What makes for a good online community experience?

General
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I was watching Grimro’s video talking about trade and the economy in POE (link here: Thoughts On The Downturn Of Trade League And The Future Of PoE - YouTube) recently which made me think about the subject title of this thread. My focus isn’t strictly about trade but on what Grimro had called the “symbiosis between different tiers of players”.

I think what would ultimately make for a rich, vibrant community in an online game is exactly this symbiosis, or some sort of interdependencies between different types/groups of players; because that is exactly what will draw players together to interact with each other - whether in a direct way (e.g. 1 - 1 trades) or at the aggregate level as Grimro described.

Now while all the examples so far relate to item trade, I do not personally believe that item trade is necessary the only way to achieve this interdependency. The EHG devs had talked about making MP fun, and I think this could also be one form of interdependency - that when a player logs on, he’s actively looking for other players to play with because more fun can be derived from the game. But I suspect this approach will be much harder to perfect than say some other approaches that involve some sort of reward. One example I can think of is Act Rushes in D2 for forge gem - players seek higher level characters to help them progress through acts quickly in D2, in exchange, they offer a valuable quest reward which the higher level characters/players desire. While this isnt exactly intended mechanics from the D2 devs, I think it is an illustrative example of potential interdependencies in online games that can keep the community interacting with each other.

I put up this post not so much to suggest specific interdependencies that should be LE. But am really just trying to say that mechanics that would encourage meaningful interactions between players are necessary to make for a healthy online LE community. This may be through trade systems, or it may be through guild systems, or other forms of questing systems which may encourage players to work together. My concern is that the devs clearly have no interest in direct interactions for trade in LE, guilds are not planned for 1.0 and the game is intended to be largely soloable. Which means, currently as is, the devs really need to nail MP gameplay to be intrinsically fun for there to be an incentive for players to seek other players. And I am not sure that is a simple task to do.

Interested to hear what everyone else think about what it takes for players to play/interact together. :slight_smile:

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I know it’s not really the type of answer you are looking for.

But as someone who lives in Australia, multiplayer is useless to me without Australian servers. I know they haven’t announced server locations yet, but if there is no Australian server, I’ll be sticking to offline and won’t be able to engage with the community at all.

200+ ms delay is a killer, and in a game like this, it won’t be fun at all and just won’t be feasible for me.

I’ve already noticed this simply using global chat, I presume because the chat server is in America, there is a noticable delay before my message posts after hitting Enter. Not sure if this is just the implementation though, as I’m assuming here.

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Of course. Issues like yours are the hygiene factors that needs to be solved/be out of the way, before we can talk about design elements :slight_smile:

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Oh this is interesting, not something I’ve heard someone talk about. I’m curious about server locations now. :slight_smile:

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Ive stopped caring in general about all these games nowadays as theres always massive issues with all of them

Once again living in australia you may as well not exist to these companies

I just had to buy a new PC yesterday so I lost everything in LE, all 1000 hours of all my stuff etc since theres no server saves - theres going to be no australian server anyway for LE so thats relatively out the window in playing with others

Cant play (*patch) FF14 online in australia…YOU arent even allowed to patch the game without a VPN…but they will gladly take your money though and provide no service

Diablo 2 beta has 400 ping as NO oceania server currently, even though Blizzard has them available they just wont use them for beta

PoE is the ONLY game that will service oceania well and I am so sick of that game

Is there any point even having a forum account when australian because you dont exist to these companies and its always ‘we dont have resources to help you’ but these games arent any cheaper for us…its actually more expensive due to US conversion

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This hit me, as I didn’t realize gaming was this difficult over in Australia. I hope this changes.

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I’d assume that it may be relatively expensive for server hosting in Aus plus the backhaul required to get the data to the rest of the server network with a decent ping. Maybe combined with the size of the market there?

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Why did Ultima Onine in 2004 have Australian servers when I was a kid in high school using dialup internet

We had Oceania servers for this game

PoE has ‘Australian’ servers which are good as GGG maintains them well and low traffic in general, but theres been an australian server for YEARS, we had one before Canada even got one, because GGG are from NZ…

Blizzard lump Australians into ‘NA’ which is North America BUT you have your own server in Australia but if you want to play with a friend they WILL be american therefore you play on NA at 250 ping because no american will play on 250ping, they just leave your game

Dark Souls pvp is dogshit, you hit someone but they already rolled away 1 full second ago because the game connects you with people with superior ping

As I wrote cant even play FF14 you actually need a VPN to lie and say you are in Singapore just to get the game to patch

its annoying as I wrote, my cpu died on Saturday morning and by Sunday evening I had dropped 1800 on a new PC and was already on it, im just over it all now

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That was a longer off topic from OP than I was expecting :sweat_smile:

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The primary way I socialize in game is playing with my irl friend specifically. I usually don’t venture outside of that. I will interact in the community via forums and reddit but only in a text discussion setting.

