Originally posted by girlgeek

 

My experience with MMOs is that the LARGER the population.....the more jerks can be found.  The smaller the MMO, the nicer the people.  Apparently asshats aren't as attracted to games that they don't have a LARGE audience in for their "asshattery," pure and simple. 

Doesn't help that in larger populations they have a tendancy to group together to cause gleefull agony to anyone that enters within the range of their chat box. But I do agree without an audience there is nothing left to do but play the game, and that is not why these people are here.

Originally posted by ursin

Originally posted by Bhagpuss

According to a recent John Smedley interview, the average age of SOE customers is 33. That's indisputably "adult" although whether it's "mature" you'd have to decide for yourself. I play EQ2 on the Test server, where i would estimate the average age is well into the 40s. I'm 50 and there are plenty of players there older than me.

EQ2, Vanguard, LotRO, EQ1 all have pleasant, polite, articulate players as the norm, I would say, although all of them also have plenty of immature, aggressive or ignorant jerks, as does every part of the online world.

One big surprise is the current open beta for F2P MMO Runes of Magic. I play on one of the European servers and expected that the combination of "free" and "beta" would result in general chat full of repetetive questions and smack talk about other games. Instead, it has generally amiable, good-natured and even interesting chat. It's apparenty a WoW clone ( I wouldn't know, WoW being one of the rare MMOs I haven't played), so it might be worth a try for someone wanting a more laid-back WoW-like experience.

 

EQ2 Test ftw

in my experience, i would say EQ2, Vanguard, maybe LOTRO, i've heard Eve is 'matture' and in the 11million people you are able to find a mature guild or 14 :)

as someone else said... with the amount of trials available, dabble until you find the community that sticks for you :) and find what you like.....

 

 

Yeah, uhm....EVE has no where near 11 million players.  You have that confused with WoW.  And yes, with 11 million players you can find plenty of mature players AND plenty of douchebags.   As I said....the larger the player base, the more idiots.

EVE, of the games you mentioned, has probably the youngest player base of those.  Not everyone is into the whole "space" thing.  It's a bit of a niche style, although popular with some.

So far in this thread, I think EQ2, Vanguard, and LotRO make the most sense.  I've played all of those for either long or short periods of time and was still able to run into annoying immature people.  The whole thing about the word MASSIVELY in an Mmo....is that it is a microcosm on the real world.  You're going to find all types of people in all of these games.  In the same way as you played WoW for years, you can do that in ANY game by finding a guild of like-minded PEERS, and just enjoying the game together.

i would suggest LOTRO. I hear the community is really nice, and the game is mostly pve.

To the OP:

I have played most of the current MMOs on the market to a significant level in the game (not just trials) and I can say with confidence there is no perfect MMO for mature players out there.  I too am an older gamer (late 30's) and I gave up that idea long ago.  The ONLY thing one can do is join a community WITHIN the MMO of your choice that is mature and for matur people.  My guild in WOW is all working adults...we have fun, great convos and I rarely look at General Chat when in game.   It's that simple.  Until more adults start gaming as their main choice of at home entertainment as we have there will alsways be asshats to contend with in ALL MMOs.

BTW, I recently retried Vanguard and found the community to be full of fanatical and rude people.  EQ2, which I played for 2+years, is full of vicious back-biting players and so many asses its unbeleivable.   WAR, no worries there because no one talks AT ALL in General for the most part and you seem to be playing the game alone except when your in scenarios. LOTRO is OK but I couldnt even get a group for any of the group quests.  So on and so forth.  Like I said every MMO has issues, just try and find a community within one that is best suited to you.

Good luck!

I would say if you're looking for a mature community then avoid most FTP games and anything with open PvP gankage.

Have you tried joining an older gamer community such as [TOG]?

Personally I'm currently enjoying AoC on a PvE server.  Most of the "kids" play the PvP servers and currently the servers are extremely active due to recent server merge and influx of new players.

