Community:  Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?

One of the most important pieces of a successful MMORPG is its community.  What types of people do you expect to meet while adventuring?  Are they helpful?  Mature?  Is that smokin’ hot elf in the chain mail bikini actually a 300 pound male systems engineer with Cheetos dust all over his keyboard?  In short, which game has the type of people you’d want to spend time with?

In World of Warcraft, you’ll definitely find a higher population of potential teammates, but I’m finding that’s not necessarily a good thing.  World of Warcraft has a very high rate of spammers and griefers when compared to Lord of the Rings Online, which I’m going to guess has something to do with the average player age of World of Warcraft skewing a little more towards the teens and early 20’s.  In my experience, it would seem that most people in World of Warcraft would just as soon watch you get hacked to bits by a Murloc as they would cast a healing spell on you.  And that’s not even on the PvP servers… if you decide to play on one of those, you WILL get ganked over and over again.

In contrast, my experience with the players in Lord of the Rings Online has been very pleasant.  While the number of players on the server is definitely lower than it is on World of Warcraft, the “quality” of player seems to be a little bit more mature.  It’s always easy to find people to group with and folks just seem to be willing to help a little more.  The obvious reason for this is there’s not really any PvP in Lord of the Rings (not including the monster play aspect, you can really only play as the “good guys”), but I think there’s another underlying reason for this… one that will probably get me a little bit of heat.

You see, as we all know Lord of the Rings Online is based on the collected works of the great English author and linguist J.R.R. Tolkein.  I feel it’s safe to say that many people who have decided to try out Lord of the Rings Online are familiar with the Lord of the Rings literature, which isn’t remedial reading by any stretch of the imagination.  So it’s not surprising that the world of Middle Earth is heavily populated by well-read people who are mostly interested in playing a positive role in the universe they’re familiar with.  Whereas I get the impression that “literature” to many of the people playing World of Warcraft means lyrics to the latest “Fall Out Boy” CD.

The chaos and anarchy in World of Warcraft can indeed be enjoyable.  However, if you’ve got a limited amount of time in your life to devote to this type of game, I’d guess you’d rather spend it with helpful people as opposed to those who would just as soon see you spend your free time corpse hunting.

If you’re interested in the Player vs. Player aspect of this genre, World of Warcraft wins this category hands-down.  However, if you’re like me and wish to concentrate more on questing and teamwork and less on chasing your corpse, you’d probably be happier with Lord of the Rings Online.