Big reason why community got worst in MMORPG...

Vermillion_Raventhal

This is just my opinion but players are too divided. 

I know at least in UO and EQ players tended to be around for different reasons.

In EQ leveling was slow so you could expect to bump into the same players for a while.  It allowed you to group and form friendships.  Also slow combat also allowed you to assist players.  You also saw higher level players in newbie zones leveling.  Buffs and items could be given to lower level players 

In UO players formed communities around player housing and npc cities.  You may port off to adventure but players tended to hang in whatever city they liked because there was no "high level" city.  Each city functioned as hub closer to real life.

I think games moving forward would benefit from getting players to just adventure and hang around the same players. Seems simple but these days you blow through content and zones daily.  The only meet up spots are big cities which usually are about as interactive as big city in real life. Don't be afraid to allow players to interact with buffs and ports amd the like.

AlBQuirky

In my opinion, the number of players that think MMORPGs are to be won or beaten far outnumber the players who enjoy long journeys.

Kyleran

My guess is most players join a MMORPG to "play a new game" first and foremost, while socializing or making new friends is a secondary consideration. 

Older titles provided for more opportunity to interact between players, and in at least the MMORPGs I played established some sort of interdependence between the gamers.

Could have been in encouraged grouping, crafting, or self defense from aggressors,  all provided incentive to reach out and learn to cooperate with others to complete game goals.

There was also more time in game to do so, these days the pacing seems to me to be almost frantic, with raid and party leaders yelling go, go, go if anyone stops to smell the rose's too long.

Every design has a plus and a minus, fact is the changes made to reduce interdependence and socialization were favored by a greater number of players so they largely became the norm to satisfy the need for more action oriented, solo activities in order to reduce wasting people's time.

Albatroes

Kyleran said:

My guess is most players join a MMORPG to "play a new game" first and foremost, while socializing or making new friends is a secondary consideration. 

Older titles provided for more opportunity to interact between players, and in at least the MMORPGs I played etablished some sort of interdependence between the gamers.

Could have been in encouraged grouping, crafting, or self defense from aggressors,  all provided incentive to reach out and learn to cooperate with others to complete game goals.

There was also more time in game to do so, these days the pacing seems to me to be almost frantic, with raid and party leaders yelling go, go, go if anyone stops to smell the rose's too long.

Every design has a plus and a minus, fact is the changes made to reduce interdependence and socialization were favored by a greater number of players so they largely became the norm to satisfy the need for more action oriented, solo activities in order to reduce wasting people's time.

You can even zoom out a bit further and say that the market is just over-saturated. A large reason as to why earlier games had 'better' communities was because there wasn't as much choice in engagement as there is today. I mean if you look at WoW today, if you dont like a raid tier, you can skip it and the devs will scale up everything so you dont get left behind in the next raid tier. Gone are the days of actually getting left behind in games. You dont have to know the 'main players' on your server anymore, or have 'aspirations' of joining top guilds since most things can just be pug'd if the group has decent enough gear (which they can buy, which has always been around but seems to be more common than it used to be). So maybe the core problem isn't the people but more so the development of the game. If developers dont care about the content they produce (I dont think making throw-away content ever 3-4 months is caring), why should the player base? And in turn they tend to care about each other less since they dont need each other as much.

Wizardry

AlBQuirky said:

In my opinion, the number of players that think MMORPGs are to be won or beaten far outnumber the players who enjoy long journeys.

Now this is the way i see the large portion of community as well.On top of this the other black mark is devs that create platforms of bragging,such as world firsts or most kills or the pvp crap like ladders or ranks .Yes it is ok in pvp centric shooters because in reality you are there to BEAT the other guy but in a rpg we don't need that what so ever.

Creating a game design that centers around players thinking they are better than others is just bad.This is also why i frown on devs who CLAIM they don't like toxic gaming and are all about cleaning it up,yet they are the ones who designed their game to be toxic but of course would never blame themselves.

iixviiiix

Wasn't those game singleplayer game ? There are no community in them .

