Community is what brings MMORPG's to life. It's the difference between Diablo 2 and Everquest. And those games are worlds apart compared to say, WoW and Diablo 3.
Things that kill community:
-Solo to max level with efficiency. Obviously if you can just solo and deal with no one but yourself, you will opt to. Who wants to spend 15-30 mins assembling a group if they can just level alone at roughly the same (or better) pace. I feel that EQ did it best, by making this a niche thing for certain classes, that only situationally competed with group exp.
Otherwise, everyone is shortly dumped into the endgame having little to no grouping experience. Then suddenly expected to find groups, make a lot of friends, and get into the raid scene. While some people managed in early WoW, most socially awkward gamers just pouted to blizzard until they streamlined raiding into a group-finder like system. This way you barely had to talk to anyone and could essentially continue to solo.
-Anything endgame or groupable is instanced. Instancing encourages linear dungeon crawls that are tailor made for any random group of people to complete as long as they are the correct level range. Every piece of loot is massively farmed by the server and easily obtained by anyone. This is where, IMO the game stops being a true "MMO" and more of a action RPG (Diablo style). I want a dungeon to be a place, in the world, where people go to explore. Not a level in super mario.
With modern technology and sufficient funding, a lot of the problems with EQ overcamping and cockblocking can be solved by adjusting spawn rates real time. In other words, more people in the zone = faster spawn. They could also just make the areas bigger in the first place. There are many ways of incentivizing guild rotations for top content. For example: only get full rewards once a week, yet the mobs spawn once every 48 hours. Or something to that effect. If more than 3-4 guilds on a server are doing top raid content, chances are you should make the game harder.
-Making all travel instant. Maybe we don't need to wait 20+ mins a boat these days. But instant porting around the map makes the world seem artificially small. Horses and hearthstones are good enough.
If you disagree with the majority of this, I have a hard time understanding why you aren't playing WoW. It is clearly the best "modern mmorpg," if that's your thing.
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