Guild Wars 2

Its not the nicest that goes to SWTOR but its still very nice either compared to all other mmo I played SWTOR and I played WOW, Neverwinter online, Dungeons&Dragons online, EVE, AQW and none besides the exception where that nice.
Why is that?

Anet worked hard at it. Implemented things like shared mining nodes, eceryone getting his own drops and XP. They made it so that other players are not competitors but cooperators.

Do also note the exceptions, like dungeons, where “everyone has to pull their weight” made a mess of these principles, with predictable results.

And because we are all, actually, proper lovely people.

Even when you strongly disagree with someone people are pretty PG. The only think that makes it worse then SWTOR is the huge amount of leaving the group when we are doing a dungeon.
In SWTOR people left the group in FP maybe 5 times in here I think a couple hundred times. Yeah I dabbled a lot in dungeons but it did in FP also.

Jure Simich.6154:

Anet worked hard at it. Implemented things like shared mining nodes, eceryone getting his own drops and XP. They made it so that other players are not competitors but cooperators.

Yeah the drama of having a node stolen when you’re fighting mobs near it so you could have access to it them constantly refusing dueling requests (not that a PvP server would help since many would be on the same faction) is gone. It’s like get back here what part of you and me PK don’t you understand if I didn’t wanna beat them I wouldn’t be challenging them.

“And because we are all, actually, proper lovely people.”

And pretty too:

Actually, I play several MMOs with good communities, so this isn’t anything exceptional.

Because gaming is more mainstream these days as opposed to say, 15 years ago, when there seemed to be a disproportionate amount of immature people playing online games that lack the basic concept of acting like a decent human being. And some of those people would have grown up by now. Add in people who are relatively more sane in the mix and it gets better.

Now, obviously some people remain kittens regardless of age and the other standard internet jerk hasn’t gone anywhere, but at least there’s more than just noise at times.

So it may be possible people haven’t gotten nicer, it’s just that nicer people have shown up more relatively speaking. Now, naturally, in more “hardcore” environments, such as PvP, instanced content, or WvW, there’s a higher concentration of the aforementioned annoying people because it attracts them like flies. So it can get just as bad there.

It also may be due to the fact that many forms of trolling have become too cliche to take seriously. Calling someone a kittening n00b at this point is just leaving yourself to be ridiculed in a generally hilarious fashion— it just doesn’t have the same impact it would years ago when people would get offended about a unsubstantiated claim that they lack skills in a video game that somehow reflects in their inadequacy as a human being. Naturally your overly emotional angry rager hasn’t usually collected enough wit or planning to really keep up with the trolling meta either and it often might be because it’s too much work to get a reaction out of people anymore. So you end up with the internet equivalent of a tiny dog barking aggressively at you.

I think the main reason is ANet’s focus on collaboration from the start. There’s no kill stealing, no node stealing, no different factions with open world pvp allowed between them. No losing items on death, no spending hours walking back to where you were if you died (which would heavily influence open world pvp if it was a thing).

When you see a champ spawn in GW2, and someone else stops by to help you kill it, you either won’t think much of it or be happy, as you both will most likely rez each other throughout the fight.

When you see a mob of similar type in other MMO’s spawn, and someone else comes along and starts fighting it, you’ll probably be ticked (ESPECIALLY if you were waiting for the spawn for a long while) because that person might be able to steal the kill.

And therein lies the key. Collaboration vs Competition. And I love it!

I agree with GW2’s community being one of the nicest one I’ve been in.
I guess a good game keeps their playerbase happy

Ya I agree, this community is the best I’ve seen.
Of course you’ll meet some really nasty jerks along the way, but hey... that’s life,

Being able to openly exclude or humiliate people in GW2 isn’t easy so the elitist element up until now has grown bored with this game and left. All thats left are the actual players who would rather work with other people towards goals and rewards. By game design rude and sadistic players are the only ones who are limited.

Unfortunately now with raids the exclusion part of that equation has been removed so the game is a little more toxic but still a far cry from some of the really bad ones who attract the 13 year olds in droves.

smiling.9028:

Being able to openly exclude or humiliate people in GW2 isn’t easy so the elitist element up until now has grown bored with this game and left. All thats left are the actual players who would rather work with other people towards goals and rewards. By game design rude and sadistic players are the only ones who are limited.

Unfortunately now with raids the exclusion part of that equation has been removed so the game is a little more toxic but still a far cry from some of the really bad ones who attract the 13 year olds in droves.

Out of curiosity, in what game (I’m thinking MMO, since those were the OP’s post) is it possible to exclude/humiliate people in a way that is not possible in GW2?

Or more to the point… how is it done? I’ve pretty much only played the GW series on the MMO side of things (oh, and Planetside 2, which has a reasonable community).

The in game GW2 community is not bad.

I think that eliminating most of the friction between players of differing skill levels by balancing content around the lowest common denominator probably helped. We will see how things go with the difficulty increase in HOT.

Oddly enough what toxicity I have seen in game has largely been generated by self professed casual players attacking anyone whose play style differs from their own. It has bothered me, as a casual myself, to see other casuals paint us in a bad light.

