Best : Ryzom, COH

Worst : War, FF XI

The best community I have seen in my gaming history would have to be CoH/CoV. Everyone was very helpful when I first started. Did plenty of missions with some of the nicest and most intelligent people I have seen. Not to mention how abundant it has been.

The worst was definitly WoW. PUGs were awful, market economy was inflated, and nobody was truly experienced. The most annoying of the memories was the overflow of cheap, moronic jokes in General/Trade chat. E.X. Chuck Norris jokes, Harry Potter and the <link conspicuous item here>, and the infamous anal <link spell name here>. 

Best Community: Everquest - Why? Because they had good players, it was about a team effort

Worst Community: WoW - Why? Because like the OP said, its about the me me mentallity and they the people that should of never played mmos to begin with.

worst community, Tyranny server Age of Conan (cimmeria server is much better)

best: meneldor Lotro

Worst Community - EQ. Killstealers, trainers, and ninja looters galore. Oasis chat = Barrens chat. People charged for buffs, rezzes, and other things that were easy to hand out. This made for selfish people unwilling to help anyone. I think all the jerks in EQ made a nice home in WoW(which would be EQ's successor in douche's per sq. mile).

Best Community - DAoC. Just awesome people that used to play that game. Most people always lent a hand. Drive by rezzes if you died, and used to get buffed all the time.

Originally posted by brostyn

Worst Community - EQ. Killstealers, trainers, and ninja looters galore. Oasis chat = Barrens chat. People charged for buffs, rezzes, and other things that were easy to hand out. This made for selfish people unwilling to help anyone. I think all the jerks in EQ made a nice home in WoW(which would be EQ's successor in douche's per sq. mile).

Best Community - DAoC. Just awesome people that used to play that game. Most people always lent a hand. Drive by rezzes if you died, and used to get buffed all the time.

Hehe ya I remember charging for rezzes on my cleric which was my first toon to hit 50.PRE KUNARK.. It would be amazing I would get about average 10 to 20 tells an hour of people asking me if I would travel across the game world to rez them. Now if someone was in the same zone as me and I was hunting.. I would get tells asking if they could get their corpses to me if I would rez them and I was like sure. Then I wouldnt charge for a rez.. but usually people would donate.

What you might not have realized is that some of our buffs actually cost us EXPENSIVE gems to cast.. That is one of the reasons people would donate or we would charge..

One of my friend who played a druid had to stay anon or Roleplay so he wouldnt get 20 to 50 tells an hour with people asking if not begging for ports...

I actually liked the fact that classes in EQ had abilities that were unique to their class and helpful outside of combat.. I think most games are missing those utility types of spells these days in favor of what some would say balance... But many of those abilities are what make fantasy worlds magical. And like ANY service provided dont see a reason why you cant decide to make a profit off of it.. IF its a service thats in demand.

Also many of the spells in EQ at higher level were EXTREMELY hard to come by. It wasnt like in most modern games when at all levels you just go to the local trainer and train up. I knew people who would take donations for KEI in Plane of Knowledge so that they could make money to buy the spells they needed off of players who had them for sell because they were expensive..

Community though is not the same as Economy. EQ1 had a VERY VERY vibrant Economy.  There were not only tradeskills but actual class skills that could be sold.. I actually loved that aspect of the game.

Best: Lord of the Rings Online

Worst: World of Worldcraft

Originally posted by brostyn

Worst Community - EQ. Killstealers, trainers, and ninja looters galore. Oasis chat = Barrens chat. People charged for buffs, rezzes, and other things that were easy to hand out. This made for selfish people unwilling to help anyone. I think all the jerks in EQ made a nice home in WoW(which would be EQ's successor in douche's per sq. mile).

Best Community - DAoC. Just awesome people that used to play that game. Most people always lent a hand. Drive by rezzes if you died, and used to get buffed all the time.

In the classic EQ days buffing people cost plat gems did not come free to anyone.  Now days they cost nothing to cast :) 

Best
EQ

Worst
WOW
Darkfall
WAR
AOC

Best: Anarchy Online
Worst: Runescape

I'd have to say that is about right. I actually was tempted on placing down Lineage II for best, because I love competitive communities. I'm sure some people can't stand it, but I love all of the trash talk and forum warrioring :D.

