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collaboration, community, community building, dual wielding, groups, mmos, parties, social events
Dual Wielding LFG Edition – Sometimes a topic is just too big for a couple of bloggers on their own. That’s when we send out the call, and see who steps up to help us with the challenge. This week, in a special LFG edition of Dual Wielding, we’ve put together a four person team to tackle the question, “What can developers do to foster community?”
Be sure to check out the other responses by Mersault, Gypsy Syl and Weakness. And also check out Aywren’s response to the question.
It started out innocuously enough. Weakness of Waiting For Rez sent out this tweet regarding Black Desert Online and Tree of Savior:
After an absolute conga line of responses later involving myself, Weakness, Gypsy Syl and Mersault, we all kind of came together to nod our heads in agreement that we should totally all blog about community-building in MMO’s. So this is my Tanker role post. Because I’m always the Tanker, dammit.
See, the point that came up was that a game with crappily designed UI or features made people stop, collaborate and listen. After all, challenge breeds cooperation, and I’ve written before about how the challenge of group content isn’t really something that feeds community. Thing is, though, there’s a whole lot more to making people come together than being obtuse about your UI or making dungeons.
A Power Rangers pose should not be the beginning and end of a group effort.
So forced collaborative efforts seem like an answer…but then, there’s plenty of that in games like Blade and Soul and in Final Fantasy XIV where I’ve felt less like part of a team and more like a tool for the use of others. It’s not just about being acknowledged or pat on the back, either, though I wouldn’t mind a digital cookie once in a while. It’s really about fostering the team effort. Or at least making people want to come together for some reason or another.
So that leaves one of two methods for making communities – either make content that demands survival or strength in numbers, or foster places where social interaction is grown and encouraged.
I have had more interaction with people in a digital nightclub than in all of the dungeons I’ve run. Ever.
For part the first, I point once more to the concept of the RvR style of MMO. I’m operating under pipe dream fantasies here, so there’s a very real possibility that I’m missing the point, but it seems like having an entire realm depend on each other to continue to subsist and survive is pretty much the best way to make communities happen.
Basically, realm pride is like factional pride but with actual implications. Having people feed and power the war engine is very much the sort of community building I think MMO’s are missing out on. There’s strategies, there’s tactics, there’s resources and supply chains – teamwork and cooperation and reliance to work together is exactly the missing link in MMO communities, and RvR seems to get that the best.
There’s also the potential for people to come together to complete a larger-than-themselves goal in the PvE space. Perhaps that’s people managing to usurp a well-established tyrant force that requires players to band together in order to maintain friendly lands. Or maybe it’s a game where people form up to explore a mapless frontier. There’s possibilities for this to happen that I don’t think have been fully explored yet.
Basically, I’m saying I’d like a pirate MMO.
As far as social tools go, I can absolutely say that RP’ers and other social communities are some of the best ones I’ve run in to. Sure, they have their wrinkles like any other game community, but overall these are the most fun to me, and having places or ways to make that happen more often is something that’s so rare in modern MMO design that it’s nearly a two-horned unicorn.
Take, for instance, Lord of the Rings Online’s WinterStock – a music festival completely run by players and fostered by the game’s robust music creation system. Or the housing in WildStar, which allows people to create not just private pads but social hubs that can host events. Or even a obvious public space like the previously alluded-to Pocket D or Atlas Park in City of Heroes. The ability to have a place to simply form up and hang out is just as crucial to making a community as ensuring groups form up easily.
I think this is stuff that should go a step further – let people own and run a weapon or armor or item shop in an MMO. Or how about we run a gambling spaceship. Or why not let us form a pro wrestling show that tours the game’s countryside and puts on shows? Why not give us the means to let this stuff happen?
More theaters to play on, less theaters to kill stuff in please.
Community isn’t a thing that has to be pushed at gunpoint or streamlined in or even demanded of people because your UI icons are shit. These things just sort of happen out of nowhere, and with ways that devs likely don’t fully expect. Still, it’s something that I think can be designed for through intelligent and creative systems and through lots and lots of playtesting at large. I mean, the stuff that Landmark is capable of wasn’t even fully understood by the developers themselves until people were let in.
Trust us, we’ll make fansites and podcasts and wiki pages whether you like us to or not. Just consider that we want to come together, design to make it happen and maybe you’ll be shocked at the results.
Through Wolfy's Eyes 
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Hmm. Your posting here is interesting, as i very often have the feeling that on one sentence i agree, on the next i disagree, just to be with you just after that again.
At the same time i consider myself a rather social player. So i guess that means this topic really is not an easy one. But before i now give my huge
wall of text, here is the short
TL/DR:
I have no clear answer to this theme. I only can present a huge list of sometimes incoherent thought on it, but am unable to really get to a hard conclusion. Lucky me that i am no game designer. 🙂
DL/DR end
That being said, some lines of thought, in no special order:
1. I found that hard content indeed is a way of building communities. Even more so, my experience is that a certain level of inconvenience actually helps a lot.
My best example is my current environment in TSW. I could dig out other examples in my rather long (over 20 years by now) history of online gaming, but this one wins by being most fresh. Also TSW is a good example due to some changes of mechanics, which made things “easier” for many people, but in my eyes degraded the experience.
