Best: EVE, EQ and DAoC

Worst: EVE, WOW, Aion

Yes I have EVE on their twice.

So far TSW seems to be pretty good but that is usually the case with newly launched MMOs before Elitest pricks come out of the wood work.

LOTRO and DDO always seemed pretty good to me.

TERA had a pretty bad community.

Honestly though the general MMO community seems like church camp when compared against MOBA communitys.

Best: Honestly I can't think of one that deserves such a rating. MMO communities in general are full of adolecent imbeciles.

Worst: LOTRO (Monster Play), EVE, Perpetuum

I loved the Face of Mankind community. Talked to a lot of different poeple in that game. From the gankers to the die hard support players and most of them where actually great poeple to know. It's the only time I really could get involved in the community, where I felt that I wanted to get involved.  

My top 3 would be:

WoW- Some of the nicest people I have in games I have met in this game

LOtRO- Tha same goes for this community

Vanguard- Probably one of the all time best communities I have come across

There are more but the OP wanted to keep this fairly current.

My bottom 3 would be:

WoW- Some of the worst most assinine people I have met in gaming I have met here

Age of Conan- Mainly from the PvP server, come on people, you're not "wolves" when your killing a guy stuck in a cutscene...

Guild Wars 2- Not released yet I know, but the almost violent devotion seen on this site kind of turns my stomach.

Best: Wurm Online, Mortal Online, Fallen Earth

Worst: WoW, APB, EVE

TSW, FE, AO are good. Rift's ok. WoW was probably the worst I've seen. 

One thing I noticed about TSW is that after playing it for over a week, I still haven't seen a single BUYGOLD DOT COM (or rather BUYPAX DOT COM) message in general. Tera had heaps of those in NA beta.

Originally posted by GTwander

Worst: EVE, Mortal Online and APB

I have to agree that worst is definitely APB, for those who haven't played it.

Nothing else is even close.

The problem with APB's community is, the people who plays on  the criminal side REALLY thinks they are some hardcore gangsters just because they play a game. Some even try to talk in the gangster Mexican accent in VoIP, lol. Pretty sad imo.

Originally posted by Ren128

One thing I noticed about TSW is that after playing it for over a week, I still haven't seen a single BUYGOLD DOT COM (or rather BUYPAX DOT COM) message in general. Tera had heaps of those in NA beta.

 

The lack of gold sellers was probably because their chat has been as broken as everyone else's (seems to finally be fixed now though) - I did see one gold seller spam, but it was removed quite quickly.

My votes:

Best: LoTRO (has always been amazingly helpful and friendly every since the beginning), EVE (some of them), TSW (the game may only have been released a couple weeks ago, but it's had a strong - if small - community of awesome people for 5 years)

Worst: EVE (yeah), GW2 (rabid fanboism, rampant spamming of "GW2 will cure cancer and create World Peace" in every fucking conversation, and the game's not even out yet!), any Korean Grinder (pick any of the millions of them)

Best: None. MMORPGs do not have good communities.

Worst (going by these forums): The Secret World. I'm so glad 90% of TSW's forum community is currently playing the game. Now we only need to get rid of the other 10%.

Edit: I just found another game (not an MMORPG, but listed on the site) to add to the list: DayZ. The community is similar to that of TSW.

WoW had the worse community that I ever experienced in game and on the forums.  All the dozens of other games I played all had great communities minus the forum moderators.  Many forum mods playing god-butthead on the players have ruined games for me.  Nothing like having a mod who is a bigger troll than the trolls themselves.  Sadly, I left a few games because the moderators would not stop harassing the community.  But as for the people I really felt pretty attached to a lot of forum posters.  Like they were more my fiends than my in game friends.  Any time someone hurt my feelings or piffed me off in game or just annoyed me I could cry of the forum community's shoulder and they'd be like, "Oh yeah, same thing happened to me the other day," and I had friends there.  Till a moderator would come along and get jealous we were all sharing and say something stupid like, "This subject is no longer pertinent," or some stupid bla.

Best:

Eq1, Daoc, Vanguard

Worst:

AoC:  Hands down the most juvenile onbnoxious self centered kiddie community of any MMO.  But the game was designed and targetted towards kiddie with an emphasis on juvenile themse with blood, gore, profanity and nudity with a simplified follwo the arrow target audience and shallow thoughtless gameplay.

2 and 3 Fill in any modern MMO with a PvP focus.

Originally posted by Zippy

2 and 3 Fill in any modern MMO with a PvP focus.

You can save space and just go 1-3.

Most communities are at their worst on their own PvP forums, to my obsevation.  But don't know if  that's due to a general acceptance of trash talk from players and careless moderation from companies...  Or a hasty generalization about the broader PvP audience.  Not comfortable with how broad the brush must paint, either way.

I think communies today are all garbage. The one good thing about faction based MMOs is you split the assholes into their factions, while in a no faction game like TERA, you combine them all into one group.

I've had pretty varied experiences, plus my main games have been FF online titles for the past few years.  That said...

BEST: GW2, FFXIV (at times)

WORST: FFXI, Aion

Feel pretty neutral about all the others I've been in.

best:  LoTRO, EVE, TSW

worst: WoW, GW2... nothing else comes to mind as particularly bad.

Best:

1)  FFXIV

2)  Lotro

3)  WoW

Worst:

1)  GW2

2)  TSW

3)  Darkfall