| I don't think EQs community was established because of grouping in particular. It was more about the size of the world people played in. I doubt the current EQ provides a good enviornment for forming communities. In vanilla EQ I could count the good leveling spots for any given level on 1 hand. Unless you could solo you went to one of these few spots and shouted LFG unless you had a perma group, in which you weren't being a part of getting the know the community. And even if you were in a perma group you would know who is shouting LFG in lguk solb etc. If you were a soloer there were limited premium spots too. IE quading dwaves and gnomes. Quading spectres in OOT, Ogre guards. The spawns were limited to only let 1 or 2 people use them. So this limited resource made people fight over spawns and people got to know each other. Hit 50 and there were the 2 main places people would hang out if they weren't raiding, solb and guk. Limited space forced people together
Go even further back in history to M59. Each zone could be traversed in 10 seconds. You could go to all 20+ zones in just minutes. The most people on the server at a given time were 150-200 and usally the average was more like 100. The game world was small and the population was low. You basically knew every single person on the server.
Now look at current MMOS, I wouldn't be surpised if WoW had 3-4k people logged on each side at a given time where EQ has pushing 1500 at once durring peak hours. You have way too many people on the server to get to know anyone. You have so much content available as a soler that you don't have to fight over spawns. Group content is not contested so you don't get to meet others your level doing the same content.
It's hard to say if Vanguard will have a better community. While you will need to group and the non instanced content will force people to compete over the dungeons the world is so huge will it even be a problem or foster community interaction?
EQ2 has non instanced dungeons but the game is so huge you don't really ever have a problem competeing over dungeons. Maybe people do in KoS now? I'd be curiuos to hear what KoS dungeons have done for communities. When I did them my group was the only one on the server able to do the content. I heard some servers has mass people in those areas for leveling though. Forcing the zones to have multiple instances.
I'd say at this point most of the good skilled players out there are already involved in a community and aren't looking for a new one to join. Most people you meet in PUGS you just get frustrated at and never want to meet them again. In EQ this wasn't the case though and there were still a lot of skilled players out there that hadn't been discovered yet, or hadn't discovered you.
So huge world size with thousands more people simutaniously logged on and people already involved in communities they like will make it hard to establish the same feel people may have had in the early EQ days.
I bet a game like SWG with super low populations actully will have a good community feel to it as sad as it is. I guess if Vanguard goes that same route it will have a good tight knit community too =P |