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What type of community will AoC have?
TheDarkSorcerer
Member
I'm pretty curious to know what type of community AoC will end up with. I'm a veteran in ESO and GW1/GW2 and these communities have completely different people in it. Even though i have love for ESO, ESO can be toxic with inappropriate conversations in zone chats, or extreme name calling in PvP due to a lot competition. While in Guild Wars, the community have a really friendly, helpful and mature vibe going and a no tolerance for bs.
The current forum community here seems great so far though
The current forum community here seems great so far though
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I mean, we don't know, because we don't know enough about the game yet. In the long term, the community will be made up of a majority of whatever type of person (psychologically) the gameplay loops reward.
Right now, based on what little we know, I'd expect a pretty casual laid back playerbase with a few strong rulers that clash moreso politically, leaving the standard player alone and ignoring the occasional murder-hobo (true ones, not PvP seekers who sometimes gank potential targets).
If the game style changes, probably so will the community. It's pretty diverse right now, mainly because the game as presented now is really ambitious and sounds like it will appeal to a wide audience. If it actually does, then it'll be really interesting.
So far, people have been fairly predictable, you can tell 'what they're interested in' and 'what games they've played before' by 'which part of Ashes they're looking forward to' or their 'ingame class intention' fairly well.
I hope the 'Strong Rulers' are cool.
What are the top 3-5 traits you find most important in an MMORPG community?
The more bound players are to their server, the better the community is.
This is why ESO isn't exactly a shining beacon of what an MMO community should be, nor is WoW.
If the community is toxic, it simply means that we ourselves are toxic. If we don’t want the community to be toxic, the first step is for you yourself not to be toxic. The same for any desired or undesired aspect of our little pocket of the universe.
Just my one-cent musings.
Ahh yes.
"Be the change you want to see in the world."
Ghandi
The community of a game is a product of that game.
You could take the entire population of WoW and dump it in a different MMO, and that would result in a different community feel.
If this were not the case, every MMO would have basically the same community, because every MMO is pulling from the same pool of MMO players.
I’m glad we agree.
The community is I'd say quite bad. You very rarely get to interact with others in a social and meaningful way. Most of the time the only way to play the game in a socially meaningful way is to have real life friends play with you or join a clan of some sorts.
But firstly Dayz isn't an MMO.
Second I found something very peculiar:
Before buying the game I played it pirated/cracked because it didn't make sense to me to buy Arma 2 games in order to play a very glitchy mod which in the end I might not even like. After I liked it I bought it but it turned out that the pirated/cracked community on pirated servers was actually more pro-social than most communities on legit servers.
That was because there weren't a lot of pirated/cracked servers. Thus you couldn't just create chaos on a server and leave when you are done to join another server. So in some degree the veil of anonymity was lifted because you belonged to a small active community and everyone knew you and after chatting a while people could even tell it's you even if you changed your nickname just by your playstyle and style of communication.
You either had the choice to be remembered as "that asshole" or not. Being remembered "as that asshole" made you into a shoot on sight target and you would never get help from others or be invited to group and new players would even get warned about you. To top it all off when someone got killed by you or found out where you were they'd announce where you were and then anyone close would come to hunt you.
I think Ashes' community might workout very well on some servers while on others it might turn out to be just a 24/7 non-stop corruption-filled-to-the-max pvp-fest.
It'll all depend on the "strong rulers" of our servers, they will shape the community or if we go about it the other way - the community will choose it's leaders. Toxic community will chose toxic rulers and create even a more toxic server community.
I think it'll also depend on whether our "strong leaders" are heterogeneous or not. Heterogeneous in terms of what node types they want to create. For a very pro-social community to be formed I think it's crucial that there is a node from each type and each of those nodes is somewhat on par with the others. if all of the strongest nodes are military nodes then I don't expect the server to have a pro-social community because the military type node to me sounds the least social out of all the node types. It's a node type which gets claimed by the strongest(pvp-wise) player and a node which mostly takes from others by force. Even it's benefits at metropolis level are I'd say questionable in terms of their social contribution - "reduced duration of corruption" ~ wiki.
From what I understand Steven has already taken action to give an incentive for a heterogeneous nodes to exist on one server. Each node type at max level gives some very special bonuses like fast travel, node-shared marketplace, "mega catacomb" dungeon that connects with other divine vassal nodes and has unique bosses with unique drop tables.
But in the end it's all player choice driven. If all the strong rulers on a server decide that they all want to build military nodes then that server will become a pvp fest and a grief fest I fear thanks to the reduced corruption duration.
It'll be up to us to decide how we want our world to feel, look and be.
If we have 6 scientific nodes spread out around the world then we can have fast travel across whole Verra. If we also have 6 economic nodes then we can have a thriving, diverse, rich and connected marketplace and economy.
If we have 4 divine nodes we can also have fun in those mega-catacomb dungeons of theirs and farm unique bosses and items. If we have 4 military metropolises then we can go and have some fun griefing I guess? "Reduced corruption duration" is a very questionable metropolis benefit, like I said.
But having a balanced world like that is I'd say unrealistic and possibly not fun. We might actually see that our rules will form some very questionable alliances. For example two military metropolises guarding an economical node, a scientific node and a divine node. Using the divine node for farm and the other two for utility. And then expanding on this with brute force(capturing other nodes) or politics - convincing other economical nodes to connect their economy and convincing other scientific nodes to open their air space for airships to connect them for the purpose of fast travel and easier access to different content.
(Narc could make this reply into a clip. Hope this helps you with content ideas buddy. Love the channel!)
A better comparison than DayZ would be WoW, as it has the same functionality due to the LFG system - and is an MMO. While you may be stuck on your server (unless you aren't), the people you group with can come from any server. As such, you can join a group, be a dick, and disappear never to be seen again by anyone in that group.
This won't happen in Ashes because not only are you restricted to people on your server to group with (with no current plans for server transfers), but you are likely restricted to people in your node cluster.
This takes the pool of potential people to group with from perhaps 2,000,000 down to maybe 2,000.
In regards to communities choosing leaders - it is worth pointing out that this only really applies to scientific nodes. People in the other three nodes have very little say in node leadership - though it is yet to be seen how much of an impact node leadership will have on how a community behaves.