Are MMOs Worth the Effort

Are MMOs Worth The Effort By Daniel Owens To better my writing skills and establish a presence in the MMO gaming community are the passions that bring me here, I enjoy writing about new and upcoming MMO's. My goal is to bring to the reader as many promising MMO's as I can find. Offering insight and advice on what's worth playing.

Electronic Arts has announced that they are closing down the servers running a lot of multiplayer functionalities for games they have previously published. The multiplayer capabilities of these games will no longer work for anyone, I guess in a sense they are bricking a lot of games. This got me to thinking about MMO's, you may spend years dedicated to a game but one day it is inevitable that all this work will be meaningless and the game's servers will be shut down.

I was wondering if anyone else thinks about this, and does it de-motivate you from playing MMO's at all? I recently quit World Of Warcraft after playing obsessively for 5 years. The game went from having an amazing community to just being a rush for the tier of the month, which is replaced quicker than you can originally obtain it. This makes all the effort seem worthless and the game becomes a chore, and it's the main reason that I have stopped playing. Those 5 years, what have they amounted to? I almost have an 80 of every class, and I have experienced nearly all the content.
Is it really worth all the effort we place into these games? I guess the only reason I am even considering this train of thought is because games these days have lost their sense of satisfaction and are slowly becoming less rewarding as opposed to a race towards the end. The original idea I had of MMO's was that they were community games in which you could play RPG's but socialise at the same time. This was particularly true to begin with, MMO's were a way for me to socialise whilst doing something that was normally considered anti-social behaviour.

While most of the time I was sitting alone in my room playing a game, I was still a part of something much larger and I had worked my way into a large online community. It's a great feeling when your apart of a tight knit community, it gives your time spent gaming a little more worth and is that much more satisfying. Of course though, communities die. Dying doesn't always mean the servers become empty and barren, but players become crueller and less sociable.

Are there still any MMO titles with amazing communities actively playing? I've been searching around the net, and the only game I can really find that has a pleasant community is Lord Of the Rings Online. So I pose this question to all the MMOsiter's, which MMO do you believe has the best community and for what reason do you believe it to be so?

For those wondering, here is the announcement from EA about the titles in which are having their servers shut down.