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What Happened to Community and Adventure?
bigbadcronk
Member Posts: 16
Does anybody remember when playing an MMO was a social experience? I remember Playing Anarchy Online Forever ago and enjoying the social aspects of the game so much that I didnt have a character over the level of 40 for 2 years. Now it just seems like an endless grind with a small ammount of joy and an even smaller ammount of social satisfaction. I am currently playing AOC and I enjoy my time in the game enough, with the guild aspect the social experience is still there but it just seems like a way to get in touch with level 80's so you can have them run you through dungeons with little to no work on your end. I remember finding places in Rubi-ka that I would go to just for the scenery, I would just walk about and take in the wilderness around me and enjoy myself while doing so. I dont get that In most of the MMO's I have played in the last 5 years. AO was pretty instanced just like AOC but the diffrence was there seemed to be more to see in AO while running about then there is in AOC, I wouldnt dare take a lvl 20 character to the feilds of the dead cause Id get murdered there or on my way there. Makes just taking a walk in the woods seem impossible. There was a waterfall not to far outide of Tir in Ao that I used to love going to! what happened to the adventure! I hardly talk to anybody anymore, The community is like I said, just sort of going through the motions. ive gone back to AO a few times but all the splendor that was rubi-ka just seems pixelated and out of date. AOC is graphically beautiful and I love the way everything looks but it seems like you dont get to experience certain areas of the game untill your a specific level and that makes me sad. I know all we needed was just another wo-is-me post about how wonderful things used to be, but I just felt a little nostalgic and wanted to share my thoughts. If ever your on the Set server in AOC feel free to mail Cronk and say hi! At least then ill know a few people still care about socializing in a world where the grind is all that matters.
-Cronk-
Comments
It seems to me that this is happening in so many games that it's more the people playing it than anything else, which is going to reflect the general culture they come from and values that they have. Granted, many people don't want to sit in a city hub all day and I'm certainly one of them, but you're talking about socialising in general and not just sitting on one's ass in a city hub all day. To that end I completely understand your position and, personally, gameplay only goes so far for me. No matter how enjoyable a game is I am not going to play it, let alone pay to play it, if the community is unresponsive or bad. After all, why should you, I or anyone keep paying for such a game? I'm not sure when communiites will make a comeback but I do know that I'm not going to spend months paying for a game and doing my part to create community with nothing coming back to me. But, hey, who knows, maybe you and I will get lucky.
If you would ever be interested in trying something different take a look at Guild Wars (and Guild Wars 2) when it comes out. My girlfriend and I play daily and it'd be great to see a friendly pixelated face.
(1)TL:DR must be your way of saying that thinking hurts. Then again, this may explain why it looks like you responded to the post without using your brain.
(2) It's not about community, is it? You just have nothing better to do.
"What Happened to Community and Adventure?"
Nothing.
Before: i have a few friends i played with in EQ but the grind was bad, and camping was impossible.
Now: i have a few friends i played with in WOW and the game is a lot more fun because there is little camping and raiding does not need live long dedication.
It is all getting better.
How exactly do you social in.. that's say AO.
do you chat with people all day in a town or something like that? and call that social?
It was more about wandering around and taking in the sights and actually talking to one another about stuff other than where you need to go to get the next badass peice of gear to complete the set. It felt alot more like a community than a team based mission/quest runaround. Thats what Im talking about
So stuff like religion, politics or sports?
What happened to this same thread that was made last week?
There are social experiment MMO's; Second Life for one. But there are no longer MMO's that have people looking to just socialize AND have people that just want phat lewts from dungeons AND have PvP happy gankers - devs just found a way to filter the three into different sub-genres.
The morning sun has vanquished the horrible night.
All three plus some, Was more the politics of the game, the clans and omni-tek and all that. That was back when people actually gave a hoot about in game polotics, was kind of awesome thinking back on it
I made another thread expressing my feelings on the matter. The internet is a great and wonderful place isnt it
Answer to your question. It died when people moved on from Asheron's Call. To be honest that was one of the friendliest communities I have ever been apart of. No one thought they were better then you..
Gaming community: IRONFIST
New World: Lilith - US East
WoW Guild: IRONFIST <Burning Legion> Alliance(We transferred to Illidan)
WoW Guild: IRONFIST <Illidan> Horde
SWOTR: IRONFIST <Satele Shan> Empire/Republic
How about guilds that have a bunch of people chatting on vent at all times. Or same people working and coordinating together doing dungeons, raids, pvp, that dont' count as social interaction?
