General

[quote=ashleyattacked]And any of that has [I]what[/I] to do with name dropping Dartmouth?

Just giving you a hard time, lol. Grats on having the self control and responsibility it takes to get into an Ivy League school =)
I always liked what I've heard about Dartmouth and prolly would've planned to apply if I didn't decide to go full time into a professional Ballet program. That kinda obligates me till I'm 21ish so formal college will have to wait till then and longer if I really pursue it as a career. I wish I could on so many levels, tho.

Btw, what I'm saying below and in the rest of this response is really boring and dense. You asked for personal stories so I figured it'd be as good a time as any to share some thots I'd had before. Otherwise just pretend I said nothing and don't waste your time =)

Back to what you're saying...I've actually given this some thought in the past. Players like myself and the people I've been hanging around with since the game started inevitably fall into the old trappings of being nostalgic and wishing things were the way they 'were way back when'...etc. Falling for such a trite and stunted emotion kinda annoyed me so I actually gave it some thought and came to some conclusions that I think are relevant to your question.

First off, I realize I could easily be falling guilty once again of nostalgia and just justifying my weakness for it with biased ideas dressed up as cultivated ideas...so yeah.
Anyways. A good place to start here is with my own mistakes. Way back then when I was a heck of a lot younger...I was a member of a guild in Scania that kind of defined itself through its relatively immature actions. Namely we would make a game of holding grudges and ksing anyone and everyone we could for whatever reason. I actually jokingly wrote down a rule in the guild bbs once that ksing was against the rules - unless you came up with a creative lie to be doing it. In that case, so long as you managed to handle yourself and the fall out you inevitably found yourself under...more power to you. I've also noted on a bunch of occasions that the vast majority of my buddylist was comprised of people I met when I would go on their map and randomly ks them on my own. Yeah I was young and yeah what I was doing was not only immature but mean - and thus the age factor isn't really relevant in my mind since I knew better at the time.

I kinda wondered tho...why I was doing all that and why I was enjoying it so much. It didn't fit in with my understanding of myself or my behaviour at all. However, in thinking about it a lot - the reason I got seduced into acting like that was because of the community that that guild provided me. We were basically like a gang, we used thug tactics and the fact that we were 'wrong' was dismissed out of hand by equivocating our actions as being balanced by the lengths we would 'selflessly' go to defend each other, how tight knit we were, etc. Of course that's just silly and it in no way elevated our behaviour above the moral imperative we all knew we were just making a joke of. But on the other hand, most of us were not like this in any other facet of our lives. How we managed to become capable of those actions, then, was something I've really thought about a lot. imo, it was enabled first by taking the usual steps as friends. Somehow we truly did become significantly more tightly knit than many of the other cliques around Scania. I don't know what the difference between us and the others was, how we became so utterly uniform and organized/dedicated to each other, etc. But we were and the more it happened the more it propagated itself. As that happened it began to evolve within the greater context of Scania in 2006-2008. It was a seriously chaotic period in Maple and the fights we fought, both as victims and as friends sticking up for each other, somehow launched us into a larger context beyond just 'friends.' In essence the dynamic shifted from friend - friend to, friends - not friends and finally, us vs them.

I say all that because, looking back on it, the prime mover in how we viewed ourselves and our relation to the 'others', that essence that somehow took our individual pieces and combined them into a whole that was greater than the combined sums of our individuals parts - is that we became aware of ourselves in a community. Were it not for that sense of community (and I don't just mean community as in our friendships, I mean it as in our friendships as well their relevance and place within Scania as a whole) we never would have reched the ends we reached, much less ever become capable of what we did (literally spending the better part of a year making a systematic production of ksing in unison and with immense degrees of organization - such that, working with time zones in mind, we could maintain a constant 'ks war' for days on end with effectively no down time.)

