As a prefix, no, I'm not a person that has played UO from the very beginning and spent millions of hours inside it. I did dabble in UO a little back in the day, but since it was at a time in my life where many changes occured to me, I could never devote nearly enough time to such a game at that point. That changed when DAoC hit the shelves, which I played for quite a while.
Anyway, the point of this Blog is a simple question. How have MMORPG Gamers changed over the years?
I ask this mainly due to one reason.
Today, the people, the community attached to all MMO's seem to be riddled with a vocal subsection that is increasingly loud in both volume and slander.
Let me go into a little more detail here. When I was first playing UO, even for the little time I did, I had a certain sense of the community. I talked to some people and listened to others talk, I read community sites and so on and so forth. In short, even in a short amount of time, you get a sort of picture of the community if you decide to look for it, and of course that was doubly so in the games that came after that for me.
Did I ever hear people slandering other games? Mhh, not that I can remember. Certainly not to the degree that it is done today. I can't remember one instance where, for example, people in DAoC were ranting constantly about how much UO is a crappy piece of game. Or vice versa. Sure, there were some remarks and maybe even the oddball thread dedicated to the issue, but it was kept in boundries, it was small.
And today. Look at what we have today. Seriously, you'd think the people playing MMO's are a bunch of zealots dedicated to their one true god (their game), and anything that is not their game has to be attacked, slandered, destroyed. Any person playing any other game has to be cleansed, has to be made miserable for even considering playing another game and enjoying it, has to be branded heretic to the true spirit of the God! The amount of the people with this kind of attitude is simply starting to stagger me lately.
It seems as though gamers these days are incapable of allowing others to have their fun without trying to make them look like idiots for obviously not seeing the Light. Anything not conforming to those gamers view of MMO's will be disregarded or ridiculed. No matter where you look, it seems the same, no matter which game you go to, if you look at the official boards (or unofficial in some cases), it's a festival of insulting each other.
So why is that? I realize that, even today, these people are not the majority, but they have grown so much louder (and more numerous) within recent years. Some will claim WoW is responsible for it all (because after all WoW is responsible for everything bad in terms of MMO's ^^), some will say that's just the effect of a growing community.
But why does it have to be that way? I'm not against competition. A healthy dose of competition is certainly needed to make things work overall, but does competition have to equal a state of continual warfare between gamers? Have we indeed reached a point where it is impossible that people simply realize that others might have differing views and allow them those views without trying to discredit them and make fun of them?
I look at these forums and even though realizing it only represents a small faction of the whole, it is sad to see the amount of pure venom running through the posts. People unable to accept that other people might be having fun in a game that they could not grow to like. Unable to cope with different opinions thus they must be attacked and destroyed by any means possible. And I am not talking about people giving honest reviews and posting negatives about any given game. Critique is a wonderful thing in itself, but you have to agree that what some people do these days goes beyond mere critique. It's pure hatred.
This is not just a subject for the huge flame-war around AoC and certainly not just aimed at those attacking this game. It is as much aimed at some of those "defending" it, at others attacking different games and still others "defending" those. It's an all out state of misery as I see it and I really have to ask myself...
What happened to the community to have changed so? Was I blind before? Is it the rapid growth? They say Growth sometimes hurts. If that is the case then I can only hope that eventually, these things will return to their smaller, quieter levels in the future. Until then, I'd urge certain people posting on these boards and on other MMO's boards, just take a moment to think before you post yet another attack that proves only one thing:
That you can't be happy with others having fun where you can't.
