Best gaming community

tuxy

I was talking to some people last night about a new game called Natural Selection 2. For an FPS game it has a high learning curve. The community that built up in beta who are much more skilled than the new players joining and are very open in giving help and advice. These people realise that putting the effort into helping new people will mean a better gaming experience for the whole community in the future.

We were comparing that to COD or CS and how no one would ever do anything but belittle and mock a new player. I don't play league of legends or dota, games that also have a high learning curve but have heard that these communities are very hostile to new players too.

What other online games out there are backed by communities that actively try to make the experience better for other players.

dreamers75

Arma 2 used to be great until Dayz came out, now they are all elitist dickheads on official forums :pac:

Nody

Eve; seriously I'm not joking no that one.

Eve University outstrips any and all other support training for new starters I can think off. It's not limited to a forum but months of ingame training, free ships, ammo, roaming, basics and advanced training etc.

And with the ongoing 0.0 faction wars you got a very engaged community to join with plenty of naming and shaming to get riled up about and politics going back years :P

Azza

Fighting game communities are good for helping each other out and improving ones ability to get good at a game. Particularly the offline communities. They have high learning curves and to get good you require strong opposition.

Online is a different story. Fighting games are not really suited to online play as they are extremely sensitive to lag more so than other genre. They are generally not team based games so everyone is out for themsleves. You get the typical ratio of decent people to asshats.

SeantheMan

tuxy wrote: »

I was talking to some people last night about a new game called Natural Selection 2. For an FPS game it has a high learning curve. The community that built up in beta who are much more skilled than the new players joining and are very open in giving help and advice. These people realise that putting the effort into helping new people will mean a better gaming experience for the whole community in the future.

I was reading an interesting article about NS2 and its community, how they actually helped make the game ,

Keeping development more open than most, however, produced an interesting effect. While some fans picked up their techno-pitchforks and space-torches (burning with that magical spaceship sci-fire that survives in the vacuum of space), others slipped on their programming gloves and got to work. Put simply, dedicated community members thought they could do better than Unknown Worlds. So they did.

“Our spectator system comes from this guy who works at Amazon who decided he wanted to make a better spectator system than we had,” Cleveland grins. “He just did it. We were like, ‘That’s amazing. Can you add some more and can we put it in the game?’ He says, ‘Of course, what do you want?’”

“And then Andreas, this Austrian guy, he was fixing some bugs. He was doing crazy work with features. So we said, ‘Hey, that’s pretty cool. Can we incorporate that in the game?’ All this with a YouTube video. ‘New Gorge ability!’ It was really weird, but kind of cool – like, how did he do that? Now he’s here. Hopefully he’ll be here permanently at some point, but for now he’s just here for two months to help us finish the game. We are paying him. He didn’t graduate from college. He’s never worked on a game. But he’s an amazing gameplay programmer. You could not find this person if you tried. If you looked at his resume you’d never pick him up. But there he is.”

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/11/03/how-natural-selection-2-was-saved-and-made-by-fans/


For Official community Support - in regards to content etc , I'd go with Team Fortress 2 - it gets ridiculous amount of support, care and attention from valve, 5 years on and a F2P game.

For general community - there's no game I can really think of. Running through my head, most games are full of trolls or griefers or elitists.
I think this is the reason, communities/clans are good, so you can find a like-minded group of people, regardless of the game; and enjoy it with them

deathrider

Azza wrote: »

Fighting game communities are good for helping each other out and improving ones ability to get good at a game. Particularly the offline communities. They have high learning curves and to get good you require strong opposition.

Online is a different story. Fighting games are not really suited to online play as they are extremely sensitive to lag more so than other genre. They are generally not team based games so everyone is out for themsleves. You get the typical ratio of decent people to asshats.

I was just about to say the same thing myself. I've been playing pretty hard over the last year, and my game has really improved because of it. However, it's mostly because the lads are really decent, and are alway more than happy to help me out and give me advice along the way. It makes me a better player, and then they have to continue to get better too, so everyone's happy.

Magill

The cs community is kinda like the CoD of PC, at least in the competitive scene... lots of arseholes(Also lots of sound people too). Public games can be very mixed tho, some of the most fun ive ever had in gaming was in community clan servers on CS(Back when i was a noob), everyone is nice to each other etc... CoD on console also has some great communities out there, such as the AK47 clan, lots of great lads in it.. always a laugh playing with them.

Other than that, TF2 has a great community.. i've rarely heard/seen anyone being elitist when i've played it.

WoW is also kind of like CS, lots of arseholes but quite a lot of really great people and some awesome guilds.

LoL/DotA are probably the most cretin filled games i've ever played tho.

I think you really just have to ignore the arseholes sometimes and eventually you'll find some great people to play with in almost any game tho.