Good luck

P.S

I'm aged 37

Originally posted by girlgeek

Originally posted by ursin

Originally posted by Bhagpuss

According to a recent John Smedley interview, the average age of SOE customers is 33. That's indisputably "adult" although whether it's "mature" you'd have to decide for yourself. I play EQ2 on the Test server, where i would estimate the average age is well into the 40s. I'm 50 and there are plenty of players there older than me.

EQ2, Vanguard, LotRO, EQ1 all have pleasant, polite, articulate players as the norm, I would say, although all of them also have plenty of immature, aggressive or ignorant jerks, as does every part of the online world.

One big surprise is the current open beta for F2P MMO Runes of Magic. I play on one of the European servers and expected that the combination of "free" and "beta" would result in general chat full of repetetive questions and smack talk about other games. Instead, it has generally amiable, good-natured and even interesting chat. It's apparenty a WoW clone ( I wouldn't know, WoW being one of the rare MMOs I haven't played), so it might be worth a try for someone wanting a more laid-back WoW-like experience.

 

EQ2 Test ftw

in my experience, i would say EQ2, Vanguard, maybe LOTRO, i've heard Eve is 'matture' and in the 11million people you are able to find a mature guild or 14 :)

as someone else said... with the amount of trials available, dabble until you find the community that sticks for you :) and find what you like.....

 

 

 

Yeah, uhm....EVE has no where near 11 million players.  You have that confused with WoW.  And yes, with 11 million players you can find plenty of mature players AND plenty of douchebags.   As I said....the larger the player base, the more idiots.

EVE, of the games you mentioned, has probably the youngest player base of those.  Not everyone is into the whole "space" thing.  It's a bit of a niche style, although popular with some.

So far in this thread, I think EQ2, Vanguard, and LotRO make the most sense.  I've played all of those for either long or short periods of time and was still able to run into annoying immature people.  The whole thing about the word MASSIVELY in an Mmo....is that it is a microcosm on the real world.  You're going to find all types of people in all of these games.  In the same way as you played WoW for years, you can do that in ANY game by finding a guild of like-minded PEERS, and just enjoying the game together.

my bad... i was saying i've heard that EVE is good for 'mature' and in the 11 million that is WoW you can find good people...... sorry for the lack of 'effective communication skills' on my part there

I'm a mature gamer myself and I would recommend you try LoTRO. It has excellent graphics, great quests and new content every 2-3 months. And yearly expansions are a gamer's dream:)

I played AC for 5 yrs, WoW for 3 months, AoC and War for one month and LoTRO for 2 years. 

 The communities of WoW/AoC and LoTRO are very different. I couldn't leave the chat on in WoW or AoC because of all the racial slurs and pr0n talk. It's like there is no ToS / CoC in those games at all. I don't want to play a game where I have to turn off the chat as soon as I log in.

The community in LoTRO is like  the icing on the cake. The game is a A+ game that is made even better by it's players. I've only had to turn off chat once in 2 years but it was during one of those Open-Beta weekends and the F words were a flying LOL!

And this is the funniest thing! Recant said:

"SOE and Turbine are not established game developers, they're companies with enough resources to build these games... but only Blizzard among the many game developers are actually *true* games developers. "

Turbine and SOE are 2 ( of the 3)  Founding Fathers of the MMO genre LOL! The online games they invented and developed in 1997-2004 are the games that Blizzard blatantly COPIED  when they developed WoW!  It's so ironic that you think Blizzard is a great developer but the two companies that Blizzard steals material from are not "true" developers.

i know how you guys, so called "mature" gamers feel. like you, i had been playing mmos for years, and played almost every mmo that has been worth to play with. after playing those games, i eventually developed a higher standard of what games are for me disrible and worth to play. today, i see most mmos are wow clones. and no innovation can be seen with almost every game in the moment. today, i regret to say that only one game is of note. Atlantica Online is innovative and a refreshing game so far.

Originally posted by Tahiti

I am what you would call a "mature" gamer who has been playing WoW for several years. I played UO, EQ1 and Asheron's Call before that.  I do remember life before Pong...I think.

Are there any robust  PVE games other than WOW that would interest an older player? I love PvE  and difficult end game content that require stratgey over boring zergfests.  I don't care for PvP since at my age my twitch skills are lol!. I like crafting, if craftable items are actually of value, and theorycrafting. Most of all, I am looking for a game with a mature community and with stable guilds interested in progression.

