Grimwell thinks that he’s found the holy grail of MMO design.

Community. You design for community first.
…
It’s about giving your players the ability to organize into groups, guilds, or whatever social organizations they are going to need to get things in order for their activities in your game. It’s also the social spaces, guild halls, taverns, or whatever is appropriate to your game. It’s also the means in which you give them to exchange the fruits of their gaming experience. Direct trading, brokers, auction houses, whatever… allowing players to share the fruits of their labor is community.

It’s good to see a designer stress the importance of community, but there’s a big warning flag. Namely, that this philosophy needs to be reconciled with the fact that World of Warcraft’s most significant innovation is the fact that it’s the first MMO that’s entirely soloable.

I hate to say it, but community is kind of a hardcore feature. At least, being deeply involved in it. Casual players may avoid guilds, not run instances, and never go to the auction house. But at least they’re playing with other people – millions of Diablo players never logged onto Battle.net at all.

Does this mean that casual WoW players don’t want community? No. If they wanted to be playing a solo game, they’d be playing Oblivion. They clearly see value in having other players around – other players are interesting. Other players is inherently theatre. But casual players want something different from their community features.

If we accept the notion that the casual vs. hardcore distinction is primarily about personal investment, we need to acknowledge that casual players do not necessarily want to make a huge, personal commitment to complete strangers. They don’t want to spend every waking hour on the marketplace finding an item they need. They’re trying to assemble pickup groups because they don’t have a guild. They quit guilds who have 3 required raid nights a week. Drama freaks them out.

Casual players want the community to be there, but they don’t want to invest. They want to people watch. They want to have casual experiences. They want to lurk. This is not uncommon to the Internet, of course — Millions of people read Fark and never post, or go to YahooChat and never type a line. Shocker: shy people tend to find their way onto the web!

So when you think about how to improve your community features, I completely agree that we need to find better ways to offer community for the hardcore – in particular, I think the tools that most guild leaders get in most games are utterly deplorable. But take the time to go the other way. Think about how to let the more casual skirt on the edges of your community and lurk there.

Original comments thread is here.