It has been a very long journey for myself with regards to mmo games. ultima online, to eq, daoc, anarchy online, sw galaxies, to the games of today.
My passion for these games was surreal, it was pleasure, entertainment, friendships with people from different parts of the world that when you stop to think would not be possible to make those friends in any other way at the time.
My honest true love of mmo games was dark age of camelot, not to take anything away from the other ones i played. in fact i learned some good from each of them. Yes they were bugged at times, yes they were not graphicaly as the monster games there are today, but the one thing that i think all of us who were there can certainly agree on is that we contributed to the creation of a culture that funny as it seems barely exists anymore in mmo's.
The reason i say that that culture not really exists any longer is because of the generation change from what was and now what is. The reason i loved Dark age of camelot were many but one major was when they had created the co-op server of gaheris, it all came together, we as players came together, it didnt matter if you were guilded, un-guilded, new or old to the game, didnt matter what race you were, when we hosted raids they were come one come all, and it was as if you were with your online family of friends. When you were tired of the grind, or bored of going into darkenss falls, you would go to your home and that would bring you a certain pleasure, carrying that trophy you earned, and created in your backpack wanting to place it above your fire place. Watching and talking to your neighbors who are decorating their garden with pumpkins.
it was home, something you had worked for and earned in a virtual sense.

Ever since i left dark age of camelot, i have traveled far and wide, to eq2, Wow, Lord of the rings. I have and am having some fun, but, somehow something is missing. I feel as if from the time i left daoc... i feel like, a refugee, who fled from home, and made a new life in a new place, however, All the time when i am doing something in game, or watching how todays players play their character. or you read the spam of rants in general chat or trade channels. I stop and think to myself, Thoughts of what was and what is.
I wish i was back home again.
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Well have started with dwango and text based muds I remember some of the early things in mmo that just would not sell today, they were broken buggy as all, and blast to play. I think mostly because those of us who started with games like eq ac the realms and UO to a lesser degree treated the game as if we were interacting with real people, now if you play a fps on the sofa with a buddy your socializing even if it is only one other person if you play with that same bud over the net you not dealing with real people. My bud was talking to me because he wanted to do something today I figured that I need to hang out with people as well as my buds who have moved to different states just because you have to go where the work is, but clearly held the fact that I had something planned if it had been a date with a girl he would have totally understood but because I made the mistake of saying I was raiding with my guild, suddenly I'm anti-social because I want to hang out with 12 people through the game despite we are talking about life and other stuff while we take breaks going through it. What I have seen as this is sad is that people depending on the game and the server took responsibility for their actions and acted as if they were still dealing with people and then slowly as time went on people seemed to realized that nothing was making them act like decent people and two groups emerged those who wanted to act out every petty twisted thing because they could and those who wanted something more a place where you could meet strangers and hang out without the bias and stereotypes hanging over your head. I'm still not sure both don't have valid places in games if kept separate only you want to hangout with your friends you already know forcing both mentalities together which causes problems and seems to be reason so many games try to please to many people and succeed in pleasing none. Then again I have played every major mmo and quite a few smaller ones and few that never made it. It is funny it is not PVE vs PVP it is usually twink vs those who want to earn every thing, min/maxers vs roleplayers, and griefers vs everyone else, and to a certain extent we all have a degree of both in us it is just the extreme ones that stand out as problems. How this all relates to the communities is that people get mocked for taking the game and their chars seriously so they distance themselves the fact they are dealing with real people behind all those avatars and thus their is no need for community with npcs since that is how the current generation is seeing all the other people online why else would the expression be go out and hang out with real people? or variations of that when all the players are people are they not? If everyone treated all the other players as "real people" you would see people treat each other better online since you only de-humanize something you want to attack and demean, which is what the very small group of griefers who seem to have a larger voice than their real number would account for. Yet if you look at the games where griefers have little chance like lotro and warhammer you find communities of people hanging out that view thier guilds as second families and know about the good and bad of what is going on in their lives. The one thing about guilds is that people move on games get boring after a while and the group in one game may not move to the new game they may have different views of what they want from the next game. So while I'll hang out with my buds from the blood ravens on lotro landroval any time I did not move with the few to same sever on war because I wanted a more active server where I joined a guild made some new friends but definitely not a second home yet maybe in time but it takes certain people to bring together strangers to something more than a herd of people, so maybe all the good GM who give a (chose your word here), about people simply are getting burned out or just getting old because part of who they are is because of how they were taught when they grew up. I know my views have more to do with the fact I traveled a lot growing up I had seen twenty five stated by the time I was ten, the teachers who cared when I was growing up and last the views of authors who wrote the books I read growing up shaped my views those are things most people growing up now don't have they have toons that have no morals they have computers that think for them. My parents growing up had an expression that never made any sense to me when I was little, TV rots your brain. I understand it is that most people when the TV is on go into auto pilot and don't think when it is on they just take the info they are given as fact instead of questioning what they are seeing. The funny thing is I love shows like ren and stumpy it is mindless and funny it is just when that is how you see the world that you stop acting like a human and may as well just be a chimp.

Oh and I'm not a GM, I did that once and I'm much better being able to help people when I want to and ignoring them the rest of the time :) Which is why I usually end up an officer in every guild, well that and the fact I usually understand the mechanics better than most people because I ask why but they look to someone else for that quality that makes them a good GM some one who cares about his/her people, and sees them as their responsibility or something, don't know I can recognize the type and when someone just doesn't have it. Though I have been in a few guilds that worked because of the people even when you had a GM who didn't have that something but they because something else once you got to many people who just wanted to belong or access to what ever thing the guild had access to because they acted together instead of against each other. Black Death was like that they started as a bunch of friends and some where along the way those of us who where there to have a good time faded away and I took a six month leave from wow because I was bored with it and when I came back it was like a totally different guild hell I remember people thinking I was someones alt and the mindset was very different. I'm not sure how much of that is because that was the only way to get certain items that blizzard made necessary or because the person setting the mood and tone of the guild was missing. The people I remembered setting it were no longer playing.