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Katamori

Which game has the biggest community?

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Every time when I visit Doomworld or ZDoom Forums, I wonder how big the Doom community is. This make me think that other games (from Pong to Crysis 2) have also big community. Sometimes even the old games have very great community where people are develpoing the game to improve the game engine, for example Doom (it's unambigious, think about ZDoom), Quake, Worms, Wolfenstein 3D, Civilization, Sim City, et cetera.

But which game have the biggest community? What do you think?

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The thing is that there isn't really one "community", it's more like 3-4 different overlapping communities. You've got:

  • Doomworld
  • ZDoom forums
  • "The multiplayer community" (which seems to be fractured into Skulltag and ZDaemon parts)
There are people who are members of some of these but not others. There are also other smaller groups - the chexquest.org forums spring to mind. Newdoom used to be another one but it seems to have pretty much died at this point.

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Among the games that interest me the most, it's idTech1 games which have the largest sane community. The count is disappointingly low for the more advanced Id engines.

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I'd dare say CoD, GoW, WoW, Minecraft and Halo communities would have the largest actively interested bunch of members and certain the largest playerbase.

Probably the most productive, large community is the overall Doom community though, due to the ease of modding when compared to newer popular choices and console/PC-split playerbases such as TES4: Oblivion, Fallout 3 (and New Vegas) and Source engine games.

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I had once read that Farmville or somesuch had the largest userbase/absolute number of players of any game in history, ever. Which is sad, I must say, and also establishes a wicked link between popularity/availability. It appears that it doesn't matter if you have the world's most unremarkable game ever as long as it's under everybody's noise and ever a special ed would be able to "play" it.

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Maes said:

Probably Starcraft, CS and WoW.

I'd agree with that. All three games are especially popular in the Asian world (where most of the world population resides, as we all know), with the first being the unofficial national pastime of South Korea.

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I say WOW because technically isn't the game itself a community?

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Maes said:

I had once read that Farmville or somesuch had the largest userbase/absolute number of players of any game in history, ever.

Bigger than Freecell?

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But that thing with farmville has a catch... You don't have to play the game to be in their database. Once they have your friend on Facebook. You are in their database. A lot of social media games do that.

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fraggle said:

The thing is that there isn't really one "community", it's more like 3-4 different overlapping communities. You've got:

  • Doomworld
  • ZDoom forums
  • "The multiplayer community" (which seems to be fractured into Skulltag and ZDaemon parts)
There are people who are members of some of these but not others. There are also other smaller groups - the chexquest.org forums spring to mind. Newdoom used to be another one but it seems to have pretty much died at this point.


I also imagine there are a number of people who post at iddqd.ru as well.

This is the only community I follow, so I can't provide any insightful information as to which has the largest membership. Certainly, Doom has some of the most dedicated members.

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fraggle said:

The thing is that there isn't really one "community", it's more like 3-4 different overlapping communities. You've got:

  • Doomworld
  • ZDoom forums
  • "The multiplayer community" (which seems to be fractured into Skulltag and ZDaemon parts)
There are people who are members of some of these but not others. There are also other smaller groups - the chexquest.org forums spring to mind. Newdoom used to be another one but it seems to have pretty much died at this point.

Hello! newdoom.com]Newdoom?

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I am certain there are a good number of communities with significantly larger userbases than this one. However, this community has the most variety in its members that I have seen, and a surprisingly good amount of activity considering its size. I wouldn't have it any other way.

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Redeemer812 said:

I'd agree with that. All three games are especially popular in the Asian world (where most of the world population resides, as we all know), with the first being the unofficial national pastime of South Korea.


Not only that, but I'd invite anyone to verify that if we exclude purely casual games with a "social" element (the aforementioned facebook tripe), the classic single-player, nerdy-videogamer type of game has all but died.

Stuff like CS, WoW etc. are so popular mainly because the adjective "competitive" has been slapped upon them at some point in time. And that, as we know, is serious business.

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geo said:

I say WOW because technically isn't the game itself a community?


