Last month, when news of the City of Heroes mess hit, the Massively OP writers and readers had multiple discussions about community – you saw some of the results in Into the Super-verse. Obviously the story has since moved on from that moment, and most of the community is coming together again. But while it was all happening, one thing that kept coming up was the realization that everyone has a very different idea of what the community in a given game actually is. Confronting that, I suspect, was at the heart of why some former CoH players reacted so strongly to the whole ordeal.
As MOP’s Tyler Edwards noted, he stopped going to events in one specific live MMO when he came to realize that they were really about the cool kids “showering each other with gifts and attention and the rest of us were just there to provide an audience.” I was dismayed to catch a glimpse of that in CoH: I didn’t want to feel that some folks were supers, and everybody else was that NPC you bump into when you’re trying to superspeed down the street. I want to fight against that as hard as necessary.
Do you actually feel as if you’re part of your fave MMO’s community? And how would you define it?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!
