by Rio Waye

Created on: March 02, 2010

There's many things to consider what exactly makes an online game enjoyable. The overall factor being the people you interact with. If a game  has an online community that's filled with annoying 11 year olds, it doesn't matter how good the game is online, it's going to get avoided.

There's many ways players can ruin the game, one of them is cheating. With online gaming, comes online cheating, which is surprisingly easy to do. There are videos on the subject all over the net on how to, so any kid can become an annoying hacker Games tend to monitor for this kind of behavior, and gamers also know what to look out for, because it's fairly obvious when someone is cheating. However some games are riddled with them and there's not much people can deal with it.

With a competitive arena, comes competitive behavior; as in sports, it's always considered the norm to have good sportsmanship towards other players. However, some people tend to take the game too far, and can get extremely rude and vulgar. Of course it may still be in good fun, but sometimes it crosses the line, makes people feel uncomfortable, and is just plain annoying to the other players not involved but have to listen to it. Most games today have voice communication, which can be both positive and negative. The positive of course, being able to communicate without having to put down the controller, or stop what you're doing. However, some people take their mic and decide they would like others to hear their singing talents (or usually lack of). Luckily most games have a mute button, but still a hassle to stop what your doing and look up the player making the noise.

There are technical aspects to think about too, such as the servers the game is on. Lag is a huge problem for some games out there, is an issue that has to be looked at seriously. Sometimes the player can have an excellent connection, and they will still lag, so obviously the problem sometimes can be client side. Sometimes a game doesn't have enough servers to hold all the players. Sometimes this happens in free-to-play games that get popular all of a sudden. In MMOs, lag is almost unavoidable, if on a player-versus-player server, lag can be a killer, and make the game tiresome very quick. Towns are the main areas that lag in MMO, which is fairly common, however it's inexcusable when you're the only one in a dungeon and you're lagging, not because of anything on your end, but because of some shoddy programming error.

This is especially annoying when tech support doesn't care about their customers. It's annoying to have to deal with the players that are bugging you, or the technical issue you can't seem to fix. Then have the technical people give you an answer that basically says they're not at fault, and it's something on your end or telling you to block the character. Blocking one character doesn't help when that person has multiple accounts to spam you with. In any online game, there needs to be a GM presence to deal with in game issues, people pay good money to play their games, online shouldn't be a wild west of lawlessness. Even if the game is free, it's still a business, they're making money off the advertisements. Having one GM, for 12 servers of different languages, does not count either.

The community, and how friendly the players are is what is going to make the game. The friends you make and have fun with are what keep people coming back. Sometimes it's the thrill of competing against someone, other times it's the sense of comradery. However, this can be ruined by someone who is just plain rude and has too much time on his hands.

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