There is good and bad in modern and old school games. Whats missing from the new games when it community is as follows.
1. You name means nothing. You caused problems like you listed, your name got around and you were banned from most end game content by the players. So you had to quit or reroll and you learned not to be a jerk this time around. Not now, you just pay to change your name or servers and the problem keeps going.
2. Old school the community learned how to work together. You know your class and your roll in a team because you could not level without people. Your class was needed as well. A team was all about balancing and people used to ask. What class do we need with what classes we have. Now any class will do and most content getting to end game can be soloed. So most people dont know how to play their class with other people.
If I had to pick the communities then and now. After 17 years of MMOing, I would pick the communities from EQ1, DAoC and SWG any day of the week. There was ways of dealing with jerks long term, you just dont have in todays new MMOs. You name means nothing in a game now, if its gets bad, 20 bucks you have a new name.
None of that sounds bad to me.
"Name means nothing" = you can play as you want in a sea of strangers. If someone don't like it, he can play with someone else. A group is always just a click away.
"learned how to work together" = even better .. don't have to waste time to coordinate with a bunch of people. Again i can play as I want. If i don't like someone (he is not playing well, don't listen ...), exit is just a click away. And it goes both ways. No one has to tolerate me, and I don't have to tolerate anyone for any reason.
Cmon Narius, talking to you about what makes (or made) a good community in a MMORPG is like talking to a Rabbi about the true meaning of Christmas, neither of you really has an understanding of the subject.
I guess you don't have to like my opinions ... but you can't deny that it takes time to coordinate with others .. and if i don't like to waste that time, it is a plus, not a minus.
They are just preferences .. you seem to think that everyone needs to agree with your preference .. if not .. then "they don't understand the subject". I hear you. Not everyone keeps an open mind.
Again, you clearly don't get it, nothing to do with preferences. Sometimes you do things for other people, even unpleasant things for the pleasure of helping them. It's just how you are wired.
Also note, I only play MMORPGS where socialization mechanics are rewarded, again something you can't fathom.
And you are the last person who can accuse someone of not having an open mind.....
I honestly couldn't believe he said that to you.
Coming from a member with likely the most narrow minded perspective I've ever seen on this site... how rich.
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
Games have always had jerks, but a lot of it was toned down back in the day because there weren't as many solo options available, and shit was tough, long and grindy, just hours and hours sitting in one spot. People had to use communication in order to make the time go faster, so there appeared to be more of a community because of it.
Not to mention that there was no cross server tech yet available, so if you were an asshole all the time, people wouldn't tolerate it and you'd find it harder and harder to get groups and such. Since it took so long to level (months, years) people weren't so readily willing to just start fresh, either, so being nice was the best option.
Really none of what you just said applied to AC.
Oh sorry. For AC: So instead of communicating, people just set up groups and bots and an xp leeching hierarchy and watched TV as the game played itself.
Games have always had jerks, but a lot of it was toned down back in the day because there weren't as many solo options available, and shit was tough, long and grindy, just hours and hours sitting in one spot. People had to use communication in order to make the time go faster, so there appeared to be more of a community because of it.
Not to mention that there was no cross server tech yet available, so if you were an asshole all the time, people wouldn't tolerate it and you'd find it harder and harder to get groups and such. Since it took so long to level (months, years) people weren't so readily willing to just start fresh, either, so being nice was the best option.
Really none of what you just said applied to AC.
Oh sorry. For AC: So instead of communicating, people just set up groups and bots and an xp leeching hierarchy and watched TV as the game played itself.
AC solo friendly. People did not really need each other too much. Darktide was filled with gankers and small pop compaired to PvE servers and all around kicked EQ1's butt. AC Power.
Games have always had jerks, but a lot of it was toned down back in the day because there weren't as many solo options available, and shit was tough, long and grindy, just hours and hours sitting in one spot. People had to use communication in order to make the time go faster, so there appeared to be more of a community because of it.
