Originally posted by Xasapis
I'm not sure why you quoted my post. I didn't claim that GW2 community was X level of quality. I just pointed out that while certain mechanisms prevent asshats from being annoying, those mechanisms do not by themselves make a good community.

And that was exactly the point I was refuting.  Those mechanisms are the only things that can make a good community.  The people are the same in every game.  The only variable in the equation is the game they're playing and its mechanisms.  Joe in game A can can be a kill stealing douche who runs away without rezzing you.  The same Joe in game B won't steal kills because that's not possible and maybe even stops to res you because it's just so darn convenient or even beneficial.  Are both "communities" exactly the same because they're comprised of the same person?  Or is one better because the game's systems cause that player to behave better?

Players who go out of their way to be excessively kind or douchy will still exist in both games, but even the extent to which those players exhibit their default behavior will vary after it's filtered through the games' systems.  A cross realm dungeon finder, for example, may cause someone who is normally very sociable and helpful to not even bother trying to make friends in a dungeon because he knows he'll never see them again.  He may not act like an ass, but he might not be as outgoing and pleasant as he otherwise would be.  Or, as in my former example, the player who is a kill stealing, PKing asshat by nature simply may not be able to do those things in a game with unversal credit on mob kills and without non-consensual pvp.  It will simply create a more positive environment, which I think is precisely what people actually mean when they speak of a "better community."  They're not referring to the players themselves, who are, after all, all the same, but rather the environment in which the players interact.

And this effect snowballs in either direction.  When the environment is more positive, you'll find the chat even tends to be more positive.  Fewer of those who have a tendancy to make douchy remarks actually do so, and vice versa.  A week reading WoW's trade chat will desensitize the nicest person to the most vile subjects.  

Some games may make it more easy for you to identify those players you would like to meet IRL than other games; and that's entirely a function of the game's mechanics, because I can assure you if there are players you find you'd like to meet in one game, there are players you'd like to meet in every game.  Because the same players can be found in every game.  

Also, please quote whoever you're replying to to avoid confusion :)  

I found Asheron's Call to be the best, When it first came out. I've lost touch in the years since and wouldn't mind finding out what happened to them

@ homitu

Just saves space when my post is directly below the one I answer.

LOTRO had none of the mechanics mentioned in GW2 and had and still has one of the best communities in any mmorpg. I still stand by my point that mechanics alone doesn't make for good communities.

In any case, it is too early to talk about GW2 community. Simply because the communities are forged by the people who play long term, not those who rush at the launch and then move on to the next hot title.

On a more general note, while shared loot in the early days of WoW (when I was still playing) would have been considered an annoyance, you could get first hand info about the quality of the people you were running with. Who were the helpful, who were the greedy, who were the asshats. The big difference between that approach and this sterilised mmorg was that back then you knew the people you teamed with were good, because they could screw you if they so choose and didn't.

In GW2, as you already mentioned, you can't tell if the person you teamed with is an asshat or not, because (unless you are in WvW) they can't screw you. Is that an improvement? Mechanisms wise certainly. Community wise, not really. That guy you've been playing in GW2 for 6 months (hypothetically speaking), you now take him into an mmorpg without safety nets and, surprisingly enough, he shows his true colours.

It's not that the community is good (or bad), it's just that the environment is so sterilised that it makes no difference one way or the other.

Originally posted by roo67

The same could be said is true of Rift an WoW . Both are city centric games with very few people questing and both have cross server instanced play which probably makes it less likly to meet players . It is a matter of making the effort to talk to people then add them to your friends list . Being a nice guild is always a plus too . I think gessekals332 is right though old school mmos did have closer communitys because they were more like villages where everyone got to know everyone else . 

That is true of course, particularly since most of those games had very little solocontent and no tradingposts meaning you had to communicate and make friends, or you were basically screwed.

That noone talks is just not true, it just seems like less since all the chatting is in local and the game lacks a general chat. That have both advantages and disadvantages.

Originally posted by Xasapis

Just saves space when my post is directly below the one I answer.

LOTRO had none of the mechanics mentioned in GW2 and had and still has one of the best communities in any mmorpg. I still stand by my point that mechanics alone doesn't make for good communities.

LOTRO attracted a much more mature crowd. Just like EverQuest 2 did back in the day. It makes already all the difference right out of the bat.

I played both games extensively for many years.

