Just why is GW Community so Rude?

From my limited experience, it seems that anet has set up GW especially for the douchiest gamer.

In LOTRO, i got a warning for calling a spammer a spamtard.
I didn't even whisper it, I said something like "Use the trade channel spamtard" , lol and i got a warning for behaviour...

ANET on the other hand, reluctantly sets up a reporting system, which Threatens you that you can be banned for "abuse" though it doesn't say what constitutes abuse.

Also as you've mentioned, the NPCs are pretty juvenile, Among the worst being in Polymock.


I don't think it has anything to do with difficulty of the game.
Everyone knows they can act like an asshat in GW and get away with it, and the nicest people sometimes even break after putting up with douchy IMs and chuck norris crap and your mom crap and 'that's gay' and all other manner of childish crap, that they too start acting like a douche.

Meanwhile in games where there are actually mods who actually care whether or not the players are being harassing, this sort of thing either doesn't happen, or it gets nipped in the bud.


The games with the nastiest players , in my limited experience, are those with no monthly fee. I think that's the only thing, again in my limited experience, i can attribute it to. I wouldn't say it has anything to do with the difficulty of the game.
jmo.

This idea of "nothing but the best being tolerated" is translated through this forum whenever anyone posts a build for help or criticism also. People of the community will only ever direct the person posting the build down one of the few "accepted" routes. For instance...someone posts a pretty decent Warrior build...it doesn't have Dragon Slash or "Save Yourselves!" but it could get someone through PvE quite nicely. The community will almost always channel that person down the route of having a typical "god mode" build, just like everyone else, and then have the audacity to complain about people using "cookie cutter" builds.

I'm not saying there's anything necessarily wrong with channeling a new player toward the "most effective" build, I just find it highly irritating that just about every Warrior build posted gets turned into a D-slash build, every Paragon build gets turned into an Imbagon build, every Elementalist build being turned into a Mind Blast build. I sometimes wonder if it's completely irrational irritation, because it's frustrating that there are, these days, very few builds which are considered by the community to be "acceptable"...anything else is cast out and the creator called every name under the sun.

I think, Shadowspawn X, you over-exaggerate about people failing if one person even puts one foot out of line, because you can beat PvE with very little practice and very few skills. I do however understand your comments about rudeness. It's not nice to see someone flamed extensively for their desire to use a skill which isn't deemed "acceptable", or for their desire to play the game a certain way. The happy medium is lost, I feel, whereby there were many builds which would have been acceptable to PuGs, where now there are only a few. I'm not in any way saying discouraging "bad" builds is wrong. There is a big difference between a "passable" or "workable" build and an outright "bad" one. There are indeed some ideas out there which need to be "fixed", such as when certain fellow alliance members of mine give their Monks Charm and Comfort Animal because they "like the pet". I have no qualms over telling them to ditch it and suggesting replacement skills, but I do feel the community needs to regain a lot of the tolerance and trust it once had.

Speaking from 18 months experience City of Heroes, whose abuse policy is almost non-existent and certainly less policed than GW's, disagrees with you and there have been plenty of other MMO examples presented here by others where this type of thing either doesn't happen at all or occurs far less frequently that have similar moderation and "Terms of Use" agreements to that of GW.

Bad analogy but if CoH is classified as "Carebear", the definition apparently being a player base that is helpful,encouraging and polite, GW is most certainly the "Boyz in Da Hood" of MMO.

In saying I do agree it's a component of human nature to some degree, especially given the nature of the medium we are talking about, but it is far from impossible to attain internet communities that behave in a civil manner without strict moderation or rules to police such behavior.

As already mentioned there are a fair few MMO examples where this is already, and in many cases has been since release, a non-issue hence I still question the effect other influences such as subscription costs, server selection, persistent/non-persistent world, number of players, censorship ratings, etc, etc, have as moderation and rules clearly seem to have little to no effect overall.

I would add to those saying "lighten up guys, it's just a game", I have no objection to a bit of good old Tony Soprano "busting my balls" banter in any game, in fact I enjoy it, and realize humor and intention are hugely subjective but straight out abuse is pretty clear cut to me.

I can only say this is one of the most ignorant posts I have read on Guru. Who are you to say who SHOULD be playing a game. Age is just a state of mind and as far as I know games don't have an age limit.

BOOMHEADSHOTZ!!11!!

Seriously though I gather the thread is more MMORPG comparatively focussed.

