What happened to MMO Communities?

[Ansultares]

I know that I'm probably going to get a lot of "you old fogie" hate for this, but it's a question I can not stop asking myself lately. I've played MMO's for just about 11 years now. Started off with Everquest and have adventured my way through multiple others. The one thing that really drew me in to the genre was it's sense of community and companionship. I thought it was awesome that your character lived in a world with thousands of others.

 

Not only were the vast majority of those people helpful; they were friendly to boot! People actually went out of their way to help another player that they didn't know from a hole in the wall. It was astounding.

 

Now, however, I feel like every game that comes out gets worse and worse in regards to it's community. People live to grief, harass, and flame the **** out of each other. The worst part is that it's become accepted as the norm. No one says anything because they've given up trying to fix it.

 

So, is it just me? Is anyone else as disappointed as I am?

You're fooling yourself; there's always been a seedy underside to the genre, though it's become more apparent as the industry continues to enable it (because it's profitable to do so, or too much risk to take a hard stance against it).

[RabidPopcorn]

Are you serious? Wow never had any fanboi issues? Not sure what world you're living on.

 

Sorry, 'never' was too broad a term, I should have said 'less'. I say this because SWTOR attracts a HUUUUGE following of SW fanbois who dominate both the forums and the game; by comparison, the bulk of WoW players probably never played warcraft.

 

It would be interesting if they gave us statistics on the background of each SWTOR subscriber, I'm very sure a vast number of them came from games like SWG, and not WoW, not that there is anything inherently wrong with this.

 

Lastly, you notice the number of people who post here in support of the game purely on the basis that it is 'Star Wars', or that 'it is true to what a Star Wars game would be' etc... It's near impossible for these people to separate the franchise from the game-play itself; people have less of such an issue in WoW (plus Blizzard never took itself that seriously, e.g. in-game pop-culture references).