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Why is this game's community so hostile?
wildemu
Member Posts: 21
Not trying to troll as I just recently resubscribed, this is just merely an observation. I came back to the game after quite a layoff and I have noticed that most realms have a very cut-throat way of running the end-game, driving the fun out of anything with these achievement and gear score checks even on NAXX runs. I know this topic has been covered, but it's frustrating to see the greatness of these wow trailiers and then when you login to the game, you see some flame fests amongst guilds or trade chat. This feels like I am paying 15 bucks just to be in high school again (which I hated). Am I the only the one that feels this way about the game?
Comments
Hallelujah my good friend!
aye "link achieve or dont bother" LFG chat is out of hand and not what achievements were designed for, but I think its here to stay, blizzard say they dont see an issue.
This addon will help http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/underachiever.aspx wont help with gear checks though.
Well, gear checking is done to keep deaths at a minimum and time at a minimum.
The thing is, in WoW... even though it's a very very simple game to play, there are a whole lot of people who just don't know how to freaking play. If they have a good gear score, that means they at least know the boss fights and have performed well enough at least enough to get their gear. Even if they suck at the game, WoW being a gear grind, the gear can make up for how much they suck.... sometimes. lol
Can you do good with a decent set of gear? Yeah. But it's not very common. I played a mage once, that out performed a another mage that had her gear virtually maxed and I was in nothing but Reg Dungeon Blues. I understood how to play the character a whole lot better than she did. I mean, she used Frost Armor ffs. Frost Armor on a PVE Mage. .... total /facepalm right there. I asked her "why" once, and she said "so I can stay alive". I wanted to go off on her so bad, but she was our GM's wife, so I didn't. lol
This isn't everyone though, but it is a reason. Some of the players are good or are at least good enough to know how to play their characters decently. You get sick of people who don't and don't want to spend 6hrs doing something that should take 1.
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thank you lol.
For instance, I login tonight to see how this patch is operating, and I already see people in lfg asking for forge of souls runs and they need a good wowheroes score or they're ignored. Only reason why it's even wowheroes now is because that stupid gear score addon is out of date I believe.
In the past week I've been playing, I can't tell you how many bad players I've seen with incredible gear but they have such huge egos. I wanted to think this was the minority but a lot of people are behaving like this in the current state of the game.
Is there any chance of civility or has this game lost itself to the xbox/halo crowd? I'm leaning towards the latter.
Doesn't 3.3 have a crossrealm LF Raid feature?
Which is so far a sweet system. I just mailed the 5th Anniversary Onyxia pet from a Horde Alt to an Alliance Alt.
They are Account Bound, makes me regret deleting all the other anniversary pets.
PS: Also all servers aren't like this. Try Ravenholdt Horde Side. They are very cool, and even helpful. I've been in raids they would take fresh 80s on just to gear them up.
Nothing excites jaded Grandmasters more than a theoretical novelty
when i played wow right before lich king came out i found out real fast there are alot of ppl that want to tell you what you should have and anything else is wrong if i pay to play a game i shouldnt be bombarded by ppl that i dont even know and not just dont know but am just sitting on the ship and they come up and tell me if it was being helpful thats one thing but often it was oh you dont have this so we dont need you this air of elite ppl that think they are better then you noone wants to help anyone its all just get me through so i can get this or that rush rush rush noone wants to just go out and do something it has to be planned and thought out and usually those ppl who donbt know how to play arent being helped at all and then everyone wonders why that person is a noob maybe its because youd rather point your nose in the air then actually help
Lexis, I have to agree with you that good things can come out of this lfg system. Hopefully, raiding will be incorporated as well although it seems doubtful.
As for the realms, I think this game suffers from having too many realms available. I have tried numerous realms to find a niche, and all of them ended with a pretty unfriendly 80's crowd. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are friendly guilds out there, but they are aware of what the game has become and they feel established enough to not even recruit anymore.
It almost appears to me that you will only run into friendly people in this game by accident, and that you should expect arrogance or idiocy on every corner block you turn.
joker you made a lot of solid points. I am in the middle of currently leveling a gnome rogue through northrend (before this patch), and I can tell you nobody wanted to do any of the group quests or even the dungeons. The Arthas-US realm is listed as high pop and there were people in each of the zones, but it appears that people just want to get to 80 as soon as possible and start the heroics grind. I'm sure it has to deal with the expansion being out for a year now and I"m probably leveling around people's alts, but I don't get why people would do the content again over and over if they don't make an effort to see all of it.