In so far as community is concerned, I come back to my original digression...that of nostalgia and whether or not I was simply falling weak to it or if there was something larger going on as well. This brings me to what finally brought our group apart. Specifically, what happened is somewhat complex and occured over time at varying degrees. The first event was Nexon introducing 'instanced' dungeons. What made these relevant to us had nothing to do with preventing us from ksing or keeping us in check - while, in effect, that is what happened, and each change Nexon introduced went a step further in that same line of progression - crediting it like that, in those words, is missing the point, especially as it relates to the role of 'community', etc. It's not that Nexon made us unable to ks...you have to also account for the role Ksing had in the first place. This wasn't just mindless bullying, etc. These things we, and others to a lesser degree and for their own ends as well, were doing filled the need for a sense of control and authority in game. We primarily focused on punishing people who had done severe wrongs, either to us, our friends or just stuff severe enough to highlight them individually. Essentially each consecutive step that eventually lead to breaking our unit apart amounted, further, to Nexon taking, piece by piece, any ability the community had to run itself and punish those who ran afoul of the 'community status quo' or who broke key tenants everyone agreed were universally relevant, such as not scamming and not hacking each other / stealing gear that wasn't ours.

In the end, when people who are from that period of time in the game, especially from Scania, talk about missing things how they were before...what they're missing is often deeper than pure nostalgia, it's that we're missing that sense of community we had back then. Back then we policed ourselves. We held people accountable for the wrongs they did. We saw that Nexon was incompetent and rather than quitting the game - we came closer together by working together with each other, to varying degrees, from small personal feuds - to friendship based feuds, all the way up to systematically destroying the experience for people who transgressed our idea of order badly enough to warrant it. imo, the way we made the leap from who we were as individuals to who we were as a guild/unit was the necessary deference from personal gain to the pride of feeling that we were, on some level, doing something greater than ourselves. That something, in my opinion, being only attributable the essence that makes and defines a community.

Sorry for the long rant, you said a few things that made me think of the relevance some ideas I had considered before had to your question within the context of a community...like you were asking. Like I said...many of us from that time period don't so much miss the time period out of a sense of nostalgia or longing for our 'youth'...we miss the sense of community we all had with each other especially as it was expressed both by our ability to police ourselves to the end that we protected ourselves by making it harder to get away with certain 'crimes'. That sense of empowerment and how it heightened our relative bonds with each other, particularly by forcing some degree of unity, even if only by obligating us to a greater social construct outside of and beyond our own experience...that's the thing a lot of us are really missing about the Maple we have today.

TL : DR --> don't bother.[/quote]

You lost me at the 4th paragraph. :S

[quote=buccortoo]bruh[/quote]

ya feel me

this has nothing to do whether or not you enjoy/like the ms community. you guys overthinking it

In a literal sense- yeah, MS is a community. All MMORPGs, online forums, social networking platforms are - they bring people together under a common interest, that fits the M. Webster bill perfectly.

The prompt isn't asking for an ideal or cohesive community, or anything positive for that matter. It's open-ended to the extent that you can easily make convincing case that a group of inc]estuous cannibals constitutes a community. Hackers, scammers, ksers, etc. - none of these elements are sufficient in themselves to substantiate a case otherwise.

@xstarmage
This is an interesting topic that definitely has the potential to evolve into a thought-provoking sociology thesis. You'll need to set strict boundaries though, before launching into your actual argument. See below.

1) Define community. There is no correct answer here. Just keep in mind that the rest of your paper hinges upon this opening discussion. You'll want to highlight certain examples- historical, anecdotal, statistical, etc. to really flesh out your stance.
2) Discuss online community A. Give a brief overview, then discuss how it conforms (or does not conform) to your definition of a community.
3) Discuss online community B. Again, give a general overview, then offer analysis parallel to what you produced for community A.
4) Discuss online community C. Offer a general overview, THEN play devil's advocate and discuss how someone could potentially argue for the opposite side. Finish off this third body paragraph by discussing how the opposing view would not hold, and how your definition ultimately prevails.
5) Conclude by briefly recapping on online communities A, B, C, and why these three instances all serve to prove your position. Then cap off by connecting this to the larger picture: What implications does this have on our day to day lives? Do you see this concept evolving a decade down the line? 2 decades? a century?