Rudeness in FPS is a no-brainer.

I've already agreed it's avoidable to a large degree but what do you do in an eight person high-end team when one person starts a flame war that could cause, at worst, a team wipe, at best, an unavoidable annoyance for the rest of the run or mission?

Seriously....get real and realize that ignoring such behavior does not automatically eliminate it from your game.

If you actually tried to understand what I write instead of sticking to your "I'm right and you're wrong" mentallity that causes and is the reason of why you have such a bad opinion on this community ( mainly because not many people put up with it and specially not on a online game).

Feel free to keep trying to prove to these people that their wrong thou, I wish you best good luck and will sent you some head ache pills.

If you think the GW community is really that rude you need to get a thicker skin.

Kids will be kids, jerks will be jerks.
KITE!! KITE!! KITE!!
Recognizing, and avoiding the problem children, continues to be the best tactic..

Thanks for the insightful comments and interesting point of views guys. I still think there is a correlation between the difficulty of the game and the rude factor. Anyone notice how polite the community was when kicking back at the dragon festival? Are these the same players? It seems if they are in a laid back atmosphere they chill out. Then when the laid back atmosphere disappears (festival ends) everyone reverts back to Mcnasty gamer from hell.

To Shadowspawn:
MOST guildless players are either griefers, or folks that don't have time for orginized play.
Most players with no social interaction with a guild, or friends..do lash out for attention.
When you can't ignore them...just avoid them.
I'll go out on a limb and say MOST GW players are here for fun...not to ruin our enjoyment of the game by being rude.

Actually, the GW comunity is just like any other it's the bad ones that get all the attention. I have found many helpful palyer here but unfortunately the rude, nasty loud mouth idiots scream the loudest and make the most noise and seem determined to ruin the game for everyone. I also think there are a lot of very young boys playing who confuse being loud, rude and vulgar with their manhood.

Ok so I'm an older *cough* gamer. Sorry about that but time does go by.

I played GW for a good long while and the degeneration of the attitudes overall made me decide to move on.

I won't go into "in the day" sort of thing but people of all ages where much nicer then now.

I now play Everquest II and enjoy it very much. Maybe it's " a romp in the sandbox" but I don't think so. From day one the community has been helpful, friendly and fun.

No I can't do high end raiding even after 18 months and a lvl 70 toon because I am not in a raiding guild nor do I have raid gear.

There's a lot more to work for and better rewards.

But the big draw is the community. You can leave level chat on even - what a concept.

I don't have to ping my build or have consumables or one skill kills all.
If there is an instance we go into and it's a wipe, even in a pug, people help you go over any mistakes so you can learn and do better.
I've even had fun in pugs in EQ big difference.

GW I have fond memories off but /shrug the better game won

From my experiences I notice it comes from the design of Guild Wars. A lot of areas you are forced to team with other players, and it is generally encouraged to do so. In PvP it is required. So a lot of times you are forced to "deal" with players who are significantly worse or more annoying than you are. Also other players who are significantly better or less annoying have to deal with you as well, but you might not realize it.

Basically most of the rudeness I've noticed comes from rage in these situations. I'm not one of those types, but you'd be surprised how many there are.

Rudeness has nothing to do with age. It has to do with maturity. I have met plenty of very nice people in game, young and old, and also plenty of jerks, young and old.

For me this has never been much of a problem except in a few areas.
It's just a matter of asking a couple of questions when someone enters the team or make a judgement on the skillset.
When most of the team members seem to be good it's easy to take a less experienced player without him/her being a burden.

Most of the people I think are rude are the ones who think they are good but actually are not.
If you are good, you adjust the team if you know you have a weaker player.
If you cannot do that, don't take that player or don't blame/rage.
If you fail to judge how good a player is... maybe you are not as good as you think you are.

Shadowspawn said that he thinks that rudeness and the difficulty of the game have a correlation. I think he's right.
In easy parts everyone can lead a winning team.
In the hardest parts only few can.
People get upset when they find out they cannot lead and most of them will blame others. And team members also have no right to be rude, they should have observed the party leader and seen if he's a good leader or not.

Might sound stupid but in most teams it's clear from the start if it's an easy ride, medium ride, hard ride or complete failure.

And always keep in mind that you are playing with humans.
Someone might just need to quit playing because something important irl happened.
Those things happen from time to time, no need to rage because of that.