Top 3 Best Communities (my experience)
1. LOTR Online: Best roleplayers around and are willing to help you immerse yourself in the game. Some guy even gave me flute lessons
2. WoW: A little kiddy but harmless. I find this game to hasve less emo rage and more immature silliness which is fun sometimes. Remember it's only a game.
3. AoC: Played on a PvP server and I was expected to get camped and gank (which I did ) but also the players that ganked me gave me tips and tricks to use in pvp.
Top 3 Worst Communities
1. Eve Online: Elitest wannabe e-proffessors. They know everything and they don't want other people joining thier niche.
2. Mortal Online (Just the forums): Emo Fanbois
3. Darkfall Online (Just the forums): Emo Fanbois
I guess the "hardcore" aspect of a game bring alot of drama and emo people with it. Oh well, if I want to frag and play real pvp I'll play bf2 or cod.
Trolls = Hardcore
Fanbois = Carebears
The only posts I read in threads are my own.
A bad community is the result of 2 factors:
- the game allowing negativity to foster. Typically, games that do not require cooperation, or that require cooperation, with too strong a requirement base. You need a game that requires the help of everyone, while not putting constraints on who those other people are.
- poor moderation. Both inside the game and out, whenever there is customer interaction, a referee should be present whenever possible. Friction happens, and unless someone can call a foul, you end up with both teams thinking they're right... and it's all downhill from there.
Why is WoW's community one of the worst? Because the game allows it to happen. One thing all devs fail to realize is that for all the wonderful tools and access points they generate, these can and will be used equally for other than the intended usage. By design, we are social creatures, but everything follows the laws of entropy. Eventually discriminators are surfaced, and must either be snuffed out immediately, or the game is going to be headed down the wrong path.
General chats are absolutely worthless. While a good idea on paper, they have become tarnished with spam and potty humor. No one can have a decent chat as the tool was intended for- because of the overwhelming spam. Why bother at this point?
Achievements were something to mark progress with. Now, it's a pissing contest. We can go on and on. All these tools, and yet none of them do anything but harm in the end because they are poorly implemented, and unsupervised.
If you removed all general chats, generated a mentorship program, removed armory and all inspection tools... you'd have people using the tools as they were designed to be used. People who needed help or wanted to help others out would do so in a streamlined environment. While one could join a mentorship program with the motive of being a jerk, you could very simply have a 'feedback' function by the mentee with grave repercussions that would discourage such behavior.
It's about thinking things through when designing concepts. What we witness in WoW especially due to its size and the genre's focusing lens being squarely placed on it... is that devs are developping tools to make things more and more accessible, but aren't thinking about how or why these tools might be used against the very purposed they've been created to fulfill.
Decrease access, and you increase interaction. Make it so one needs others on a frequent basis, but make it so you must actively seek someone out. By doing so, parties involved will not just understand the value of the interaction, but will respect the effort it took to make the connect in the first place. And with all things, actively monitoring to always be just one step ahead of the community, in the event they start a bull run, so you can steer the mob. Less is more.
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc.
We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be.
So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away.
- MMO_Doubter
WoW community sucks. We all know it. We all hate it. This is how WoW is. This is how it will stay. Wow is a great game, but the community is one of the worst I've ever seen.(and i went to highschool with some of the WORST people ive ever met) this is why I quit
BTW - Why did you hate highschool >_>
Tis true, we've all got PH'Ds in physics and mathematics and if you didn't go to Ivy league you are just not welcome.
Actually, EVE community is actually one of the best, but.... you do have to know how to approach it, with humility until you know what the hell you are talking about.
Too many people don't and bear the wrath of the those who do.
edit: As for WOW, its a victim of its own design, people have to be egotistical to keep up on with the leveling treadmill, because in the end, that's all the game (especially the raiders) have. Ever efficient procurement of gear is the main goal and they won't let anyone stand in the way.
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"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Yep, this "show achievement" thing is out of hand.
Do it like this, install the UnderAchiever addon and it will fake every achievement you'll ever need. You won't be left out again.
About the community, there is little one can do. Everyone must admit, even the greatest WoW fans, that the game is populated in it's majority with high school kids. It is exactly like going back to high school.