Good luck and have fun

My best experience with maplestory was the the time I played between 3 to 5 and a half years ago (pre-bb, and a bit after). The reason being I actually had more than 2 buddies that logged on...
I started a bit after Gali was released, and it was full of Arans. I got an explorer warrior to lv 20something, then switched over to a thief. Met some people that are still with me today across many other games and social networks. I also met my boyfriend here, and we have been together for over 5 years now (I'm a girl irl, I like making both male and female characters on here though). He takes care of his mother while she recovers from a stroke in another state right now, so we keep in touch through skype, phone, games, packages with mail and presents, etc. His family has become sort of my family too.
I got to take part in 3 or 4 different guilds during that time, and made a little network of buddies. There was drama here and there, but looking back none of that mattered much in the end. I still talk to some of my old guidlies on facebook and skype.

I left Maplestory for a while, after several of my friends left. Someone lead me to a close-knit minecraft community, and I became very involved over there for the following 3 years, serving over 2 of those years as an admin. I left that community a few months ago, after the owner had done me, several of my friends, and fellow staff members very wrong. Now I'm working on my own little server, with support from friends.

I went back to Maplestory off and on over the past couple years. I've managed to stay semi-active the past few months. Today, I'm just happy to be back in an active guild in Grazed. My buddylist is full of ghosts.

[quote=torque]^basil is not a good place to get philosophical and wordy[/quote]

If I cared...maybe not. But I don't care. The guy asked for personal stories about Maplestory within the context of its community or lackthereof...so I took the time to help him out.

[quote=ashleyattacked]And any of that has [I]what[/I] to do with name dropping Dartmouth?

Just giving you a hard time, lol. Grats on having the self control and responsibility it takes to get into an Ivy League school =)
I always liked what I've heard about Dartmouth and prolly would've planned to apply if I didn't decide to go full time into a professional Ballet program. That kinda obligates me till I'm 21ish so formal college will have to wait till then and longer if I really pursue it as a career. I wish I could on so many levels, tho.

Btw, what I'm saying below and in the rest of this response is really boring and dense. You asked for personal stories so I figured it'd be as good a time as any to share some thots I'd had before. Otherwise just pretend I said nothing and don't waste your time =)

Back to what you're saying...I've actually given this some thought in the past. Players like myself and the people I've been hanging around with since the game started inevitably fall into the old trappings of being nostalgic and wishing things were the way they 'were way back when'...etc. Falling for such a trite and stunted emotion kinda annoyed me so I actually gave it some thought and came to some conclusions that I think are relevant to your question.

First off, I realize I could easily be falling guilty once again of nostalgia and just justifying my weakness for it with biased ideas dressed up as cultivated ideas...so yeah.
Anyways. A good place to start here is with my own mistakes. Way back then when I was a heck of a lot younger...I was a member of a guild in Scania that kind of defined itself through its relatively immature actions. Namely we would make a game of holding grudges and ksing anyone and everyone we could for whatever reason. I actually jokingly wrote down a rule in the guild bbs once that ksing was against the rules - unless you came up with a creative lie to be doing it. In that case, so long as you managed to handle yourself and the fall out you inevitably found yourself under...more power to you. I've also noted on a bunch of occasions that the vast majority of my buddylist was comprised of people I met when I would go on their map and randomly ks them on my own. Yeah I was young and yeah what I was doing was not only immature but mean - and thus the age factor isn't really relevant in my mind since I knew better at the time.

I kinda wondered tho...why I was doing all that and why I was enjoying it so much. It didn't fit in with my understanding of myself or my behaviour at all. However, in thinking about it a lot - the reason I got seduced into acting like that was because of the community that that guild provided me. We were basically like a gang, we used thug tactics and the fact that we were 'wrong' was dismissed out of hand by equivocating our actions as being balanced by the lengths we would 'selflessly' go to defend each other, how tight knit we were, etc. Of course that's just silly and it in no way elevated our behaviour above the moral imperative we all knew we were just making a joke of. But on the other hand, most of us were not like this in any other facet of our lives. How we managed to become capable of those actions, then, was something I've really thought about a lot. imo, it was enabled first by taking the usual steps as friends. Somehow we truly did become significantly more tightly knit than many of the other cliques around Scania. I don't know what the difference between us and the others was, how we became so utterly uniform and organized/dedicated to each other, etc. But we were and the more it happened the more it propagated itself. As that happened it began to evolve within the greater context of Scania in 2006-2008. It was a seriously chaotic period in Maple and the fights we fought, both as victims and as friends sticking up for each other, somehow launched us into a larger context beyond just 'friends.' In essence the dynamic shifted from friend - friend to, friends - not friends and finally, us vs them.