Any hope of there being anything out there besides WoW?

 

 

 

Sadly nothing. After my free month was up in WAR I have not played a single minute of a MMORPG. What is kind of disappointing to me that there is nothing in works that excites me at all. Well besides the rumor that a Deadlands MMORPG is in the work.

If by mature you mean, longer in the tooth, then Vangaurd is a game with more mature players.  Many, many husband/wife teams... many players in their 40s or so.  Seems like a lot of MMO vets have settled into Vanguard.

Mostly eve here. My war guild is fill of mature players so i dabble in that here and there.

Right now I am not subbed to any mmos. I'm actually waiting for Champions Online or Jumpgate Evolution. Though right now I am currently still playing Guild Wars and Dead Space.

Originally posted by girlgeek

 

My experience with MMOs is that the LARGER the population.....the more jerks can be found.  The smaller the MMO, the nicer the people.  Apparently asshats aren't as attracted to games that they don't have a LARGE audience in for their "asshattery," pure and simple. 

There are asshats everywhere.  It's just that the ratio of asshat to nonasshat increases as the population increases a la WoW.  The more players you have the more you notice the asshattery because it gets proportionately higher with population.  All future games are doomed to this kind of existance.

Originally posted by Illius

Originally posted by girlgeek

 

My experience with MMOs is that the LARGER the population.....the more jerks can be found.  The smaller the MMO, the nicer the people.  Apparently asshats aren't as attracted to games that they don't have a LARGE audience in for their "asshattery," pure and simple. 

There are asshats everywhere.  It's just that the ratio of asshat to nonasshat increases as the population increases a la WoW.  The more players you have the more you notice the asshattery because it gets proportionately higher with population.  All future games are doomed to this kind of existance.

I don't think it's necessarily proportional, it's about what is going on when you join a community: if everyone is amock or abusing and not self-policing with total absence of GMs like in WoW or many F2P games then it'll get worse. No rules = anarchy. New people, even good ones will feel like it's a frigging playground where anything goes and may feel the temptation of misbehaving too (how could a mmorpg not suffer from "gregarism"?).

If you join a game with an already serious and settled community, you simply can't talk BS forever because you're very out of place, and alone and you'll piss off everyone quickly so they'll shut you up and report you or ignore you and no one will join your BS. You have sometimes this riff-raff in starting areas and Bree in LOTRO but then they simply disappear in other areas, so either they adapt to the general spirit either they stop playing.

It's not about numbers too, small F2P games can be nasty because GMs are often the guys financially involved with the game localized from an Asian developper and they close their eyes on abuse. Phoenix Dynasty Online for instance has lots of people blatantly insulting each others in world chat, even GMs, and they are never punished.

To be honest with you I'd say that the amount of punishment induced and the ability to have to stand for your words is equal to the level of maturity in most cases..

WoW - You can always get away, make an alt, move server and you'll never Ever lose gold, items or anything in any way.
The Asshattery is strong in this one

EvE - Management by fear.
If you stick to the 0.0 systems you usually meet people who are really Really nice, assuming they're on the end of the cannon.
I like EvE, people aren't very annoying if you're in the right areas, areas where you risk losing what you got.

This applies to most games,
obviously the size of the community will directly impact anonymity too,
take for example Neocron, an old MMOFPS that's been around since forever,
it never had a big community and those in there knew eachother, so did I, heck people still remember me and alot of old timers on their forums.
Attitude was great there, small fights occured but noone acted up in major ways, why? Because everyone knew everyone (Also you'd get your head blown off as soon as you left the city) and there just wasn't any room for Asshats.

So as it stands now the Mature Gamers are most likely playing most game and suffering.
Myself I'm not playing anything now for that reason.
I'm hoping for Darkfall to be fairly *meh* so I can move in there...
Full loot, all time PvP and a small community....
It couldn't suit a mature mentality better.

So here's to hoping that you trolls manage to bash that game into the ground! :D

I don't think high-pop games have a higher percentage of morons than low-pop ones.