Not to mention that there was no cross server tech yet available, so if you were an asshole all the time, people wouldn't tolerate it and you'd find it harder and harder to get groups and such. Since it took so long to level (months, years) people weren't so readily willing to just start fresh, either, so being nice was the best option.
Really none of what you just said applied to AC.
Oh sorry. For AC: So instead of communicating, people just set up groups and bots and an xp leeching hierarchy and watched TV as the game played itself.
AC solo friendly. People did not really need each other too much. Darktide was filled with gankers and small pop compaired to PvE servers and all around kicked EQ1's butt. AC Power.
It was solo friendly if you wanted to level incredibly slowly and didn't care how long it took, but yeah, it was one of the big things I preferred about AC. I played it for 3 years, and I have a friend who's been playing since close to launch and still plays today, especially now that they've given free reign to players and they can basically develop it how they want now.
Most of what I hate about current games came from EQ1 crowd. The elitist guild attitudes that infest games. DKP and Gear score to be in our guild for examples. All came out of the snobby guilds formed in EQ1 that tried to control spawns.
Yes there were always bad people in all communities. You just knew who they wers. These days you barely know anyone on your server.
Which is great .. no need to keep track of the bad and the good.
And exactly why I play single player RPG over single player MMORPG. Better game play and more convenience and control over my game experience. I only play MMORPG for the other players and world.
ECCLES 7:10 Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this.
no one really knows why. no human is smart enough to determine why it was better,or if it was in reality better. different time periods, different games, different people, different hardware, and a thousand other factors in which we can't correctly put together.
There were a lot of nice people and a lot of people who were not so nice.
In UO my first experience walkout out of town was being blown up by a much higher level and looted. This happened often including groups and was fairly frustrating. It did give some purpose to the game though and make it more interesting.
The same could be said for games like EQ with people who blocked content, brought trains on you, ninja looted, ranted in chat, kill stole, etc. Watching people rant in chat for the thousandth time where to find something that was obvious to find because there was no mini map was priceless amusement IMO. Then there was sure to be one thousand replies of find it yourself and maybe a few saying where to go. There there was all the insanity in the newbie zones where people were competing for mobs so they could get out of there. I met a lot of nice people who helped me in EQ, but it had all types and that made the game a lot more interesting IMO.
Yeah, I saw all of that as well.
So, I have a laugh when these threads pop up about how great the communities in the old MMOs were and how your reputation mattered because everyone on the entire server knew everyone else on a first name basis or some such nonsense.
Its funny because the bitter veteran players complain about modern MMOs when ironically they are mostly shaped by the actions of those players. MMO developers had to remove or restrict features or content because of such rampant abuse during the time of the old MMOs.
People on the forums choose not to remember those aspects of the old MMOs because then they would have to concede that the communities in the old MMOs were no better than modern MMOs.
I guess it all depends on your idea of fun.
Most stories I've read contain people of many different varieties. Not all of them are nice. That's part of what makes the story interesting.
I was frustrated many times in UO, EQ, and even Vanilla WoW, but that's part of what made it entertaining and worthwhile to me.
I don't want to play with polite robots who almost all act the same way. That is fairly boring from and entertainment perspective IMO.
The majority of players seem to enjoy playing in environments where no contact is forced at all and everything is happy happy all the time. To me this is a boring environment as there is not resistance, variety, or anything emotion provoking that would make me consider entertainment. It is just a long string of fairly bad quests in most cases that get boring fairly quickly IMO. I see a lot of people enjoy this for whatever reason though.
There were only a handful of games with community and i can only really speak for FFXI.Great community and the reason it was better was because of it's design.Nobody was complaining about community but instead the only criticism i heard was controller and grouping issues.
When EQ2 and Wow released within a week or so of each other,i didn't even know a community could be that bad,man was it a shocking experience for me.Now ever since that week in gaming history,i have seen a rather bad community everywhere.
So imo it most certainly was not just better but a LOT better.It was mostly if not all working class adults,kids did not have PC's and likely were not even allowed on the internet until around the era of Wow/EQ2.They were still installing the last of dsl upgrades in my area as i was still on 56k because my old cable lines were just awful and i know in the UK there was a huge waiting list to get in on DSL,i assume they were waiting for enough modems to be made.