I say all that because, looking back on it, the prime mover in how we viewed ourselves and our relation to the 'others', that essence that somehow took our individual pieces and combined them into a whole that was greater than the combined sums of our individuals parts - is that we became aware of ourselves in a community. Were it not for that sense of community (and I don't just mean community as in our friendships, I mean it as in our friendships as well their relevance and place within Scania as a whole) we never would have reched the ends we reached, much less ever become capable of what we did (literally spending the better part of a year making a systematic production of ksing in unison and with immense degrees of organization - such that, working with time zones in mind, we could maintain a constant 'ks war' for days on end with effectively no down time.)

In so far as community is concerned, I come back to my original digression...that of nostalgia and whether or not I was simply falling weak to it or if there was something larger going on as well. This brings me to what finally brought our group apart. Specifically, what happened is somewhat complex and occured over time at varying degrees. The first event was Nexon introducing 'instanced' dungeons. What made these relevant to us had nothing to do with preventing us from ksing or keeping us in check - while, in effect, that is what happened, and each change Nexon introduced went a step further in that same line of progression - crediting it like that, in those words, is missing the point, especially as it relates to the role of 'community', etc. It's not that Nexon made us unable to ks...you have to also account for the role Ksing had in the first place. This wasn't just mindless bullying, etc. These things we, and others to a lesser degree and for their own ends as well, were doing filled the need for a sense of control and authority in game. We primarily focused on punishing people who had done severe wrongs, either to us, our friends or just stuff severe enough to highlight them individually. Essentially each consecutive step that eventually lead to breaking our unit apart amounted, further, to Nexon taking, piece by piece, any ability the community had to run itself and punish those who ran afoul of the 'community status quo' or who broke key tenants everyone agreed were universally relevant, such as not scamming and not hacking each other / stealing gear that wasn't ours.

In the end, when people who are from that period of time in the game, especially from Scania, talk about missing things how they were before...what they're missing is often deeper than pure nostalgia, it's that we're missing that sense of community we had back then. Back then we policed ourselves. We held people accountable for the wrongs they did. We saw that Nexon was incompetent and rather than quitting the game - we came closer together by working together with each other, to varying degrees, from small personal feuds - to friendship based feuds, all the way up to systematically destroying the experience for people who transgressed our idea of order badly enough to warrant it. imo, the way we made the leap from who we were as individuals to who we were as a guild/unit was the necessary deference from personal gain to the pride of feeling that we were, on some level, doing something greater than ourselves. That something, in my opinion, being only attributable the essence that makes and defines a community.

Sorry for the long rant, you said a few things that made me think of the relevance some ideas I had considered before had to your question within the context of a community...like you were asking. Like I said...many of us from that time period don't so much miss the time period out of a sense of nostalgia or longing for our 'youth'...we miss the sense of community we all had with each other especially as it was expressed both by our ability to police ourselves to the end that we protected ourselves by making it harder to get away with certain 'crimes'. That sense of empowerment and how it heightened our relative bonds with each other, particularly by forcing some degree of unity, even if only by obligating us to a greater social construct outside of and beyond our own experience...that's the thing a lot of us are really missing about the Maple we have today.[/quote]

bruh

^basil is not a good place to get philosophical and wordy

And any of that has [I]what[/I] to do with name dropping Dartmouth?