Guild Wars 1 had a great community. While GW2 isn’t bad, it definitely isn’t what GW1 was. I’m glad you feel differently though! I just find that there is a lot of hostility and toxicity in group/party formations especially with build setups. All-around/general game-play is fairly friendly for the most part. With any game, you’ll always come across those few crap-stirrers.

Is it really a better community when you have very little reason to communicate and the majority of content can’t be failed due to one or two clueless players? Same goes for SW:TOR – the vast majority of it is solo-able and you are so wrapped up in your own storyline it is like other players aren’t even there. In both of these games you don’t need others – let alone need them to do well for most content.

Star Wars: Galaxies had a great community and it was a very “selfish” game from a player stand point. Not only that but there were no safe zones and you were free to verbally harass your opponents or even prevent them from playing – it just rarely happened as players needed each other.

Arena Net also had a no tolerance type way of running their game at launch and it’s amazing how they actually enforce their TOS unlike other companies.

They perm ban exploiters, and issue punishment to toxic players. People much rather behave on Guild Wars 2 because they value their account (=

Guild wars has by far the nicest MMO community.

I guess the pve and RP folks are nice. Don’t expect the same in spvp though.

I agree, the bulk of it i guess is because ANet went to great lengths to prevent competitive play in the open world. No kill steals, no node steals, no PK maps, everyone shares loots and exp…
Only trolly and jerky people, but you don’t encounter them (that much) :p

Because the game is old enough the people that don’t want to be here, aren’t.

It also didn’t hurt that all the content can be done by anyone. So there aren’t a whole lot of natural rifts that form between groups.

Wryscher.1432:

Because the game is old enough the people that don’t want to be here, aren’t.

It also didn’t hurt that all the content can be done by anyone. So there aren’t a whole lot of natural rifts that form between groups.

Well, except that the GW2 population spiked when it turned free-to-play. Those people haven’t left yet.

Until you enter the darkest deepest parts of the forum

The thing is, any individual player does not see the entire community. We only see slices of the community. That said, I’ve personally experienced very little negativity in GW2 the game, but a bit more on the forums. There’s also timing issues. For example, my experience of the SWtoR community came as a free player right after the game went F2P. I have never, before or since, seen worse, with chat filled with bile and hate speech for the free players.

Swift.1930:

Wryscher.1432:

Because the game is old enough the people that don’t want to be here, aren’t.

It also didn’t hurt that all the content can be done by anyone. So there aren’t a whole lot of natural rifts that form between groups.

Well, except that the GW2 population spiked when it turned free-to-play. Those people haven’t left yet.

If you say so. But I’m mainly in wvw, there certainly wasn’t anything close to a spike there.

Any group of people adopt the attitudes of each other, and it creates a culture. People generally try to get along for the greater good and our own mental health, and Anet helps foster that with some really bizarre and borderline stupid rules, like the “kitten” filter on this forum that ruins completely innocent sentences .And in game too, verbal abuse is even a reportable offense.

Contrast to someplace like 4chan/reddit/youtube where anything goes with no repercussions at all, and a culture of the trolling evolves. It’s literally in the culture to be cruel and vulgar under the pretension that it’s funny. It’s learned behavior.

Fluffball.8307:

Any group of people adopt the attitudes of each other, and it creates a culture. People generally try to get along for the greater good and our own mental health, and Anet helps foster that with some really bizarre and borderline stupid rules, like the “kitten” filter on this forum that ruins completely innocent sentences .And in game too, verbal abuse is even a reportable offense.

Contrast to someplace like 4chan/reddit/youtube where anything goes with no repercussions at all, and a culture of the trolling evolves. It’s literally in the culture to be cruel and vulgar under the pretension that it’s funny. It’s learned behavior.

Well said. It’s human nature so it can’t be stopped however it can be redirected with some creative “bizarre and borderline” methods and a little diligence.

Nice, sure. Competent, absolutely not.

@OP- I’ve been playing this game on-and-off ever since launch, and I’m still freaked out by how nice people are. I’ve also played every single iteration of WoW, and there was no shortage of kittennozzles, no matter what level of gameplay you play (I’ve done casual, and hard core raiding…oddly enough, the hard core raiders were nicer).

Anet applied one of the oldest tactics in the book to make people nice to each other. They created a common enemy, themselves. There might be a ton of hate on the forums for Anet but we are hating together.

The Marvel Heroes community is by far the best, hands down! There are TONS of player giveaways (gifting cash shop stuff to others!) every day. Players are helpful, fun and extremely generous.

Once I saw someone trying to do a giveaway in the GW2 forum, people jumped on the person yelling “Scam!” “Keylogger!” “Virus!” and eventually the thread was closed… It was ridiculous. GW2 is a bunch of paranoids.

Because in its core, GW2 is a single player game with the option to have other people around you, not as a necessity. There are no “roles” one could fail in a dungeon, no ninja looting/need rolling, everything is carefully separated so you dont interfere with other ppls game. Most of the dungeons are basically soloable, the ones that are not have gating mechanisms that physically require a second/third body to stand somewhere or use a switch. Apart from some world bosses and meta events, the open world does not require any cooperation at all.

Dont fool yourself, the ppl playing GW2 are not “more mature” or better human beings or any crap like that, they just have less reasons to be angry at each other.