Evolution of the Community

  The MMORPG genre has been around for a very long time.  Depending on where you personally credit the genre's beginning, we're talking about at least 13 years.  I personally credit a game which I've found most mmo players these days never even knew about, Meridian 59, which would date the mmorpg as far back as 1995!  Since then more and more game developers have caught on to the potential of this genre and began to innovate and dare I use the term, copy their way into the market. As the genre's community of players grew almost exponentially over the years, the developers have been able to open communications with their players and learn what they like and what they don't.



   In November of 2004, Blizzard Entertainment released what is now the mmo titan (no pun intended), World of WarCraft.  Many players have mixed feelings about this game now a days but back then it was something we hadn't seen before. By today's standards WoW falls short in several areas which makes it easy to forget the game's many successes.  The most notable impact this game had on the mmo industry is, in my opinion, the sheer numbers of players it drew in.  WoW today is holding just over 10 million active subscriptions.


  What I'm getting at in mentioning this controversial giant is the number of players that began to get involved in giving feedback to the developer and this is only the community for one game.  As of 2012 there are more than 15 mmo's which were released as full retail clients with subscription costs that are still live and at least a handful more titles will be released over the course of this next year or two.  Each title with their own following of players and each player with their own opinion.  That's a lot of opinions!


  The market has changed so much over the last 15 years or so and I don't mean the game interface or the raid encounters.  What I'm talking about is how the developers react to community feedback and the kind of feedback being given by the community.  If I had to guess I would say it was right around the release of WoW's first expansion, The Burning Crusade, where players started to become extremely critical about the features that were implemented in the game they were paying monthly fees to play.  Don't get me wrong, the player has every right to a say about what happens to their favorite title.  I mention TBC because it was also somewhere in this time-frame when players also became overly critical.  Over the course of the years leading up to WoW's most recent expansion, Cataclysm, players began to explore other titles just as other titles began to explore the genre and take their shot at fame.  Unfortunately this means that a lot of the negativity towards the developing companies also bled out into other titles.


  In March 2011, Trion Worlds released their debut title.  RIFT came out of no-where and many players didn't hear about it until a month or so after the initial release.  Players flooded in from many different titles including WoW to see what this new gem was all about.  So many players flocked to the new scene that Trion Worlds had to open several new servers in order to accommodate the unexpected success.  You take the good with the bad I suppose because over the course of 2011 and into the present day, Trion maintained such an open line of communication with their player base that they quickly earned the reputation of the most transparent game developer in the mmorpg market.


What does this giant history lesson mean?  Well, let's put it this way; if you tell someone they're important for long enough they'll believe it.  If you continue to tell them how important they are than they will likely develop an ego.  It's just to bad that a majority of feedback a great developer such as Trion receives is negative.  The mmorpg community now-a-days is full of so much negativity that it completely takes the focus away from what we used to love about the genre.  I wonder what kind of results we would see and how companies like Trion would react if we spent as much time complimenting and crediting them for the parts of the game that we love.  Think back to the following titles if you've ever played them: Everquest, City of Heroes, Lineage II, Guild Wars, Star Wars: Galaxies.  Each one of those titles released before WoW and before Rift.  What's the difference between all those titles you ask?  The difference is the community.


  SWG is especially notable for it's community.  Thousands of friendly players interested in meeting others and conducting role-play by a campfire somewhere out in the middle of Tatooine, or perhaps you just had a simple off-topic conversation with your newest friend in the cantina.  City of Heroes had a bit of a harder time as it was released later into the genre but still had this air of fun about it.  Always finding new powers to toy with, or new costumes to take a screenshot of and show your friends, or participating in PvP where players recognized and respected each other.  The mmo community I think forgets these aspects of multiplayer online games to frequently and quickly takes to the forum to critique the game developer on what is in their opinion the most critical part of the game and what's wrong with it.


  So I say to you, my fellow mmo gamers:  voice your opinion and voice it loud but be respectful and before you write up that huge tl;dr post, remember the great things about the game you're playing because those are the things that make it fun.  The developer may not always respond to your thread and you may not always see the exact changes you want but someone else out there in the millions of other players looking for change did get what they wanted and that's a good thing.


Stay friendly my friends!