Just giving you a hard time, lol. Grats on having the self control and responsibility it takes to get into an Ivy League school =)
I always liked what I've heard about Dartmouth and prolly would've planned to apply if I didn't decide to go full time into a professional Ballet program. That kinda obligates me till I'm 21ish so formal college will have to wait till then and longer if I really pursue it as a career. I wish I could on so many levels, tho.

Btw, what I'm saying below and in the rest of this response is really boring and dense. You asked for personal stories so I figured it'd be as good a time as any to share some thots I'd had before. Otherwise just pretend I said nothing and don't waste your time =)

Back to what you're saying...I've actually given this some thought in the past. Players like myself and the people I've been hanging around with since the game started inevitably fall into the old trappings of being nostalgic and wishing things were the way they 'were way back when'...etc. Falling for such a trite and stunted emotion kinda annoyed me so I actually gave it some thought and came to some conclusions that I think are relevant to your question.

First off, I realize I could easily be falling guilty once again of nostalgia and just justifying my weakness for it with biased ideas dressed up as cultivated ideas...so yeah.
Anyways. A good place to start here is with my own mistakes. Way back then when I was a heck of a lot younger...I was a member of a guild in Scania that kind of defined itself through its relatively immature actions. Namely we would make a game of holding grudges and ksing anyone and everyone we could for whatever reason. I actually jokingly wrote down a rule in the guild bbs once that ksing was against the rules - unless you came up with a creative lie to be doing it. In that case, so long as you managed to handle yourself and the fall out you inevitably found yourself under...more power to you. I've also noted on a bunch of occasions that the vast majority of my buddylist was comprised of people I met when I would go on their map and randomly ks them on my own. Yeah I was young and yeah what I was doing was not only immature but mean - and thus the age factor isn't really relevant in my mind since I knew better at the time.

I kinda wondered tho...why I was doing all that and why I was enjoying it so much. It didn't fit in with my understanding of myself or my behaviour at all. However, in thinking about it a lot - the reason I got seduced into acting like that was because of the community that that guild provided me. We were basically like a gang, we used thug tactics and the fact that we were 'wrong' was dismissed out of hand by equivocating our actions as being balanced by the lengths we would 'selflessly' go to defend each other, how tight knit we were, etc. Of course that's just silly and it in no way elevated our behaviour above the moral imperative we all knew we were just making a joke of. But on the other hand, most of us were not like this in any other facet of our lives. How we managed to become capable of those actions, then, was something I've really thought about a lot. imo, it was enabled first by taking the usual steps as friends. Somehow we truly did become significantly more tightly knit than many of the other cliques around Scania. I don't know what the difference between us and the others was, how we became so utterly uniform and organized/dedicated to each other, etc. But we were and the more it happened the more it propagated itself. As that happened it began to evolve within the greater context of Scania in 2006-2008. It was a seriously chaotic period in Maple and the fights we fought, both as victims and as friends sticking up for each other, somehow launched us into a larger context beyond just 'friends.' In essence the dynamic shifted from friend - friend to, friends - not friends and finally, us vs them.

I say all that because, looking back on it, the prime mover in how we viewed ourselves and our relation to the 'others', that essence that somehow took our individual pieces and combined them into a whole that was greater than the combined sums of our individuals parts - is that we became aware of ourselves in a community. Were it not for that sense of community (and I don't just mean community as in our friendships, I mean it as in our friendships as well their relevance and place within Scania as a whole) we never would have reched the ends we reached, much less ever become capable of what we did (literally spending the better part of a year making a systematic production of ksing in unison and with immense degrees of organization - such that, working with time zones in mind, we could maintain a constant 'ks war' for days on end with effectively no down time.)