All the MMORPG games itself are the community. :)

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The Super Mario Kart community is pretty big, despite there only being a handful of playable custom mods on a SNES. People are still setting time trial & 150cc records on the original courses. There's an annual championship in Europe where players compete for prizes, hang out, and play other games. And everyone's really nice.

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They might have bigger communities but are there any that rival the maturity level of Doomworld?

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Mr. Chris said:

They might have bigger communities but are there any that rival the maturity level of Doomworld?


What about chess? Unless we're talking about ZOMG COMPETITIVE 60" SPEEDCHESS EXTREEEEME11!!11! That one I'd expect to be full of assholes and "stop having fun guys" types ;-)

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It's not a game, but in all honesty, the My Little Pony community is the biggest and most productive community I've ever seen. Just minutes after a new episode airs and they're already producing some amazing and hilarious stuff based on it. It's pretty epic. Granted, it's the first community I've attached myself to since the Doom community, so maybe this thing is actually rather common.

As for games communities, the Civilization community is pretty major and even more multinational than the Doom community (which is already pretty diverse. It's kind of funny, though, because there are a lot of people from tiny countries that rage at Firaxis repeatedly because Uzbekistan/Botswana/Estonia hasn't been made into a civ yet. Or the Israeli nationals who claim their civilization is the greatest the world has ever seen and it's a (hate) crime that it hasn't been included. Or Canadians and Australians wanting their country to be a civ. Oh, and the Russians complain about everything. You can't please everyone. Anyway yeah, they have a pretty big community, but they also have about 7 games at this point, with one being released at least every 5 years or so.

WoW has a huge community, but it's literally full of 14-year-olds, so it's not that great. Also, the communities between servers differentiate quite a bit. For instance the server I started on was full of 12-year-olds who just called each other 'fags' and the forums were basically full of people smack-talking each other. It was...horrible.

EvE has a pretty strong community, but there's not a lot of helpful advice being handed out there, since pirates don't want to help out those they prey on, and vice versa. Also, it's full of autistic neckbeards and if you do ask for advice, they'll just mock you for not knowing it. Corpmates are a lot friendlier, though.

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Maes said:

What about chess? Unless we're talking about ZOMG COMPETITIVE 60" SPEEDCHESS EXTREEEEME11!!11! That one I'd expect to be full of assholes and "stop having fun guys" types ;-)


Heh. There was some kind of competition going on in France last week - 2 teams from each participating country (supposedly best players of certain age restricted category, or smt like that), the first consisting of males and the second of females. Well one guy I happen to know was in our national team. The only thing he remembers is drinking few litres of wine during competition with the rest of our best players. He couldn't remember actual games too clearly... and both our teams ended up as last, independently :). And by all means, this wasn't any lolpetition and the said guy was in newspaper pictured as superb talent a few times. From what I heard before, there is minority of such "zomg extreme chess" guys, most of them being fed with chess while too young. "Casual talented chessers" during championships just enjoy free trip / food / holidays besides actually competiting. I don't really know anything about forums though so there may be an actual place for these extreme guys.

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I don't think multiplayer or competitive aspects should equate to how well a community communicates on building a foundation for the content's love and appreciation. I simply see it as a bonus after all the fresh content that's put into a communtity. Of course there are exceptions. Games such as Quake 3, Starcraft, or WoW thrive and live on these very things. I see things like this in a different light, so take it a merely an opinion.

Nice avatar Danarchy.

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Before I joined Doomworld, I'd never even been a Lurker, I'd just played the game when I was alot younger and been obsessed by it, but eventually stopped playing after my realisation at the time; "No one plays this anymore except me". This was confirmed by my older brother's words; "Get an Xbox"

Years later, out of curiosity, I googled "Doom WAD 2011" thinking I've be told to buy an Xbox (which I had already succumbed to and not enjoyed as much as I was meant to), and found this forum thriving with so many people that love it as much as I do.

What a great day! Brought a tear to my fat squinty eye

The moral of the story is, it doesn't matter how big this community is, as long as we're aaaaallll the same colour

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