Community

[Zehn - Vhex]

I'm not feeling well so please humor me if this turns out to be a stupid question.

Anyways, just curious, what do you guys think caused the 'tight' community of EQ?

Personally, I think it developed because of negative reasons. We were pretty much forced into two small spaces for nearly a year.

Secondly, EQ was much more word-of-mouth so you had larger groups of RL friends. I knew 10 or 12 people when I first started playing and only 2 were in the same guild.

Lastly, it was all pretty new to us so we weren't quite as jaded as we are now. I had no problem up and chatting away in EC with everyone else when I was 17 and still leanring the ropes, but the conversations then are no more intelligent then the shit that goes on in IF/Ogrimmar now, it's just now I'm an elitist prick so I pretty much just go about ignoring people.

[Hardcore Cracka]

I was an elitist prick before it was cool.

[Frax]

I agree with you Zehn and I saw your post in the other thread. I just think that even that sort of forced co-existance made the game better, you had to deal with other players everywhere you went, even if some of the player/player encounters were negative for you, you still were interacting with a person instead of a quest NPC.

[Fammaden]

Forced grouping. Period. Nothing else comes close for community building in my opinion. Although I eventually quit FFXI for numerous reasons, the forced grouping for XP coupled with a steep XP curve really pushed me into meeting many more people there than I have in WoW. Like EQ, you met the good the bad and the idiotic and eventually formed cliques and joined guilds based on friendships made through the necessity and hardship of needing to group. People that you like or hate become readily apparent and some people end up standing out as server celebrities or pariahs. In a solo game you obviously meet less people because you do not need them. In extreme situations you meet no one else at all.

The fact that both EQ and FFXI have harsh death penalties that require other players to overcome adds to this aspect but I maintain that forcing the players to group for advancement and limiting or even almost removing the capacity for solo play is the primary component of community building. I think a strongly group oriented game could build community more than a solo game that only requires other players to overcome a death penalty. A harsh death penalty alone can build some community but not nearly as much as forced grouping.

[The Bog]

Clustered areas of grouping.
BoT?
Dreadlands?
Hell, Chardok?

Forcing people together made them work with eachother. That doesn't happen with all of this postered instancing crap. I liked a bit of mystery, you know? I could say to this day that I never did fully explore CT, and I honestly really would have liked to. It would've been cool. There're corners of zones I didn't see that probably did have content in - in WoW, I know for a fact that most likely, there's nothing there for me unless I have someone with a yellow ! telling me there is.

[Kiely]

And generally you see in WoW groups its just a zerg fest, never once played with more then 1 person who knows what he is doing. Clusterfuck.

To be fair, all WoW would need to do is make every mob on the game around elite -- above elite status. Even if it didn't make much difference with grouping on a eq scale, it'd still teach fucks to play. And value patience.

[Renolin]

You just had to think in EQ; it was relatively hard. I hate having a book of 20 quests that I need to go run down back and forth, each leg taking 10 minutes or so to run down. In EQ, I would pick out my current exp goldmine and grind there. Other people were there, my guild was there, and I was a cleric. I needed a group and the group needed me. EQ had good and bad, but I miss the friends I made in game, just the random people I would talk to and group with. In EQ I met tons of people, in WoW, I can't really name any good friend I made.

[Camerous]

You needed people. Plain and simple.

[Gurgeh]

Don't forget in WoW, even when soloing there's no down time, you're cruising at 300 apm, and never stop to freneticaly click on your mouse.
Slow paced game + forced grouping - instances = community

[Samus Aran]

As everyone said before: forced grouping.

In WoW, I probably grouped with a person (non-guild) again, maybe twice. Why? Groups in WoW are just to finish a quest/instance, nothing more. Groups last only an hour or so max, so there is nothing like a good ol' FrEnZy group that lasts for 10+ hours. In fact, I don't know if I ever stayed in the same zone in WoW for more than a few hours (whereas in EQ, I may have spent an entire week in Guk, leaving only to bank/sell). You got to know each zone's little community. I sorta felt that, if comparing EQ to school, they were my class: the people that I would be leveling and competing with.

The second thing you need is a non-bazaar system. Haggling/shooting the breeze in EC made the community SO FUCKING GOOD. I won't go into it, as I am tired, and I wouldn't really be able to explain the perfection that was /ooc...but, I think you guys know what I'm talking about.

[Mir]

1) Forced grouping big time, part of an over all bigger concept:

2) Forced player interaction. We didn't have auction houses, and LFG tools etc. All the fancy things that do everything possible to avoid contact with other people EVEN IN A FAKE WORLD (OCD / Agoraphobic, retarded nerds of the world unite)

3) Smaller community. There were a lot less of us back then, so it was easier to get to know most of the folks around you. Since there were so few players reletive to current community sizes, you become friends of friends of folks and a lot sooner you really end up knowing virtually everyone whos playing, or at least are familiar with guilds.

I firmly believe that the big killer of WoW's community is quite obvious. The game is completly built to do everything under the fucking sun possible to avoid any fucking human to human contact. God forbid people have any sort of social interaction.

[Suineg]

No instancing was the tight community builder.

[BanquozGhost]

Originally posted by Zehn_Druidbane
Personally, I think it developed because of negative reasons. We were pretty much forced into two small spaces for nearly a year.

Add to this the amount of downtime you usually had waiting for casters to med up and the slow pace of combat allowing people to just click auto attack and carry on a conversation.

[0hz]

I didn't enjoy the type of community EQ fostered and prefer what I see in WoW.

I'd much rather group/associate with people based on genuine relationships than be forced to by game design.

I'd wager that the way people present themselves in WoW is generally closer to who they really are.

[Cybsled]

Community developed in EQ since the actual game (grinding shit and camping shit) could become so mind-numbing and tedious, we were forced to talk to people so we wouldnt log off from the sheer lameness and boredom of it all.

That and it's easier to type when you just have to press auto-attack and occasionally press a number 1-6. The fact people could play playstation or eat a rack of beef, while at the sametime doing their role in the game effectively, somewhat hints at the inherant weakness of the game's mechanics. It was great back then, but you are making assumptions based off a completely different era of MMO.

Remember: You can't type if you are too busy actually playing the game. If a game is giving you ample spaces to chat in during actual COMBAT, then there is something wrong with the game's combat mechanics. I will stand by the fact that stronger community forms as the result "flaws" or "negative" aspects of a given title.

Becareful what you ask for.