MMOs 'don't give people the tools to build community anymore,' says EverQuest 2 creative director
MMOs 'don't give people the tools to build community anymore,' says EverQuest 2 creative director
That is what happens when the thing that matters to everyone is to get stuff done and fast. The general difficulty got adjusted to the point where people never have a reason to cooperate in the open world, crafting got relegated to the side lines and is usually not worthwhile enough and even then people would rather have alternative characters that do the few dependencies there are instead of relying on someone else. or there is an NPC that solves that issue outright. Then there are the tools that automate finding a group for the things where you absolutely need a group and you bet no one interacts in those groups... Oh no, it's rush to the end cause everyone got different things to do including so many daily quests. No time for even banter.
You want community? Great, slow down the game and see if that helps. Sure you may loose players that way that liked the pure convenience but if players find that they have time they may just start interacting.
Me personally, well I stopped playing MMOs entirely simply because the magic that was community got killed off exactly like that. Why play in an otherwise boring and dead world when the big promise of the genre is to play in a shared world WITH other players.
People have been trending away from random online interactions for decades. With good reason. As populations increased the ability to police behavior plummeted. Negative interactions skyrocketed and now few people want to chance abuse with it being so common.
It's also partly what you said: people want to get stuff done. I remember EverQuest 1 and Nexus. You couldn't do shit solo. People generally want to be able to actually play the game and accomplish something and they don't always have 30-60 min to look for a group before they can start playing.
It's a very different market these days and people have a lot of things they can do with their time. Playing chat roulette to play a game doesn't cut it.
EQ2 recently launched their own classic server. My wife who has been an avid player for decades is delighted. She always loved the crafting which has been totally dumbed down in later versions.
And within hours of joining the classic server she has also joined a guild like in the good old days. Sure, she is sad to see her the millions upon millons of platinum gone. But now on the classic server money is suddenly a viable currency again. So all is well.
Honestly, classic wow got me back into it for those same reasons. I can barely play retail for the story, thankfully I already have a large guild of friends I've been playing with for years so we still have a micro community.
Admittedly i don't play mmos very much, but from what I've experienced they are in no way designed around building community.
The focus on instanced, end game raids makes it more or less impossible to have the spontaneous interaction that originally sold the genre. The combat being optimizable the way it is gets rid of any creativity or self expression (and hurts the games in other ways too). Even little things like maps and map markers remove reasons to interact. Then auto matching and market places remove what little community is left between the lines. Community is formed in spite of have design these days.
Indeed that is the case, the way you build community is to make it not fucking optional.
Dungeon finder that gets you into a group and conveniently into that dungeon? Nope, do it yourself by chatting with people and finding a guild, clan, whatever that suits your needs.
Map markers that show you outright where to go and what to do? Nope, figure it out yourself or ask someone who may know.
Allowing crafting to have a good place In the sandbox by making it valuable and requiring several different professions to get to the good stuff? Yes please.
Don't Introduce NPC's that allow you to circumvent the need for other players.
Make it inconvenient to transfer items between your characters on the same account or multiple accounts of the same person. The original mail delay in WoW between characters did exactly that.
Ensure that direct trade is always better than using a big market place.
And that is just off the top of my head. Building good community happens when it's needed and there are consequences for being an ass. Back then you couldn't just find a new group of people on the server you were on. Of you were an ass to everyone you would end up on ignore lists and make your own life so much harder. At the end of the day community only works if there is a need for community.
HorizonXI is free and immensely popular if anyone wants a good look at what old-school MMOs used to be. It requires cooperation and teamwork at every step, and the community is wonderful.