You can still have a volatile community with adults but it would be a different kind of community,with kids you are pretty much getting a lot of silliness,childish nonsense.Until the massive influx of young gamer's around that time ,i never even heard the terms L33t or elitism or hardcore raiding,all that was this young generation needing terms to feed their egos.Likely also why you notice all these epsort games are rising up so popular,again gamer's need to feed their egos.
As adults back in the day,we just played,enjoyed the company of others and that was it.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Most of what I hate about current games came from EQ1 crowd. The elitist guild attitudes that infest games. DKP and Gear score to be in our guild for examples. All came out of the snobby guilds formed in EQ1 that tried to control spawns.
Guess mileage may vary, but in the first 3 years of EQ, playing hardcore on two different servers, this was not a thing.
They were pretty great actually for the shear fact that old school mmos used to have proper crafting and shops thus commercial activity was ran by players, not NPCs.
It was a lot of fun talking and getting to know weapon/armor crafters in SWG and building all the relationships with them and making deals.
Hello Kitty Online is actually not a bad game. Try it. But yeah back then everyone knew what they were doing and unless you were in a popular guild with likeminded people you couldn't do something such as lure a train to town.
I agree with the OP for the most part. However, I have more people that I made friends with back then that I STILL play games with. That is at least 12 years or more. To me, people were more "social" and willing to make friends then today. Seems everyone just wants to make pug and then move on. Too bad but that is the way it is. Then again, I find myself not WANTING to be social since I seem to get far too many of those any social types.
Nahh, they were better. Players cared. They had to. Being a douche bag earned you a rep. And back then, if you had a rep, you didn't group. If you didn't group. You didn't play. Now, who needs to worry about being a Douche bag? In fact, you get more from the game for being one. Solo-centric game play, group finders.....No one misses out anymore. So you no longer need to establish yourself as a team player anymore.
Why be cooperative and nice when i can go play a hundred other games or reroll and level in a few days or server hop or name change any time i want?!
My old school memories were mostly positive until the first ever server changes were allowed. This completely changed the game in a negative way. Reputations were almost meaningless after that point.
OP, I'm sure you realize that your post is completely subjective and can only be based on your personal experience as well as the recanted tales of others that you may have read or heard. In general, there are bad and good people/groups/etc. As for how many outweigh the other, no one can know. Some people/groups are jerks to some people and not to others. I guess you can kind of rule this as elitism, since many people of high 'status' would look down on others if they did not have certain gear/clears/etc. But there were good people/groups as well that would take the time out to help people with such things. So saying old communities weren't that great is as valid as saying that they were great. All based on perspective.
Yes there were always bad people in all communities. You just knew who they wers. These days you barely know anyone on your server.
Which is great .. no need to keep track of the bad and the good.
And exactly why I play single player RPG over single player MMORPG. Better game play and more convenience and control over my game experience. I only play MMORPG for the other players and world.
Play MMORPGs like single player game .. it is the same.
And you won't miss out on unique IP & gameplay like Marvel Heroes. If you ignore others, it is the same as a good (well actually ONLY .. unless you count old games like MUA) arpg with marvel characters.
10 to 15 years ago, mmorpg communities were much nicer. Global chat was often both interesting and helpful. Idiots existed but always seemed to be a small minority. The big difference, in my opinion, is not the evolution in game design so much as the evolution of payment methods. In the "good old days" almost everyone playing had a credit card and was willing to invest $15 a month. FTP has changed all that.
or rather those games were actually worth the monthly sub?
When people put rose tinted glasses on they see everything as sunshine and rainbows. In the old days of UO there were many guilds who would lure players in with pretty words, invite them in guild, then take them out of safe zone in the name of helping them increase their skill, kill them and loot them. It is quite easy to forget bad things from "good o'l days".
