bullying, harassing, or even “criticizing” them is an entirely pointless endeavor that does nothing but make you feel superior to another person. having a “minimum standard” for random matchmaking is OK i guess, but not having that standard met is the developer’s fault for not having proper matchmaking, not the random shitty player just trying to play the game.
and it’s a game. it fundamentally does not matter if someone is so bad you can’t get your +0.2 second record or whatever. it does not matter if you can’t win the difficulty you chose. everyone starts somewhere, and in games where different difficulties tend to be almost like entirely different games, this is even more true. if you want a game where you have an 100% chance of everyone involved being at the correct skill level you want, than don’t play with explicitly random players. no one cares if you want to feel special because you can win more at some fictional game than other people. I respect skill, but if you think that’s a reason to bully people than you should leave every game scene ever to save people from your presence
if a player stumbles into something but doesn’t understand it it’s the developer’s fault 90% of the time. if a player doesn’t want to “git gud” it’s the developer’s fault 90% of the time. every single genuine criticism made about a game’s difficulty is inherently valid. every game should have an easy mode. players should default to helping new players rather than dismissing them. learning a game by playing it is always more intuitive than using google or reading blog posts.
WoW is so guilty of this lmao, it’s like half the appeal of playing the game for most of the player base - the “i know more than you, so I’m better” types.
The mechanics for each encounter are so opaque that you have to reference a website outside of the game to understand what’s going on because the default game is sure as fuck not equipped to tell you anything (and don’t bring up the combat log, no one looks at that at mid to low levels, especially if you’re new). Some classes can’t even be fully utilized without 3rd party add-ons cause it’s too difficult to tell what araus are active or when procs happen.
Making it worse, there’s a ubiquitous culture of expecting everyone to already know mechanics of each encounter and what you’re supposed to do (unless you’re playing at CE mythic raiding level ig). There’s no trail and error and, in fact, playing that way is considered a huge waste of time and a valid reason to get booted from a group. I CANT EVEN JOIN NORMAL PUG RAIDS IF I DONT HAVE AOTC TO LINK MOST OF THE TEAM FUCK.
I hate it, I wanna like the game so much, maybe for nostalgia, maybe for when it can be fun, but it’s such a badly designed game with the worst kind of culture. I felt this for a while, but it really hit me recently when I got a friend to play on a trial account and I was realizing how much information, add-ons, and mechanics they’d have to learn about ON TOP OF THE HOURS IT TAKES TO LEVEL - of course they fucking lost interest, the game’s barrier to entry reaches the moon at this point. Even for me, I have trouble getting into groups and I haven’t been able to join a guild for years because I’ve been playing on and off, so I have no “evidence” of my competence in game (like AoTC or high m+ io scores, which are almost impossible to pug your way into anyways).
Why waste time on this when you can just jump into a DRG lobby and actually play the game?
saw a great and extremely long youtube video called “Why it’s rude to suck at Warcraft” about exactly this kind of stuff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU
I played a bit of the modern wow and it has the matchmaking system. They managed to get rid of all the whining and insults in chat, but it’s replaced by something so, so much worse.
You’ll do a dungeon for the first time, and you pull a mob around a blind corner, or walk the wrong way, or some shit like that. Suddenly and without any warning, you hit a loading screen and you’re standing back where you queued up. You have been silently, without a word between them or you, vote kicked by 3 out of the other 4 players.
Saw this video as well and I really liked it, really voiced a lot of the frustrations I had with the game that I couldn’t quite as accurately diagnose. Nothing about it has changed for the better either.
The social aspect of the game is even in the toilet now, nobody talks and recruitment for teams and guilds takes place almost entirely outside of the game as well.
there’s literally an hour and a half video about this kind of thing happening as a historical phenomenon that uses sources and if i distantly remember my first watch of it correctly basically only includes correct information. and g*mers still argue about it to this very day. wow. or should i say WoW.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I remember like 15 years ago being told by people putting together raids that they were only looking for people with achievements for content that had been out for a week.