I think that this is 100% accurate, at least for PvE. I can say that at some point in time, it was believed that all-human parties would be superior to AI controlled players. Right now I can say that this is almost entirely untrue for the majority of the game, unless you're running a textbook build used to basically farm or "run" the elite areas.

Guild Wars does a really lousy job of actually teaching players how to run an effective build or running with some smart strategy. Usually most players will just play solo with H/H, and for the majority of Normal Mode, you can run a totally ineffective build because the AI will cover for your bad play.

At some point the players will get roadblocked because eventually their super-bad playing gets them stuck somewhere. This is where they ask for their guildies/PUGs, because they will blame the "bad" A.I. for their inability to beat a mission. Of course, the gut reaction is to absolutely ignore any player that tells them that they need a different build or a total change in strategy. The usual phrase that I hear is: I've made it so far doing it this way, and so I don't see why I need to change it.

If you think that I'm talking about some exotic strategy, I'm not. Here's an example: Three assassins that aren't using any Elites is guaranteed to wipe your party if they continue to tank and "expect" the one monk in the party to keep up. This kind of rule should be about as clear as day to anybody. But I swear that as late as last month, I had to monk a mission that was just like that, and the subsequent wipe actually improved conditions, as most of the players left and I was able to run two players and get Masters Reward by replacing every former-human spot with heroes and henchmen.

Need another great totally-true example? I was asked to monk for A Time For Heroes. I said that they should just pay the runners 1K to do it if they had trouble with the mission. But these were my friends--three year veterans of the game--and they said that it wasn't any "fun" to do it that way. In the end, the party layout consisted of four air spike elementalists, one BHA ranger, and three LoD monks.

I said that there's no way that this kind of party layout can work as an elementalist or ranger can't tank, but they said enough spike damage surely was the magical secret in beating the Great Destroyer. The plan was to basically run around to "safe" hardened lava spots, and spam Extinguish when they were burning. I said that this was the absolutely worst way to beat the Great Destroyer, and he can be killed with a variety of methods: Touch Ranger, Pain Inverter, Spoil Victor. If they were that worried about burning, then just equip Frigid Armor. The response that I got was--and I'm dead serious--that this kind of strategy was "cheesy" and running those builds were akin to "exploits".

So according to my friends (again: three-year GW veterans), if it takes you less than five minutes to kill the Great Destroyer, then you must have been cheating because it is supposed to be hard work!

And that's when I stopped reading this thread. If you belong to this age group I would like you to know that you are wrong. And if you don't belong to this age group I would like you to know that you're wrong.

There's no age where you should be playing video games and there's no age when you should stop. "Normally" is a word used to describe a lot of video gaming ("Normally for kids" "Normally not for adults") but if you honestly can't see that games are marketing more to adults than kids (by a HUGE ratio) you missed the bus.

And it isn't about "Taking a Joke." There's a huge group of people who play this game and you cannot possibly expect them all to be the same. Some are immature, some are mature, some make jokes and some are serious, some don't care if you win or lose and some demand perfection. And you what? It's perfectly fine. I'd say 90% of the time the problem is finding people you don't agree with. And it breaks the game.

On the topic of the Rude GW Community, I really don't believe it. Of course there's the rare rude player, griefer or scammer. But they're no where near the majority. I find the GW Community to be distant, but not rude. And I blame the distance on ANet, Introducing Heroes (Which I actually do like) and Creating Tons of Outposts over 4 Games made it more difficult to find people.

Some may infer that distance as a standoffish quality, but it's not.


Jeez, I need to shut up, huh?

People have gotten used to playing with customizable AI help, so when they play with other players, sometimes they forget that not everyone is attacking the same target (which you never have to worry about with h+h). It becomes a total clusterf#$@ when people don't pay attention or call targets.

It's like refusing to go from a typewriter to a computer. Modern conventions of the game. They gave you a challenge, but they also gave you the tools to deal with it. Alot of people think it's cheap to have the power to just walk in and pwn the final boss, but that's why those skills are there. *sigh* I feel your pain.

lol, what ?

GW is far from "difficult". Anyone with half a brain can easely finish pretty much everything.

So what if there are no "leisure" activities like fishing or crafting ? Damn, if you want to fish, go to a lake/river and fish there. If you want to play GW, fire up your computer and play a game. Straight out of the outpost action !

GW is just like any other gaming community. Both bad and good behaviour everywhere. Get over it, grow a spinal cord or something.


