Do you care what other players are doing on your server?
Part of the appeal of MMOs is the whole massively multiplayer setup. Even when you are playing solo, you know there are many others online. You run past toons who are actually real people and not codebotted NPCs. You hear them chattering and arguing on world channels. Maybe you are one of the tiny minority who reads your official realm bboards to get the lowdown on the latest ninja looting scandals, or to see which raid guild is recruiting?
Maybe you get to recognise some names, some guilds, some server personalities. Is there that one guy who always organises the Wintergrasp raids, or fusses at people for not roleplaying in the trade channel (news flash: On RP servers, you do not have to RP in the trade channel!)?
Even if you never group, never utter a word on a chat channel, and never talk to anyone, the gameworld around you feels alive with real player activity. You would notice if you were on a silent game or server. You’d wonder who sucked all the life out of the world.
I think it is a huge boost to immersion in game if players have a way to keep up with the gossip, guild recruitment/ drama, raid achievements, world PvP, and other player initiated events on their server. Even if you just watch passively, it is immersive to feel the gameworld changing.
There are three sides to server news. Gathering news, reporting news, and broadcasting/ publishing the news.
Server news and RL news
It is very immersive to feel that you can do something that affects the gameworld and that other players will react to it. Conversely, most people are not all that interested in what others are doing unless it affects them personally.
We see this with the real life news also. We read the news, focus on any stories concerned with our personal interests or hobbies, gawp at anything that affects people we know, glance over news in our locale, ponder wider ranging political/ financial stories because they will also affect our lives. Anything else … is pure entertainment, only vaguely more real than fiction.
So to get people to be interested in what others are doing, the ‘news’ either needs to match one of their interests or affect them directly.
Matching Interests
Raiders in hardcore guilds are fascinated by guild rankings, news about server first kills, lists of who killed which boss the fastest, and other sports-style statistics.
PvP junkies might like to know the current state of any player-ownable areas (eg. keeps in Warhammer), numbers of kills, writeups of any particularly exciting battles, and news about any PvP events that are being planned by their faction.
Server gossips want to know all about the guild drama. Which guild split up? Which guild just started? Who left who for who? And was there any cybering involved? What’s the big scandal of the week?
Regular players want to know about things that impact them directly. If they are looking for a guild, they want to know which guilds are recruiting. If there is an in-game public event coming up, either programmed or player organised, they want to know when and where it is (and why they ought to go).
Where current games fall short
Just going through the list above, it’s easy to see how few MMOs really provide good channels for this information in game. And yet, these represent a lot of the ways in which players can impact and interact with each other.
They could certainly start by publishing lists. And some games do post lists of top guilds, top PvP kills, and so on. But that in itself is interesting but not immersive. Posting the lists in game, attaching them to a town cryer, letting interested players subscribe to the in game ‘PvP Newsletter’ — that would be more immersive.
A lot of the time players will happily take up the job of being in game journalists, but they need the tools to help them gather information. It’s phenomenally difficult to find out about things that happened when you weren’t online unless you are very well connected or have a super information gathering network.
And yet, finding out about things that happened when they weren’t online is one of the lures that could make a game (and in particular, a social game) very compelling to people.
What do we usually get in game? A guild message of the day, restricted to a couple of sentences. And chat channels which wipe when we log off.
Guild Recruiting
Finding a guild that matches your interests and playstyle is the single biggest random factor in whether many people decide to stick with a game. Given that, it’s plain crazy to me that so many games have such dreadful channels for guild recruitment.
If there was one single thing a developer could do to increase player retention, it’s making it easier for people to find guilds and make it easier for guilds to find people.
What do people do now? External websites, spamming global channels to recruit, hope to randomly bump into nice people while wandering around, wait for players to come to you?
Better in game tools for guild advertising and recruiting could help hugely. Even if it’s just a searchable list with a few sentences of description and a contact for each guild, it’s better than nothing.
In Game Gossip?
I’ve never really seen a gossip mechanic in game, but imagine if every player had a gossip rating. And they could add gossip messages to the network (number depending on rating) — maybe short twitter style messages that would time out after a few days, based on gossip rating. And then others could vote the gossip up or down depending on whether they agreed with it.
Sure, it could lead to social cliques. But servers have those anyway. What it might do is create a very dynamic, very exciting gossip mechanic that would have people excited to log on to see what happened since they were last online.