Get used to it or just leave the game, there is no other option. There are great people in WoW, just like in any place, but the community as a whole is simple the worst thing that can exist. Or at least the games that I've ever tried
honestly in my years of playing WoW I didn't notice that bad of a community.
I played on Arthas, Dark Iron, Burning Blade. Sure there are the occasional random people but generally I found it decent. I played alliance for a year and a half and then switched to horde for 3 years. i didn't notice any difference between the two aside from there being a lot more military people on alliance (kinda random).
For me the issue with WoW is an issue with a lot of post wow games, that being gear is a suppliment for intellegence. Prewow games didn't have that awsome of gear, we were forced to take what we had and deal with it. Learn to play better or die, WoW was more you need gear x to do raid y set up. That has lead to the loot centric playstyle that has been taken to far in some games, while I love LoTRo moria was one of the worst for the loot centric instances. This was one of the reasons I loved AoC was it wasn't loot centric for a long time.
There are 2 very simple reasons why this happens: It's trivial to level and success in a raid is almost entirely based on equipment. They also go hand in hand.
Everyone can reach maxlevel. Everyone. Whether they can play or not, whether they ever grouped or think aggro management is what their boss does when they fu.. something up at work, eventually they will hit max. In other games, having a level of X could be used as a gauge whether the person knows how to play or not. If he didn't, he couldn't have reached that level. Doesn't work in WoW.
That in turn means that skill, player skill, plays a minor role when it comes to the question whether you succeed or not. Sorry if this comes down hard and I know I'll get flamed by self proclaimed pro-gamers, but WoW isn't the game where your playing skill makes the difference. If it did, people who just can't play couldn't remotely get to maxlevel. This in turn means that the question whether a group will be able to succeed in a dungeon or not is mostly answered by the gear they wear. And that again means that whether you're taken into a group depends on you having the "necessary" equipment for a raid.
It gets out of hand when people require you to have gear that drops in instance A to be taken along to instance A. That simply makes no sense, but that's where we are now. It gets absurd when you see people LFG for Naxx10 with a requirement of a EQ level equivalent of Uld25. And no, they weren't trying to assemble a speed run for quick loot.
Generally what this means is it alienates new players. It is already nontrivial to find non-heroic raids (I am currently leveling an alt, try it yourself, it's horrible). Unless you have a good guild (ok, granted, anyone who reaches 80 and isn't a complete tool should be able to find a home with one) you're pretty much stuck with gear that you can get from quests.
The new LFG feature might help here. Though I fear all it will help is getting more PUGs with people who reached 80 by smashing random buttons...
Because WoW is aimed at what I like to call the "console generation" because its made to be a pick up and play game which I think kills any real immersive community based gameplay and fuels that "I dont care" attitude, this isnt a bad thing for Blizzard's bank account because it works for their target audience, but hostility seems to come with those type of gamers, try playing a few games on Xbox live for a while and see how many times you have some moron swearing and hurling abuse at you for beating them or scoring a goal against them, the world is full of internet gangsters these days.
In all honesty i'd say Aion had a lot worse of a community than WoW from my experience anyways.
Exactly, I tried AION for a few weeks and I would see people sitting in town with weird web urls above their heads. And they would ignore me when I tried to talk to them! How rude!
Seriously, World of Warcraft is heavy achievement, gear, and stat heavy. It's the nature of the beast. The game was designed around leveling and getting items. One crutch of a game with a leveling system is once you hit max level there isn't much else to do. It's like you "beat the game."
Don't be terrorized! You're more likely to die of a car accident, drowning, fire, or murder! More people die every year from prescription drugs than terrorism LOL!
It's a gear based game so the end game will naturally be elitist. I believe the RP servers would have better communties, might want to try playing on those servers.
Simple answer: Anonymity over the internet. People do what they wouldn't in real life.
@Pojung: Great post, you raised some valid points. However, I don't think you can narrow it to just those two reasons. Let's face it, you can't expect the GM's or moderators to take sole responsibility for the way people behave. Rather, people need to be held accountable for their individual behavior as well.