There are lot of discussions about in-game socializing (see e.g. Group Play vs Solo Play sticky), game communities… But do we have “technical” possibility for that in modern and old MMOs? On P2P games you have to “run” for your money as fast as you can, no time for long discussions. Typing speed, language barriers, absence of real-time voice support (probably this feature would only increase lags) are another “contributors”. Guilds do not have specially reserved for a particular guild places to meet and advertise guild rules, demands, goals, preferences. Group quests have just tags but no game mechanics that helps players to build a party. In RL there are clubs of interests, sport centers, etc. Why there is nothing like that in games? I have to read forums to find an interesting for me guild. Why this cannot be transferred into a game? Massive battles have no attempt whatsoever of any organization, no time to train newcomers, build formations, set tactics, elect leaders-generals. I cannot “socialize” just with anyone, I lave to know the people with whom I am going into battle. Under such circumstances it is not a great surprise that there are so many lonely “asocial” solo players. You are lucky if you have RL friends to play together, but if not… Players obviously have no possibility to change game mechanics, than this option (group/guild organization, socialization aspects) should be incorporated in a game by developers. At the moment we are on our own, just cattle, mob that should somehow selforganize like inanimate matter in protolife during abiogenesis. I feel uncomfortable in these prehistorical conditions. Developers should either create surroundings for players to be capable to selforganize or this “organization” should be “forced” by the game engine. Before that (“technical possibilities”) all discussions about socialization and communities are doomed to be not productive IMHO.
So getting an organized groups of regular people for dungeons and pvp isn't consider as social or a community? Because that's all there to do in most MMO's endgame.
It's all game mechanics and the increase in casual gamers. In the older games you were forced to group, which made guilds more important and communicating with other players mandatory. In EQ, you couldn't solo after lev 20 for the most part (and if you died there was a death penalty of having to get your body from a dangerous, mob infested area just to get your gear back) or in pvp type games you weren't safe traveling or leveling alone. In todays game of casual gamers the game mechanics have changed to make the masses happy with more solo, story driven content, instances, lack of death penalties, less focus on pvp, etc. Though some of these changes were inevitable with "advances" in game development. So community interaction is optional and not necessary and little effort is made by developers to support or encourage it. People still chat in general over the zones, but no one has to work together to achieve their goals, so it remains fairly shallow and OOC.
Of course End game is different with more forced interaction to achieve goals.
soloable games and social games need to be distinct niches.
a large majority of games, both indy and big name, try to capture both styles and end up ruining all cohesive direction.
players need to define the experience they are after, and learn to be saticfied with the limits of the game theyve chosen.
community and adventure can only be found in games where the players are, by design, forced to rely on eachother.
the current craze of offering a completely soloable path has ruined the defining features of traditional social MMO's
there needs to be a sense of urgency to truly bring a community together. the bonding must be meaningful and somewhat structured, or it will present as meaningless.
though i am generally a proponent of F2P games, i have to admit they are definately anti social, and will not help communities form within MMO's. worthwhile coordination must be the focus of social MMO design, and F2P tends to apply most specifically to individualization.
games that wish to have a strong community and inclusive gameplay need to accept that such a feature is a niche requirement and will not apply to the average gamer.
that said, if such a quality was valued by a design team, they would end up with a superior product, and a more productive partnership with thier customers.
I think Anarchy Online had a few things going for it that many other MMORPGs don't these days:
1. The factions themselves and the communities within them were forced to share and work together.
2. Many end game bosses were open world mobs on 18 hour timers (i.e. non-instanced) which promoted cooperation.
3. Meaningful content existed for lower levels and not just end game.
4. The level cap was much tougher to reach than many current MMORPGs.
5. Points 3 & 4 made it seem like you were less aggressively funnelled toward end game before you could start having fun.
6. The population was only spread over three servers, one of which was German speaking.
7. You could safely explore all of Rubi-Ka very early on in a flying vehicle (although not the content in the Shadow-Lands).
