State of the Gaming community

steelmanwho

What the hell has happened over the past few years... I use to enjoy loggin into a game, meeting up with friends and having friendly matches.  Occasionally we would come across a troll or somebody hacking, but then there was always an active and functioning support system put in place to deal with them.

 

Now a days I find myself more and more hesitant about joining any game or trying anything new.  Because 9 times out of 10, even if you do find an Oasis where everyone is friendly and the dev team cares about the community, it eventually falls into the crapper.  Either because some other company buys out the game and decides the community is nothing but more potential money, or little kids whose parents are too busy to give a dam, stumble upon it start thinking they are unstoppable and can behave in any manor they want.

 

The constant downfall in the gaming community reflects the downfall in our own society.  More and more people feel that because the anonymity that comes with the internet and screennames, they are fully within their rights to act in a manor that the rest of society deems unwanted.  In the real world we have police to deal with people like this (and the occasional very fulfilling vigilanty justice), however the lack of gaming companies policing their own games, and instead leaving the community to govern itself results in a pathetic lack of humanity.  If gaming communities actions had real world consequences, there would be alot more murders, riots, and coorperate suferage every day.   Oh yea, nevermind, that's what is already happening...

 

The saddest part is I remember a few years back when things 1rst showed signs of starting to get bad, a lot of us started standing up to it.  Saying it was unacceptable and needed to be dealt with.  We started trying to unity the communities in an effort to curb this behavior.  We were countered with coorperate greed, the F2P genre and micro payments... The combination of the 3 all but destroyed the support we use to receive from the Development teams that use to care about us.  Slowly more and more games have either removed their report systems, or set them to auto-pilot (which infact is against the rules of the ESRB if you want to have a low rating and stay exempt from online community content).  Without the support of those who made the games we love, we are destined to fall into a "mad max' style gaming community, where nobody is safe, and the only way to deal with the abuses that take place, is to become as "hard" as the ones abusing.  Our kids will never understand the peace we once had.  Much like how we all miss the way the world was in the 80s and 90s, before the corruption levels, greed, war  and violence became so rampant.