Big Knox

Magill wrote: »

The cs community is kinda like the CoD of PC, at least in the competitive scene... lots of arseholes(Also lots of sound people too). Public games can be very mixed tho, some of the most fun ive ever had in gaming was in community clan servers on CS(Back when i was a noob), everyone is nice to each other etc... CoD on console also has some great communities out there, such as the AK47 clan, lots of great lads in it.. always a laugh playing with them.

Other than that, TF2 has a great community.. i've rarely heard/seen anyone being elitist when i've played it.

WoW is also kind of like CS, lots of arseholes but quite a lot of really great people and some awesome guilds.

LoL/DotA are probably the most cretin filled games i've ever played tho.

I think you really just have to ignore the arseholes sometimes and eventually you'll find some great people to play with in almost any game tho.

Pretty much all of this.

CS, CoD, WoW, LoL, HoN, Dota all for the most past have terrible communities, full of knobheads.

Basically games that have a low level entry point to be part of the competitive scene!

ShadowHearth

Nody wrote: »

Eve; seriously I'm not joking no that one.

Eve University outstrips any and all other support training for new starters I can think off. It's not limited to a forum but months of ingame training, free ships, ammo, roaming, basics and advanced training etc.

And with the ongoing 0.0 faction wars you got a very engaged community to join with plenty of naming and shaming to get riled up about and politics going back years :P

I will second that.

I play eve more then a month and in game community is the best gaming community I ever seen in any game or mmorpg. You can just type in in any local chat and 99% of the time you will get proper answer, witouth any dick head smart asses. That 1% in my experience are Russian players so far. I can speak Russian so I know what they saying and they give a lot of crap to other players and hide behind language barrier.
Forums of eve are hit and miss. They are very friendly and good in new player section ( even some fella from uk added me as a contact and giving me mountains of advices and info ), but the rest of the forum is a troll and moaner army at its worse. Some moaning are just idiotic even in my noob eyes.

So yeah, you want mature and great community, go to eve online game, but not forums.

KilOit

I liked the vanilla WoW community, i was always super nice to other players and no problem helping them out. Best community i was part of was the Planetside 1 community, was quite small but very close and helpful. By far the worst community i have come across is the League Of Legends community, absolute scum, think youtube comments and nasty morbid sites and you got a taste of the vile community of Lol. I'm trying to get learn a little of Dota2 at the minute but pretty terrified doing public games.

ShadowHearth

KilOit wrote: »

I liked the vanilla WoW community, i was always super nice to other players and no problem helping them out. Best community i was part of was the Planetside 1 community, was quite small but very close and helpful. By far the worst community i have come across is the League Of Legends community, absolute scum, think youtube comments and nasty morbid sites and you got a taste of the vile community of Lol. I'm trying to get learn a little of Dota2 at the minute but pretty terrified doing public games.

All moba games have rubbish communities.

KilOit

ShadowHearth wrote: »

All moba games have rubbish communities.

Figured. guess because no other game type can have such a devastating outcome on your team if you suck.

Gummy Panda

In fairness to wow, it depends on server. Worst I experienced was LoL

ShadowHearth

KilOit wrote: »

Figured. guess because no other game type can have such a devastating outcome on your team if you suck.

Moba is a game where one person can completely **** up the 40min match, which you were winning. Nerd rage is a very comman thing, i wont hide it, a had few games, where all i wanted to do is take particular person and wipe the toilets with his face at the busiest pub on Paddies Day...

and then you get elitist jerks Moba players. those are the breed, which should be shot in day light. very unpleasent individuals. HON is infested by this kind.

tuxy

Each team in natural selection has a commander. If he does not play well your team is ****ed. I play public servers so anyone can end up as commander. Very little rage going on and most people making an effort to do their best even if they don't fully understand the game.

JTER

Ryzom ( formerly Saga of Ryzom) , it has a small but very helpful and friendly community. It is surprisingly still going but I would argue it is one of the most original MMO's out there. intelligent crafting and foraging systems to master , no classes and decent graphics for a game released over 7 years ago.

A very popular guild is called Fluffy Bunnies, need I say more. Avg age group is prob 30+ if not higher and most people are there for the PvE environment with sporadic pvp between factions fighting for material producing outposts.

TheDoc

LoL is most probably the worst I've played, and experienced.

CS nationally was also pretty terrible with alot of inflated egos, and it wasn't much better on the professional level either.

WoW is mostly fine. I've a nice guild and a good core of friends, and rarely run into any drama outside of LFR, so I'm happy enough with that. Bar the obvious people ganking lower levels but what can you do

WC3 was probably the best community I was apart of, along with DayofDefeat. WC3 had a serious amount of nice people in random ladder games and that mostly transcended into top level play too with most of the players being down to earth, humble and friendly which was in stark contrast to the CS scene at the time.

