Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

A thought occurs regarding forums in an MMORPG community in comparison to those pertaining to others, which may explain at least part of the reason forum interactions are generally so much more painful for, say, WoW as opposed to Galactic Civilizations. It might be readily boiled down to the simple concept of competition.

WoW forums are, generally, composed of WoW players, who are a notorious bunch for feeling strongly competative and defensive in their posts. This is a natural reflection of how much they have at stake in a game that will chew up literally hundreds of hours of their lives. Making a change in WoW will, invariably, bring a flood of poorly punctuated, emotional, and generally tiresome complaints from individuals who feel slighted by the changes.

GalCiv II, however, is a non-competative game by nature, at least from the standpoint of other human players, and so the entire “self-defense” aspect of the forum community is virtually non-existent. From a political vantage, GalCiv has a different set of advantages, based on the fact that they have entirely cut out the most socially acrid demographic of their community, simply by nature of their game. You won’t post to a GalCiv forum because they nerfed your favorite character class and you are trying to mask your annoyance by pointing out percieved imbalances with other classes; you’ll only post if you have an interest in improving the game after a manner that all will enjoy.

This is not at all intended to suggest that community forums in the general industry are conducted in the best manner; I merely suggest that comparison is more effective when considering the social evolution that controls the forum demographic. You can’t have a positive community experience when those posting on the forums are negative and fanatical, no matter how good your forum organization is. WoW forums will always be unpleasant, because their will always be a lot of jerk postings. GalCiv II, in contrast, will always be better, because there is little motivation to post after the manner of someone who is defending the honor of their mother. Warm, close-knit communities will come to organizations that tend to attract those sorts of people. Most avid players of competative multi-player games are not those sorts of people.

There are three games that come to mind after reading this article: AO (anarchy online), DAoC (Dark Age of Camelot), and Tibia (the most vindictive addictive 2d mmo out there). In each case they have develop rather loyal communities. In tibia’s instance they divided the game into many seperate communities forcibly through the use of multiple server worlds (I think they are up to almost 20 worlds now). The downfall of this is after these worlds build up and become stuctured, very little change can take place without causing an uproar from the players, but it is the player base that made the social climate in these servers that way. This results in the estiblishment of the “grass is greener” syndrom where players from all of the worlds start thinking another world’s player base is more fun or has more options because the powergamers haven’t destroyed that world yet. So it has that downfall, along with making the worlds rather small so the 1000 people per server gets laggy and hellish to play with those same folks all of the time.

In the DAoC case, the creators have made physical restraints between playing relms (which are always at war do to the storyline) and these restraints force the players from the opposing relms to encourage and help one another building a strong community base.

AO follows a similar pattern, you have to pick a side after you leave the intial newbie island, you have to join either Omni, Clan, or Netural and each side has its pluses and minus. The communitiy learns to work together more or less otherwise one side will have a negative impact on the other side (in terms of a precentage bonus to xp, which when you are a very low level or very high level comes in handy quite abit).

WoW doesn’t temp the players into these types of settings, they just force the player to pick a side and say good luck! The community has no real influence on the games mechanics or do they have an influence over eachother in the community. Its a law and order thing really. Each of the games I have listed have estiblished a sort of “law of the land” to play with while the WoW seems, at least the times I tried to play it to be disconnected from any order within the community. I felt powerless to influence either side in the “story.”