And if players did want to take on a gossip columnist role, they’d have the information they needed to do it.
And if there was demand for a more newsy channel, why not encourage players to gather news from their server? It might require a specialised mailbox (maybe people can send anonymous stories to the editor). Might need some thought on how best to publish an in game newsletter — would regular mail be too spammy? But if players have the tools, someone will take up the challenge.
To my mind, the key to keeping players interested in what others are doing is to make it entertaining, and to make it all part of the game.
Welcome to Spinksville! 
Personally, I get my server news from people in guild who care about such things. For more world-wide stuff, I go for WoW Insider, MMO Champion, and blogs (BLOGS!).
You read blogs(!?) Revolutionary heresy!!
I know, right?
I know this sounds really strange, but I actually pop into the offical Blizzard realm forums now and then. There you find the realm runs that one of our top guilds arranges every week (yay for them! I got my MC achievement thanks to them). And there you can see what’s going on with the guilds. I got inspiration to write a post the other week when our Realm Clown decided to quit. I wouldn’t have known without the realm forum.
I’m not sure if a blog with a “gossip oriented” journalistc touch would gain a huge audience. Probably it would, if it was good. But it would definitely require quite a lot of work to run it. It requires a huge friends list, connections in all the top guilds and loads of time and passion. I’m definitely not up for it.
I think the realm forums really aren’t bad! I know on AD, guilds do use them to recruit. But I’ve no idea how many players from the realm read them, guessing not that many.
What I usually do is ask around, but that only works because my guild is very old and loads of ex-guildies are now scattered around lots of different guilds. It really would be a lot of work … and that’s just one server.
I just sometimes feel that server communities are so weak in WoW, it’s so easy never to talk to anyone outside your raid group. And I wonder if it’s because we never have to know or care what anyone else is doing.
I definitely agree that devs need to do more to help guild matchmaking, but the process is more complicated than slapping a better UI on it. Just about every guild out there, other than the elite guilds of uberachievers who pride themselves on being asses, says that they are mature players who don’t take the game too seriously and believe they will be able to complete endgame content. The number who will actually deliver on all of the above is not going to be nearly as large.
You’re right, of course. But even if you just could filter out the guilds who raided on a suitable schedule or who focussed on RP/PvP/some non-raiding interest then it might be a good start.
I can never get over how many people play WoW, and how relatively hard it is to find eg. a guild who doesn’t raid on Thursdays.
“Do you care what other players are doing on your server?”
I used to. Sadly, in the last few years/games I just haven’t felt that most of the servers I played on had any kind of unique identity — just more of the same asshats complaining endlessly about whatever irrelevant pseudo-nerf is the whine-of-the-day.
Oh dear, I didn’t mean to let my crushing cynicism about “the masses” shine through so loudly. 😐 I’m really mostly an idealistic and optimistic person, but these days the signal:noise ratio on most mass-sized community sites (forums especially) just tires me out.
It’s saddening, now that you make me think about it, to see how my gaming community “feel” has shrunk from an entire server (as it used to be in AC and SWG) to maybe a few score friends, acquaintances and guildies.
I’m going to go off and a) juggle some kittens while shouting BAH HUMBUG and b) sniffle quietly in a corner at the depressitude of MMO-life. 😉
I know what you mean. When I played DaoC, Prydwen/ Alb did have an identity – it might not always have been brilliant but it was ours. The hardcore guilds were OUR hardcore guilds. I knew all the people who led big public raids (because I was one of them) and every single one was great about offering raid leading advice if we needed it.
I don’t think it’s inevitable that we lose server community but I can see that on more recent games, there are fewer and fewer reasons to mix outside your circle of friends. And I feel it’s kind of losing some of the whole massive feel … for me at least.
I get my WAR news from just keeping my eyes and ears open when playing the game, reading WHA forums, or browsing through blogs. Oddly, I don’t check the Herald more than once a week. WAR is a very political game, so I have to keep track of what guild is active, what they are doing, what their goals are, etc.
On the subject of guilds, one thing that has always irked me is finding a guild in a MMORPG which is a “good fit.” It’s been my experience that the guilds that recruit the most heavily are the ones that I want to avoid. And I’m not even going to comment about the ones that spam invites to everyone in the zone without saying a word to them. Word of mouth seems to be the only reliable source of information about guilds. That makes sifting through all of the guilds on a server rather tedious.
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