The community in GW2 is fine on my server (Eredon Terrace) and there is plenty of talk in map and team in wvwvw. Sometimes in the world it's not so chatty, but I think a lot of the players during my play time are from various Asian countries so they may not be comfortable chattin g in English, though they are cooperative in play (whether by game design or not is up to you).

Best communities I've played with include TSW and maybe a surprise to many -- Darkfall. Yes, there were some jerks, but they were far outnumbered by decent, helpful players. All you have to do is talk to them. If you get ganked as a noob, you could tell them as much and ask for tips or advice. Seriously, 9 times out of 10 the player was very helpful with advice, returning stuff they looted, and even giving extra stuff like mounts, armor, and aid.  It was great.  

The Rift community seems good right now, too. 

I'm thinking that WoW has absorbed a lot of players with MoP. Of course, there are fine people playing WoW, but I think a lot of the less mature players from other games got sucked over to MoP as well. That has perhaps cleaned up some of the other games' communities a bit.

Originally posted by AshenTech

Originally posted by sfc1971

Got to disagree, especially higher level.

This is after SWTOR one of the most anti-social games I have come across. There are indeed a LOT of nice players but my god, it also attracted some utter dregs.

A lot of players say "thanks" after a ressurection especially if it isn't a rez fest. Just nice manners right?

Right. Except yesterday at the Balthazar DE, some players actually bitched about people saying thanks, insisting everyone should follow their orders and ignore dead people and what not. Basically they seemed to think leadership is done by shouting.

Compared to The Secret World or Lotro.... my god. Although Lotro has gone down hill since going F2P. 

I am more and more beginning to understand why female members of my Lotro guild refuse to team up outside the guild and want to me to keep their gender secret and their mic suddenly doesn't work if I invite friends to a raid.

When is the next MMO launching to take the 12 yr olds away?

I also get the feeling that people who think GW2 community ain't so bad after all are coming fresh out of barren chat. That is like saying people here are nice compared to 4chan. True, but what a standard to measure things by.

must be your server, the 3 i have been on have been great, the few rare idiot kiddies tend to get chased out of /m pretty damn quick when they start up....

sure you will run into the random idiot jackoff who wants to play commander or wants to troll.....but they are far less common then the people who just want to have fun and play with others.

please done blame 12yo's, some of the honest to god kids I have met and ended up in guilds with over the years have been more mature then many adults, in some cases more mature then their own parents....(i kid you not...) 

i have seen 55-65yo men act like cs kiddies, and 11yo's act like perfect manared and mature adults......sure they dont get some of the jokes humor that the adults do....but at least they dont rage quit over stupid stuff.....

 

if you want an anti-social game, i could link you to a few where you will find real jerks....people who will spend an hour trolling somebody acting like they are helping them, just to dump them someplace they cant survive.....

i could say more but no real need, other then to point out, you may want to try another server and /m more often, and when you do some a jerk, just rclick them and ignore/block them....

You know I don't mean people botn in 2000 when I talk about 12yr olds, you can be 60 and be a 12yr old and you can be born in 2000 and be a human being.

And I didn't say it was all bad (Underworld) but the original premise was that GW2 had a GREAT community, well it doesn't in comparison to some other games I played.

Recent games for me are Lotro, SWTOR, TSW and GW2. Lotro started out very good but went downhill with F2P. SWTOR was mostly silent, a common reason given for it failing. TSW saw people helping each other left and right with lots of talking and advice. GW2 is mostly silent again but with extra helpings of "what a piece of shit".

There are nice people but as I go to higher level areas, I get the feeling I am leveling to fast and catching up with the kiddies. Go back to a lower level zone and stuff improves again.

One of the main reasons people left WoW in the beginning was the childish community. I can see signs that GW2 might suffer the same, it happened to the original after all.

Best community for me has been Fallen Earth, LoTRO, DDO and EQ2.

WoW had some nice guilds and groups of people but it was so full of asshats it made it hard to enjoy the game.

Originally posted by NeVeRLiFt

Best community for me has been Fallen Earth, LoTRO, DDO and EQ2.

WoW had some nice guilds and groups of people but it was so full of asshats it made it hard to enjoy the game.

In the first year on my server at least WoW had a great community . It was sometime in the second year I started to notice more and more players with a bad attitude. These days when I go back its hard to find anyone whos friendly and nice . I don't know wht it is about WoW that attracts such people . Rift ( which I thinks a great game ) has a similar problem to a lesser extent .

