Where do gaming communities go when they die?

UrbanMasque

UrbanMasque

Everyone Wears a Mask
Where do gaming communities go when they die?

http://www.gamerevolution.com/blog/Urba ... -die-93367

New blog post with the questions below:

Maybe its the holidays turning me into a sap, or maybe I’m getting nostalgic in my old age but what were some of your first or favorite online communities?
What makes a strong in-game and out-of-game community in your opinion?
Have you been a part of other communities that have died (gaming or not) - what’d you do after? Stay in touch with the other members still or did you guys naturally part ways?
 
There's an old text-based MMORPG called Eternal Duel that I used to play religiously. It's 11 years old now, and I've been a member for 9 of them. It was just one of the games I came across when I was just getting into the internet. I got good at it and met a lot of new people through it. Of course, I was just a stupid kid, and the game turned out to be the place that I would go to lose my innocence, but I made a lot of friends and spent a lot of time talking to people much smarter than me.

I stopped playing it before I started my church service mission, and I tried getting back into it after that, but later that year, the co-owner, my friend and clan leader, Paul, died. I slowly stopped visiting the site after that, and I never kept contact up with the other people I knew. I don't know how active it is right now, but I'm still 285th on the leaderboard, and the 849th oldest player.
 
Gaming communities could last a long time. I was a part of a guild in WoW/EQ2/AC2 who were together 9 years (I was in 4 of those years) but it fell apart when we lost our forums and our guild leader.After that I've quit WoW for about 5 years. I missed those guys. Whatever you think of WoW or any other MMOs, I didn't play those games because they were fun but it was because the community I was a part of was fun and they play the game. I did came back to WoW and came into contact with one of my former guild member.

I think what kills gaming communities faster than anything is if you lose that common communication method: forums, voice comms, or even a chat room. Imagine if GR gets rid of the forums but then say... MattAY, Bret, or Urbz picked up the slack and started a new one but on a different site. Would it be the same? How many regulars are we gonna lose?
 
Who's to say I haven't already started one in my garage and that I haven't made sock puppet versions of all of you.

I've only defiled three of you.

Honestly this is the only community I've ever had since I've only really played multi with you guys. I did however have a bad company 2 group and we played pretty often. Two Americans, a Canadian and 2 Brits. We played together for half a year. I still see them online but we never really got together over the other games.
 
Yea I had a few friends like that on my AIM/ICQ buddy list like "Oh, that was the dude who recruited me in Everquest" or " Hey, thats the dude I played Socom 2 with - I wonder what he's up to now" but never really reached out outside of that. I feel like we're all one big group of friends shuffling around constantly under variations of different names. When I was RPing in the chat rooms it was the biggest "where is everybody" moment, because it felt like everyone stopped playing over the weekend or decided it was lame and forgot to send me the memo. Nothing really to be done about it except move on.

cyberjim2000 said:
I think what kills gaming communities faster than anything is if you lose that common communication method: forums, voice comms, or even a chat room. Imagine if GR gets rid of the forums but then say... MattAY, Bret, or Urbz picked up the slack and started a new one but on a different site. Would it be the same? How many regulars are we gonna lose?
Click to expand...

Yea its a bit harder to disintegrate these common grounds. The corp i'm in on Eve Online has member who have been absent for YEARS, but like the forums people occasionally pop-in and go "hey who's here, whats changed - stay active for a week then bounce again". I think having somewhere to call "home" is the biggest factor in keeping a community. I always though voice comms outside of a game was a bit weird, but some people prefer it. Can you imagine HEARing a twitch chatroom or forum? Sounds like Hell on earth.

I imagined that we might all migrate somewhere, but a few stragglers would vanish for sure. It definitely wouldn't be the same, because we'd be the new guys in someone elses forums which sucks!
 
If it wasn't for MSN Zone back in the day, I'm not sure how long it would've taken for me to get into online gaming. I played Rogue Spear on there for years, and the community didn't really die out until quite a bit after Raven Shield's release. AoE ran on it as well, I believe. Wasn't a bad service, allowed you to lobby up before playing, made it a little easier to find and arrange clan activities.
 
