So video has 2 guys doing a PAX East “mini-panel” on gaming communities and what makes them bad and what makes them good.
They used several examples. The first one was Heroes of Newerth, which is basically a DotA clone played straight, with the same stats and the denying mechanic which allows you to kill your own soldiers and structures in order to “deny” the enemy the rewards inherent in gaining this kills. In addition, a public rating system makes players highly competitive as they play to increase their rating and not to have fun. This is a good observation. Good players don't want to be teamed with bad players who don't understand confusing game mechanics and cause them to lose the game.
They also pulled out a game called Natural Selection, a Half-Life Mod with a small community of only a few hundred players. This game was quoted as being a good example of a community because of the way the game worked. The first reason they quoted was that teams had to work together, so players would teach noobs how to play. The second thing was obvious and logical mechanics, unlike denying. Finally, a pre and post match common room where players would put trance music to their mics and have impromptu raves made the game have a very positive community.
Now, I have not played Heroes of Newerth much, I played DotA amongst Friends and did not experience the horrible community that surrounds DotA. I have played League of Legends, a similar game, however.
League of Legends tries to be obvious in its gameplay mechanics. There is no denying. They recently removed Ward Blocking, where players could drop a ward right in front of certain spells and block the spell, or use use some spells to jump to wards and escape. There is a public Rating for players who chose to play “Ranked” games, and there is a lot of mean and annoying players who play these ranked games. However, unranked “normal” games are just as bad, in my experience. Its just not as frustrating because you don't lose rating when your team is bad and frustratingly abusive to each other.
Now, these guys claim that Natural Selection is good because it has sen sable gameplay mechanics. So does League of Legends. They claim that because teams require players to work together, new players are taught what to do and the sensible gameplay mechanics are then easily reinforced. They claim that the post game lobby where players can enjoy themselves after a good game encourages community-building.
League of Legends is a game that requires teams to work together and new players have this knowledge reinforced by sensible gameplay mechanics. League of Legends also has a post-game lobby where players can view stats and discuss the game amongst themselves. League of Legends has a horrible community, even disregarding Ranked Games. These guys are not entirely correct. They have a good thesis, one I want to believe, but its not entirely correct.
A couple of things come to mind here, as to why these guys might be wrong. First of all, Natural Selection only has a few hundred players. If we assume that 10% of the population of the internet are a bunch of horrible trolls that live to make our lives miserable (and that might be a rather conservative estimate) that means that a game with an active population of 500 players has 50 trolls. Thats a lot in terms of percentage, but its a small number that is manageable in terms of flat numbers. Good admins can block these trolls and keep an active blacklist going so as to prevent these players from mic-spamming and the like. A small community, like it or not, makes for a community that is easy to manage, where trolls can be hunted down and banned easily. League of Legends has had to fight severely to create useful and effective report and ban functions, and even these have not been 100% effective in removing trolls. It has helped, I admit, though. But these methods have taken a very long time to create, test, and implement in effective fashion. When you have a userbase in the hundreds of thousands, a blacklist of trolls is not that easy to create, especially when you don't have private servers and most players randomly queue with the entire active playerbase instead of a group of well-trusted friends. This is perhaps the least important problem with the theory proposed in this video. I think its fair to say given an infinite number players there will be an infinite number of obnoxious people. Smaller playerbases are easier to manage period.
However, there are other, more severe, problems with this thesis. League of Legends is a team game. That means a team needs to work together to win. That means players need to compromise. For instance, League of Legends teams benefit from having a jungle, a carry, a mage, a support and then either another carry or another mage. However, in many games the last player to pick will pick what he or she wants to play instead of a hero to compliment the team. If the first three guys picked guys that deal physical damage it makes sense to get a guy that does magic damage, but sometimes you just want to play what you want to play. That's what happens when you play with random internet people. Meanwhile the enemy team gets a balanced comp and simply outpicks you because players on your team refuse (for good or bad reasons) to pick heroes that create a better team comp. BOOM, you lose.
Then these guys say that you need to work together and that this can be accomplished by saying stuff like, “hey, try to last hit, try not to push, build an Infinity edge first on Ashe.” This is all good advice. However, it has been my experience that there is about a 50% chance that my allies will say “fuck off,” when I offer them advice. Pardon my language, but you have no idea how many times people flat out tell me to “shut the fuck up, noob, I know what im doing,” and then proceed to die and again and again. In other words, they're rude and mean and they don't take my advice.
Finally, the idea of an end-game lounge where players can converse with each other and look at stats and talk about awesome moments. This is a good idea. However, this doesn't happen too often. Most of the time the end-game lounge is a place for players to rant about how horrible their team was, or for players to conintue their shouting match they have been having all game long. Only very rarely have I, in my 1000+ games played in League of Legends seen the lounge used in such a method.
I want to believe these guys with their thesis that a good game creates a good community. I want to believe that Heroes of Newerth has a bad community because it has bad game mechanics. But I can't believe this given my observations in League of Legends. People can say that you can remove stats like creep kills and hero kills and deaths and assists, but this isn't fair since these are ways to observe how good or poorly your team is doing against the enemy team. You need those sometimes.
I think its better to say that small communities are more likely to be better, and that some games, while they can attempt to make things “fun” and “noob friendly” are not going to succeed if the majority of the players want to be jerks or don't feel they should be teaching other players. I understand this. I really don't have the patience to explain to players I've played with why Clarity is a bad summoner spell, and why Malphite doesn't need it, or farm for that matter. I've done it, and when the player rejected everything I said with “well you don't play malphite,” I had to end the debate. I was nice enough to say, “Okay, you're right, I don't play malphite,” instead of “real malphite player. Takes clarity. Fuck noob shit,” like a real LoL troll. There are a lot of players who simply do that, “don't take clarity, it sucks,” “I think its good,” “gg. Noob malphite. No way we can win.” That's the attitude players have in this game, and its independent of skill or game mechanics. It doesn't help that there are some heroes, items, and abilities, that are not the best, but this is the same in every video game. So, I have to, sadly, reject this belief that its the game, not the community, that determines the community. Unless we're talking about a very small, close-knit community that can heavily monitor its members, I don't really believe these guys have a good thesis.
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