Quizzical

Vermillion_Raventhal said:

This is just my opinion but players are too divided.

We're not too divided, but rather, too multiplied.  That is, there are too many of us.  In a game with only a few hundred active players, you can see the same other people a lot and get to know some of them.  In a game with hundreds of thousands of active players, you'll likely never see the same person more than a few times unless you seek him out.

The problem is that you can't make a profit on a game with only a few hundred particularly active players unless you've got an incredibly small budget or most of them are pretty extreme whales.  Most players aren't whales, and most players want features that aren't practical to implement on an incredibly small budget.

Shinobe

What Quizz said.

IMO back the days with EQ i remember that (before Sony) they announced and celebrated when they had hit 100.00 players, world wide. At this time it was a great achievement for a non asian game, with Sony they reached 250.000 and i remember huge community events for that as well. If you as a player on a server got a bad rep. you could start a new char because the community was so close.

For me that changed with Blizzard announcing WoW and bringing MMOs to the masses AND cheaper and easier internet connection (i was running EQ on a 56K Modem and in Germany you had to pay per hour). Plus for EQ you needed to have a CC.

Today, an MMO with less then 100.000 players counts as a failure. And with a larger playerbase you also have larger idiotbase.

I just had a conversation with a friend i know from EQ and we talked about naming (just a very small example i know) in EQ we could not remember someone with a "bad" name, everyone had a "proper" name. Todays, every second person (gut feeling) has a name like XxxxlegolasxxxX or Kill3rroXXor.

Just my2c

Kajidourden

Reason number one:
Nobody can seem to figure this simple thing out......


Worse*  

delete5230

DMKano said:

AlBQuirky said:

In my opinion, the number of players that think MMORPGs are to be won or beaten far outnumber the players who enjoy long journeys.

The number of people who just want to get to a destination in real life far outnumber those who enjoy a long journey.

Are we there yet?

I disagree, their are a large number of both.  Problem is games are small giving no choice and all are finished with the content quickly.  Key word is no choice.

Knytta

I think that part of the problem is that almost every developer at any given time tries to meet the needs of the SAME customers, at the moment the survival, PvP sandbox, in a couple of years it will be something else that all developers are doing. It is almost like all the developers are using the same focus groups. Anyway when all games have the same ideas the player base gets diluted making the games more impersonal and "maybe it is better at the top if I grind to it" and no stable group of players - less interaction - even higher turnover. At the moment Pantheon and maybe one or 2 others tries to do something different, I hope they succeed!

iixviiiix

Quizzical said:

Vermillion_Raventhal said:

This is just my opinion but players are too divided.

We're not too divided, but rather, too multiplied.  That is, there are too many of us.  In a game with only a few hundred active players, you can see the same other people a lot and get to know some of them.  In a game with hundreds of thousands of active players, you'll likely never see the same person more than a few times unless you seek him out.

I don't think being too many is main problem . Cause as you said , people mostly will seek for other ,

MMO player wasn't social sites celebrities with millions of followers but close to non , they circle only around 10 to 50 , and when they feel like they can play together.

The relation ship quality wasn't depend on number of time you see same people but the quality of the time you spend with them .

Then it lead to the main problem of divided , that cause even if you want to seek him out , there are no way to .

Let say , how many game allow players with power gap to play with other ? Power gap alone , there are also contents gaps , time gaps ects ...

This talk is about how a normal casual player spend time , i am not some hardcore player like you guys .

Kajidourden

DMKano said:

Knytta said:

 At the moment Pantheon and maybe one or 2 others tries to do something different, I hope they succeed!

Had to laugh at this - Pantheon is literally using EQ1 vanilla as a blueprint.

Not that this is a bad thing - just when you replicate the gameplay of EQ1 from 19 years ago - that's not exactly doing something differently, is it?

It might be new to them if they've never played some of those early games.  

GeezerGamer

DMKano said:

Knytta said:

 At the moment Pantheon and maybe one or 2 others tries to do something different, I hope they succeed!

