Someone on the World of Warcraft boards, usually somewhere where you could spend years separating the wheat from the chaff, inspired me to think about the game’s social structure in some detail. My response, a bit paraphrased, is as follows:

I think something that Blizzard may fail to realize is that there are two key elements to EQ that made this formula work.

First and likely most importantly, it does not take effort or any real sort of dedication to get to raiding level, that being 60. It’s arguable that it takes a bit of dedication to get seed gear to start raiding with, but I do believe there are opportunities for those with greens and Maraudon/ST blues to at least guild for blue instances. This causes two problems: players don’t particularly care about their reputations or actions in the game because they can always reroll and be back within a short period of time, and there are a lot of inexperienced 60s out there. This also opens the door for less-than-desirable players to thrive–sorry to call you out, but this is namely the homophobic, slur-slinging alpha male and children–who have to be “maintained” or “appeased” as a mage pointed out in the thread a few pages back. This is good for Blizzard’s subscription revenue, but bad for the casual player looking for a mature guild. Hardcore guilds exist because these types of people naturally coalesce as a result.

This leads into the second reason why EQ’s raid, raid, raid formula worked - the playerbase wasn’t diluted in this way. With multiple servers spread out across the globe and large groups of players who don’t actively participate in the social arena, the servers feel more like small high schools rather than worlds where every single day you can run into someone you haven’t met. Sadly, this is likely worsened by Blizzard’s hardware woes, which don’t provide for larger server populations. I’d like to see some statistics on EQ vs. WoW server population totals. I bet they are quite different. Furthermore, you have a popular game, introducing an even more casual (or undesirable) element to every server.

The key word is non-committal. Hundreds of players on every EQ server realized the worth of their character and, in turn, respected the time put in by others. This led to a much more friendly community. WoW is so hostile in comparison. I, personally, have not killed Ragnaros and I doubt I will before I reach level 70. I was further along in Molten Core back in early 2005 than I am now, back when characters weren’t decked out in full epics and trinkets that changed the game. I’ve spent time on three different servers trying to find a decent guild, and I’ve never found one that I could tolerate for more than a few months at a time.

Perhaps I’m just picky, and I’ll admit that my case may be a bit extreme, but I do strongly feel these are serious issues that Blizzard will have to address when (not if) their player base starts to shrink significantly.