TheGrumpyElf has a thought-provoking post today that I believe everyone should go read right away. I hope he’ll forgive me for not agreeing entirely with his point but I think he makes a good history of the problem, how it used to be and how things changed. I was there to see those changes it happened pretty much like he said.
If you’re wondering (which you should not because you read his post right?), Grumpy is talking about how automated group finding tools like LFD and LFR removed accountability for the bad players. Before those tools a bad player name would eventually get around a server and be black listed by the community, the good ones would get invited everywhere and that was life. You were responsible for how people viewed you. With LFD/LFR, you can do whatever you want and you’ll never be blacklisted and a bad player will be allowed to sour the game experience of as many people as he wants.
Grumpy finishes with this.
But one thing I always say is that I missed being able to be in a group where everyone was at least a decent player capable of doing the content because it was built with people that earned the right to be in that group by the accountability system we had in place before the looking for system.
Sometimes I wonder if what we lost is worth what we got. We sold our souls for an easier system and lost our community in the process.
I’ll be honest, when people start talking about “earning the right” or “deserving” it gets my attention fast. I don’t believe any player deserve more than any other. We all pay the same amount of money and everyone should be able to enjoy the game playing how they want.
So with that long introduction over, let’s talk about the bad players and how we can save our community.
The colors of bad
Bad is such a broad term. It’s also a very subjective term. If I compare myself to someone who never played then I might find him bad. If I compare myself to a raider from Paragorn, I must be downright awful. But bad might not only be about performance for some, it could also be gear. If a tank is in a heroic with barely acceptable gear he could be tought of as bad…. then again maybe he started playing way later than the rest of the player base who got better gear on average.
Then you can start combining these factors. Maybe the tank has poor gear because he’s a new player to the game and doesn’t know any better yet. Sure his tanking is awful but does that make him a bad player? Back in the day he would probably have been blacklisted while his only crime was to have picked up the game later than everyone else.
You see where I’m going with this. Being in a group with strangers doesn’t tell you squat about them . What you perceive as bad can be explained in a multitude of ways. Time, experience, skill, comprehension, distractions… any reason really. I learned my grandfather died while I was running Old kingdom and I finished the boss we were fighting in a kind of dazed state while my father was talking to me. Pretty sure my fellow puggers thought I was awful.
But sometimes in the heat of the action we forget to consider all of that. I’m often guilty of raging at hunters who keep their taunts on their pets while I tank. Sometimes I ask them politly to remove the taunt but more often than not I rage at them along with my guildies. I’m not especially proud of that because it’s not helping anyone in the end. Grumpy talks about community and I believe that this behavior or seeing Bads everywhere is not helping at all. But before getting to community building I want to address a particular issue.
Criminals
I’m going to label a particular group of bad players Criminals. Criminals are the trolls, the jerks, the people who deliberately ruins it for everyone else. These are the ones that make racist jokes and throw insults left and right. Those are the players that no matter what you do, they’ll just ruin it for you.
For these I entirely agree with Grumpy. I miss the old days because we could identify them and keep track of them. I hate it when I get them in my pugs and I wish all their accounts would be banned and their computers burn.
But I don’t believe all the “bad” players should suffer because of those criminals and I think that if we want a better community we’ll just have to live with them.
If we want community back…
If we disregards the criminals, every player pays the same and is allowed to play the game how they want to play it. No one deserves to play more than other or have privileged access to content. I’m not saying that everyone should play with everyone. Hardcore guilds have the right to choose who they play with when they raid just as casual can choose their members based on personality alone.
But LFD and LFR are tools designed to give a chance for everyone to see the content. It doesn’t rob anyone of anything. Hardcore can still do world first if they want to. But when you click that LFD button, you do so with the knowledge that you will be put with four other players who come from many different backgrounds and all have the right to be there.
You should not resent people for playing the game in another way than you. There’s more than enough room for everyone.
Again, criminals are excluded.
So, going in LFD with the knowledge you may be put in with people with vastly different goals and aims as you your choices become really simple when you are faced with a player you consider bad. Is the bad player preventing you from finishing the run? If the answer is no then simply smile and run along with it. There’s no need to get upset about it. You’ll finish the run, get your loot and go home. Bitching will not make it better and it won’t help the other guy either.
If the answer is yes then ask yourself if you can do anything about it. If you think you can correct the issue simply by offering a few suggestions then go for it. They might listen or not but at least you will have tried to help out. If there’s nothing to be done and disaster is sure to happen then simply leave. There’s no need to waste your time and there’s no need to make someone else day more miserable by belittling them.
So it’s really that simple. We’ll never go back to the old community and accountability and I’m happy for it. Too many players got blacklisted back then only because they didn’t fit some standard often set by players whose only merit was to have started before them. Think back for a moment how new servers got flooded with people needing to make a fresh start along and level along with everyone else.
