Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead 2. Sadly I have to admit I pretty much suck at it. Yesterday I even got to impress ReR from Multiplaying in a game of versus with my noob skills. We were unable to dent the survivors as the infected and when we were the survivor we would get pwned as soon as we left the safe house. As far as L4D2 is concerned I’m pretty much the definition of a noob.Okay, I’m not that bad… I can do the campaigns in coop and single player and sometimes in versus I do have my moments of genius but I still need practice, a lot of it.
And you know what happens most of the time when you’re a noob in these games? You get kicked… Off the top of my head I got kicked for not having a mic, accidently shooting a teammate who ran into my line of fire, missing a shot with the boomer, getting jumped on by a jockey and a few more times for reasons completely unknown. I’m fine with getting killed because I suck but getting kicked is pretty aggravating. It’s hard to get better when your not being given a chance to.
I see the same thing in WoW and others MMO too. Whenever there’s a noob in a group or someone who’s not as good as the rest they often get kicked, called names or any other jerk behavior. For example, we had a mage with a green (uncommon) gem equiped and he got kicked for being a noob and being lazy. I got kicked also right after for not voting with the rest of the jerks. I mean what if that mage is a new player who just got to 80? Maybe he doesn’t know better, maybe that’s the best gem he could get his hands on at the time. Your not helping anyone by kicking him.
The story of Baub
Years ago in vanilla WoW we convinced a friend of ours (Baub) to start playing WoW. He rolled a priest and worked his way up the levels until he was high enough to do Scholomance. Another friend, a tank, was so happy to finally get a healer that we decided pretty quickly we would run Scholomance until we all got our tier 0 head-piece. So we go into Scholo with our new healer who’s not even 60 yet and soon enough we start dying, and dying and dying again. We quickly figured out that it was because Baub wasn’t removing diseases.
“Get your thumbs out of your arse and remove diseases! You see that little icon called “cured diseases” ?! It’s there for a reason. USE IT!. It’s your job!” Says the tank.
“But I never had to remove disease before. I didn’t even know you had one.” Says Baub.
“Wtf noob! Learn to play!” reply the tank.
Needless to say Baub didn’t take quite well to the whole exchange and he was pretty pissed at the tank. He wasn’t arguing that he needed to remove diseases, simply that he had never done it before and he needed practice to learn to do it well. And I agreed with him. Today he’s a star healer.
A few days ago we were all in vent and Baub starts screaming. “Damn noob DPS! God these guys sucks. They’re dpsing all over the place and this damn warrior is not moving out of the whirlwind. Arghhhhh!!! Hate them so much.” It went on like that for an hour. After his run he started complaining about all the noobs in the game who don’t know how to play but at some point I reminded him of his noob days and how he felt when he got called out on it. I told him quite plainly he was acting like an ass and that maybe the “noob dps” only needed to be told what to do instead of just screaming at them.
The moral of the story
I am waffling pissed and tired of this damn intolerance that seems to be everywhere. It seems that as soon as someone is good enough in a game they feel they have to right to scream at everyone not to their standards. They expect everyone to know everything they know, have read every single website, do top dps, never miss, etc… etc.. They seem to forget all those run where they got one shotted by a boss because they din’t move and that they were praying no one noticed and kicked them.
There’s not a single player out there who logs into a game telling himself he’s going to suck and that he’s fine with it. Everyone wants to improve and we all believe that we can succeed with enough practice. Instead of screaming at people for not being good enough try helping them instead.
Absolutely.
And this is the number one reason I will not willingly join groups, let alone PUGs. I can do without the stress and plain meanspirited anger being directed at me for trying to learn and improve. Frankly, I’d rather play 2/3rds of a game where I know I can enjoy it and not be subject to spittle and agression from players – than to extend into the last 3rd of play requiring grouping and just not have fun.
I’m in my 40’s (age, not level) and have a mortgage, car payment, full-time job, spouse and a multitude of other pulls on my time. I can’t know EVERYTHING to be able to pull it out of my ass at the appropriate time and will never be the top anything on any server in any game. More and more, it feels to me that this disqualifies me ipso facto from grouping. So I don’t.
Do I wish I could? Sure.
Do I wish I could if it means the kind of abuse that this article highlights? Nope – sorry. Just a game. Have fun or don’t play is more my motto.
Being yelled at by others clearly better than me rather than trained and stretched to improve is not condusive to anyone’s fun. I don’t want rainbows and skittles – I want plain, direct honest input. Ranting does not count. If you can point out my error, great. If you need to impughn my basic worth – back to solo play for me.
That’s why I try to avoid being negative in games, or I’ll just politely give advice. Whenever I start acting like an ass I remind myself of how I used to die in literally every game I played until I learned what “tactics and strategy” meant. (Damn Heroes of Might and Magic became SO much easier after that!)
We’ll have to give L4D2 another go, you should also definitely try out LoL.
Healers never get kicked. You could try that. Well I say ‘never’. I don’t know for sure as I’m the only one in my groups.
I’m pretty sure these pugs would be less tolerent of my demented effort to top the DPS meters by running around like a moron spamming Holy Nova and meleeing bosses, IF it didn’t take 5 mins to replace me. But it does, so I stay.
I never vote or quit and love rolling heroics with inexperienced players because:
1) I can out-DPS them while healing if I try really hard which is top fun.
2) They are usually not jerks yet.
3) The best way to annoy a jerk is to defend the ‘noobs’ from them. Jerks hate that. Really hate it.
4) It’s harder. In WoW these days, difficulty is the rarest resource.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a saint, I do laugh with my housemate about guys that are comically, not just technically, bad, but it stays the hell out of the game.
Blizzard built the Universe’s Largest Eternal Grind. In this infinite grind, time is God. And noobs ‘waste’ it. Blizz did this to us.
Mission complete! I knew I could blame Blizz somehow 🙂