8. The world was largely linear but seemed less restrictive than most linear worlds today.
9. You weren't quest grinding the whole time to level up.
In conclusion and to answer the OP's question I think it all comes down to design. Force players to cooperate outside of just their guild and cliques, distribute loot better, remove some of the gate grinds and add meaningful content in lower levels that isn't simply a way to get to the end game before the 'fun' can begin and you might stop players feeling like they are in such a rush to get through the content which will go a long way to bringing back the things you miss.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Voice chat is a good thing IF it's built into the game from the start and all you need to get is a mike or a headset so it should actually promote social interaction.
I blame the lack of social interaction on the people flooding in from the FPS games, theres no social interaction to speak of in those games and they behave in the same way when they come to our MMORPGs.
All those memories will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
Join a good guild.
.
Turn off global chats.
.
Set a good example.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
Communities are changing, and not for the better.. In my opinion, mmos today are turning into epeen E-sports.. I used to remember the days back, back long ago when 80% of the playing population spent their time grouping up adventuring.. Granted, there were some downfalls because at times people played classes that couldn't solo, or just had a hard time socializing.. This lead to gaming companies making everything more soloable, like WoW.. Even that game has changed over time.. I read and hear more of "my stuff is better then your stuff" each and every month.. Gear driven games I believe are part of the problem, along with the design of finding ways to exclude people from groups and activities, then include them..
I honestly don't see this improving anytime soon, until most of the e-sporters go find a new genre of gaming to go play..
Of course we do, but times have changed. In the early days of MMOs, computers weren't as widespread, and people online were fewer, and they tended to be the computer enthusiasts of the 80's and early 90's who, if not actual adults, were generally a mature and social bunch. The early MMOs tended to be quite harsh with penalties for dying, and travel between zones was usually by foot and took a LONG time, so players just naturally stuck together and looked out for each other with help on corpse runs, escort through zones, rescue from imminent death, drive-by buffs and offers of teleports to distant zones. Thus, almost unbidden, sprang up a friendly, helpful, co-operative community... and It Was Good.
Then, computers and internet access became widely available to the "I Win" generation of kiddies, who had cut their teeth on games consoles and arcade-type games, where Competition Is All and other players are just more competition. They wanted shiny, spiky gear, lots of levels that were easy to come by, flashy combat graphics and noises, transportation to zones that took a few seconds and, finally, death penalties that approached those of arcade games (10 seconds of minor inconvenience) - all of which is what they were used to in their play-and-forget console games. Unsurprisingly, the games companies spotted this vast potential market and pandered to it in every way they could possibly think of. The money just flowed in, and thus the MMO community just withered away to a mere shadow of what it once was.
Now, instead of helping other players out just for the fun of it, players are rated on websites that show all the equipment and skill trees they have, and players have their characters analysed by number-crunching addons to see if their gear and talent trees have wrung the last drop of efficiency out of the game system. Their sole criteria for being allowed into guilds and groups is how much damage their characters can do per second, and what social interaction there is still left in MMOs amounts to basically the 'words' KK, Lol, WTF, Plz and Noob sent out on a semi-random basis. It isn't "who you are" any more, for modern-day MMO players, it's simply "what you wear".
The really, really sad part is - the old days are never coming back.
Yeah.. What he said ^^
You can do that by chatting on MSN while looking at pretty scenary pictures. You do not need a GAME to do that.
I would much rather group & PLAY coop. MMORPG .. the "G" stands for GAME.
(Please use paragraphs).
You ask "what happened to Community and Adventure?" Dev's designed recent MMO's as easy-mode solo games, with gameplay very much on-rails, with instancing and phasing. So basically, you really do not need a group anymore, indeed, other players would contest you for spawns, therefore gameplay experience has been conveniently isolated.
It's almost as if dev's designed gameplay to reduce calls to customer service or in-game GM's. Most of the old complaints were about this player "stealing my camp", "ninja-looting", or "training to zone". What was never realized by these dev's is the player community interaction, both good and bad, was the life of the MMO.
You can still do that. Join a guild and chat with people. I used to do that all the time on AO, there was rarely a time when I wasn't talking to someone, I always had org chat open and usually one or two private windows as well and we just talked. I'm sure the same can be true of any game on the market.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
Relatively Recently (Re)Played: HL2 (all), Halo (PC, all), Batman:AA; AC, ME, BS, DA, FO3, DS, Doom (all), LFD1&2, KOTOR, Portal 1&2, Blink, Elder Scrolls (all), lots more
Now Playing: None
Hope: None