WoW: The Community Factor

This post has been long in coming, so hopefully I have figured out a way to sum up my thoughts on the topic to make this a not-so-long post :)

It has been over a decade (or 2 depending on your stance) since the advent of MMOG's. And it seems to me that industry leaders and developers are still failing to understand what the most crucial feature of these games are: the community.

That means the people who play the game. I'm going to pick on WoW here because it really is, hands down, the worst MMO community I have ever seen. Some will cite the huge subscribership to somehow explain that with the sheer volume of it, there is simply bound to be more bad seeds within it. I don't blame the players as much as I blame the developers.

The WoW community is heavily unmoderated, uncensored, and just downright rude. I stopped posting on the official forums years ago, when I learned that Bliz simply did not care about that place. It's a disaster. At the same time, I've noted the extreme difference between WoW EU boards and WoW US boards. EU moderates liberally and encourages a productive, fun community. For the most part, your posts and threads will be removed/locked if you don't adhere to the rules moderators have set out. No it's not a perfect system, but by and large it is a much more valuable community than the US boards. By a long shot. Just have a look for yourself.

Now how can these developers control their communities? It's not about *controlling* them. It's about directing them, leading them, and nurturing them with things that are healthy and relevant to the game's growth. And there is no way that the WoW community is contributing to it's growth in any positive fashion.

Things which help direct player communities are the presence of staff to moderate and improved guild tools. In-game moderation helps as well, especially on RP servers, but good luck with that. Again some will argue that with the massive amount of customers the company has, there is no practical way to monitor the community. To that I say one thing, and remember this:

1. MMOG's live and die by the quality of their community.

It's not the content. It's the community. Eventually, players will decide to stay or leave based on the people around them. This includes friends they've made online or friends they began with IRL. It comes down to the quality of the player base. And quite frankly WoW has never done enough to manage it's community.

Here's a few things I feel would've gone a long way; I say past tense because it is an old game, and at least for me, starting to lose it's appeal in some ways.

1. If you're going to have a forum community, it needs tight moderation. The (often flippant) CM moderation, or lack thereof, truly kills the quality of the community there. It doesn't matter how much shit there is to sort through; fact is, that is a responsibility of any CM. Or at least that is what players are led to believe, since CMs no diddly squat about development matters for the game. They are there as representatives to serve and manage the forum community. Period. This almost never happens. Instead they have fallen in the role of relaying often bad information to players in response to questions that are asked. They do a poor job of even that, since they know shit about development of the game.
2. Better upkeep of the homepage, with up-to-date information, and useful guides. The current homepage, while neat looking (depends on who you ask) is littered with out-dated info or just plain useless. Information is difficult to find, and when you do find it, it is often not helpful or just plain incorrect.
3. Massive player management tools upgrade. With the humongous role guilds play in the game with regards to advancement and social impact, the available management tools are horribly lacking. Guilds are so very important to advancing the game, no matter what style of play you employ. Additionally, LFG is a just an utter failure; absolutely unacceptable for a game this size and shows exactly where dev priorities are; milk that cash cow. The policy of polish and improvement has long begun to lose out against the deployment of new content to keep the carrot out in front of subscribers.

To some extent I don't feel I am adequately getting my thoughts across on this topic, as there is so much to be said about communities in MMOGs. But the point is that not nearly enough is done to groom communities and make them pleasant and relevant resources for the playerbase. Too much focus is put on content development while community development is clearly not even thought about. And these are the very essence of what made MMOGs popular to begin with; the community experience.

In games like WoW, players should be encouraged to work together. Not forced. Encouraged. But with encouragement comes the need to practically "raise" the players from lowly newb, to high hero. Gameplay introduces them to mechanics and skills, while the social development rewards positive feedback and shuns negativity. I do not pretend to know what exactly makes some player kinder/ruder than others, but I know the behavior is a product of the community developers try to nurture. I cite games like EVE where, even though you can be a dick and a prick as a player, there is NO BENEFIT to be had. In fact, it is to your detriment. I am in no way implying EVE is a game community free of morons, but rather that the social landscape of the game does not encourage this sort of behavior. The key here is the kind of behavior developers encourage as a result of design decisions.

I will also site the rapid server transfers. Sure, it makes a quick buck and gives players a very nice option of moving to where their friends play. But one cannot ignore the huge negative impact this has on server communities. Huge. It's not like it was back in the early days of the game where you literally knew players by name and face, wherever they were. And this provided a way for players to police themselves, since your reputation is more important in an unchanging community demographic. With transfers ...it is impossible for players to police themselves, and thus discourage disruptive behavior.

I'm not against transfers. But I do question the impact it has had on the community, which doesn't seem very positive at all. In the least, they cool down for them is too frequent, and should be much longer. With transfers, the goal should have been to give players an option to get together with friends on distant servers. That is the sole purpose. No one needs to transfer more than twice a year, nor once a year for that matter. Further more, without PvE to PvP transfers, it makes the community even more divided and is counterproductive to the entire transfer concept.

I could go on ....but I have probably rambled long enough. Any future developer who reads this, listen up: include community development as a core feature of your game design. Don't skimp out, because this is the most crucial aspect of it, and ultimately will determine how long your game will last through the years. It's not shiny new content, its the relationships players build amongst themselves that ties them to your game. Sure, content plays an important factor, but it is not greater than the community factor. Not by a long shot. Spend time developing for a strong, resourceful, relevant, and exciting community. Examine the impact of gameplay and mechanics on the social environment of the game. And if group play is a core feature of the game, don't sacrifice it in the name of diversity, but rather embrace it and encourage it through clever mechanics that encourage group play while nurturing the community. Finally, if you'll be taking the multi-server approach, ensure you have mechanisms in place which bind those server communities together and which aren't divisive in nature to those communities.