We can build a new community though and for that we only need to stop resenting people who are not at the same level of play as we are.
While I find myself not wholly agreeing with your point, the opposite is also true. Yes, everyone pays their sub every month. And yes, that sub allows them to play what they want, how they want. However, it doesn’t allow them to detract from others. What the old system, before LFR, before LFD gave communities was a way to segregate by goals, and by skill levels. Why people see that as a bad thing, I don’t get. If you wanted to run raids before, or dungeons, or what have you, you needed to be accountable to the requirements to successfully complete that dungeon. If you didn’t have the gear required to tank, and didn’t want to put in the effort, you’d quickly find yourself unable to tank anything with anyone, because word would get around. Same goes for healing, or DPS.
That, I feel is the core of Grumpy’s arguement and many like it. Players now are de facto forced into dealing with players who are overly entitled(but not criminals as you put it), feeling they should be able to be carried through content without putting forth a minimum of effort. Do I resent them? Yes, I do, because their actions hinder my ability to play the game. I’m sure they resent me too, leveling accusations like ‘elitist jerk’, when they’re told that they need to improve.
I think my biggest issue with these arguments however, both yours and Grumpy’s, is that nobody wants to find the middle ground. It does exist, a place where folks who want to run the content can be made able, and the folks who want the community of old can have it. But it requires folks who scream “BAD!” and the folks who are being screamed at to bend a little and meet in the middle, something that happens rarely and isn’t likely to change.
I’d argue that you are not forced to run LFD/LFR but I understand that people feel like they are given the limited time they might have.
But this is the system we have for better or for worst. Our only choice really is how we deal with the cards we are dealt with and if community is important for you as it seems to be for many other, then we need to work with what we have.
LFD is not a magic pill but I’ll take it over the old system that I felt was a lot more unfair toward new players coming into the game. Ultimately, for any game longevity you need new players to come in all the time and I’d rather help them than hinder them.
Totally agree with your thoughts about “bad” players, and I try to keep those ideas in mind whenever I find myself in a random group with people who seem hellbent on driving me crazy.
I’ll take things a few steps further though, and call shenanigans on much of the content of Grumpy’s post and this whole idea of “we had Community back in the day”. I first picked up WoW on the original release day and since that day, with only rare exceptions, I have only ever felt there to be negative aspects to these Communities that so many of us seem to fondly remember from the pre-LFG-tool days. Bear with me…up until relatively recently, I was never a raider, and I suspect that the beneficial aspects of the server communities were something that existed mostly (if not solely) for the raiders or those who wanted to become raiders, so perhaps the good communities were there and I just never saw them because I was not part that group of people. At the same time, I feel like I saw that group from the outside and it looked extremely unpleasant. Not just from the strained time commitments and knowledge requirements, but also the exclusionary and frequently insulting attitudes in the raiding community toward those not already accepted into their community.
While I’m sure things back in the day looked rosy for the in-crowd, I think that the people singing the praises of old-fashioned Community and Accountability today aren’t really considering just how damaging those things were for large portions of the playerbase. Had the WoW developers not taken huge measures to “erode our communities” with things like the LFG tools and various cross-server technologies, I’m not sure that WoW would have maintained the massive financial success that allows the developers to continue building new things for both dedicated raiders and casual players.
“I don’t believe any player deserve more than any other. We all pay the same amount of money and everyone should be able to enjoy the game playing how they want.”
That sounds nice and egalitarian, but it fails to account for the effect players have on each other.
If this were a single-player game, then the concept of “deserving” would be troublesome. But it isn’t a single-player game. It has other players and when we play poorly we impose costs on them. Did we somehow earn the right to ruin groups for others, whether by intentionally bad behavior, indifference, or lack of skill?
This isn’t a call to ban the bad players. Rather, I think the solution is to help them improve. To improve they need help from other players, but they won’t get that help, or at least not enough relative to the abuse, if we’re in a system of mass indifference or hostility.
I admit I will vote to kick someone from LFD for almost any reason that annoys me. My time is precious and I don’t want to spend my leisure time full of frustration or rage at the antics of people who can’t be bothered to learn basic rules of the game or of etiquette. I enjoyed grouping much much more “back in the day.”
I actually think the changes to the guild system did not help with people’s behavior. When I was learning the game I was in a mid-sized social guild and I actually cared what those people thought about me. If I was a jerk in a dungeon or did something dumb most likely the guild leader would have found out about it and I would have gotten help or an explanation of why not all loot is hunter loot or whatever. If one person was blacklisted that’s bad enough but making your whole guild look bad was something you just didn’t do.
The new guild system encourages people to just sign up for whatever lvl 25 guild asks them first, and many of those are huge and full of people who are there because they want guild perks. I’m not sure the accountability to a guild is as strong as it was before, so that’s one more social pressure towards good behavior that’s been loosened.