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
When people put rose tinted glasses on they see everything as sunshine and rainbows. In the old days of UO there were many guilds who would lure players in with pretty words, invite them in guild, then take them out of safe zone in the name of helping them increase their skill, kill them and loot them. It is quite easy to forget bad things from "good o'l days".
well thats not the bad things. what you are describing was one of the better features UO had. real backstabbing.
When people put rose tinted glasses on they see everything as sunshine and rainbows. In the old days of UO there were many guilds who would lure players in with pretty words, invite them in guild, then take them out of safe zone in the name of helping them increase their skill, kill them and loot them. It is quite easy to forget bad things from "good o'l days".
Which game are you talking about, most of the old school games I know didn't even have the mechanics to do so.. But even if that was the case that would be the exception that confirm the rule. Really, old school communities were more mature and more fun, there is no doubt about it.
What I am not sure about is if that was because the games were built differently from modern games or just because the mainstream jerks WoW attracted didn't even know what a MMORPG was at the time.
When people put rose tinted glasses on they see everything as sunshine and rainbows. In the old days of UO there were many guilds who would lure players in with pretty words, invite them in guild, then take them out of safe zone in the name of helping them increase their skill, kill them and loot them. It is quite easy to forget bad things from "good o'l days".
well thats not the bad things. what you are describing was one of the better features UO had. real backstabbing.
HUH!!! That sure is one fun way to look at it..hehe
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
There were only a handful of games with community and i can only really speak for FFXI.Great community and the reason it was better was because of it's design.Nobody was complaining about community but instead the only criticism i heard was controller and grouping issues.
Really? Because complaining about the horrid community certainly already happened in games that predated FFXI, EQ, UO.
Perhaps you weren't frequenting message boards much at the time? Because the majority of player vs player character assassination (the real, deep nastiness) always takes place offline on message boards, and is then carried over OOC into the game.
I'd be baffled if someone could successfully Blacklist anyone, ever, without access to a message board.
And that's also where the majority of the "zomg, these kids are so terribad, they're just wrecking everything" whining, in any (every?) title occurs. That's just a function of Group A (the guys who elected themselves the true original veterans) confronting Group B (any/every player who came along later).
In the olden dayze of yore, we did a lot of our character assassination in AIM chatrooms...
When people put rose tinted glasses on they see everything as sunshine and rainbows. In the old days of UO there were many guilds who would lure players in with pretty words, invite them in guild, then take them out of safe zone in the name of helping them increase their skill, kill them and loot them. It is quite easy to forget bad things from "good o'l days".
Rose colored glasses are more myth than reality.
I remember the bad, and it was those things that made the rest of the community band together, EVE operates very much like this today.
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
When people put rose tinted glasses on they see everything as sunshine and rainbows. In the old days of UO there were many guilds who would lure players in with pretty words, invite them in guild, then take them out of safe zone in the name of helping them increase their skill, kill them and loot them. It is quite easy to forget bad things from "good o'l days".
well thats not the bad things. what you are describing was one of the better features UO had. real backstabbing.
HUH!!! That sure is one fun way to look at it..hehe
I'm currently playing age of wulin only because of their murderer system and features. (Im a PvE farmer type of mmo player), but I need the thrill of danger that OwPvP brings to the monotone grind that is farming mats.
One of my favorite memories from UO, was getting scammed when buying a house, dude sold me a key to his house, then locked me out and switched keys, stealing all my stuff i freely put into his house, because i did not know how house transfer really worked and just accepted a random house key.
You might want to call me a masochist, but I live by the rule, no risk, no reward. So if im grinding mats in a PvE enviroment i will never get the mental satisfaction of doing it in a hostile environment.
Comments
Coming from a member with likely the most narrow minded perspective I've ever seen on this site... how rich.
"Mr. Rothstein, your people never will understand... the way it works out here. You're all just our guests. But you act like you're at home. Let me tell you something, partner. You ain't home. But that's where we're gonna send you if it harelips the governor." - Pat Webb
AC solo friendly. People did not really need each other too much. Darktide was filled with gankers and small pop compaired to PvE servers and all around kicked EQ1's butt. AC Power.
no one really knows why. no human is smart enough to determine why it was better,or if it was in reality better. different time periods, different games, different people, different hardware, and a thousand other factors in which we can't correctly put together.