Still, Anarchy Online was an amazing experience in community for me. I joined the game when it had the fr00b deal, and needless to say I was confused. I actually had someone stop by and start talking to me. He told me about implants, how to use them and all of these other things. He than actually bought me some implants, told me how to put them on, what was good... I mean he seriously spent a solid 30 minutes of his time helping out a poor old fr00b :).

It's a good thing too, I probably would have gotten frustrated with the game otherwise.

Worst is runescape, easily. No explanation needed.

 WOW & WOW

It has fantastic people and the lowest of the dregs all rolled into one.

Originally posted by Azntranc3

My best community experience will have to be: Silkroad online. I greatly enjoyed that game, plus grouping was fun.

ALSO, Gates to heaven, which was literally my first MMO and I thought it had a great community.

 

Worst: WOW

To be fair, the community in wow is HUGE meaning it attracts all sorts of people, good and bad. Don't get me wrong though, there are lots of nice people on WoW as well but more times than naught, the "bad" sort of people are more and plentiful than the "good" people.

Underlined Part: I used to play Silkroad Online, but it ultimately has been destroyed. Bots fill up 90% of servers (both gold farmers/seller and user controlled), the GMs are untrustworthy and care about money more than you, and the forums became filled with angry and violent people (well, counting ones that ranted non-intellectual posts).

Silkroad Online's original community (during the times when the level cap was before 90) was nice, and the group-oriented gameplay was very fun. You also couldn't really be an asshat during that time, because word would get around quickly and you would find soon enough why people refused to party with you. However, then bots started showing in masses, GMs stopped monitoring their forums carefully (to the point where some posts were downright racist, yet were never deleted or editted by the GMs), and the community went to hell. There are some good people left, but ultimately many of them left.

Best: Tough one. I've played quite a few games with great communities, although most of them only for a short period of time. One of the best was the community on UO's Siege Perilous shard a few years ago, although that shard died off eventually and the same can't be said for it at all anymore. Vanguard's was pretty good, AO isn't too bad, FFXI is pretty good. Generally I find that games with smaller playerbases tend have better communities, either because it's more personal or because they know pushing players away risks potential failure of the game they play. When you have a huge playerbase, you just don't have the personal connection with the other players so there's no real incentive to go out of your way to be friendly to them (except in the case of AO, which rewards you mechanically for helping low level characters).

Worst: Guild Wars, hands down. I played it for a few months, and while the arenas and AB battles were fun for a while, I never -once- had anything good to say about the community. I was in a guild with a few of my friends, but outside that... Horrible, horrible interactions, especially when you beat other players which apparently makes you a noob in that game and I was playing it wrong all along. How foolish of me. Of course, I've had some bad experiences in other games, but I've never played a game besides GW where I felt like over 95% of the playerbase consisted of horrible miscreants. I find a lot of F2P games tend to have less diserable playerbases due to the fact that the average age of the players is lower than games which require subscriptions, although it's not always the case thankfully.

Ah, I forgot to mention my best and worst communities I've seen.

Best: FF XI

Reason: First off, I must state that I actually only played FF XI for about an hour (a friend owned the game). And that one hour was magical. I also have been shadowing the game for a very long time, and the community I've seen was beautiful. It encourage team work (it is a hardcore group game), was friendly to the average noob, and asshats were reported quickly to ruin that person's chances of being with a party anytime soon. A beautiful community it was, and I hope to see that in FF XIV (of course, SE didn't realize that when they tried attracting the casual and soloist communities to FF XIV that we would see less of a nice community than before).

Honorable mention: Silkroad Online before the level cap 90 came out and bots weren't rampant at the time. Was somewhat similar to FF XI's community (though asshats were existant in the game). Bots weren't rapid, you could trust the GMs at the time because they kept catering to the fans, all the nice things basically.

Worst: Silkroad Online when the level cap 90 came out and bots became rampant. Basically, the community went to hell (simply read my previous post for more thoughts on this).

I played FFXI for 6+ years and the best help and good attitude were the japanese players, I got all kind of shit and drama from na players.

