In a Daily Grind question on Massively Overpowered, the community of readers were asked if anyone among us had ever run a player event. Now I, personally, have not done anything outside of a costume contest in City of Heroes. Still, I had considered doing a lot more events, either in large scale or being given the chance to run a series of quests or events with a guild or an RP party.
Then it struck me….not many games let us actually DO that. And this strike was initiated by a Sigbjorn and his post about the matter. Looking at the comment now, Brianna Royce had pretty much said everything I was going to say…but it does bear some expounding on. Or at least what I’d love to see to make an MMO playerbase an actual community.
In many MMO’s the person with the shovel would start PK’ing everyone in this image.
First and foremost, players need to be allowed the tools to make an event happen. Tools within the game. Either some way to create their own instance, or a public space that can be rented out and arranged and decorated to suit the event–whatever the case may be. Letting the players pull together a social event with creation tools provides a sense of ownership. And if the event runs smoothly and is attented well, that would give players something to look forward to on perhaps a monthly or annual basis. Giving us the power to shape a part of the game world is immense.
Second, the game should have GM support. If the toolset is limited on purpose for easons, but an event needs a special level of panache or flair that is beyond user access, then GM’s should be allowed and empowered to oversee these events and make them much more special. I had once attended a wedding in Final Fantasy XI, and the priest of the ceremony was a GM, who not only gave us instructions on where to sit and what emotes to use, but even changed the background music and gave everyone a confetti item to use. It’s the simplest of things, but it was acknowledgment that still sticks with me to this very day.
Even that “event” that WildStar had was fun, because MMO life is neater in a crowd that devs create.
Brianna had also mentioned a public event calendar in-game, and I was going to say precisely that–some sort of a public corkboard or even a town crier that players could feed information to and have an event announced in a large hub city would galvanize action and immediately create interest. Why not also allow players to put together fliers to post on that community board, or have them handed out by an NPC while in-game? It doesn’t strike me as a terribly complex thing to do.
I suppose what annoys me the most about this whole thing is that this doesn’t really seem like rocket science, but is almost never considered by MMO devs. They’d rather focus development time and money in the things that will directly offer an established ROI. Dungeons, combat, PvP, endgame stuff…basically, the idea of making people stay around for peacetime as well as wartime just doesn’t click.
A community is built not just on the need to stick together long enough for a dungeon clear, and a community should be fostered in-game instead of in however myriad forum sites and social sites there are on the internet. A community should be given the space, the tools and the time to let a garden grow. And believe me, if WildStar’s housing or City of Heroes’ Mission Architect or many RP events are anything to go by…people can be intensely creative. And we can make things that will last in the minds of others.
Through Wolfy's Eyes 
Hehe… yes, i have run some events in the run of the years, and i really think that the way a game supports it makes a big difference. There’s three MMOs out there, in which i was hosting or helping in the organisation of a player event.
The first one was SWG. The event i remember most was an overland racing competition. Thanks to the games building mechanics, allowing you to place structures (we mostly used small harvesters) as landmarks, we even didn’t need any support, just having a few guildmates as observers on the track and at the finishing line was sufficient. Since the game also had classes/professions (if you really want to know more about it, look it up) like musician, entertainer, dancer and image designer, along with a very flexible city building and house decoration system allowed us to really build everything we needed without requiring any GM support. (As far as i remember, we never had GM support, but we always got things to work there. )
The next place where i was involved in the planing and execution of several player events was Anarchy Online. The toolset in the game was much smaller than what SWG offered, but we still managed to get things going. Several times we got support by GMs or ARKs. (The ARK program was supported by Funcom but run by players. Effectively it was a players help players system, where merited members had some extra tools available, somewhere between a normal player and a GM. )
After Anarchy Online there was a long gap. Not that i didn’t at some times try to do something, but WoW left such a massive wake of destruction, nothing was able to survive there. For quite a while all events ever happening were guild-only. The way WoW and all of it’s copies funneled players and dragged them around on a chain basically eliminated many events. An utter lack of tools and deafening silence when asking for GM support didn’t help, either.
Things finally got better with The Secret World, which was my return to Funcom. The tools available to us players are a mere shadow of what was possible in SWG, and thus are several orders of magnitude better than what every other MMO currently out there provides. (At least as far as i know, and i have played many. ) As additional bonus, the games support is second to none, not only can you rather easily get support for an event, but the team also likes to participate in player run events by their own initiative. My girl runs her weekly radio show (MP3 stream outside of the game for the music itself, the in-game show is inside the albion theatre and my usual work there is to set up the stage, control the lights and stuff like that) and once every few weeks somebody of the community team, several times even the community manager, passed by for a visit.
Based on this experience, i still think that if i ever find myself with plenty of time spare, i might take a look at Age of Conan and find out how things are there. After all, it’s the one MMO from Funcom on the market which i haven’t played yet, but Funcom seems to be the one publisher which actually seems to care for the community and to support their events.
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I think having a smaller playerbase can allow a GM to feel more able to participate. This assumes, of course, that TSW is small. I have to assume as much, but I don’t have hard data to confirm or deny that.
Still, there is something to be said of the insular nature of a small fanbase. It feels perhaps more inclusive. I dunno.
On point, though, yus….tools is moar better. And I LOVE reading about your experiences with them. Thanks for the comment/story. 😀
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Neither of the MMOs i mentioned were really “large” by present day scale. This of course might be connected to the fact that in the western marked every MMO is considered “small” compared to WoW. (And for some reason, many players connect “small” to “failed”, which i still don’t understand why. )
MMOs have a tendency to hide their player numbers, and if they actually hand out numbers, the semantics of the statement usually reveals enough to make the attentive reader realize that the numbers are filtered and made to look good. (Not that they would be fake, only that the selection is “optimized”. ) This might be connected to the moro… unfounded line of thought of “small is fail”, which unfortunately a too large portion of the players seem to follow.
The only criteria i could use thus would be how well populated some MMOs feel. Based on that i can say that many MMOs, among them a highly praised tripple-A title which was released less than half a year earlier, feel much more empty when taking a look there, than TSW does. But this indeed is no foundation to work on, it might be that i didn’t reach the established lines of communication there, it might be that server segregation hurts more there or it can be that players in some MMOs are just so shy and won’t talk…
So all i can offer is my impression: TSW is much smaller than the really big fishes in the pond, but it at least feels more populated than many other MMOs out there, which still don’t provide GM support and presence of the community manager.
Also note that GMs seem to respond faster and more competently. And note that GMs cost money, MMOs with a smaller playerbase might indeed need less GMs, but they also have less GMs. I rather “feel” that GMs in TSW are better trained and more efficient than in other MMOs, although that of course is a very personal impression.
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I’ve not run any, but I have participated. It is amazing the tools found in older games that have no equivalents in newer ones. I don’t even see guilds meet up in a shared space that much anymore, which is like the most basic community event possible!
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