Community in MMOs

Recently, I have been thinking about how communities form in MMOs. In truth, these are quite possibly the most important part of an MMO. Without a community, an MMO is simply a single player game where you can watch other players play the same game. With a community, you can take on far larger objective and even make friends online. The problem with communities is the game developers have no direct control over them. They can provide tools to foster their creation, but it is next to impossible to pre-create communities for a game.

I have been playing Bungie's recent title Destiny. There is a lot one can do without a community, but the highest level content requires that you find a group. The problem is Bungie greatly restricts in game communications. There are no public chat or voice channels. The closest thing would be using the Bungie forum. This seems far too much like posting an add on Craigslist. You have to get lucky in having the comparable people view your advert and you will still have to sort through a lot of crap first. There are also third party sites, like Destiny LFG, which look promising. Though it really depends on the power of their search and matching algorithms. So we will have to see.

The other method available is to send lots of messages to people in game hanging around certain spots. This is a very high variance activity. A group found me to help with the Raid on normal, and that went well. Though then a member of that group invited me to do the Raid again later and it was massive mess of cursing from a player who thought he knew more than he did. So I am not super optimistic about this tactic for finding a long term community.

My only other experience with MMO communities is EVE Online. And I started EVE after it had been running for nearly 10 years. This meant that there were many large, established communities to pick from. And all had nice websites and private voice comms. While a good part of the difference can be attributed to the difference between an established MMO and a new MMO, I think some of it comes down to the medium. It is much easier to run other programs in the background on a computer than a console. This means it is easier for communities to develop new tools to help their growth. On consoles this is much harder due to restrictions the console manufactures place on apps. This means that players have to rely more on support from both the console manufacturers and the game developers to give us tools for forming communities. In this sense, I am pessimistic for console MMO communities because no one knows the tools that we as players need better than the players. Not to mention we outnumber the developers by a huge factor meaning we have more time to develop the custom tools for our particular community instead of the one size fits all versions from the developers. I hope I am mistaken, and probably will be due to how creative players as a group are.