(yes, i am well aware the above text wasn't "nice" in any way. I liked the irony of it and didn't rephrase it :P )

I think you've pretty much hit the nail on the head. Most people's tolerance for bad players ends where the bad player's ability to completely waste their time begins.

Ummmm.....yeah......

I'm not.

I'm discussing the OP, your attempting to justify bad behavior while suggesting that ignoring it stops it being an issue.

Erh. In PvE, except for the idiots faffing about in SJM, rudeness only seems to really occur during party wipes.

As I've played through Factions far too many times, I PuG everything now for the hell of it. Did Gyala Hatchery last night and the silly leader didn't specify that he/she wished to go the "back way", so whilst most of the team followed, our monk ran for the turtles. I was the only one who noticed that triggers the escort part of the mission, so called everyone back, and the poor monk was shouted at.

Needless to say, unprepared as the party was, we got masters in a little under twenty minutes. Everyone was happy then.

I can guarantee half the team would have screamed bloody murder if it was any other way. Which stands to reason I guess, but I don't know why one would PuG if they wanted a guaranteed chance at the Master's reward.

I challenge you to try and spend a day in RA without encountering a rude player.

I agree That right goes to the phantasy star universe official forums community with their daily "Inb4lock" or the all to popular PSU trade mark "Gibrawrs" or even the "Noobtube" So far the PSU community is by far 100 times worse than the Guild wars community could EVER be. Seriously Spend a day there Any one who wants to see rudeness at its best spend a day there. PSU official forums. More than half of the things posted are ether complaints or reasons people quit, And the rest are not making it better all of their responses are Inb4lock or gibrawrs or telling them their a noob. Its just pathetic. The guild wars community is a bunch of saints compared to psu community.

the big huge debate over ursan kinda sorta goes back to the op's point. i think for whatever reason some people get WAAAY too worked up over a GAME. i play everyday, several hours a day alot of the time and even though that's alot, i don't get so worked up over it. all the people who bitch and rant over pug's, ursan and god knows what else is ridiculous to me.

there are many nice people in the game but they usually either keep their local channel off or just keep quiet when people argue about nonsense. in my opinion, it's people of all ages who are running around being complete assholes in the game. the ones that are adults act this way because it's a way for them to vent their "real life" frustrations and stress. i'm 29 and have played online games for years but i don't go around cursing people or calling them "noobs" or whatever. if i start to get that stressed while playing i'll just turn the game off and take a breather which is something ALOT of players should do instead of acting so ridiculous.

for some reason this thread reminded me of the WOW south park episode, where the middle aged dude did nothing but kill low level players, just being an asshole for no reason because he obviously had no life outside the game.

I find the inanity worse. Local chat in RA/AB/whatever is filled with people discussing how to best wtfpwn with crappy crappy builds, talking about how 'cool' their names/characters look and other assorted rubbish.

wow are you sure you're in RA?

like every time i go there it is one of the following:
*sex
*drugs
*politics

I'd be SUPER HAPPY if I found them discussing crappy builds.


...seriously.

I usually turn local chat off whenever I'm in a district, but turn it back on again when I enter the mission.

The smacktalk is just too funny to ignore.

My nephew just turned 12 and recently joined GW.

I really, really tried talking his parents out of getting the game for him, but he cried for it and of course, Mommy went and bought it for him. >.<' I am resigned to the fact that I will be helping him every time he's on (or deal with my sister,) and actually praying that he will get frustrated and quit the game for good. He is impatient and can't quite grasp how vast of a game GW can be and that I won't always be there to help him. He thinks this is simply another run around, hack and slash. He is a very slow responder chatwise (very short attention span. He gets up and does other things.) I'm sure he's been in a few bad PUGs (I just got him out of a bad guild and into mine where I can at least keep a better eye on him.) I know he's probably given people a hard time as well (he is 12 and hasn't played anything online but Runescape.) Urrg!

At least I will see him this weekend. I will do my best to sit him down and go over the game in detail the best I can. At least that will relax my nerves somewhat. If he's going to be in a gaming community, then I would rather it be GW. Any rudeness I've come across has been few and far inbetween. However, I am a mature and experienced adult that types/acts as such. =/

The people who think the GW community is "rude" are the people who have a very, very thin skin.

Meaning what?

It doesnt offend me in the slightest when I have to read anything bad in the game, in fact, I am in full support for swear words and bad language to be useable without bans being given out, just as it is possible to do so in AoC. but that doesnt mean that you can just ignore that rudeness is there, and the rudeness isnt a case of someone just saying a bad word, it is normally insuting people for the builds they play, your mom jokes, racist comments (report + insta ban), and hateful comments are all pressent at some point.