DayofDefeat was also pretty great considering it required so much teamwork at times.

CoD probably picks the bunch for me though, the Xbox experience was terrible and I would regularly play with no sound to just avoid hearing whingy american kids

Magill

TheDoc wrote: »

LoL is most probably the worst I've played, and experienced.

CS nationally was also pretty terrible with alot of inflated egos, and it wasn't much better on the professional level either.

WoW is mostly fine. I've a nice guild and a good core of friends, and rarely run into any drama outside of LFR, so I'm happy enough with that. Bar the obvious people ganking lower levels but what can you do

WC3 was probably the best community I was apart of, along with DayofDefeat. WC3 had a serious amount of nice people in random ladder games and that mostly transcended into top level play too with most of the players being down to earth, humble and friendly which was in stark contrast to the CS scene at the time.

DayofDefeat was also pretty great considering it required so much teamwork at times.

CoD probably picks the bunch for me though, the Xbox experience was terrible and I would regularly play with no sound to just avoid hearing whingy american kids

You can mute people with just one click you know or just turn down the ingame voice.

Reekwind

The Paradox forums are, as you'd expect, quite civilised and helpful

EoghanIRL

Call of duty , sure you can't beat immature kids.

Burgo

TheDoc wrote: »

DayofDefeat was also pretty great considering it required so much teamwork at times.

Dunno about that, the competitive scene was pretty similar to the cs scene, lots of egos, but still was playing it for the bones of a decade (god I feel old) so it wasn't all bad!

TheDoc

Burgo wrote: »

Dunno about that, the competitive scene was pretty similar to the cs scene, lots of egos, but still was playing it for the bones of a decade (god I feel old) so it wasn't all bad!

The mainstream leagues and the UK scene I was involved in were mostly amicable.

Burgo

TheDoc wrote: »

The mainstream leagues and the UK scene I was involved in were mostly amicable.

Missed out on all the e-drama fun at zeropoint then

docmol

There still is a small DODS community out there. I'm in one and a more relaxed and friendly bunch of guys/gals you will never meet. Most of the eliteists are playing newer games, which suits me fine, and the people playing it now want to play it. Still the occasional ass though...
The skill level of the game does make a difference as well. It's harder to shoot a rifle well then to spam bullets from an auto. takes a while to learn.
The worst I've played on is CSS. Love the game, some really nice people playing it. The amount of moaners and fools means I only ever play on private servers.
If anyone wants to try DODS or maybe re-live the good old days PM me and I'll hook you up.

Doctor DooM

Another vote for the offline fighting game communities.

Internationally too. I've had a chat with Ryan Hart and with Tokido, two huge names in the scene.

I've gotten help from other people who play my character in Colombia, and I've helped Americans.

Local is great fun too. I've learned more from people like Azza above than I ever would have just playing online.

It's just a pity that a lot of resources for FGs are either incomplete or filled with inaccuracies: You have to spend time and effort finding the good stuff.

super_furry

WoW was really good during Vanilla and Burning Crusade - loved the unofficial PvP ceasefires in Outland when everyone was levelling. However stuff like random group finder and now even random raid finder fragmented server communities and there's a lot more people just soloing their way through stuff.

Not The Real Scarecrow

Nody wrote: »

Eve; seriously I'm not joking no that one.

Eve University outstrips any and all other support training for new starters I can think off. It's not limited to a forum but months of ingame training, free ships, ammo, roaming, basics and advanced training etc.

And with the ongoing 0.0 faction wars you got a very engaged community to join with plenty of naming and shaming to get riled up about and politics going back years :P

On the back of this I decided to give Eve a go and have to say the comment is spot on. Can not get over how polite and patient the community is with new players. Started about a week ago,no communication with any one for a day or so, then out of the blue some guy private chats me, asking me do I need a hand with anything. I didn't need any help as I think the tutorial is fairly good(long) and covers things pretty well, but can see how some people have troubles with it. The guy stuck around for about an hour giving me tips and advice about what to do and sites to visit for info. Was really surprised, as in other games you normally only get that kind of greeting from a stranger if they think they can get you in a guild, rob money or groom you.

Looking in the rookie chat channel ,I can't believe the patience of some people with rookies struggling with the very basics.Some people come across as if its their 1st time even seeing a computer, but people stick with them and help them as best they can.

Dcully

The iracing community is without a doubt the most helpful and friendliest ive experienced.
Although i dont play anymore ive met some great people in iracing,even got to race with and chat to Dale Earnhardt jr and John Henry amongst others.
I also find the Minecraft community to be decent too.
Pretty much most other genres and their respective games i find to have plenty of dickheads.
Having said that once you find good servers for your fps games of choice you will see how the fps community can in the right environment be pretty good.
Someone mentioned DODS above,easily the best fps community out there.