TPL Interviews
Carneros: When you try a new MMORPG, how important is the culture and quality of the player community? Does that factor into your choices? Or do you figure the only culture that matters is your own guild’s culture?
McActionpants: The community is the heart and soul of any MMO for me. I generally like to mix in with the larger crowd and not join any guilds at all, so it’s important to have a great many of the players be open and sociable.
ObsidianStone: Culture and community is everything. In some MMORPGs it’s so easy to just dabble and stumble through solo, which is fine, alone time is good. But it doesn’t lead to longevity or memorable moments. Community and an MMORPG that fosters community… magic.
Dr. Julie Wainlight: It is probably the second most important factor without a doubt. I’ve been through several MMORPGs in the last 2 decades and community really makes or breaks the game. The most important factor is the game design, mechanics and how it plays, especially when you have to be considerate of community because the designs and mechanics create incentives, behaviors to reinforce the community as a tremendous halo effect that continuously compounds. I’ve seen the positives and negatives of that effect in extremes.
When you play an MMO, you have to accept that there are many different points of views, different playstyles. In my view that is actually a strength and not a weakness! There are so many ways people can surprise you and give you ideas you never considered if you have a relatively open mind in various domains from crafting to combat. The real trick is to have each playstyle be recognized for singular or collaborative experiences and that is a tightrope act without one overshadowing the other.
LastDitchPlan: Player community factors into my decision to join an MMO/MMORPG a lot! Ideally I’ll be spending a lot of my free time in the world created and want to overall enjoy the folks I’m spending my time with. MMOs generally are such a microcosm from my perspective that you really need to love the whole thing, these are strangers you run into on vacation, they’re realistically your neighbors and I want to enjoy the entire cul-de-sac, not just my house on the street.
JesDyr: It is always the gameplay that attracts me to a game and I rarely go into an MMO with a guild lined up. After I have been lured in with gameplay, it is the community that keeps me playing. That could be the overall game’s community, it could be one or two general subsets of that, or it could be the friends I made along the way. It has varied over the years, but it is always important.
Are you coming to Stars Reach with your usual gaming guild? Or are you making new friends and joining a new guild in this game?
hooby: I’ve tried quite a few MMORPGs, and most times I had no clue what the community would be like, ahead of time. It’s hard to judge a community from the outside, as second-hand accounts of others aren’t always that reliable. So no, I don’t think it factors into the decision to try a game.
What I do have noticed though, is that the culture and quality of the community is a strong indicator for how long I am going to stick around. When a toxic community sucks all the joy out of the game, I’ll be gone a lot sooner than when in-game friendships keep me playing way past the point of getting bored with the game.
In an MMORPG, the culture and quality of the community seems very deeply connected to my ability to enjoy the game. Having a great guild can do a lot to mitigate the negative effects of a less likeable community – but there’s something magical about the larger community being great, that you simply can’t replace with anything else.
Nadraxes: Culture and the player community is quite important as it is what usually “binds” me to a game. I played a ton of MMO’s and some were really bad. What kept me coming back to them was my guild and the bonds that were formed between the players. Of course guild culture is a big reason for joining them in the first place, but the community at large is also quite important to be inclusive and non toxic. Especially for me, as I often play at odd hours and not always having the biggest of guilds, I often run alone in the game. Having a toxic community will detract a lot and I will enjoy myself a lot less.
In these cases, when the community is toxic, I often find it much easier to just move along to the next mmo that promises to fulfill my wishes for a dreamworld.
Here I found the community, at least in this early stage, to be quite helpful and understanding if you ask newbie questions for the upteenth time.
Keaggan: When coming into any game where I MUST interact with other people, I think the community plays a significant role in the overall fun. However, the larger the player base, the more the community will change. I think having player-regulated options goes a long way in self policing. A company can’t force people to act a certain way, but a player group can. Now we can choose to set how a large portion of planets can operate (PvP/PvE/Safe/Hostile/Etc), as well as clearly defined zones and PvP tags in the “wild Space” are more important than the community the devs try to build.