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What a unique way to simply live life. I think I love this lol.

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Activities mentioned are all a good thing, and some good ideas from Jerle.

I think another oft overlooked aspect these days is the social environment as well and moderation. In the old days, I was always somewhat against moderation and encouraged free speech in forums & in game chat. However, times have changed, and looking at how toxic a game like poe can become in forums and in game, I have reversed my opinion on moderation.

I know that in most games the first thing I do now is disable chat in-game, and usually I stay away from the forums & reddits, due entirely to trolls & toxic haters. This is sad, and this does not foster any sort of community. How can you chat with other players, party up, raid, or do anything like that if your attitude is to disable communications by default.

In other games, long, long ago, I used to leave chat on. We used to have “banter” with other players. This was not flaming, it was obviously in good nature. I also used to answer the occasional question from newbies in chat. We used to shout out & form parties to do MP content when bored, etc etc. However, this was all dependent on chat not being flooded with spam, bots, trolls, toxic people, etc.

LE at the moment in the forums is in a great place. There is a diversity of opinions, we don’t all agree, we sometimes debate, we sometimes get annoyed. WE ALL however share the common sense of community and are civil to each other.

I think that this is about the most important aspect of “community”. None of the MP in game activities can survive or flourish if the social environment is ever allowed to become toxic due to a lack of moderation.

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Agree.

I would also add, as an example, that POE trading feels really toxic in part there are no visible moderation of trade scams that are now rampant in the game.

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With Microsoft, Amazon and Google already having major infrastructure here in Australia the pricing is not as bad as it was a decade ago, so it should be affordable, however your spot on with the size of the market. Unfortunately, Australia’s population is only ~25 million, so number of players is quite small, unless the cost can be absorbed by profit from all global customers.

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Honestly, it’s hard to make multiplayer atractive in an ARPG setting, exactly for the fact that gameplay is largely constructed to be soloable. Moreover, without a traditional RPG group setting, endgame boils down to players following the strongest player or each player going their own way to complete the objective.

First way i can see multiplayer working is making support roles. Traditionally aura bots, healers or straight tanks would be great for making multiplayer feel great to play.

Second way i can see multiplayer working in the same way MMOs do it, make a boss have absurd amounts of HP so that every player can have the chance to help. That can be in conjunction with the first option, having support roles invaluable, instead of just having whatever number of dps, promoting teamwork (in my opinion).

Of course, this is not a MMO or a game focused on multiplayer, but if you want to do it on a meaningful level, i believe it has to be with meaningful roles, instead of 6 mages going into an adventure, so to speak.

Notice, i focused in the gameplay action aspect of multiplayer, not the chat/trade multiplayer aspect.

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That’s not a particularly big population (the UK has ~70m and London alone has ~9m), there may also not be as high a % of gamers as other countries which would further reduce the size of the potential market for any given game.

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I think the absolutly most important thing for community is a very harsh and strict moderation. Sadly that is absolutly mandatory imho.

If you dont instantly ban the idiot posting “type … for free items” after the first warning for at least two weeks ten minutes later all your chat is flooded with this type of spam cause 100 other “less talented” guys think its funny to jump on this. We have had such an incedent ingame just some weeks ago.
(The dark side in me says: give it 30 minutes of free run and chatban all “jumpers” for two weeks too…).

Toxic people and spammers kill every community and make the civilced guys turn off chat so you need to get rid of this maybe 10-20% of playerbase in chat asap.

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Synergy between different player segments is great. I think the problem with POE is, that it does not have synergy as such, but more of an exploitation of the 99% by the 1%.

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Thank you. I completely agree with your view. And I think what the devs have in mind are probably along similar direction as yours - make partying together fun. My problem is, I’m not sure if it will play out that way naturally :slight_smile:

Thanks for sharing. I agree with you it should not be forced (and the devs have stated as much. This game will be soloable). But I disagree that just because it shouldnt be forced, it can also not be incentivised.

Moderation for sure :slight_smile:

I mean… that’s the cynical way of looking at it right? :stuck_out_tongue: the symbosis between players will find an equilibrium that each tier of players are comfortable with. For sure, it may be the case that the low tier player makes 10c from the high tier player. And the high tier player uses that 10c item to make 1ex with. But I think it’s simply an expression of the different amount of “value chain” in the different tiers of activities?

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Content creators give the community things to talk about. Could be wikis, tools, streamers, races, etc. It’s early in development to expect a lot here though.

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