Sorry about the missing blog for Monday...but the Guild Wars 2 beta weekend was over and I was in no condition for prolixity. Also, blogger's editing tool is acting like a COMPLETE POS today.
For the record, asura teeth are sharp so watch the lawn-gnome jokes around them, and be careful using the phrase "sporting a woody" around sylvari women. I've got one word for you..."splinters".
Today I'll be talking about community and MMOs, the different kinds, how they evolve, and how they can be changed by changing game architectures.
THE TWO 'M's
That would be "massively" and "multiplayer" for those not paying attention.
MMOs have changed a great deal over the years in the way players interact. It used to be that to get a great deal accomplished in a game, you needed a group. This almost mandatory grouping forced people to be (to some degree) social, to make contacts, join guilds, to know people.
More recently, MMOs have become much, much more "solo friendly", allowing players to reach the endgame with little interaction with other players. Sometimes with none.
Obviously, these two styles will lead to vastly divergent in-game communities.
The first, more old-school type of MMO, in essence required a web of friends and acquaintances, and almost always membership in a guild, to achieve many of the in-game accomplishments. Vast amounts of content were difficult or impossible to explore solo.
Some of the most notable content would require multiple raids camping content for hours or even days.
That sort of insanity is inevitably going to create close bonds of community amongst the similarly deranged.
The more modern, solo-friendly MMO certainly allows for building a close-knit community, but the content doesn't require it for player survival and advancement. And that sort of "sleep next to the computer waiting for the growling sound made by 'BargleGnash, the Hellborn Warbeast of Karthlax' when it spawns once every 72 hours" content has gone the way of the dodo and MMO permadeath.
So the games have changed...they are still massive and multiplayer, but very little of the content in the games still is.
E PLURIBUS UNUM
Another big change we've seen in MMOs is in their overall logical server architecture.
In the earliest of the old days, when someone said what server they played on they were actually talking about a single piece of hardware.
A logical server had a physical existance. It was an actual machine (or a blade).
There were hard limits as to how many people could reasonably play on a single machine, and hence on a server...
Hmmm...server...I'm going to refer to it as a "shard" from now on in this article, because "server" kind of melds into some weird middle ground between physical machine and logical game-world.
So a single shard would live on a single server, and only so many people would "fit". This limited number was very conducive to a community. With only so many people playing on a shard, people would get to know each other, to recognize players and guilds. Community would grow strong organically.
EVE Online started the big shake-up in server architecture. They run a single shard, with various star systems living spread out across a large number of servers. Now they've had performance issues when huge battles have gummed up star systems, but their single-shard architecture works successfully.
Having 10 or 20 more people in a single shard leads to a lot of different dynamics than in a WoW or EQ server. Of course, so does EVE itself with its far more hardcore player base. In fact, I'd say it's impossible to extract what community elements in EVE are based on the large, single-shard architecture and what parts are due to the back-stabbing, free-for-all, laissez-faire design philosophy.
And now we're seeing a new architecture design, with semi-solid sharding. Both The Secret World and Guild Wars 2 have "home servers" which defines the residents PvP play, but allows players to act as guests on other servers for PvE play.
The physical and logical differences can lead to enormous differences in the nature of the communities created.
Let me address some of the community differences from different games...
EVERQUEST--My WoW guild is a former EQ guild, so I've heard some stories (especially during our Las Vegas get-togethers after a liberal application of adult beverages, although not all of those were game-related). Their server (E'ci, I believe) was close-knit and they were a very close group. The game and the environment were conducive to growing a community.
STAR WARS GALAXIES--My server...uh, shard...was Eclipse, and it definitely had a community. There were a lot of people and guilds that were instantly recognizeable. I remember trekking halfway across Tatooine to reach the shop of the top weaponsmith on the server (Smith'n'Wesson was his name, if memory serves) to get a vibro-knuckler to help my smuggler slog through skilling up hand-to-hand. And I wasn't the only one there, because he was known. Our guild started a mall with a whole bunch of vendors of top-end goodies, and we got so well-known that we broke the database with too many requests. Dozens of people would show up for the PvP events organized by one of the guildies. Strong community formed over time through many of the same mechanisms as EQ, plus the added element of the player-run economy.