Had to laugh at this - Pantheon is literally using EQ1 vanilla as a blueprint.

Not that this is a bad thing - just when you replicate the gameplay of EQ1 from 19 years ago - that's not exactly doing something differently, is it?

But it is new.

How many years has it been since the Early Theme Park MMORPG model has been available?

EQ1 is still online, but it's not the same game it was in its early days. Neither is WoW or almost any other MMORPG still around.

That early WoW and EQ experience isn't available right now. And hasn't been for a long time.

I am not so familiar with EQ1 as I played other games back then such as Anarchy Online, SWG and City of Heroes to name a few. So my 1st experience with this model was Vanilla WoW.

That experience had it's 1st major overhaul in patch 2.3 towards the end of the TBC expansion. This is when we started seeing Sparkling quest objectives, Minimaps that pointed us to our quest objectives, increased experience gains, and an overall reduction in the game's advancement requirements. This trend continued from there, and I'd say by the middle of the next expansion, what remained from the overall Vanilla WoW experience was pretty much gone. Cataclysm put the nail in the coffin on Vanilla WoW's experience.

So now it's been the better part of a decade since anything that resembled that early experience has been seen by the online gaming demographic. Only those of us who played 10 years ago remember it and we are dwindling. How much turnover has occurred in 10 years? How many new players have come into the market and how many have permanently left?

Given 2018's MMO player base, those currently and potentially available to purchase and play a new MMORPG have ever even seen anything like Vanilla WoW or EQ1?

Those of us who are familiar with the old models are probably a small enough in number to not even be worth mentioning.


The old concept of "It'll fail because people have already done it" no longer applies anymore.  For most gamer's today, they've probably never seen or experienced anything like Vanilla WOW or EQ1.

Vermillion_Raventhal

Quizzical said:

Vermillion_Raventhal said:

This is just my opinion but players are too divided.

We're not too divided, but rather, too multiplied.  That is, there are too many of us.  In a game with only a few hundred active players, you can see the same other people a lot and get to know some of them.  In a game with hundreds of thousands of active players, you'll likely never see the same person more than a few times unless you seek him out.

The problem is that you can't make a profit on a game with only a few hundred particularly active players unless you've got an incredibly small budget or most of them are pretty extreme whales.  Most players aren't whales, and most players want features that aren't practical to implement on an incredibly small budget.

It is not just that there are more people and more games.  It is almost impossible to meet up with the same player randomly.  You level quickly. They are in different instances.  The only meeting area is crowded cities which are impersonal as real life. 

Quizzical

Shinobe said:

I just had a conversation with a friend i know from EQ and we talked about naming (just a very small example i know) in EQ we could not remember someone with a "bad" name, everyone had a "proper" name. Todays, every second person (gut feeling) has a name like XxxxlegolasxxxX or Kill3rroXXor.

Unless EverQuest strictly enforced naming conventions, I'd be extremely skeptical of that.  I was playing other online games around that time period, and names of the sort you describe were in abundance.

GeezerGamer

DMKano said:

GeezerGamer said:

DMKano said:

Knytta said:

 At the moment Pantheon and maybe one or 2 others tries to do something different, I hope they succeed!

Had to laugh at this - Pantheon is literally using EQ1 vanilla as a blueprint.

Not that this is a bad thing - just when you replicate the gameplay of EQ1 from 19 years ago - that's not exactly doing something differently, is it?

But it is new.

How many years has it been since the Early Theme Park MMORPG model has been available?

EQ1 is still online, but it's not the same game it was in its early days. Neither is WoW or almost any other MMORPG still around.

That early WoW and EQ experience isn't available right now. And hasn't been for a long time.

I am not so familiar with EQ1 as I played other games back then such as Anarchy Online, SWG and City of Heroes to name a few. So my 1st experience with this model was Vanilla WoW.

