MMO Communities (was RE: [MUD-Dev] MMORPG Cancellations:Thesky isfalling?)

[Aaron Switzer]

On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 08:44, Sean Howard wrote:

> I would go so far as to say that you will have that
> anyway. Community happens, and unless you go out of your way to
> alienate them, you'll get at least some sort of top level
> community there. Look at City of Heroes - almost no interaction
> with other players in game (other than grouping and kill
> stealing), yet it has a ton of people who are part of the overall
> community.

> I would argue that it is more important - or at least requires
> more distinct effort - to create smaller communities with more
> valuable input on the player's behalf. For instance, some games
> FORCE you to group, which feels like a poor design decision
> because one can interact with other players without requiring them
> to play. SWG has arbitrary crafting dependencies where making
> something like a droid requires some object which exists for no
> other purpose than to be used to make droids, but some other
> classes makes them (ie Master Artisans create droid batteries, but
> Master Droid Engineers can't).

> That kind of thing hurts games. Those are the decisions that
> designers make to increase "community", but they fall flat on the
> floor and end up ruining the game. Everyone being part of a global
> community is just how it works. I mean, when you've got arguments
> over whether DAoC is better than AO, you are going to fall on one
> side of that line. It just happens and it would be difficult to
> stop it. If it happens anyway, let's concentrate on the parts we
> can screw up :)

I agree with you that forcing players to group is not necessarily
the best approach and I also agree that the top-level game community
will happen on it's own.  But what I don't agree with is that the
top-level community can safely be ignored.

When I argued that concentrating too much on sub-community formation
was a bad idea, my intention was that concentrating on the
sub-communites to the /exclusion/ of the top-level community was a
bad idea.  I fully believe that tools enabling players form and
manage sub-groups is a good thing.  I just feel that supporting all
levels of community is the best approach.

As an example, I would like to point to A Tale In The Desert.  The
game allows you to form small communities made up of individuals, as
well as communities of communites.  But it takes this mentality all
the way to the top and allows players actually create new in-game
laws and even to ban other players from the game.  I would argue
that this not only gives the player a strong feeling of connection
to thier immediate community (aka "guild"), but also gives them an
equally strong connection to the game community as a whole.

> I disagree. We need to make these sub-communities more important
> to the larger ones, and we need to make it easier to get into the
> sub-communities. For instance, Lineage II has guild vs guild
> combat, but the concept of guilds and clans is kind of a hardcore
> attitude that the average player won't identify with or seek to be
> part of.

This is exactly why all levels of communities need to be
addressed. >From short-term groupings to guilds to regions to the
entire player base.  The short-term grouping is easy to get into for
the non-hardcore, which possibly leads to the joining a guild, which
in turn leads to participation in region (or some equivilent)
activity, which final gives a stronger feeling of connection to the
entire player base.

> I would be surprised if that were the real reason they moved on to
> new games. They've got a community and they are willing to take
> that community - the whole thing - with them to other games. I
> don't think it is because they don't feel connected, but probably
> because the game itself got old and boring after they all max
> their third characters.

I agree that most of the time a group will move on due to the game
getting old, but what I was putting forth is that these groups,
without a feeling of connection to the game, would leave all at once
and never look back.  Where as with a group that is moving on simply
because they have grown tired of the game, they would do it in more
gradual fashion and would maintain a connection to the old game, at
least in some fashion, for a longer period of time before completely
leaving it behind.

I have seen it before in communities were a group that has
connections to multiple game communities will completely dump a
community if they feel they have no relevence in that community.
But if they still have a connection at least a couple of the members
will stick around and continue to report to the rest of the members,
sometimes even managing to bring some of the other members back to
the game.

>> On the other hand if they feel that they have a real say in how
>> the game and the game's overall community is run, then they will
>> have a vested interest in sticking with the game, even if they
>> have grown tired of the game play.

> That's not neccessarily community. That's just a show of faith
> that the problems they have with the game will be fixed because
> there are people listening. I stuck around SWG for a while because
> it seemed like they were going to fix Droid Engineer - not because
> I felt like they were listening to my suggestions on how to fix it
> (probably because I never offered any).

It does refer to a community if the players are leaving for a new
experience not due to precieved problems with the game.  And as with
what I said above, if a couple of the group's members stick around,
then they will report any new additions to the game that might
interest other members into coming back.

But I also want to stress that when I refer to a connection to the
overall game community I'm not talking about communication between
the players and the dev team.  I'm talking about the players'
connection to the in-game community, ie. the player base and the
it's social structure.  And I think that A Tale In The Desert is one
of the first MMOGs to really do a good job at this.

> I don't see nationalism as politics. It has more to do with self
> esteem - probably another subject which is important for game
> designers to understand. It's just that self esteem has so many
> defensive mechanisms that the closer you get to the true
> motivations behind actions, the more defensive people get -
> perhaps even violently so.

True, but there is no reason why nationalism can't be discused in
the abstract.

I guess I'll just have to keep the discusion of my plans to create
the nation of AaronSwitzerLand to another venue. :-)

>> I agree with you based on the idea that "community" == "people
>> that know each other personally".

> Not just people. Entities, whether they are individual people or
> smaller communities. And I don't think they have to know each
> other personally, but maybe know OF each other? Or at least, can
> deeply affect each other?

How about this scenario (again using A Tale In The Desert).  A
player has found a technique that allows him to advance rapidly
within the game, the rest of the community votes and determines that
this technique is unfair and outlaws it.  Now this player has been
deeply affected by the 10,000+ players that voted.  Does this
constitute a 10,000 person community?

- Aaron Switzer
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