I think it's just that morons behave in such a manner that they are much more noticeable than the average gamer who just wants to have fun and not ruin other peoples day.

In a game with 1 million players the population of morons will likely seem less intrusive than in a game with 10 million players since the morons tend to band together and attempt to out-moron each other.

But I don't think that translates to a higher moron-to-normal ratio.

---

Originally posted by Ilvaldyr
I don't think high-pop games have a higher percentage of morons than low-pop ones.
I think it's just that morons behave in such a manner that they are much more noticeable than the average gamer who just wants to have fun and not ruin other peoples day.
In a game with 1 million players the population of morons will likely seem less intrusive than in a game with 10 million players since the morons tend to band together and attempt to out-moron each other.
But I don't think that translates to a higher moron-to-normal ratio.

---

Sadly this is not true as the common Moron is a pack wanker..
A pack wanker is a Moron belonging to the Gaming community, which has evolved to trolls its prey by working together with other members of its species. Normally, such animals are closely related or have a fairly long history together. The most commonly known pack-wanker is the Troll, the ancestor of all breeds of Forum Whores. This pack-wanking history is thought to be the main conduit through which Morons have been able to form a mutual relationship with Trolls, as both species are highly socially maladaptive and attentionseeking. Other pack-wankers include simple In-game horrors such as the enfant provocateur and highly-annoying Troll forms such as Filibusters, Palookas, and Blowhards.

Originally posted by demolishIX

Originally posted by dimmit77

The best community by far is in Vanguard. It's the most helpfull, I have ever seen in any game. It's not very large though. EQ2 also has a very mature and helpfull community, but most of them are in higher levels. EVE has a mature community since its played by older players. They are not as nice crowd though, since eve is mostly a pvp game.

 

 If old means 16-25 ... then yes EVE is played by old people... ive only met one person in EVE over 25,and ive being playing for a long time.Seriosly dont bash communitys wich you have no clue about,ofc Vanguard has the best community,2 people playing it and them both being nice...

ROFL, if you've only met one person over 25 in EVE, then you've never really played EVE.  I've been in corps were 3 or 4 people were older than I am, and I rival father time already.

EVE is a game full of working adults and I'd estimate the average age of the long time player community at about 25-44.

Originally posted by Thandras

Originally posted by Recant

Originally posted by Zarraa

Your best bets community & maturity wise are the following.

1) LOTRO, 2) Ryzom, 3) EQ2, 4) CoX (City of Heroes), 5) Vanguard, 6) DAOC.

While I may of missed a couple shinning stars the majority of today's MMO's  have dreadful communities. most of the above have good guilds (or SG's CoX) and offer decent crafting especially Vanguard.

I'm sorry but you're mistaken.

Stagnation and disinterest might make a community appear more mature, but the reality is the players are less involved and less inspired to interact with each other.  So while you think the communities of these other games are more mature, they are merely dulled.  There's an unmistakable sense of life and activity in WoW that has is reminiscent only of games like EQ1 and UO in their hey-day.   

Nothing else out there at the moment offers that community experience.  Yet this fact is ignored by people who for entirely irrational reasons choose to label the millions of people that play WoW as a single immature entity.  

This is simply wrong, and anyone who might consider themselves capable of reasoned debate, playing the devil's advocate would understand that there is no genetic trait in people to gravitate towards certain kinds of MMORPGs.  The so-called maturity you are witnessing is the dilution of the human condition through poor game design.  

SOE and Turbine are not established game developers, they're companies with enough resources to build these games... but only Blizzard among the many game developers are actually *true* games developers.  And until Bethesda and Bioware come on board, Blizzard remain the only veteran game developer to enter the MMORPG space and it's no coincidence that WoW is the most successful by a gigantic margain.

(Guildwars doesn't count in this discussion because it's not an MMORPG as it's own developers have stated, but I digress...)

I contest that these communities are not more mature in any way shape or form, but are wholly inferior to WoW which has a greater sense of excitement and a more brilliant expression of a sense of community.

