MMO-RPG Communities

Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games are, like the name describes, online games where the player explores a virtual world as one of many types of characters and can interact with an enormous amount of other players. Popular MMO-RPG's often have two types of communites: communities outside of the game (fans and forums) and communities inside of the game (parties and guilds). For this research, we will be looking at the communities inside of the game, because the dynamics of these communities often require active participation.
Most MMO-RPG's have two in-game systems that can be seen as communities: parties and guilds. A party is a small group of players that train or do quests (in-game missions) together for a short period of time (possibly one game session). The benefit of forming a party are experience-sharing (to some degree) and strength in numbers. Strength in numbers means that players can kill high-level in-game creatures they could not kill on their own. If a party is formed for the purpose of doing a quest, the composition of the party (the distribution of roles or functions) may be adapted towards the goal of the quest to ensure optimal performance[1].
A guild is a group of players forming a community. The purpose of a guild is creating a social connection or to make it easier to form a trust-worthy or well-composed party over a longer period of time (longer than one game session)[2][3][4]. Within a guild, members can be classified based on connectivity, type of player, role within the guild and involvement[5].