The overwhelming power of community
by Shawn Schuster 
Jan 4th 2010 at 1:00PM
Filed under: Culture, MMO industry, Opinion, Massively meta
While this saying is true for most things in the entertainment industry, it's mandatory for MMOs. A single-player game can make that initial retail box sale and never worry about keeping anyone happy after that, if they don't want to. Sure, most single-player game developers understand that they want their customers to be happy in case there's a sequel or future downloadable content, but for the most part, they can do alright with a relatively low maintenance developer-community relationship.
Of course this isn't true at all for MMOs. The community makes an MMO. You can have the most immersive, gorgeous game with the perfect PvP and roleplaying capacities, but it still needs to appeal directly to a community. It doesn't matter what community, but it just needs to have a role and find that niche with people who are looking for that specific itch to be scratched. This isn't going to happen with advertising alone.
Depending on your outlook on life, the community you are currently a part of may the best or worst community you've ever seen. Everyone has their own opinion on what makes an enjoyable community, but there are many that are simply not for you. In my opinion, Lord of the Rings Online has the best community out there. Do you agree with that? It doesn't really matter, because that opinion is based on my experiences. The MMO community that holds a special place in your heart is there because of your own experiences.
This brings us to a topic that has been keeping our website (and inboxes) afire throughout December.
The Reader's Choice Awards started out simple enough, but was quickly dominated by one company. No, I'm not talking about Frogster for Runes of Magic (at least initially), I'm talking about NCsoft for Aion. If you remember earlier in the month, Aion was topping every category in the awards. Why? Because NCsoft reached out to their community to back their favorite game. It's perfectly harmless, and it worked. Until Runes of Magic did the same thing.
Frogster was not the only company to do this, though. As I mentioned before, NCsoft did the same thing, as did most of the other companies on the list. Jade Dynasty created a contest to reward their players for getting the game in the top 3 of their nominated categories. Again, there is nothing wrong with this, but it just wasn't enough to even compete with a game like Runes of Magic.
"Frogster has figured out the formula for motivating a passionate group of people and has kept them at it for almost a year now." |
It should be pointed out that I'm certainly not saying anything negative about Aion here, because they have a passionate community as well. All of these games have passionate communities, otherwise they wouldn't exist. But using this whole Reader's Choice Awards situation as a perfect example, we're shown just how much the community (which includes the community management team) does matter to these games. Frogster has figured out the formula for motivating a passionate group of people and has kept them at it for almost a year now.
Quite frankly, it doesn't matter what the strongest detractors think of Runes of Magic. It doesn't even matter what I or anyone here at Massively think of Runes of Magic because our job isn't to tell you what opinion you should have. The fact is, Runes of Magic has one of the strongest communities out there, and they truly love their game. That should be admired, not condemned.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Scopique said on 1:03PM 1-04-2010
Great way to turn this whole dust-up into a segue :D
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Tizmah said on 1:15PM 1-04-2010
But I Hated having subjobs, because that means more leveling :(
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UltimateQ said on 1:24PM 1-04-2010
I hate WoW, so don't misunderstand this. But from what little bit I did play of RoM, it looked and felt exactly like WoW (to me), and that turned me away. Not that I dislike RoM, I just hate WoW so passionately that being reminded of it is a huge turn off.
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Holgar said on 1:24PM 1-04-2010
I rolled my eyes when the contest first started because I figured right off the bat it was going to come down to whatever CM team spent the most time and effort promoing the content to their fanbase. Needless to say I was NOT disappointed.
Personally I think RoM is a great big steaming pile of.........meh. Its not BAD but if you want to do endgame type raiding your going to have to either grind your face off or use the cash shop and if you go the cash shop option you might as well just get a similar but better game thats p2p.
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derella said on 1:31PM 1-04-2010
RoM just bored me. Everything about it felt like a grind -- crafting, leveling, traveling -- designed to get me to buy from their item mall. I don't have a problem with F2P/item shop games... but making the base game tedious isn't going to entice me into opening my wallet.
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Pingles said on 3:19PM 1-04-2010
Sorry, but as an RoM player I disagree wholeheartedly.
