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[Column] General: Ask Not What Your MMO Can Do For You...
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In today's social hub, we take a look at the ways that players can create a sense of community within MMOs even if the opportunities provided by the developers themselves. See what we suggest and then add your ideas to the comments.
Player-run events used to happen so often (or maybe they were just that much better publicized) that there were sometimes conflicts or guilds working together to make sure to avoid planning them on the same day. Massive parties, tournaments, and other types of gatherings felt like the norm. This often went hand in hand with roleplaying, and even though the RP community was never the majority, support in place for these events made it so they could attract even the curious mainstream community members. In essence, players banded together and created event based upon mutual interests. Though these player events do thrive in certain games (LOTRO is just one).
Read more of Christina Gonzalez's The Social Hub: Ask Not What Your MMO Can Do For You....
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Comments
I totally agree with you. Usually I try to socialise, go out and do stuff with others and embrace whatever comes on my path, but it gets harder the longer there aren't any people around that you actually enjoy playing with and got to know earlier. Especially in this day of MMO-hopping (and I'm guilty as charged).
Currently I'm playing RIFT and as a fan of roleplaying sometimes it's hard to stay nice and polite to someone interrupting you purposefully (and not the random comment of: dude, you can RUN you know?!?!). Fact is that I could move my business to an instanced dimension, but I prefer to be out in the open as an invitation for people to join in.
On the other hand I know a lot of people (a lot roleplayers as well) who are sick and tired of some of the less nice people around and turned off all general chats and only hang with people from their guild and friendlist. I can't say I blame them for doing so, as it makes for a tight-knit community, but as I see it, it also closes off the community for outsiders.
So all concluded your article made me think about setting up a community event sometime soon, probably something minor like hide and seek (it's something), and spread the fun of doing stuff with other people. Who knows, it might catch on!
"We need men who can dream of things that never were." - John F. Kennedy
And for MMORPGs ever so true...
Check out GW2's Sanctum of Rall server and the story behind the name.
http://www.sanctumofrall.com/
@Wicoa: why limit yourself to a sandbox game? Player run events are limited by the fantasy and imagination of the creator and attendants only (and a bit by the game features). It's about the feel of community and playing with others, about shunning the age of solo-ism and about generally having fun doing so. This can be achieved in a themepark as well, even when the game functions when they don't happen.
"We need men who can dream of things that never were." - John F. Kennedy
And for MMORPGs ever so true...
I used to run a weekly, public dungeon crawl in Vanguard. A different dungeon each week. I was then posting all the quest info etc to my wiki. It was a lot of fun, and even the devs mentioned me a few times in some of their interviews. lol
While that's awesome and I had a lot of fun doing it, I have since shifted over to doing youtube videos. I don't really have time for events like that any longer.
What's also sad is really the changes the industry has been pushing to make MMOs more casual friendly has really eroded the need for a community. ... Which is quite ironic in an MMO if you think about it. lol
nethervoid - Est. '97
[UO|EQ|SB|SWG|PS|HZ|EVE|NWN|WoW|VG|DF|AQW|DN|SWTOR|Dofus|SotA|BDO|AO|NW|LA] - Currently Playing EQ1
20k+ subs YouTube Gaming channel
Nice column again. I agree with Freezzo (and with the previous columns of socialization and community), in the last couple of years it became much tougher to "do something"...
For the questions part,
Have you chatted up strangers? Yep, all the time
Planned a player event? No, sadly my limited game time isn't enough for that, but I participate on them a lot if I can
Helped newbies with learning the ropes? Numerous times, also crafting them or just giving out freebies
Dedicated yourself to healing randoms along your way? tough one, depending the game... There was thread on it when LotRO introduced open tapping, that I can finally dishing out heals again (before that the system literally punished the recipient with 50% less xp). My main is usally a healer.
Cool illustration pic btw, I like the revamped Bree but I think the old West Gate stable with the wide open field behind it was much better, thanks for the nice memories
Yes.....
Back in the day there use to be a thing called "Community" where these things called "Guilds" would group together and come up with events and such to do. I remember holding fishing tournys in WoW using a great addon to track the results. We use to have "Bounty Hunts" also.
BUT.....
Those days seem to be fading away. There is less and less a community in most MMOs and more a growing populace of Trolls, that rather churn the chat waters with brain numbing chatter. As far as the RP community it seems to be non-existent as of late in many MMOs.
I do not believe it should be expected of the developers to provide all the content in a game. I enjoyed MMOs more when the players were given the tools to create their own "content". Many great addons have been created in WoW alone that helped to create player content like guild events. More MMO developers need to understand RPers especially just need the tools, not so much have it all handed to them (Skyrim being a great example, even though it is not an MMO).
One nice thing about roleplaying servers, even for non-roleplayer, is that events are generally tolerated and sometimes even encouraged.
(When Blackrock server isn't down, causing your normally quiet RP server to be invaded by PVP guys pointing fingers and jeering at the goofy RPers, anyway.)
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.