I remember back in school me and 3 of my friends discovered this game called Realm of Kaos. Was a text-based MMORPG basically.
We would play into the long hours of the morning online, and in doing so over time we developed online friends in the "clans" we were in. After a while my friends left the game, but I kept playing and stayed with my clansmen! Remember them being a wonderful bunch of chaps! And I VIVIDLY remember my Mum asking me what I was doing, I responded, "playing with my friends".
"What friends?"
"My online friends!" And after that she just gave me a look of disgust, shut the computer off (we only had one in the house) and basically ordered me to play outside with my real freinds!
Dont know, maybe she was worried I would become a shut-in or something. Maybe she wasn't quite caught up with the times either. Think the thought of "online communities" would not sit right with her, as this was a time when the internet was taking flight!
I kept playing the game, being vigilant when my mum was around! But after about 5 years I just stopped playing, I think I got tired of the extreme levelling you had to do to be a decent character.
The creators also introduced "charter accounts" which allowed people to buy things with real money, and in my opinion it ruined the game completely

Still up and running I believe, but the people I played it with have all long gone.
 
I used to play online games a long time ago and I made a lot of really good friends there. I didn't have a lot of friends (if any) when I was younger in school, so this was the next best thing.

Slowly over time, these gaming environments unfortunately "die" and we do move on. Some of these people I am still Internet friends with today, having them on Facebook and such.

Before Facebook, I used MSN Instant Messenger a lot, but sadly when that went, so did some of the 'net friends I had. I have no idea where they are or what they are doing today.
 
UrbanMasque said:
and when the forums go?
Click to expand...

Steam. If they don't go to steam I expect the friendship to die along with the friend. As someone who had friends on consoles I cut off my connection to these people because chasing these friendships into new consoles is nothing more than a financial liability. I know steam will be around so when I have PC friends not using steam then I expect to not hear from them again.
 
cyberjim2000 said:
Gaming communities could last a long time. I was a part of a guild in WoW/EQ2/AC2 who were together 9 years (I was in 4 of those years) but it fell apart when we lost our forums and our guild leader.After that I've quit WoW for about 5 years. I missed those guys. Whatever you think of WoW or any other MMOs, I didn't play those games because they were fun but it was because the community I was a part of was fun and they play the game. I did came back to WoW and came into contact with one of my former guild member.

I think what kills gaming communities faster than anything is if you lose that common communication method: forums, voice comms, or even a chat room. Imagine if GR gets rid of the forums but then say... MattAY, Bret, or Urbz picked up the slack and started a new one but on a different site. Would it be the same? How many regulars are we gonna lose?
Click to expand...

Yep, good guilds and good communities last long, and often move together (well, at least the core does) from game to game and from forum to forum.

It often depends a lot on one or couple good organizers, and when something "happens" to them ( say, marriage, kids nd such horrors :) ) it can all spontaneously fall apart. Anyway, I know people in the same guild for 20+ years already, jumping from game to game.
 
First community...hmm... perhaps that was Arena Online gamers, a huge clan called Christen by Blood - they even had an initiation ritual.
That was a close gaming community with a very active forum and no voice chat. Really. No voice chat. And they still had great coordination during pvp I could never see since then...
 
I played with a tight group on GW2 for a year or two. Typical guild/server politics broke it up after bouncing servers plus the WvW map changes caused some annoyances. Moved with some to SWTOR, that didn't last long. Now we just play BLOPS3 on xbox one occasionally and chat on facebook.

I did read about some really dedicated RP Neverwinter Nights group that fell apart and the core basically just RP through forums now. Pretty neat.
 
I manage to catch up with my old gamer friends I met online through social media sites and we usually just find good gaming communities to frequent...
 
My problem is almost all of my old gamer friends are either on here or in person, and we never really played together that much.

Now we just stream all the time for funsies.
 
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