Frogster wanted to make an aggressive showing in these polls and they made an admirable effort to send their players to vote.
THAT does not define Runes of Magic's community. It just says that their players were willing to go vote in a poll. I think even the most hated game could probably get enough votes in an online poll if they were as committed as Frogster.
As far as communities go I am not impressed by Runes of Magic. It has the same percentage of dingbats, veteran snobs and mature helpful people as every other youth-oriented game out there.
LOTRO (I am an ex-subscriber) was definitely the game where I felt most comfortable when asking a question.
Someone should do a test. Perhaps Massively can.
Go into a low-level area (not the starting area) and ask "Where is the mailbox?"
Then count how many "noob lol"'s they get.
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Holgar said on 3:24PM 1-04-2010
I used a level 23 one of my friends has and asked exactly that in the general chat there wasn't a single "Noob Lol" answer.
I was however called a moron, a fag, and told to l2p.
Tizmah said on 3:34PM 1-04-2010
I agree with you. I was going to reply to this article and just say "So a company telling people to go vote by offering them something means the game must have a great community?"
I didn't see RoM have any better community than any other MMORPG I've been apart of. I'm not saying it's bad really, but it's nothing worth defending at all with a whole article dedicated to it.
Jeremy S. said on 4:49PM 1-04-2010
Pretty much all these complaints are universal complaints. They exist not due to Runes of Magic's indivuduality but to common denominators of all MMORPGs.
RoM is as far away from being or looking like WoW as Warhammer or LotRO is.
I'm sorry I know it's entering a very fanboy realm to start with, but the only time I ever used "WoW alike" or "WoW clone" was for Alganon, and that was because of details of how there craft, and training system work, along with all the main motivators for achievement they've placed in the game.
Allods, at times, reminds me of a similar art look, but that's about it.
As for any other MMORPG out right now, I just don't see any "WoW clones" at all.
I do think a lot of MMORPGs, WoW included, could learn from some of the new ways that RoM has implemented common features.
They offer unlimited UI costumization
A ton of game play options focusing on NPC/quest tracking
Turning names on/off for a wide variety of NPC/player/mob labels as well as HP bars
A great world search feature
The aggregator(which I personally think is a new revolution in MMORPGs) that let you take any and all weapons and any piece of equipment and change the look while keeping the stats you want(You are not limited to changing your look using cash shop "costumes" that is a very small part- you can use all items in-game) On top of that you can color each separate piece using an advanced color wheel with thousands of colors.
The daily quest drops are unique to RoM in that you can collect them without taking the quest first which is nice. It gives you more freedom to collect then take quest, if you want.
There's many more totally unique takes on standard features as well as totally new features like exp debt, etc...in RoM.
It's not the greatest game on Earth, but it is a lot of fun, and I think it can easily be explained why, not the least of them is now that some sites like tentonhammer are finding that it actually beats WoW in running on a wide variety of machines. Once their streaming client is implemented, the accessibilty of the game will be greatly improved, and that is a big part of any MMORPG.
But take my word for what it's worth. I am a big RoM fanboy after all :P
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Graill said on 5:27PM 1-04-2010
Hmm, apparently readers choice means if you simply come to the website one time in your life or one time that year, you are now a "reader" pretty sad.
As this website has pointed out though, never underestimate the power of a child.
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Sean said on 8:55PM 1-04-2010
It surprises me that you are not only defending the integrity of your Reader's Choice Awards given the circumstances around it, but also drawing from those dubious results evidence for genuine, well-functioning communities in these MMOs. Having players collectively respond to explicit promises of rewards is not the same as a genuine community effort to promote a particular game. For one, all the examples you cited were of the developers themselves taking the initiative to drive players toward participating in Massively's polls. That they succeeded is a credit to their community managers and their understanding of social engineering/psychology, not because of a player community in any meaningful sense.
Overall, the whole episode reflects poorly on Massively and I'd expect for you and the other staff to at least acknowledge that. To treat this like anything more than community managers whipping up individual players to flood a site's poll is disgraceful and I hope next time you think through the implications of how you implement any "reader's choice" type of awards.
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