WORLD OF WARCRAFT--WoW has gone through three phases of community. First was at launch, where the servers were booming and everybody was getting the hang of the game. Guilds were forming, people were playing, the community was coalescing. The second phase was the real community. Players and guilds knew each other (not everybody obviously) and there was a great deal of (mostly) good-natured banter on the game forums. The third phase was marked by the introduction of the cross-shard group finder. I was surprised to learn from my guildies that the cross-shard group finder in many ways destroyed the existant community on the shard. Sure, a lot of the top-end guilds knew each other, and some of the old-timers were still around, but none of the ad-hoc community founded through the old-fashioned method of a shard-wide LFG channel existed. I figured that "we want to foster a sense of community" line was developer BS, but I guess not.
LORD OF THE RINGS ONLINE--LotRO had a similar arc to WoW as far as community goes, but the "big change" that irrevocably altered the community there was going free-to-play. A huge influx of new blood could have strengthened the existing community, but unfortunately it mostly just overloaded zone chat with noob-noise. And Turbine's continued pursuit of commerce-driven design has alienated so many of the old-timers that the once thriving community is withering away. You can occasionally see a familiar name, but that's getting more infrequent.
STAR WARS: THE OLD REPUBLIC--We briefly had an active community on our shard, but that got nuked. Perhaps we can have another one later! Seriously, at launch there were SO many shards that no community could evolve on most. We had something of one on Shadow Hand, where we knew at least some of the other prominent guilds. But with the shard merges (yeah, I know, not technically merges, not yet) and going from 120-ish shards to about a dozen super-shards, the community will take a while to evolve. But so many people have gone, the opportunity for true success has gone with it. And whaddya know, the dev who keeps citing "building community" by not having cross-shard LFG tool might be right (see my WoW entry above).
THE SECRET WORLD--This is a bit of an odd bird (in oh-so-many ways). A shard is mostly a PvP construct here, and your guild can be spread out among any number of shards (note that you can only PvP for your home shard). But I don't see PvP being a big driver in this game, so I don't see that building community. I expect certain guilds will become well known, and perhaps a few personalities, but I can't see how the sort of interwoven community you see in other games. The architecture makes it less likely if not impossible to form organically.
GUILD WARS 2--Again we have the sort of semi-sharded architecture where anyone can be on any shard at any time, playing with friends, and where the home shard only really matters for PvP. As an additional complicating factor (which may improve or reduce community-building) is that each person's account can be in any number of guilds, although each character can only "represent" one guild at a given time. I think this will help individuals be part of communities, but I'm not sure it will help overall community. On the positive side, the shard identification through competitive World vs. World vs. World PvP will certainly be a factor in building shard community, especially amongst those who will partake in PvP.
SOMETIMES, SIZE DOES MATTER
In summary, looking through all the factors that in my experience have lead to community building, there are a few that stand out.
GROUP PLAY--I've never been a fan of forced group play to deal with standard content. But I won't deny that it is a positive community builder. If you make people play together, some of them will end up friends. I'm still not a fan, but I understand that it does work. Too bad ain't nobody gonna put it back into MMOs anymore.
PLAYER INTERDEPENDANCE--This one's not obvious, but for example, in SWG and EVE online, you could only have one character (yes I know, per account per shard in SWG, and per account gaining skill points in EVE) and so to get many things done, you had to track down assistance. Whether it's nullsec ratting in EVE or finding a weaponsmith to make the part you need for making slicing tools in SWG, you couldn't just make an alt to handle it for you. Sometimes annoying, but it does drive people to interact with each other.
NUMBER OF PLAYERS--To me, this is unfortunately the single best driver of community building, why the communities build by many of the early games were so strong and are remembered so fondly. Combined with the previous two factors, having a limited number of people around (due to the technical limitations of hardware and software years ago) concentrated both the need and pool of available options. In those ancient days, if you wanted to play and progress, you didn't neccessarily have to make friends, but you had to make contacts. And in an MMO this web of contacts is what makes up a community. Just as in real life, community is easier to find in a small town than the Big City. And most MMOs these days are definitely, the Big City.
I think the vast majority of players would agree, that a thriving community increases the enjoyment of the players and the longevity of the game. It's not something that the devs can make happen. It has to happen organically.
And whether we like it or not, as the games have grown and changed it has become less frequent and less compelling. Also organically.
There is no simple answer to recreating the sort of shard communities we used to see in the days of EQ and SWG. All we can try to do is find a smaller, more intimate community of a guild or group of friendly guilds and hope that, over time, something good grows out of it. And hope our games give us reasons to celebrate when it does.
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