Now I'm playing rom and for my supprise every single time I ask for help in /zone I get help right away it's amazing.

When I was playing wow I felt bad playing online the wow players are the worst in he world.

Best community so far has been Ryzom and LotRO. Worst, by far, was AoC.

Originally posted by coffee

Ill jump on the "cool kids" bandwagon and say WoW has the worse community because you know I've played on all 200 or so of my region servers... no sorry I've played 3 of em but thats enough to lable all players right? and every 1 shouts out "chuck norris" jokes... oh wait sorry that stopped in 2005... every one ninja loots... oh wait wait I tell a lie from my own 4 year experience I have never been a group with some one ninja looting... every one is 8 years old... oh wait somtimes I play up to the early hours around 2-3am and the servers are still packed.

In all seriousness I didin't need to open this thread to know WoW would labeled as the worst... price it pays for being the most played MMO I guess.  Your all entitled to your opinons but for me WoW is just fine community wise, not too serious and can have a bit of fun.

Worst community and for the only reason no one talked was WAR.. for the short month I played it.

If you've nothing to say but trolling, dont say it.

EQ1 old school is best hands down

LoTRO is worst

best i've ever been in is EQ1 and LOTRO. worst i've seen WoW and AoC.

The best community I've experienced by far is Guild Wars.

The worst is a toss up between Darkfall and AoC pvp servers.

Best: EQ1, Horizons, FFXI, Vanguard.

Worst: AoC.  Nothing else close.  I thought WoW was bad but AoC made WoW look like a friendly and mature community.

Best: EQ

Worst: EQ

EQ went from the best to the worst community during the years, it's a bit shocking how kind and helpful players used to be and how elitist and selfish they were when I left the game over a year ago.

Best :

Star Wars Galaxies pre NGE was heaven community wise. On an unofficial RP server a real community feel. You could walk into the mos eisley cantina at any time day or night like it was real and full of activity...I have never seen a single inn in any MMO with people actually in it other than for a brief event or two.

Runner up - Everquest 1 - Before velious expansion because so many of us were so nieve to this type of game and the rush rush powergame mentality hadnt kicked in in general across MMOs.

Worst :

Vanguard for a pve focussed game it was a real shocker it was this poor but probably largly down to there being noone left by time I was hitting higher levels..hard to have community with no players..just a feeling of doom and gloom most days.

Runner up - Everquest 1 - Post Velious expansion your own mother would stab you in the back for the super rare dropping loot item she always wanted ..paving the way for the general style of community ever since.

Originally posted by bastioni2

Best: EQ

Worst: EQ

EQ went from the best to the worst community during the years, it's a bit shocking how kind and helpful players used to be and how elitist and selfish they were when I left the game over a year ago.

wow to think you were writing this the same time as I was..:)

BEST:  Vanguard.  Most people will say "mature" or "helpful."  I am going to use a different word.  In my many (many) years of online gaming, I have to say that I think Vanguard players are the most . . . intelligent.  

CLOSE SECOND:  EQ 2 and SWG tied.  Helpful, friendly players.

WORST:  WoW.  Typical answer, probably predictable.  I know.  I have had some awful experiences with this game in terms of my social interactions with people.  

CLOSE SECOND:  Everquest.  I agree completely that when I first played EQ, it was an awesome social game.  Let us face some facts:  EQ was redesigned from group cooperative gameplay to guild competitive gameplay.  It totally undermined the small group and community guild experience, which I believed --and still do-- was the very backbone and soul of Everquest.

Originally posted by RamenThief7

Ah, I forgot to mention my best and worst communities I've seen.

Best: FF XI

Reason: First off, I must state that I actually only played FF XI for about an hour (a friend owned the game). And that one hour was magical. I also have been shadowing the game for a very long time, and the community I've seen was beautiful.

 

Wow, I feel bad for you. You only played for an hour and it left that much of an impression on you?

You know you can pick up FFXI pretty cheap these days...14.95 gets you the 2008 collection (whatever that has)

www.direct2drive.com/6/6753/product/Buy-FINAL-FANTASY-XI-Vana%27diel-Collection-2008-Download