That experience had it's 1st major overhaul in patch 2.3 towards the end of the TBC expansion. This is when we started seeing Sparkling quest objectives, Minimaps that pointed us to our quest objectives, increased experience gains, and an overall reduction in the game's advancement requirements. This trend continued from there, and I'd say by the middle of the next expansion, what remained from the overall Vanilla WoW experience was pretty much gone. Cataclysm put the nail in the coffin on Vanilla WoW's experience.

So now it's been the better part of a decade since anything that resembled that early experience has been seen by the online gaming demographic. Only those of us who played 10 years ago remember it and we are dwindling. How much turnover has occurred in 10 years? How many new players have come into the market and how many have permanently left?

Given 2018's MMO player base, those currently and potentially available to purchase and play a new MMORPG have ever even seen anything like Vanilla WoW or EQ1?

Those of us who are familiar with the old models are probably a small enough in number to not even be worth mentioning.


The old concept of "It'll fail because people have already done it" no longer applies anymore.  For most gamer's today, they've probably never seen or experienced anything like Vanilla WOW or EQ1.

Vanilla WoW and EQ1 are two entirely different types of games.

Vanilla WoW was the first game to really introduce "quest driven" gameplay, while EQ1 vanilla had no quest and used "camping/mob grinding" as a main mechanic.

WoW is the cornerstone of Themepark MMORPG design, EQ1 is an early prototype that had a lot more open gameplay, but was still a themepark at heart, just the rides were not so in your face like they were in WoW.

The early EQ1 experience IS available right now - Project 99.

Not to those who have not experienced it. You need to have owned the disks to play P99.

delete5230

DMKano said:

Knytta said:

 At the moment Pantheon and maybe one or 2 others tries to do something different, I hope they succeed!

Had to laugh at this - Pantheon is literally using EQ1 vanilla as a blueprint.

Not that this is a bad thing - just when you replicate the gameplay of EQ1 from 19 years ago - that's not exactly doing something differently, is it?

Had to laugh at that ?... Why?

It's been so long, it IS NEW ! 

You think you could have used a better word than "laugh".  It's like you have a resentment against Pantheon for some reason.  I've detected that in many of your post.  

If you have a resentment it should be BDO, it takes advantage of people. 

Scorchien

Quizzical said:

Shinobe said:

I just had a conversation with a friend i know from EQ and we talked about naming (just a very small example i know) in EQ we could not remember someone with a "bad" name, everyone had a "proper" name. Todays, every second person (gut feeling) has a name like XxxxlegolasxxxX or Kill3rroXXor.

Unless EverQuest strictly enforced naming conventions, I'd be extremely skeptical of that.  I was playing other online games around that time period, and names of the sort you describe were in abundance.

If im remembering correctly EQ had restrictions even when you created to at least be somewhat in accorcdance with Racial spellings , and if you did manage to get some offensive/unusal name thru , people would report it and you would have to change it , Even on DAOC on RP servers , you had to abide by naming restrictions also and EQ2 ....This has all gone away now tho

Amathe

There is more than one way to get separated from your friends and not be able to play with them. Levels are one way. Gear quality is another. Lack of key access (to a dungeon or raid) is a third. Faction standing is a fourth. Where you are in some long chain quest is a potential fifth. 

A lot has to happen to make it productive to group with specific people. EQ was good in some ways, but not all ways. I played with 2 real life friends in EQ and it wasn't long before we found we couldn't play together much anymore. 

Scorchien

Amathe said:

There is more than one way to get separated from your friends and not be able to play with them. Levels are one way. Gear quality is another. Lack of key access (to a dungeon or raid) is a third. Faction standing is a fourth. Where you are in some long chain quest is a potential fifth. 

A lot has to happen to make it productive to group with specific people. EQ was good in some ways, but not all ways. I played with 2 real life friends in EQ and it wasn't long before we found we couldn't play together much anymore. 

well , the way my group alleviates that problem , and the core has been together since Asherons Call , We all have Static character that is for Guild play ( we generally group up 2-3 times a week if we can ) These Guild runs are usually a couple hours +/- .. Make alts to do whatever ya want when not in guild function , Unless of course its game that allows the freedom to do content with out messing up the Static group like UO,FF14,ESO etc ... ..

