My only experience with MMOs is City of Heroes and SWTOR and while CoH is not quite as bad, both message boards for the games seem to be full of two flavors:
People who hate everything about the game but continue to play and complain.
People who will defend everything the game has done with their last breath.
There is a spectrum but these two types seem to dominate every conversation eventually. I suppose you can chalk it up to “Welcome to the Internet, nice to meet you.” but I was curious if other games were like that.
The word-of-mouth I get is that other game boards are actually much worse than CoX’s board. People say that they often can’t ask questions about builds and so forth and get answers besides lots of insults about “noobs”
CoX boards aren’t even as bad as most other MMO official message boards. I don’t bother with any of them, I have other places if I need some MMO information. Internet tends to be a seething cesspile of bile if left unchecked so those message boards just reflect that. Also as Snarky_Kong said, some niche boards are fine, either because they are out of the way and have a real community, or because they have heavy moderation, or both.
The CoX boards are the only ones I’ve ever been able to stand visiting regularly, even when I was playing other games. (The WoW forums, in particular, are a bottomless pit of suck.)
There’s a lot of thoughtful, constructive criticism and suggestions in the beta forums, for example (in addition to the wailing and the brown-nosing), and some of it even gets acted on. It’s also possible to get actual, useful help there. People may squabble over the fine points of build advice, but at least they usually provide it without insulting you. You can also find help testing obscure things (though that’s less of an issue now, with the power stats available in-game) or troubleshooting problems.
It’s true that the fanboy/naysayer contingents on the City boards are loud and persistent, but at least it’s possible to find reasonable people in between them. The trick is mostly in learning who to tune out. The other boards I’ve been on–WoW, LotRO, Tabula Rasa, and Champions among them–if you tune out all the obnoxious, useless people, you’ll be left talking to the crickets most of the time.
Universally terrible might be a bit strong but my personal experience with MMO forums hasn’t been all that great. There were a lot of people on the WoW forums who were convinced that verbal abuse from other players was simply part being a tank.
Video game boards are nigh-universally terrible, not just MMOs. Except maybe those of niche games that nobody’s ever heard about.
At least that’s true of the official ones - it’s always 99% trolls, fanboys, nazi (or astroturfing) mods and ANGRY FUCKING PEOPLE WHO HATE EVERYTHING ABOUT EVERYTHING ARGH but can’t shut the fuck up. Or quit playing.
In fact, many will keep bitching and poo-pooing the game, and any change made to the game, long *after *they’ve stopped playing it. It’s truly flabbergasting. Honest to Aïsha, I wish I had that kind of free time. Or that amount of freewheeling seething hatred.
Third party sites are hit-or-miss, it really depends on the game’s community. There are some great little nooks out there for just about any game. But the first Google results for “Name of the game forum” & “name of the publisher forum” are always utter shit. Always. Also the Steam ones.