Well a crucial thing that has happened to the MMO community over the years is that game developers have added more features to entice a larger player base to reach higher earnings. This helps the short term profitability of the game but tends to weaken the fabric that will keep that community together by dragging in dreaded "twitch" players that want immediate results, hence why ALMOST every MMO has catered to this. The game companies make more money off these quick burst games (apparently) which might foster bad communities ( but they don't care so much as long as their earnings call looks good (thanks whales!) . Eve is another success story which is very much not for a twitch style gamer and is niche but the community is more enjoyable for me partially due to the payment model I suspect and part to do with the complexity of the UI (opinion sry!).
Until game companies stop making profit off of these smaller games that they can pump out in half the time (FTP helps tremendously because they can tap the whale market much easier), there is no reason why they would go back to longer development cycles and more risk. The level of the quality of game directly affects the community's willingness to even WANT to give the game a shot,let alone stay there for an extended period of time.
Neverwinter (not trying to offend action-based combat fans cause I dig that style personally in well built games) for me was such a hard game to even want to jump into the community due to the heavily instanced nature of the game.. MMORPGs need to feel like worlds..not a cash shop lobby . Sorry for being long winded and no offense meant
The problem I find now is that modern MMORPG bring in a lot of competitive players that looking for action and aim for the top of the ladder. Play the game to finish it. Anything else but reaching that goal is a waste of time. If you bring those crowd to a social tea party, they just simply rage quit.
Everyone all around are just so rushing.
"Be the change you seek in the world" is something I've often used as a tagline to remind myself of the attitude I should be bringing wherever I go. That said, I worry I've been drifting deeper into bitter vet territory lately - I seem to be having a harder time spotting opportunities to make a positive contribution.
I agree with so much of this. In the past there wasn't much point to being in a rush as even if you hurried everything still took a while, so taking time out to talk to somebody or help someone out wasn't really a problem in the grand scheme of things.
I think it isn't just the LFR/LFD but how the impact of decisions like these affect how you play. For example, if I am in a queue I am less likely to group up with someone or offer to help someone out because my queue could pop at any time. Not being able to complete quests in a raid group because Blizzard is afraid they would trivialize the quests, but at least you would have people doing stuff together which is fairly important in an MMO. Having casual content that can be soloed is great, having content that is only doable or is optimal when done alone, not so much. So pet battles, farming and all the crap they added in MoP kind of pushes people away from each other.
Trying to help the community is one thing, but sometimes people just don't want to stop and listen to what you have to say. And nothing is more demoralizing than putting in a lot of effort into helping people who don't want your help. So most people just take what scraps of fun they can find.
Honestly when a games community has gone bad, at some point it is unlikely to get better even if all the underlying problems were addressed. Sometimes it is better to move on to a game with a better community.
Crap like WoW and Guild Wars 2 just showcase how dead the community driven MMO's are..
Just not going to happen anymore unless something like EQ Next goes back to the EQ 1 formula..
Then they designed it wrong. The designers are creating an environment in which players interact, if you design that environment to encourage a certain kind of behavior then that is the kind of behavior you will see. It is of course much more complex than that, but games that pay no attention to engaging the community have very poor communities. Designers need to take responsibility for the ways their decisions affect the community, and players need to stop giving them a free ride.
It's mostly in the design of the game, If you design 80 % of your content for a game as "solo play" or with "auto group join features" like seen STO or RIFT , not really sure about GW2 but the public events seems to work this way aswell..
As a result you will get a silent community, there is really no NEED for talking.
Also, more and more gamers (ALL maybe ?) are using voiced communication instead of that trusty chatbar.
You may say that this isn't the developers fault, these things are there to make players meet automatically , yeah , but players/people are in general rather lazy, iF you don't force it on them you will not get anyone to speak either.
The older games took up ALL your free time, all from grouping and meeting up to corpse runs etc, features that made REAL friends, these features are now gone ..I can't say that I'm surprised that these features has been axed, but still can miss them from time to time. These features made players more/less forced to talk or they coudn't play the game.
EVE was here before those games.
EVE will be here long after their last server is switched off.
Give me liberty or give me lasers
It's a new level of invassivenes for some and thier spouses for that matter. For the unmarried though it's great. The world of mmorpgs has turned into an online dating service with virtually unlimited opportunities to make new friends. Back in the day you didnt build your relationships based on a cute voice or a persons looks.
So today we get things like raidfinder that dont require your full attention so you can press a few buttons and skype at the same time.
I have seen some people chatting about how it is only the players responsibility to provide the sense of community, but i think it also is part of the games devs responsibility to enforce rules and codes of conduct. I played Wow for quite a few years on an RP server and saw so much griefing and negativity thrown at the faces of people trying to enjoy their time in Wow with RP and bliz did nothing to discourage it. The real problem is the fact that when mmo's started out in the late 90's there was a player base that for the most part was at the same maturity level, now there is a much broader mix and companies don't take the trolling and abuse seriously the way they are supposed to.
When a game is created solely for as much profit as can be squeezed out of the player base then thats what most important. ( I also know that companies making the games are in it for the money ) I hope that a game dev will try something outside of the current box of trying to replicate another Wow and surprise everyone with something akin to EQ early days and dark age of camelot.
So the best way to help you would be roleplay a grateful quest-giver?
(I ask with sincere curiosity, not to needle)
Great article!
Think this type of thing is very important for the survival of MMOs as a genre.
MMORPG Gamers/Developers need a reality check!
Great article. Nicely written. It highlights that we all shape the community we judge.