MMO Communities (was RE: [MUD-Dev] MMORPG Cancellations: The sky is falling?)

[Tom "cro" Gordon]

Derek Licciardi wrote

> MMOs have not even begun to design for large scale communities.
> Part of the reason used to be technical.  The other part is that
> many don't seem to be willing to challenge this law that was
> founded in the days where servers were not much larger than 1000
> or so online at a time.  The Laws of Online World Design are a
> wonderful thing to think about but continually challenging them is
> how they evolve and we finally have the technology to really test
> the 250 person community law.  Don't get me wrong, the law is
> pretty sound for the types of communities that it was intended
> for.  We now can do more than that so I think it needs a revision
> which I'll formally toss out there for debate.

What I do find interesting about MMO games and MMO game development
is the pre-existing work and experience in very large and ultra
large communities is not being applied in any meaningful way, and
the tools available to create, manage and support these communities
in an online environment are really not being applied as well as
they could.

Since the essence of community is not any one virtual space, but a
cocnept of identifying with a certain item, game, group or other
identifying label, you quickly see communities far larger than this
supposed 250 person limit springin up all over the place. Takem, for
example, and entity like QuakeNet. This is the home to thousands of
communities, whilst also acting as a community itself. Which
immediately breaks the 250 person limit when you have single
channels that are home to several thousand people, all identifying
themselves as part of that community, and when you combine channels
with similar themes, you get communities into the tens of thousands.

Or take a service provider like BarrysWorld (now sadly gone), where
each person who made use of the services would identify themselves
as part of the BarrysWorld 'community' - which at it's peak topped
the 300,000 mark. Sure, there were lots of smaller subgroups of
varying sizes, but each participant also saw themselves as part of a
greater whole.

As Derek said, MMo designers are not addressing or designing for
large scale communities - which is odd, as this is exactly the ideal
market for MMO games - get people identifying themselves with the
game, rather than with guilds within it, and you have a much larger,
much more stable community to build on, rather than the fractured
grouping you get when you focus on guilds/clans alone.

Regards,
Tom "cro" Gordon
CEO, AlienPants Ltd
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