Most stories I've read contain people of many different varieties. Not all of them are nice. That's part of what makes the story interesting.
I was frustrated many times in UO, EQ, and even Vanilla WoW, but that's part of what made it entertaining and worthwhile to me.
I don't want to play with polite robots who almost all act the same way. That is fairly boring from and entertainment perspective IMO.
The majority of players seem to enjoy playing in environments where no contact is forced at all and everything is happy happy all the time. To me this is a boring environment as there is not resistance, variety, or anything emotion provoking that would make me consider entertainment. It is just a long string of fairly bad quests in most cases that get boring fairly quickly IMO. I see a lot of people enjoy this for whatever reason though.
When EQ2 and Wow released within a week or so of each other,i didn't even know a community could be that bad,man was it a shocking experience for me.Now ever since that week in gaming history,i have seen a rather bad community everywhere.
So imo it most certainly was not just better but a LOT better.It was mostly if not all working class adults,kids did not have PC's and likely were not even allowed on the internet until around the era of Wow/EQ2.They were still installing the last of dsl upgrades in my area as i was still on 56k because my old cable lines were just awful and i know in the UK there was a huge waiting list to get in on DSL,i assume they were waiting for enough modems to be made.
You can still have a volatile community with adults but it would be a different kind of community,with kids you are pretty much getting a lot of silliness,childish nonsense.Until the massive influx of young gamer's around that time ,i never even heard the terms L33t or elitism or hardcore raiding,all that was this young generation needing terms to feed their egos.Likely also why you notice all these epsort games are rising up so popular,again gamer's need to feed their egos.
As adults back in the day,we just played,enjoyed the company of others and that was it.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I did however notice this in WoW and games since.
It was a lot of fun talking and getting to know weapon/armor crafters in SWG and building all the relationships with them and making deals.
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
Let's party like it is 1863!
My old school memories were mostly positive until the first ever server changes were allowed. This completely changed the game in a negative way. Reputations were almost meaningless after that point.
And you won't miss out on unique IP & gameplay like Marvel Heroes. If you ignore others, it is the same as a good (well actually ONLY .. unless you count old games like MUA) arpg with marvel characters.
or rather those games were actually worth the monthly sub?
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
Herald of innovation, Vanquisher of the old! - Awake a few hours almost everyday!
But even if that was the case that would be the exception that confirm the rule.
Really, old school communities were more mature and more fun, there is no doubt about it.
What I am not sure about is if that was because the games were built differently from modern games or just because the mainstream jerks WoW attracted didn't even know what a MMORPG was at the time.
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
Perhaps you weren't frequenting message boards much at the time? Because the majority of player vs player character assassination (the real, deep nastiness) always takes place offline on message boards, and is then carried over OOC into the game.
I'd be baffled if someone could successfully Blacklist anyone, ever, without access to a message board.
And that's also where the majority of the "zomg, these kids are so terribad, they're just wrecking everything" whining, in any (every?) title occurs. That's just a function of Group A (the guys who elected themselves the true original veterans) confronting Group B (any/every player who came along later).
In the olden dayze of yore, we did a lot of our character assassination in AIM chatrooms...
I remember the bad, and it was those things that made the rest of the community band together, EVE operates very much like this today.
"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
One of my favorite memories from UO, was getting scammed when buying a house, dude sold me a key to his house, then locked me out and switched keys, stealing all my stuff i freely put into his house, because i did not know how house transfer really worked and just accepted a random house key.
You might want to call me a masochist, but I live by the rule, no risk, no reward. So if im grinding mats in a PvE enviroment i will never get the mental satisfaction of doing it in a hostile environment.
Yo!
/oscar aka The No Sect Farmer, Qigami.
Herald of innovation, Vanquisher of the old! - Awake a few hours almost everyday!