Maybe you havnt seen it yourself, but I have seen it all. I have been wishing for a feature that can automatically log me in as offline when playing RA, because I normally forget to change my status when swapping characters, but I forget and then theres someone whispering me to cry about my build, reminding me 'Oh, I forgot to change to offline'.

GW doesn't present an actual consequence for being rude. I have typed /report on many people that were being obnoxious, leeching, using racist comments and so on but I have no idea that it did anything and never will.

There are people anywhere you go inside or outside of a game that just want to be a pain in someone's ass. That is their intention and most often they have become really good at it. Usually this is because someone was a pain in their's at some point in time. The reaction is all they are going for and as long as they continue to feel like they are getting under someone's skin, they will continue to push.

I used to be in a guild where there were 45 active members on at any given point. One person of these 45 was a complete ass all the time for no reason. He scammed people, insulted people, or just tried to start crap with people that were just minding their business and not saying anything. He made people leave because of it. When ever he would say something to me, I would snap back with something equally as obnoxious and insulting as was the trend on how this guy was responded to.

After a couple weeks of this I sent a pm to everyone else in the guild asking for people to just ignore him. Of course the next time he logged on he started with his normal crap. After an hour of no response he logged off. Next time he was on, same thing. By the 4th day of this when he logged on there was no "what's up fags" or what ever clever insult he wanted to use, after ten minutes he finally said "anyone need any help?".

Since then he's left that guild and I recently saw him at the eotn outpost with no guild tag just randomly insulting people.

Guild Wars is a demanding game?..... Are you kidding? You can play for 1 hour a day and still be about as good as anyone else.

As for the rudeness, I think that's really just a side affect of the "darwinist" system that Anet's implemented into the game. I think you're right on a lot of what you said. If you make the smallest mistake, you get "omg noob"'d, and that's really frustrating, but can you blame them? Guild Wars was designed to be an easy game to pick up, and if you take the time to read through the manual, and learn the way things work, you'll be fine.

The problem is with people who refuse to take the time learn on their own. Too many people expect others to play the game for them.

My friends list is actually full of people I helped out when they first started, and yes, they all made their fair share of mistakes. I enjoy helping people, but it's a two-person job. They have to WANT to be good at the game.

You seam to forget that the +40 crowd are the ones that have played video games since the late 70's, it is something we grew up doing and like doing.
I think the 14-20 crowd are the ones that should get away more from the monitors and experiance the real world, the +40 crowd turn to the monitor to exscape the real world for a change after a day or week at the office, supporting these little online hooligans.

And it is frightning to see how the younger crowd act in any online community, they will have a rude awakening when they go out into the real world.

Good points, but dont forget that you didnt have online games in the 70s

They are relatively a new thing, and unfortunately, a lot of children nowadays dislike old people playing games.

Heres a video for all the little brats that dare to think such things:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW9UG9O3GOg

MUDs! Ok, not in the early 70s, but by late 70s early eighties there were a slew of crappy online multiplayer text-based dungeons (many of which were probably more enjoyable than bloody frostmaw). On the grand scheme of things, online 'game-like environments' have been around for quite a long time now.

Yeah, and "Old Granny" has earned her right to be a bad ass gamer

damn strait.
well..not quite a 'granny', but I have been kicking digital butt for many a sleepless night!!

I agree. totally, except in one area. Presearing.

The competition in presearing is not like that in any other part of the game. I will run with lvl 3's and up. I teach the basic skills of pulling, salvaging and other things while they are in presearing. When someone does not listen to me and just runs off after I have given instructions I just stand there.

At home I shake my head but after they die. I res them and say "try this" or try that. or you just died again so I will die cause my res is out.

After dying several times and they do what I suggest I help them. My toon is lvl 17 WOOT. Killer in pre. The game becomes robotic to them and takes way less time to kill things and avoid agro.

Most of the time noobs are like - agro? what is agro? How did you draw on my map. Love it

So there are those of us out there trying to enforce a nurturing community before they get to the flaming part of the game. I love noobs and I do it cause I wish someone would have taken me under my wing before I put a rune of minor health ontop of a rune of Sup health. What is non stacking anyway ? Let this not happen to you.

I'd actually prefer fishing but that's just me.