Here my point is: i have a list of people i do dungeons, raids and whatever with. Most are in my Cabal (and some were with me in previous Cabals, too), but some were always in different Cabals. This group of people formed a while ago. Some of course got lost in the run of time, like communities in MMOs always do, sme came in later, but the core still is the same.
The group formed when content still was hard, when group tools were weak and when having reliable partners was essential. So you can conclude that we’re each others tools. Some people could see it like that. I mean when i think of a friend and his WoW raid guild, which he described as “i wouldn’t like to meet half of them in private, but for the raid i arrange with them”, that’s a clear statement of beeing tools for each other. But in my case, when i know where most of them live, what jobs and pets they have, other hobbies, about their pets, about the health problem of ones husband, some other stuff and last not least one of them by now being my fiancee and we having moved together into one flat recently, i somehow feel that the “tool” aspect is not that strong here.
At the same time i see a strong contrast to the games present state. By now it has a strong group-finder tool. It was very much welcome by many players, but while it sure is “quick and easy” and supports lazyness to the extreme, i also have one other experience: whenever i use that, the most i get out of a group is a “hello” at the start of the dungeon and a “thank you” at the end.
By all means, the next step for this tool would be to not display the names of the other group members any more but just display “tank”, “damage dealer 1”, “damage dealer 2” and so on. The difference would be marginal.
So all in all, the advent of the powerful group finder tool, which the community strongly and for a long time campaigned for, according to my experience lead to a sharp decrease of the communities quality. Mind you, i am not speaking about their ability as players and there’s also no rudeness or something like that. But it’s all quick, easy and cheap, so indeed, people in thus tool are each others tools.
At the very same time, i couldn’t blame the developers. It’s the community who fought for it, and they did so with a lot of endurance. I guess a significant part of MMO players want to be tools?
2. Your statement about RvR and realm pride: I casually play GW2, where the whole “realm pride” still is supposed to be a thing. I spent a lot of time in WAR, it for two years was my only MMO. And the design of WAR was all about PvP, the two realms fighting each other. While some of the PvE group content actually was well designed, it was small and got very little support, making it a very insignificant part of the game.
In GW2 nobody defends a castle. They rather attack an undefended one. After all, that’s where the rewards can be acquired. The same was true for WAR, people were busy circle-raiding, always attacking undefended castles and eagerly retreating from castles under attack, as no reward was to be gotten for defence.
This was even true if a keep would’ve been essential for an attack to the enemies capital, which means that on longer term bigger rewards could’ve been acquired by some people holding this keep, while others taking the last missing keep for the big assault. Usually people left the defended keep in masses, going for the attack instead.
The strategic picture was of no importance, only the short term reward determined the players actions. The absolute proof for this was also brought by WAR. Peoples behaviour changed significally once successful defence of a keep also granted rewards of the same level as a successful attack.
Despite all of that, no matter of GW2 or WAR, no matter how much people there spoke or still speak about “realm pride”, i found it to be only words without any meaning, a waste of perfectly good electrons.
3. I like the part about letting people run their own cities and shops. It’s exactly what you had in old times SWG. At the same time, i am 100% sure that no MMO ever will have those features again.
Why i think so? Just consider what was required to make that system of SWG workable:
– A really huge world (or actually several worlds) offering a lot of land to build cities. This is a lot of area to create for developers which then later will be “killed” by players building houses and cities there.
– A complex crafting and ressource system, which requires more than “5 wood and 4 iron make an axe”. The last time i saw a game try a ressource system of that complexity, it was Firefall a few years ago. But while i loved that system and made a fortune by building and selling high quality equipment, most people found the system too be too complex. They managed to cry it into several iterations of simplifiations and dumbing down, till the system was brought to the level of WoW crafting.
– A strict limitation to crafting professions. I mean, in SWG people were able to make a name as crafters. You had one character per server, learning a crafting profession took from the same (finite) pool of skillpoints and even learning just one crafting profession already stopped you from maximizing your combat rank.
Learning even a second crafting profession would bring you close to the limit of what is possible, which was far from the whole variety. So, every crafter was an expert in one or two fields.
Now try to communicate that to present day players, who want to have all crafting professions, best on one character, but if that’s really not possible, then they want to be able to have enough alts to cover all crafting needs to be self-sufficient.
The demands of masses of players these days utterly forbid a system which allows a master crafter to even exist, not even mentioning the chance for him to shine.
4. I find it nice that you show the Albion Theatre of TSW. (A place which i am quite familiar with. While i don’t play TSW every evening, i spend one gaming evening there every week, so all in all i am there for a significant part of my gaming time. ) You hint to RP building communities. But while in some way they do, i also find that most RP communities at the same time segregate the playerbase.
Mind you, i find the RP community of TSW vastly superior to what i experienced in other games, but even here i sometimes get the “outsiders are watched closely” feeling. But of course, that could be just me.
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What’s kind of awesome and infuriating about this topic is that there’s really no hard answer or way to make this happen. We’re dealing with people and their preferences – an X factor so big, the X is damned near pornographic. I think that there’s enough people out there to make (nearly) any MMO community as long as your vision is clear.
And I’m with you, I’m so glad I don’t design this stuff for a living. Doesn’t mean I don’t have thoughts on the whole thing though. :3
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