stick to each other like magnets, conflicting with each other, but never mixing with any of the other groups. This 'bad element' is the single force out of all the groups that can 'ruin' a place or start to enforce a certain kind of behavior. All they have to do is start hanging out somewhere, and the other groups will often leave. The 'followers' that remain are influenced by the bad eggs, degrading their behavior to something unacceptable to their former group.
The same cycle goes on in much larger groups as well, and the internet adds the extra element of anonymity, letting people's inner 'bad eggs' out. The larger the net group becomes, the more powerful the base elements become. In the case of MMOs, the 'bad element' moves freely between games, finding more members as the popularity grows. By default, this drives out the other groups, or makes them adapt to stay. It takes a lot of effort to control the bad element and its influences, so game makers generally only target the worst of it. That makes lower behavior become the accepted social environment.
I changed my mind. PlaneShift is not worth the time.
Extremely well said. Thank you all very much for your in depth feedback
Believe it or not, people who like to be self-sufficient and able to (when the mood strikes) solo an MMO are not particularly anti-social, and in my experience are actually more mature and pleasurable to deal with.
I remember Verant's obsession with forcing people to group. How they arrived at 6 people being the perfect number for social interaction on a server with thousands is beyond me, but I digress.
The basic premise that if an MMO is designed a certain way, then it will attract a certain class of player only has merit assuming a static universe. Sony has "WoW-ified" EQ to the point where it promotes a very different kind of player than the initial game. So, in that regard, the success of the game led to a change in the behavior of players because they began appealing to a certain demographic... because they needed to appeal to the LCD. After all, in growing and expanding, they had invested monies, some of which were perpetual expenditures.
So, basically, UtM has it right. Why am I not surprised?