I have been playing WoW since Wrath of the Lich King came out and the only time I have stopped is when I didn’t have anyone to play with. To me, it's a key attribute to any successful MMO. A good storyline makes an MMO great, it keeps you interested, but when all that is done and dusted, end game content comes into play and most of the time it has to be done with other people.

Now yes, WoW has the raid finder and all that jazz but I find when doing it with complete randoms that barely talk, you lose half the fun and it is more of a drag of getting that one achievement, item or whatever you want. With friends though or guild members it seems the fun and enjoyment multiplies.

WoW I believe is great example. Also I think community is probably more important in WoW than any other MMO, based on the fact that I find that the questing falls short compared to some of the newer games like The Secret World. I could play TSW just because of the questing as I find them challenging and I am interested in the storyline itself but community will always play a huge factor when it comes to MMO’S. If your community fails, I find that an MMO will lack big time. Give a game the best graphics, best storyline, best everything! But bad community and that MMO will still fall short in my opinion.

What makes a good community though, I think the one thing I should explain is when I talk about community is people to play with and the fulfillment and enjoyment you get out of it while playing with them. So it could be friends or a random in Russia named Boris who makes you laugh and makes the game fun.

I think why I am writing this article is I find WoWs community poor. I will admit that I am sure many people play WoW and the people they play with are amazing, but introducing such things as dungeon finders, raid finders and even cross realm battlegrounds takes away community within a server which is important. Everything is so spread far apart across many realms you don’t get decent competitiveness in servers and you also take away the effort to make MMO friends since you can just que a dungeon or raid, do your thing and leave. Some people like this, it is convenient and easier sure but I find no MMO should be made too convenient for a player.

An MMO to me, as well as other online games, has to have a challenge and effort involved so that at the end of whatever you do, the fulfillment is great enough to put a smile on your face or just feel proud what you’ve done. Now that is another issue but with all these introductions what happened to finding that dam good player on your realm or friendly player while doing a dungeon that you had to add as a friend since it was fun. In my opinion it’s gone!

In WoW even guilds have taken the “specialness” out of being in a guild. It’s more for the perks than anything else and only when you finish levelling or doing what you need to do, do you find a guild you want to interact then and even then I find it can be challenging since I find the guild finding aspect of Wow is congested.

I could be talking a whole lot of rubbish but hopefully you get my point, community makes an MMO amazing compared to great. It is why we play MMOs! We play because of all the players online and WoW for one has gone from one thing to another to make it as less personal as they can. Personal meaning everyone is a random!

I use WoW as an example since I find it to be the best way to explain my issue here. Anyways, I think I have made my point and hopefully you guys understand where I am coming from and hopefully this may influence atleast one person to get off raid finder and start a PUG. Oh how I miss those!