All in this together

I'm not a roleplayer, but I've been to RP events.

More than ten years ago I went to a wedding at this church in Kingman. I know it was then because a video that someone took of the event is still up on YouTube, from 2010. There was a big turnout, and it was a very mixed crowd. Roleplayers and PVPers and PVEers and even a couple of Mods all showed up. Everyone had a good time and afterward we all made our way up to Credit Bend in Sector Two for the reception, where there was roleplay, dancing and max level players getting into fights with the town guards.

Fallen Earth is a single server game (or a single server cluster game, if you want to get technical) so there are no barriers between the various MMO playstyles. We're all in this together, and that - and the relatively small population of the game even then - made for a melting pot of different approaches and attitudes. Dedicated PVPers were a good customer base for crafters, who would sell them weapons, armor and vehicles, and especially ammo and consumable items like food and drink.

There wasn't - at least in my experience - a lot of friction between these groups, and there was some crossover between them. I remember PVPers of one clan providing security for an RP event that was being hassled by PVPers of a rival clan, and PVE players would venture into the arena or the open world PVP zones.

It kept things interesting then, and it still does now.

Being a small pop game with a single global chat channel (actually there's two, but I don't recall the last time I saw anyone talk on Global 2) the social dynamic is different from that of a multi-server, high population game. I'm mainly a soloist, so my experience is grounded in observation rather than participation, but my overall impression has always been that Fallen Earth has a fairly good community. There's the occasional outburst in chat, but they tend to burn out quite quickly.

The game also has a terrific Help channel. Back in the day there was often a Mod presence in Help which kept things (mostly) on topic, and over time that established a norm for the channel which, even in later years, led to the players more or less regulating themselves without the need to be pushed into doing so by the by then rarely seen Mods. That's something I haven't seen a lot of in other MMOs. Final Fantasy XIV has the best community I've seen, but that's at least partly due to standards of behaviour being rigorously enforced by Square-Enix.

(As an aside, I haven't been back to FFXIV since the huge influx of new players came over from World of Warcraft, and I have to wonder how that playerbase is adapting to the very different attitudes they've found in their new home.)

There's probably a couple of reasons for this. I've seen it suggested (in chat) that the playerbase of Fallen Earth skews older than a lot of other online games, and there's something in that. It's likely that it's also the instinct of a small playerbase to be welcoming to new players and want to make a good impression on them in the hope that they'll stay.

Which isn't to say it's all good. I run with the chat channels active about half the time I'm in game - usually as background noise when I'm doing low intensity activities like gathering resources and crafting, or just travelling across the map. I'll often turn off one or both of them if I'm going into an area where I have to focus, or if it's just too much that day. Still, it's a step up from certain other MMOs where I turn off the chat channels as soon as I log in.

Right now the auction house and the economy in general seem to be the trigger topics at the moment, from which I can only deduce that there aren't currently enough max level players on the new server yet to live up endgame PVP.