Take the OP, he's 50 years old, he's looking for games that cater for a more mature audience.. but he's been playing WoW for years... and there are many others like him.  Unfortunately for him, there is no other game that can hope to compare with the experience WoW can offer. 

Some of you will be compelled to disagree strongly.  If you're going to do so apply some logic to your counterarguments, and if I don't reply to your replies it's because what you've written isn't worth replying to.  That said, I look forward to seeing what more enlightened folks have to say, because I'm amused by the fact that self-proclaimed mature gamers think that they are somehow intellectually superior to the multi-faceted communities that WoW has to offer.

It's a game played by millions, many of those people exactly like yourselves and I.  You are not above them, more mature than them or less so.  You ARE one of them you have just aligned yourself to this ridiculous belief that a game determines how mature you are.

And why do people associate crafting with maturity?  This is one of those utterly bizzare things I see 'veterans' do between sessions of bemoaning the state of MMORPGS today and anticipating the next MMORPG release.  I can sift through trolls throwing jealous balls of dirt at WoW all day, but what truly astounds me is how seemingly intelligent people can get caught up in this anti-WoW sentiment and allow it to cloud their judgement.

*Gets step ladder to assist Recant down from his high horse*

You must feel better after regurgitating all of that rhetoric, it had to have been causing you brain cramps. ;)

You could have summarized your entire post with a simple, "I like WOW and if you don't like it or say anything bad about it, you're stupid." But then that would have conflicted with your little theme that WOW has a mature community, wouldn't it?
 

As for a logical counterpoint... simple... to each his own. Some people don't like WOW and want to play something else. If you think there is not a HUGE level of immatuity in WOW then you evidently have never been witness to a "Barrens Chat : Chuck Norris style".

Your point about WOW being so popular is without dispute. However, you failed to address the fact that approximately 80% (not sure of the latest figures, so friggen shoot me if I over shoot my estimation) is from China. What does that prove you ask? Blizzard has an awesome Marketing department and tapped the largest population before anyone else did. Just good business and I give credit where it is due. Another point, statistically speaking, with the large population you will have a higher probability of running into "immaturity". While speaking of numbers, I am also reminded of a quote I heard somewhere and will alter to fit the WOW topic: "Can 11 million people be wrong?" Answer: "Yes and very frequently"

From reading your post, it's obvious you are intelligent enough to articulate your thoughts with a well written post, but I mean... d**n man. Don't take things so personally. I also think you misinterpreted his meaning of maturity as lack of intelligence. I actually think he was pointing toward the "Leet speak" "KEWL DOODES" and the drivel that spews from the gaping holes under their noses and not saying that people who play WOW are not intelligent.

In summation... Play what you friggen want and let others play what they want. Does that make them wrong and you right or vice versa? No, it just makes both of you... happy.

QFT...100%

 They are playing WoW and/or EVE, the only 2 quality MMOs out there.

Im with ya. I played well through the MU days

Give WAR a go. Thats where I am and I enjoy it

Originally posted by Kyleran

EVE. And the Pvp isn't twich based so its good for us people with less than steallar reflexes. (You sitll have to be somewhat nimble however)

And very few younger players in EVE, probably has one of the highest average ages of any modern game.

 

this

Originally posted by Czzarre

Give WAR a go. Thats where I am and I enjoy it

Until you hit "end game".

Age of Conan has a bit more mature player base than most other games at this point. It's rated "M," so it requires you to be over 18 years old to purchase it, so -most- of the community is over 18. But if you wanna be sure, I'd say join an RP server such as Cimmeria, where I currently reside. And don't listen to all of the people that say it's a failure of a game, because it really isn't. It just had a lot of bugs at launch, as all games did, including everyone's precious World of Warcraft. But meh, send me a message if you'd like to know more about the game or whatever. Take it easy, and have a nice day!

~Z

i encourage the p;laying of eve by mature players because it requires the use of different parts of your brain in what i find to be fun ways.

You have short term immediate goals like : i need to kill these rats or these players or i need to get this can of ore back safely but you also have long term goals like if i do this process for a week i will have __x__ then  I can move on to __Y__

Nothing compares to the sense of being an active participant in a world that Eve gives.