Originally posted by kostoslav
All thouse "bad" guys went from WoW to LoL. League of Legends is today what WoW was few years ago. Today u ll find WoW community to be much better.
The worst community I had to deal with was in GW1 (af&jq for example)

Definitely has something to do with it. My daughter plays LoL, and the douchebaggery she has encountered is off the charts. I never saw such rude, selfish behavior in any game before. Not my cup of tea, and she only plays with her BF and a few rl friends, but they deal with douche bags daily.

As to GW2, the community is top notch, but like others have experienced, very quiet because they don't need to talk. But then this is getting more common, and while I would not say GW2 promotes much social interaction, to be fair it has grown less common to strike up conversations in any game these days. Many people in ALL games are using Vent or guild chat as their sole social outlet in the community, and I think it is just a change overall.

Hell, for my part, I have quit trying in GW2. I just play with my wife and a couple of RL friends, there is no need for me to group with anyone, so I have quit reaching out. That said, the people I do know in GW2 are top notch.

Originally posted by Khondor
No need to ignore people when no one is talking.

lol

Originally posted by skydiver12

The usual for me.

The "honeymoon players"
who will claim the color of centaur droppings are the best thing ever.

The "successfull Trolls"
but i like gw2 more than WOW, because i just want you all to talk over wow for the next half hour.

The "failed Trolls"
GW2 sucks, i hate this game (and repeat it for the next 2 hours instead of leaving)

The "elitist wannabe"
Sorry no Warrior for COE EXP P2, we need someone ranged (like if having a group wide buffing aoe burning / bleeding dot longbow build with 1200 range isn't range enough).

The "elitist"
sorry only lvl80 with 1212 max damage weapons and that setup. (For CM EXP - ouch).

The "12year old"
wha, this sucks why you guys are so weak! (invited 3 other warriors with only a 2 hand sword and 5 sigils - for an dungeon EXP run. Counting a total of 4 Origami Rambos)

The "denial"
nO this is not a bug this' a feature.

 

 

lol..yep

Originally posted by Homitu

Originally posted by Xasapis .....snip

Since we seem bent on generalizing an entire group of 2 million+ players as either good or bad, I feel obligated to point out what should be obvious: the same people play all of these games.  There is nothing intrinsically better about the character of the people playing any one game over the people playing another game.  The only way we can possibly distinguish one community from another is based on how that community manifests itself as a function its game's specific systems.  

this isnt really true, the same people dont play all these kind of games, inface, I know a few people who wont get gw2 because they only play mmo's with world pvp, because they think the fun of the game is going out and "ganking noobs", I consider them dbags in game, and in the few we have played togather, I have spent alot of time ganking them as they tried to "gank noobs", they would get mad at me over it, but thats their problem, they wana be a dbag ruin somebody elses day as they level, i will do the same to them.....over and over....

Originally posted by ShakyMo
I wasn't particularly into the game with it being lobby based, but I thought gw1 had a fairly good community.

The best I encountered were coh & daoc
The worst were wow & EQ.

The importance of gear seems to be a big factor in amplifying asshat behaviour. I'm not suprised gw2 has a good community.

I've kinda noticed the same.

Games with more skill based systems (LoL aside) seem to have generally better communities. I'm not sure why that is. It might be because it's harder to blame other people for mistakes, who knows. I've seen some of those players try to seap into the GW2 community, but they don't generally last long.

I know when I see people claiming 'LF 80s only' for a CM run, or 'need banner warrior', it's generally a sign that the group doesn't know what they are doing.

Originally posted by Khondor
No need to ignore people when no one is talking.

LOL

Comical, considering many players have turned off Map Chat specifically because of the huge amount of chatter taking place within it.

Do you even play?

Originally posted by Xasapis

@ homitu

Just saves space when my post is directly below the one I answer.

LOTRO had none of the mechanics mentioned in GW2 and had and still has one of the best communities in any mmorpg. I still stand by my point that mechanics alone doesn't make for good communities.

In any case, it is too early to talk about GW2 community. Simply because the communities are forged by the people who play long term, not those who rush at the launch and then move on to the next hot title.

 

On a more general note, while shared loot in the early days of WoW (when I was still playing) would have been considered an annoyance, you could get first hand info about the quality of the people you were running with. Who were the helpful, who were the greedy, who were the asshats. The big difference between that approach and this sterilised mmorg was that back then you knew the people you teamed with were good, because they could screw you if they so choose and didn't.