In so far as community is concerned, I come back to my original digression...that of nostalgia and whether or not I was simply falling weak to it or if there was something larger going on as well. This brings me to what finally brought our group apart. Specifically, what happened is somewhat complex and occured over time at varying degrees. The first event was Nexon introducing 'instanced' dungeons. What made these relevant to us had nothing to do with preventing us from ksing or keeping us in check - while, in effect, that is what happened, and each change Nexon introduced went a step further in that same line of progression - crediting it like that, in those words, is missing the point, especially as it relates to the role of 'community', etc. It's not that Nexon made us unable to ks...you have to also account for the role Ksing had in the first place. This wasn't just mindless bullying, etc. These things we, and others to a lesser degree and for their own ends as well, were doing filled the need for a sense of control and authority in game. We primarily focused on punishing people who had done severe wrongs, either to us, our friends or just stuff severe enough to highlight them individually. Essentially each consecutive step that eventually lead to breaking our unit apart amounted, further, to Nexon taking, piece by piece, any ability the community had to run itself and punish those who ran afoul of the 'community status quo' or who broke key tenants everyone agreed were universally relevant, such as not scamming and not hacking each other / stealing gear that wasn't ours.

In the end, when people who are from that period of time in the game, especially from Scania, talk about missing things how they were before...what they're missing is often deeper than pure nostalgia, it's that we're missing that sense of community we had back then. Back then we policed ourselves. We held people accountable for the wrongs they did. We saw that Nexon was incompetent and rather than quitting the game - we came closer together by working together with each other, to varying degrees, from small personal feuds - to friendship based feuds, all the way up to systematically destroying the experience for people who transgressed our idea of order badly enough to warrant it. imo, the way we made the leap from who we were as individuals to who we were as a guild/unit was the necessary deference from personal gain to the pride of feeling that we were, on some level, doing something greater than ourselves. That something, in my opinion, being only attributable the essence that makes and defines a community.

Sorry for the long rant, you said a few things that made me think of the relevance some ideas I had considered before had to your question within the context of a community...like you were asking. Like I said...many of us from that time period don't so much miss the time period out of a sense of nostalgia or longing for our 'youth'...we miss the sense of community we all had with each other especially as it was expressed both by our ability to police ourselves to the end that we protected ourselves by making it harder to get away with certain 'crimes'. That sense of empowerment and how it heightened our relative bonds with each other, particularly by forcing some degree of unity, even if only by obligating us to a greater social construct outside of and beyond our own experience...that's the thing a lot of us are really missing about the Maple we have today.

TL : DR --> don't bother.

go to the league of legends community
/s

[quote=appall]That's a very typical sociology type question actually. I had a similar question in my sociology class (the evolution of technology). Not all questions are meant to be answered, some to just invoke thought.[/quote]

I guess. Don't get me wrong, I like Maplestory - I've also played it for quite awhile. It's just Maplestory would probably the last thought that would come to mind in regards to online communities.

[quote=chungyv2]Not to be rude or anything, but why would a professor working at an institution within the Ivy League ask if it's possible to have a sense of "community" online? It doesn't even sound like a college paper.[/quote]

That's a very typical sociology type question actually. I had a similar question in my sociology class (the evolution of technology). Not all questions are meant to be answered, some to just invoke thought.

Not to be rude or anything, but why would a professor working at an institution within the Ivy League ask if it's possible to have a sense of "community" online? It doesn't even sound like a college paper.

With Scammers,Hackers,( I would say dupers but cmon everybody has benefited from a duper in someway or another), macroers, ksers in the game? HAH nope.

I wouldn't say Maplestory has the greatest sense of "community", at least I was never a part of it.
However, if we're just talking "can online communities exist" in gaming, then most definitely. A game I used to play, Fantasy Online, was a decently populated game but still had a very close community. I still even keep in touch with some of the people I met in that game, even now that the game's been shut down for nearly two years.

I personally do not see Maplestory as a good example of a community and here is why.
There are many servers in Maplestory - meaning that active player base for Maplestory is distributed. Within those servers, you have guilds, or guildless people, that serve have different purposes in the game - this kind of leads to the types of players in these servers (i.e. bossers, merchers, hene hoes, hackers/exploiters). They all play this game for different reasons. Because of this, people will naturally associate themselves with people who enjoy the same aspect of Maplestory like they do. When I think of community, I like to think of people coming together. Basil and Maplestory Forums are examples of the player base acting as a community in some sorts; however, it is not the entire player base. The benefits of this is that it helps Nexon more able to determine what the majority wants rather than the few.

Basically, this game is more cliques than an actual community.