@everyone: Speaking as someone that was involved in a business (former cyber cafe owner) that came across a lot of gamers, the problem that I always noticed with WoW players in general, is not only a severe lack of maturity for the most part, but it seems that a large portion of players are those that are void of accomplishing anything of meaning in their lives outside of the game. This I believe helps lead to an elitist mentality in-game because they are able to achieve a great deal with continued investment of their time, which many of those that are socially inept often have. Although, I wouldn't dismiss age as being a factor.
It always struck me as peculiar though, that a large majority of the WoW crowd seemed to have some of the worst social skills of those that I dealt with on a consistent basis. Now, I'm not saying that all of the WoW apples were spoiled, but unfortunately a large portion that I dealt with seemed to be. Maybe being devoid of these social skills for most of their lives has lead to them lacking the necessary skills when it comes to dealing with people along with civility towards their fellow players, but it's not certain. While I have met a lot of fantastic people that play WoW I have met many more introverts that frankly seemed to just not be people friendly, if you will.
In addition, the WoW community also seems to bring out the worst in people. Perhaps it's a result of their environment where player A and/or B is behaving in a certain manner, therefore it must be the in-thing to act in such a way, but I have experienced such a thing on a personal level. I have a close friend that I grew up with since childhood and one in which I introduced to WoW shortly after release. We started off our MMO-playing days with another popular title and he would often come over to my condo to play on a second PC that I had as he lacked a decent gaming computer at home. I eventually sold him the second computer that I had at an extremely reasonable price, just so it would be more convenient for us to play together.
When we started playing WoW, we would almost always group for the majority of our questing just to enjoy the game and have fun. It was interesting however to see the turn in his behavior as time went on. Unfortunately, as time progressed, he turned from the friendly give you the shirt off his back kind of guy to a player that was consumed with fitting in with the elitist types that plague the game. It became less about us having fun together, to I need to grind out gear or rep, regardless of the cost. Now while I was always more of the casual gamer that didn't have as much time to invest, it became very clear to me that he was becoming more and more self absorbed including telling me that he didn't have the time to play and then logging onto alts to lvl instead of helping me with quests like I often did with him. It was always about, "well I just need to do this, then we can do your quests", while my quests never seemed to materialize.
Finally, and on a slightly different note. While I have played many MMOs, like others have consistently pointed out I have found LotRO to have the best community I have come across and a night and day difference from other games including WoW. While their still happen to be some bad seeds within LotRO's community, the community as a whole is like a breath of fresh air making for a much more enjoyable experience IMHO.
Sorry for the rant, but wanted to add my 2c worth.
Your fail comment, failed.
Clearly, you cannot have moderators but maybe for 1 in every 1000 or so customers, and clearly, you cannot expect this 1 person to coordinate the social interactions of 1000 people. You'd need a rigid hierarchy, pyramid-style like a military unit.
You can have this moderator do exactly as your last sentence describes: hold people accountable. If someone is using '@$$' to circumvent vulgarity filters (just an example), you can moderate... using human interaction to hold other human interaction accountable is the only way to do it: you can't expect to draft a program that when placed into a bot will moderate properly. Mischevious minds will always find a way around it.
Thanks for reading the post though. I'm glad some of the points struck home for you.
That is exactly right, and we're not saying NO to save WoW, because it is already a lost cause. We are saying NO to dissuade the next group of greedy suits who decide to emulate Blizzard and Cryptic, etc.
We can prevent some of the future games from spewing this crap, but the sooner we start saying no, the better the results will be.
So - Stand up, pull up your pants, and walk away.
- MMO_Doubter
Clearly, you cannot have moderators but maybe for 1 in every 1000 or so customers, and clearly, you cannot expect this 1 person to coordinate the social interactions of 1000 people. You'd need a rigid hierarchy, pyramid-style like a military unit.
You can have this moderator do exactly as your last sentence describes: hold people accountable. If someone is using '@$$' to circumvent vulgarity filters (just an example), you can moderate... using human interaction to hold other human interaction accountable is the only way to do it: you can't expect to draft a program that when placed into a bot will moderate properly. Mischevious minds will always find a way around it.
Thanks for reading the post though. I'm glad some of the points struck home for you.
That would be a welcomed idea and would, I feel, help others enjoy the game more.
I am still waiting for the first company to release age-restricted servers. And, I do believe we'll see it eventually. Granted, it will be a task to implement and hard to police, but I believe it can be accomplished.
The first company to do so will earn my respect and perhaps my loyalty and money as well.
Your fail comment, failed.