Corber’s Corner is updated every week to every three weeks.
Hey welcome to the 2nd Editorial for June 17th 2010.
Been a while hasn’t it? I’m Corber and today well I’m going to talk about something very intergral to this game-nay all games which is the community. Obviously this is a very big topic and I’m probably going to see myself making future editorials about this as the community progresses but I’m going to talk about it now and also I’m going to talk about how important community is and use another sandbox MMO as an example: “Roblox”.
The community now in Neverdaunt8Bit is great, spectacular. There have only been a few bad apples here and there but we have an awesome one man developer team (aion), great moderation in the form of Pillow and Weasel and we have also many players with flourishing building talent to bring to this game-GreenWolf is one example as he is a wizard with the maker. In fact, all around small beta communities for games tend to be excellent.
So community right now = 10/10. But when Neverdaunt becomes the new WoW of sandbox games, what will happen to the community?
I’m going to use the community of Roblox as an example of generally the path we should NOT take. Roblox in 05-06 was great. It didn’t have great gameplay, it was just a blockish sandbox starting out and the community was great, the players got along and the admins talked with the players though there were some “bad” noobs. 06-08, it grew brighter as the gameplay got better, more admins and more friendly players.
However, from the end of 08 til now the community slowly but surely disintergrated. Players no longer got along, more “noobish” behaviour, places which took great time and effort were not being cared for but rather places which consisted of a mere “obstacle course” or “tycoon” were played more frequently. The admins of the game also no longer cared for the players but instead cared towards making “hats” for players avatars in an effort to gain more revenue. Roblox has no gotten to a point in which 90% of the community consists of whiny 8-year olds, exploiters who ruin fun, no admin communication whatsoever and an influx of poorly made hats made by the developers for money. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t do that-I mean everyone needs money to survive. But they’ve left behind important game updates and they are yet to fix bugs which allow for exploiting.
Whew that was a long paragraph. But my point is that Roblox started great, now it’s a heaping decrepit mass of “noobish-ness”. So, what’s going to happen with Neverdaunt? Are we going to let it follow suit or are we going to save it and make the community a shining example? I certainly hope so. If there are more players like the ones in our community now, Neverdaunt8Bit won’t only be popular for its gameplay but our community. And providing a great encouraging community is the hardest thing to manage with an MMO, but it certainly is the most rewarding.
That’s all for now I guess, see you guys later!
-Corber
P.S. There are a lot of items in the game right now which can be only bought with tickets (but very well designed I might add) and no I’m not complaining about tickets, because quite frankly aion needs income and revenue to support this game (I bought tickets so should you). But will it rise to a point in which production of ticket items is the main agenda over gameplay?!
P.P.S. I admit, a little conflict between players is normal and in fact is good as it adds some drama to the game to keep it from being monotonous.
