Many games were designed as ‘gamey games’ and that’s the difference between a virtual world like AC2 and other MMO games. AC2 didn’t hold your hand for the first 10 levels. That’s when veteran players would help and guide the new players. This helps foster a friendly community. In other games, there are few or no reason or opportunity to help new players and low character alts. The impression is that you’re alone in the world and you can do everything by yourself.
The system of mini-quests is awkward for multiplayer because 1. two people have different quests and you don’t want to help others complete their quests because you’re so worried about your long list of uncompleted quests, 2. few games even let you share quests. Even if you can share quests, most are trivial fedex or kill x mobs or collect x items, and give pitiful rewards that are pointless and don’t require groups. In other words, the time spent together doesn’t tighten the bond between players. In WoW I felt like I would waste other people’s time and they would waste mine. On the other hand, in AC2 I usually want to help others and many times would call for others to do quests together.

AC2 is much more of a immersive world because of the open world and open communication. You can go anywhere and meet and talk to anybody. There is no restriction by class, faction, race, etc. Even if you were on different sides, you could talk to each other. Sure if you were different factions you would talk smack to each other, but that only makes the game world more realistic and engaging. At the end of the day, it’s all in good fun. Heck, you might even build respect for each other over a PVP scuffle.

It all has come down to making the game easier.

Instead of conversing with fellow gamers for quest help… they gave us question marks above the heads of npc’s

Instead of trading by meeting other players…they have the Auction House *while handy it removes all aspects of community

Even Global Chat takes away the ‘feeling’ of community. Again it’s an easy way to get a question answered, but probably not worth the flight time to group up with this person half way across the world.

The solution can be as simple as giving extra xp for grouping with somebody in your friends list, or making ‘guild only quests’, or giving achievements for helping out others.

The question is what kind of people like PvP and what kind like PvE?

Okay, you can flame me now!

There was also a dependency a little deeper than group content necessitates in other games. Just to level, you needed to be running the master vaults every time your cool-down timer would allow. If you were ostracized by too many people, you wouldn’t be allowed into these groups, that required hard to get components to open up the vault. Not running vaults is way worse than being locked out of end game content because you’re guild-less or don’t have the gear. In this case, you can’t even level effectively, unless you want to grind until you’re ready to blow your brains out, much less get to end-game.

I think when you combine small community + players loved the setting + felt more like a citizen of a virtual world + dependency just to level, it encouraged better behavior all ’round.

I still believe that darktide bred a nice community. The main reason being that players were forced to interact and create their own sub-communities within the server.

In order to “succeed” you had to be part of a group. The first choice was usually deciding between pk and anti-pk, that already puts you in either of two subgroups. Next, you would choose a guild based on who you would like to protect / be protected by, reputation mattered and skill mattered.

It wasn’t an environment where everyone was friendly (by game design) and you could get away with being neutral. You really had to become part of one community or another, anonymity was not an option.

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@AC2:

As Eric mentioned, the chat servers were down for two months, just a few months after release (6?).

This definitely whittled down the community along with the release of SWG. However, with no chat server, you would think that there would be no community at all.

A player has to like the setting that the community is based in, in order to promote their desire to form one. If I start up a new game and don’t like it, I have no desire to be a part of even a good community.

That being said, In AC2, the remaining players (how many people would be playing AION right now if chat died for two months?) all loved AC2… would they have really put up with that if they had not?

I played AC2 while the chat server was down and I was in the heavy grouping levels during that point, yet I stayed.

So what I’m saying is that:

Love of the game —-> Desire to be in a community —-> Necessity of having a community (grouping / survival / economy / etc.) —-> Size of community.

(more or less)

Note: AC2 remains my favorite game ever, because of the community and the factors listed above that promoted it. We were in the minority (size of community) and relied on eachother (necessity of grouping). It was once in a blue moon that I would log on and see anyone that I didn’t recognize. It was like going home after visiting a new city.

In games like WoW, there is no downtime. You heal and recover mana very quickly. Even if you die, you can usually be back in the fight before it’s over. And when you die, there is not much penalty.

Compare this with EQ1. Dying meant something. It was something to be avoided. If you died, everything you had (presumably the best that you had) on was a) not enough to keep you alive the first time and b) left at the feet of the creature that killed you in it. So you were now tasked with retrieving your gear naked (or with lesser gear) while trying to avoid the notice of the beast that killed you the first time.

When you gained a level, you didn’t automatically gain spells or skills–you just gained the ability to use them. You still had to create/find/pay for them. And when you ran out of health or mana, you had to wait. This meant that there was a strong reason to be nice to people (or a little nice, anyway) because you had a lot of time to spend with them. Basically, in my mind, games like EQ1 fostered the “us vs. them” mentality where the “us”=players and “them”=the game.

I think that the downtime that occurs in “harder” games–recovering, traveling, searching, etc–provides the opportunity for community that faster, easier games does not.

Cute article linked there. Separate micro-servers is -a- solution, but perhaps not -the- only solution. Now that you bring up the thought, I wonder if micro-neighborhoods in-game would work.

In standard MMOs, these are normally guilds. In ATITD, the culture and community of each local region was strongly flavored by the people who chose to put down roots together, but this worked only because it took ages to run anywhere else at the game’s beginning and the game’s design encouraged a regional solidarity mindset.

As an aside, I’ve been finding the real world intruding quite amusingly in the form of the Oceanic community and the one token Oceanic server recent MMOs have put up. I used to play North American servers and mix about in the blissful homogenity of strangers, but since Age of Conan, Warhammer Online and now Aion were all PvP-focused, I thought to find a server and community closer to home. Well, they’re practically ALL the same people. Same guild names. Wafting from game to game.

I guess that’s a meta-community. :) Wonder if the Euros find that common too? Especially those on the non-English speaking servers?

In today’s MMO world there is a new way to reduce anonymity and thus potentially obtain a friendlier community that is fairly independent of game dynamics, its called Facebook. By connecting your online game to Facebook you are effectively tying your players in-game characters to their real-world persona where suddenly they care about how many friends they have and what people say about them. Obviously this might raise certain privacy and safety concerns but those can be managed.

I’d wager that we’ll see more Facebook integrated MMOs in 2010 than traditional stand-alone MMOs.