The Path Ahead

Every so often I like to browse through the forums at mmorpg.com ... yes, I know it's Trollville, but some subforums are better than others and you quickly see past the sea of trollery to find the core members that are actually intelligent and fun to interact with. Plus, sometimes when I am not in the mood to play it is the only way to really get my MMO fix.

A few days ago, I came across this post: Having an "adventure" again?

Right away I was intrigued, as it hit upon one of the major problems with post-WoW MMORPGs - community. I tend to think that for all my or anyone else's musings on What is Wrong with the design of these games, a lot of it can all come back to the lack of quality community.

Are people who are part of a community that they enjoy and take part in less likely to complain about the little things that irk them in a game? Are they more likely to blow those little things up into huge things?

It seems like I wasn't the only intrigued as the thread quickly became a hot topic and a mere few days later it was featured as a mmorpg.com Community Spotlight. Now there is a Guild Portal site set up for our cause and we are in the process of choosing a game to play.

It seems like a phenomenon I have heard mentioned more than once is that back in the "old days" bugs, exploits and all manner of "game-breaking" issues were rife ... but people put up with them. Most often this accounted for by the assertion that there were far fewer choices of different games, occasionally it is said that we were more "innocent" back then.

Those two assertions may (and at least to some degree are) true. But there could also be another explanation - the general communities were just better.

Sure there were trolls and loud, foul-mouthed children playing back then. But were there as many? Was the signal-to-noise ratio quite the same now that literally millions of new MMORPG players have been introduced to the genre?

It's funny, and maybe I don't get around as much anymore, but it seems like these days you don't hear a fraction of of the complaints about maturity level (quite low) of the Counter Strike community like you might have five years ago. Now you hear the exact same complaints but about it is the World of Warcraft community.

For me personally, I would relate my experience in LOTRO. I subbed on opening day and thought the game was a lot of fun. Except for the fact that the community out of the gate was pretty awful. I was just coming off of playing nothing but WoW for about two years or so (literally, I can't believe how many quality non-WoW games I missed between 2005-2007 that I am still finding out about) and was quite sensitive to anything having to do with player2player interaction. If I could have put the global population on /ignore I would have happily done it.

When I quit LOTRO the straw that broke this camel's back was being chased around Breeland by a player named, and I shitteth thee not, "Iclubbabyseals." I couldn't take it, I unsubbed, uninstalled and didn't look back until almost a year later. And ironically went back to WoW ... there had to be some element of abuse psychology at work there.

If you know me, then you know that I am also a Tolkien nerd and so of course I couldn't stay away. So I resubscribed and made the server Landroval my home (it was/is the unofficial RP server). Lo and behold the experience was amazing. Landroval had (has) one of the best MMORPG communities I have ever experienced in an online game. That is why I am still subscribed even though I rarely play anymore. Even if I am not terribly fond of LOTRO anymore, the exceptional Landroval community keeps me coming back.

So Why do MMORPG Communities Suck?

I really hate being a WoW hater, but as the years are turning the more and more I am convinced that it has had an extremely negative impact not only on the MMORPG genre but on PC gaming in general. I know that is a stretch and it's nothing I am going to stake my life on, but it is worth considering.

To me it seems like the older games were meant to be more like a typical PnP game, where you and your friends hang out for a few hours and have fun battling some orcs, slaying a dragon and saving a princess (or prince) or two. The allure of the MMORPG over the PnP game of course is that the online video game could connect friends living on separate continents and unlike those Saturday afternoon games, MMOs are going 24/7/365.

But if you look at the technological innovations in general, you almost always find that they do not live up to all the promises they make about making life better. So for instance, now the modern worker has more work and obligations and lives a much more harried and less satisfying life than a medieval peasant. Even as productivity of a worker increases, he or she must work even more and continue to be more and more productive. Hey, at least it makes anti-depressant manufacturers big bucks.

Now I'm sure there is a lot of controversy over that example, as there are other factors at play aside from mere technological process (I'm looking at you, you Calvinist bastards), but it illustrates what I think has happened to online video games.

An MMORPG these days seems to be less about casual (not speaking in the current and popular sense of that word) fun and more about working on achieving goals and being productive as a player. And all the focus seems to be on achieving those goals as an individual player - the group only exists to get you as an individual to where you want to be; there are no communal goals. The individual is the only thing that matters; selfishness is a virtue.

Again, I hate the fashionable trend of disparaging WoW simply because it is WoW, but I can't help but feel that World of Warcraft, more than any other individual game, has inculcated this behavior in the greater mass of players.

But these behaviors are not new since WoW, you can see them everyday. Just look around you at the people going into debt for fancy houses and cars, committing every sort of privation on their lives to "make it." To live the corrupted fantasy of a life that currently passes for the American Dream. Greed is good, right? He who dies with the most toys wins.

I think that WoW tapped into these memes and put them into its core design is precisely the reason it is as popular as it is - it addresses the same lusts and character defects in general society inside the game. It has nothing to do with it being "casual" or that it is a game for "non-gamers." The sad thing to me is that it has seemingly has trained a generation of gamer to expect that in all games.

And what is the result? Turn on CNN or Fox News and you see the real-life equivalent of the WoW player. By focusing only on the needs of the individual - to the point of exalting them - the general community has become diseased, like a rotted piece of wood. So you experience phenomena like a large upswing in the troll population - those who resist the unnatural condition of hyper-individualism and try (usually subconsciously) to wreck the system almost always without realizing why (explained as being for the "lulz" or some similar example of infantilized behavior).

You have players who retreat from the community and focus solely on the "solo game." You have the smarter jackals who set up "professional" guilds to make sure they achieve all they can often at the expense of its members and the non-pro guilds whose members will quit at the drop of a hat to be in the pro guild. You have the phenomenon of entitlement - those who think that because someone is not "hard core" they should not have the chance to experience all the game (e.g. endgame raids) has to offer.

Essentially you have all the real-world bullshit we have to put up with, consciously or not, invading one of the last sacred spaces of lackadaisical dreamers of the world. And the community becomes more like the real world in the sense it is fractured, cut-throat and dysfunctional.

So you can see now why I am very interested in this new group of players from mmorpg.com who are banding together to fight both virtual fantasy evil as well as the real evils of misanthropic behavior and alienation. The thing I think we share in common is the same thing that made older MMORPGs so much fun, despite the bugs, lag and other nasty fubars and glitches. We want fulfillment from playing together as a group of people - learning from and enjoying each other. What in today's games seems to have been superseded by achieving goals set by the game developers and the all-important goal (in both PvP as well as PvE) of competing against each other. Maybe The Path Ahead can learn what it is like to have fun again and leave the "work" behind.