Friendly Community MMO

[Chalkarts]

Long ago I played an MMO that was challenging.
It required party play and cooperation in order to advance.
It also was a 1 character game, removing the shield of anonymity.

These factors led to a beautifully friendly and welcoming game world.
I've tried my hand at many MMOs over the years but have found the communities have grown toxic and hostile to new players.

I'd like to find a welcoming friendly game,
do they still exist?

[The_Jackal]

What game was this? I'd argue that a 'single character game' isn't necessary to 'remove the shield of anonymity', just a level-up process that takes a modicum of time and effort, and the lack of a auto-queue mechanism to enable toxic player behavior.

[Chalkarts]

What game was this? I'd argue that a 'single character game' isn't necessary to 'remove the shield of anonymity', just a level-up process that takes a modicum of time and effort, and the lack of a auto-queue mechanism to enable toxic player behavior.

Final Fantasy 11.
Several years ago I walked away from it so that I could advance as a human, lol.
I tried going back but it had been too long and the genre had changed too much.

[DeTess]

Long ago I played an MMO that was challenging.
It required party play and cooperation in order to advance.
It also was a 1 character game, removing the shield of anonymity.

These factors led to a beautifully friendly and welcoming game world.
I've tried my hand at many MMOs over the years but have found the communities have grown toxic and hostile to new players.

I'd like to find a welcoming friendly game,
do they still exist?

I've personally found the ff14 community to be mostly very friendly, but its not as challenging as the MMO you described above. It's also mostly a 1 character game. You can unlock everything on one character, and leveling a new character takes significantly more effort than just leveling a new class on your old character.

[Anteros]

WoW classic just launched and it's mostly an older playerbase who miss older MMOs. They've been very friendly in most of my interactions so far.

Can't promise it'll last forever or it's what you're looking for, but it may be worth a try.

[NeoVid]

City of Heroes is back, and CoH's roleplaying server community (the server now named Everlasting) beats any I've seen in the 15 years since CoH originally released. The fact that it was my first online game left me really disappointed with all other online game communities after that...

[Hollysword]

I miss playing FFXI.

I find Guild Wars 2 is very friendly, specially given its emphasis on teamwork, both in lore and in gameplay. You get full XP and drops from participating in events and battles, which promotes working together without cries of killstealing.
Another less known community driven MMO I've played is WAKFU, where the entire economy is literally run by players. No NPC shops at all, everything is gathered by players, crafted by players, sold by players.

Also, both of those are free to play.

[Brother Oni]

Warframe is fairly relaxed outside of one end game activity, although it doesn't really fulfill the 'massively' criteria of MMO (currently restricted to 4 players per missions, barring glitches, unless they bring back Raids which have 8).

It's a free to play third person shooter, although its movement system makes it very different to play. It's also pay to skip, rather than pay to win - pretty much everything you can buy with the premium currency can be earned in game, barring cosmetics.

Another less known community driven MMO I've played is WAKFU, where the entire economy is literally run by players. No NPC shops at all, everything is gathered by players, crafted by players, sold by players.

Out of curiosity, how does that not devolve into the bitter 'undercut by 1 currency unit' shenanigans of other games' auction houses, let alone the cut-throat market pvp of Eve Online?

[Hollysword]

Out of curiosity, how does that not devolve into the bitter 'undercut by 1 currency unit' shenanigans of other games' auction houses, let alone the cut-throat market pvp of Eve Online?

I'm not sure, never had that problem in WAKFU. The marketplace seems stable. The problem a lot of people have in WAKFU though are lazy people who chop wood but never replant, causing deforestations. Sure someone's going to start planting again, but still annoying. Wonder if that has anything to do with stable market prices. Even monsters can get depopulated and would need 'replanting', although monsters are less affected since dungeons will always have stuff in them.

[GhoulKaven]

Totally agree, but I think it's all about generations. We used to be more kind to each other:)