
We are Nostalrius, a World of Warcraft fan-made game server. AMA - sergiotapia
https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/4droz4/we_are_nostalrius_a_world_of_warcraft_fanmade/
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Shenglong
Not entirely the same thing, but somewhat related: I used to run the largest
Ragnarok Online private server for its time, and this AMA is really nostalgic.
Well, except how great their community seems to be.

All throughout running a server, I asked myself whether the community was
unbecoming (not just towards us, but towards each other), or whether we (and
the servers before us) were just doing a terrible job at fostering a positive
environment. A few years after we shut down our server, I heard a rather
famous League of Legends player had started a private RO server, and a few
months later, heard that he flipped out and told the community to f--- off,
shutting the server down.

It's hard for many people to imagine a community more "toxic" than in League,
so I had just figured, perhaps the failure wasn't our fault. Reading the
comments in this AMA really makes me think though, that there was actually a
solution, and we had just failed in community management.

My words of wisdom here: lots of people focus on product development, but the
community is often just as, if not more important; don't neglect it.

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clevernickname
I played on Nostalrius for a bit. The sense I got was that the community was
mostly populated by older people (by internet gaming community standards, at
least) who quit WoW years ago and wanted to relive the experience. So the
baseline of maturity was a bit higher than average, and people got along well.
On top of that, while there were various 4chan/reddit/insert-notorious-
community-here guilds, they mostly kept to themselves outside of world PvP.

I played a tiny bit of RO back in the day, and instead got the impression that
the community was mostly populated by teenaged anime fans, so of course the
baseline for maturity was lower. And with the way the web was so much more
fragmented back then, most of the kinds of people that today would make a
thread in a notorious community saying "hey there's a new private server
launching, anyone wanna start a guild?" would instead have to be obnoxious in
the in-game chat until they found like-minded people.

I wouldn't beat yourself up too much wondering about how you could have done
things differently, because at the end of the day the intrinsic appeal of
certain games to certain demographics has by far the greatest effect on what
kind of community will develop around it, and if you're making a direct clone
of an existing game, your hands are obviously tied. In all likelihood, it was
out of your control from the moment you turned the server on.

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giancarlostoro
I loved Blizzard when I was a kid, playing Starcraft for hours on end till my
parents told me to go to bed. Then I started playing Wacraft 3 oh boy was I
addicted. Sadly the Warcraft 3 phase died for me with Warcraft 3. World of
Warcraft just didn't cut it for me, it really wasn't the same type of game and
I couldn't see the creativity of players with custom maps anymore. I loved the
maps of Warcraft 3 like "Life of a Peasant" and on Starcraft I loved "Evolves"
and similar maps. I bought Starcraft 2 but I never really got back into it,
not yet anyway. I'm currently on Linux so it'll be complicated for me to play
any Blizzard games anytime soon.

~~~
tcdent
I'm no expert, but it's interesting enough to note that League of Legends was
born out of a Warcraft 3 map/mod.

Had Blizzard stifled their freedom to create (they used to provide a map
editor with earlier games), the worlds most popular video game may not exist.

~~~
giancarlostoro
There's also DOTA 2 which was a mod of Warcraft 3 as well. Valve decided to
make a sequel to it, I think they hired the guy who created the mod if I
remember correctly. They did similar with some other games, I guess since a
number of Valve's own games were made out of mods for their own games.

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sluggg
Dota 2 was not a mod, Dota was the mod. And Blizzard did not hire the guy that
created the mod. Valve hired Icefrog who maintained the mod after the original
creator(s) left to go create LoL/Riot. Icefrog went on to create Dota 2 at
Valve, while the actual creators of the moba genre (the original Dota mod)
created LoL. Blizzard not hiring either the creators or the maintainer
(Icefrog) of the Dota mod has to be one of their biggest mistakes imo.

~~~
kazagistar
There was a Mona in Starcraft too. Dota was just the game that refined the
concept enough for it to become mainstream.