In GW2, as you already mentioned, you can't tell if the person you teamed with is an asshat or not, because (unless you are in WvW) they can't screw you. Is that an improvement? Mechanisms wise certainly. Community wise, not really. That guy you've been playing in GW2 for 6 months (hypothetically speaking), you now take him into an mmorpg without safety nets and, surprisingly enough, he shows his true colours.

It's not that the community is good (or bad), it's just that the environment is so sterilised that it makes no difference one way or the other.

you dont need the mechanics to have a great community but it helps, also the fact theres no world pvp helps, in my exp people who are overly into pvp and who love to pk tend to be the biggest dbags in games, and they dont really like games like gw2, because they cant "gank noobs" or "pwn noobs", sPvP and WvWvW arent really the same as world pvp that so many of them crave as an outlet for their douchbaggery....

you mention loot and the quality of people, I have had more people give me stuff in this game (good stuff no less) then any mmo i have played since UO, people genuinly want to help eachother.

little story of what happened last week.

I was running around malchors leap trying to get some points and such done.....as anybody whos been there knows, its not a solo friendly area even in great gear....well i was doing OK, but got hit by stuff that somebody else had drug along and went down, a group came alogn revived and healed me, so i tagged along, they eventually tossed me a party invite, we started talking between "i need this point" and "i need that point" in the end, we all completed the top half of that map.

well afer we did a few big events some of them had to go do other stuff, so they split off, i was left with one fellow who offered to run me down to where my story mission started(pain in the arse run down there), we got there and he asked if i wanted help doing it.....i figured "what the hell,nobody else i know is on to team up with" so we did it, near the end i got a nice yellow hammer, i linked it in party chat, he asked if i was gonna sell it, the way he asked was pretty clear he needed it, so i just gave it to him, no great loss, sure it was worth like 20silver at the time but to me, the help he had given was worth more then that....

later that night we worked on more map completion as we got him caught up on his story....he got a set of very very nice exotic shoulders he couldnt use(guardian and ele, i was the ele) he asked if they where better then what i had, and without even a moments hesetation, he tossed them to me.....6 gold value.....

you cant tell me thats a bad sort....I have also had times when people after an even will link their good loot(green/yellow/orange) and i have said "omg that <incertn item name here> is nice...wish i had one> and the persons mailed it to me without evne saying anything.....

I have done the same, because, yes i could make some money off them at times, but, helping somebody out is just good karma and the neiborly thing to do, the only thing i tend to tell people is to "pass it along" meaning, if somebody else needs something you got as a drop, and its not got some insane value, give it to them(if i got a "the legend" i wouldnt give it away for example)  but yeah, I honestly have met more nice people here then aholes, and have had more people willing to go that extra mile to help here then in any game since UO....

Oh and a friend of mine who use to play LoL says "damn if thats not the truth of how that games devolved" from what i gather its got the same kind of community that WoW private servers enlarge have.....bunch of immature asshats who just want to pretend they are big men because they can "pwn noobz" 

Originally posted by sfc1971

Originally posted by AshenTech

Originally posted by sfc1971

snip....

......snip

....snip.

There are nice people but as I go to higher level areas, I get the feeling I am leveling to fast and catching up with the kiddies. Go back to a lower level zone and stuff improves again.

One of the main reasons people left WoW in the beginning was the childish community. I can see signs that GW2 might suffer the same, it happened to the original after all.

I really dont see that, but, it could just be the server, I have seen a few jerks but, they tend to shut up when people in numbers tell them to knock it off, that or everybody agrees to just block/ignore them.

the people who act this way will either evolve to become part of the community or they will leave for other games where they can feel more "1337" where their actions will be considered "cool" and "Funny"

oh all the comments i see about how f2p is the cause of alot of asshattery, this isnt really true, and no im not talking about this game its b2p, with f2p games alot of why things devolve is that the developers of the game dont do things to curtale aholes, somethign as simple as having a mod in game to kick/block/silance somebody whos being a jerk, or taking reports and looking at how people are acting and either perm silancing them or the like.....

FireFall is a good example, I have watched some people make real jerks of themselves, and I found out why they kept dissapearing one night when staff member said "dont worry about it, hes gone now, he cant talk in game anymore", and firefall is still in beta.....(great game!!!)  red5 seem to really understand that they dont wana get the rep that hi-rez and many other f2p game houses have, they dont want to get a rep for games full of aholes, and they dont wana get a rep for being overly harsh...i mean silencing people is in some ways better then banning or kicking, forces them to think about how they acted, also causes many to quit without making new accounts......because they are mad they couldnt talk and the game sucked because they couldnt talk shit and be a jerk....