Pemmin

lack of downtime and scaled back difficulty

basically everything plays like a hacknslash now and the drivers that used to help people break the ice are gone.

WoW is actually a perfect example. The people doing the hard content(mythic raiding, rated pvp) tend to still have fairly tightknit communities while the casual players tend to solo and dip out of the game for more extended periods of time.

Viper482

Community was the core of the original MMO. Servers were small towns where you could run into the same people all the time and you needed each other to advance in all way. People tend to be nicer when they others in all things.

My reasons why MMORPG communities suck now

1. Gameplay more solo focused than not.

2. Crafting jack of all trades...no reliance on anyone else because you can do everything yourself.

3. Auction Houses...even if you do have to buy from others there is no personal interaction.

4. Destination rather than journey....every new MMO that comes out the first to max gets there in like 2 days at most. Speaks for itself. When they journey is going to take forever anyway you tend to stop and smell the roses more. This gives community a chance to flourish.

5. Megaservers/phasing.....when you never see the same person twice outside of your guild how on Earth can a sense of community be possible? I used to make friends all the time in early MMORPG's, it was near impossible not to because they were social games above all else. 


6. Too easy. When you can run a pug through a dungeon for 30 minutes and no one needs to type one word.....


7. The internet in general is a cesspool in 2018 and it won't get better...ever. 

Iselin

Torval said:

The quality and civility of our online interactions have been declining outside of MMOs. Maybe MMOs are a reflection of that mood and mindset.

I think around here we tend to over estimate the importance of game mechanics and under estimate the greater prevalent social media environment whenever we talk about how much better these MMO communities were 19 - 15 years ago.

Social media wasn't even a phrase we used back then and now MMO interpersonal relationships are just one type of social media interaction and a very small and minor one at that.

Vermillion_Raventhal

DMKano said:

Vermillion_Raventhal said:

Quizzical said:

Vermillion_Raventhal said:

This is just my opinion but players are too divided.

We're not too divided, but rather, too multiplied.  That is, there are too many of us.  In a game with only a few hundred active players, you can see the same other people a lot and get to know some of them.  In a game with hundreds of thousands of active players, you'll likely never see the same person more than a few times unless you seek him out.

The problem is that you can't make a profit on a game with only a few hundred particularly active players unless you've got an incredibly small budget or most of them are pretty extreme whales.  Most players aren't whales, and most players want features that aren't practical to implement on an incredibly small budget.

It is not just that there are more people and more games.  It is almost impossible to meet up with the same player randomly.  You level quickly. They are in different instances.  The only meeting area is crowded cities which are impersonal as real life. 

You are also forgetting another important factor - many players simply don't want to meet anyone else today, they just want to play near other players but have no desire to communicate with them.

Example - group dungeons runs where nobody utters a single word, or if they do - it's hi and that's the extent of the whole interaction - this is pretty much the norm today in many games.

I think that with so many facets of satisifying "social interaction" outside of MMOs today - like social media - people today just don't feel nearly as compelled to communicate in games - as that need is already satisfied elsewhere.

How many of those groups formed through being social?

I just have a hard time believing that lack of social interaction comes from the players. So many online genres have social interaction.  

Vermillion_Raventhal

Iselin said:

Torval said:

The quality and civility of our online interactions have been declining outside of MMOs. Maybe MMOs are a reflection of that mood and mindset.

I think around here we tend to over estimate the importance of game mechanics and under estimate the greater prevalent social media environment whenever we talk about how much better these MMO communities were 19 - 15 years ago.

Social media wasn't even a phrase we used back then and now MMO interpersonal relationships are just one type of social media interaction and a very small and minor one at that.

Hard to believe it is the players.  My son makes tons of friends on online games.  Almost none on MMOs except Warframe if that counts as one. Arc he has tons of friends. ESO... nada.