What is/was the most elitist MMOG community?

Cafe Society
1

In World of Warcraft, there are often clashes between the needs of ‘casual’ players (players that only play a few hours a day/days a week) and ‘hardcore’ players (the kind of people who play 16 hours a day). Overall I would say it is about average in terms of elitism; but some EQ people would occasionally complain that the WoW community is far more mean-spirited than the EQ community.

Not neccesarily elitist but in a similar vein, I had heard that World War 2 online had such a steep learning curve (because they game was going for realism) that extremely skilled players would form air squadrons and utterly crush any other players in the sky, making it nearly impossible for someone to have an opportunity to learn to get good enough to pose any threat to them.

2

I don’t know the answer, but I think that you would need to take some of the existed since the 80s M.U.D. gods into consideration. Linky.

3

Sorry for the highjack, but overall, is this game good? I’m looking for a new game, and it seems intersting.

4

Never played it myself, and the graphics are very, very dated.

From what I heard though is that it is so realistic you get killed extremely quickly. You can spend an hour making your way to the battlefield only to get killed without warning. While this is fairly realistic, it doesn’t necessarily lend to fun gameplay :frowning:

5

I never played it, but my friend used to regale me with horror stories about the absurd levels of hyper-realism. Like, you spawn an hour’s walk from the front, or that it take something like six different keystrokes to fire your rifle - bizarre crap like that. Made it sound like all sorts of anti-fun.

6

Dark Age of Camelot, hands down.

There were (are I suppose) three realms to play in, each designed to stand alone and fight the other two. Each realm has it’s own unique races and classes, but over all there is supposed to be a balance (i.e. no bard class is ultimately stronger than another realm’s bard class–as well as fighter > rogue > mage > fighter) to keep things fair.

However, each realm develops an sense of elitism as the best realm. The other realms suck. They aren’t worth playing. Trolls smell bad. Etc., etc…

And on top of the realm vs. realm elistism, there grew a class vs. class elitism because (can’t speak for now, but for the first year or so at least) none of the classes were balanced at all. There were huge gaps in abilities at the end game… not to mention horrible game glitches that allowed for very unfair exploitation by certain classes.

And lastly, certain realms were populated by far more players than other realms (varied from server to server) and regardless of class or realm balancing issues, had a huge advantage in sheer numbers. On the server I played on, we took to calling the Albionians “the Zerg” because they just kept coming and coming and coming. At some of the larger battles we were convinced that their intent was to win by crashing the zone.

All of these issues led to a huge amount of trash talking and bad-mouthing on the boards dedicated to the game. To make matters even worse, every enemy kill was worth a certain amount of realm points (the more rp’s someone had, the more they were worth), and so there was an inherent competition to be at the top of the RP list.

After a while I stopped reading the “Hibernia Sucks” posts because I began to actually feel discriminated against.

7

The same sort of thing happened in Planetside. May still be happening, but I left the game a couple months ago. There’s three factions, just as in DAoC, and apparently it was damn near impossible to keep it perfectly balanced, since at any given point one faction would be slightly to significantly advantaged over the other two. When I first joined the game, I signed up with Vanu Sovereignty, primarily because my friends also did, but we all picked Vanu picked they were A, interesting, being the energy weapons and alien tech faction (the other two factions used conventional weapons, shotguns and machine guns), and B, at the time they were the underdogs, and we like fighting for the underdogs.

Eventually, the developers changed the weaponry such that Vanu became stronger. The other factions thought, naturally, we became too strong. The sheer visceral bigoted hate that rolled off the messageboards was overwhelming. It got to the point where if Vanu rolled into a sector, the other two factions picked up and left because they were boycotting us. It was the most absurd thing I’d ever seen on an MMOG.

The other bout of severe elitism I’ve seen spans MMOGs: PvPer attitude towards non-PvPers, or “carebears”. I took part in the Star Wars: Galaxies beta and participated in development discussion as well. The PvP crowd derided any player that simply wanted to be left alone in peace and grow their crops or whatever non-combat trade they wanted to participate in. The idea of a voluntary PvP system was abhorrent.

I’ve seen this derision toward carebears on several games, most recently EVE Online. You’re just not a real player if you won’t take part in fighting other players. Preferring cooperative gameplay to competitive is anathema to them.

No matter where I see this argument crop up, it’s nearly always been the same. The group that says “Look, you guys go have fun blowing each other up over there, and I’ll have fun crafting weapons over here,” always gets yelled at and mocked by the group that says “You have to be subject to getting attacked and killed at any time! What, you don’t plan on investing in combat skills? That’s your tough luck, isn’t it?”

Sorry to get a little rantish, but that’s always driven me batty.

8

Oh, the ‘carebear’ attitude is pretty strong in World of Warcraft.

I do like PvP, but there are some times when it is downright aggrivating- like when an enemy faction is in the zone you are trying to quest in, and you get killed to the point of having to give up doing any questing that evening. Or opponents that wait until you are fighting a computer-controlled mob, then when you are half dead they finish you off. Very annoying, but one of the prices I pay for playing in a PvP server (Sargeras by the way).

Planetside was always a 3-way seesaw bitchfest to see which faction was overpowered. Never heard of people boycotting a whole faction but that sounds seriously jacked up.

Not a MMO game, but if you ever still play Starcraft/Warcraft 3 online, I’m sure you’ve met some of most pompous, elitist ‘gosu’ players around. :rolleyes:

9

It is a shame when nerds get power.

10

It’s my experience (from developing a MMORPG, as well as playing just about every MOG I can get my hands on) that PvP tends to create an “Us vs Them” mentality. If you don’t want to do PvP all the time, or if you have the temerity to suggest that, perhaps, PvP ought to be toned down a notch, you’re labelled a “carebear”. If you level faster than the majority, and thereby gain any sort of advantage, you’re now a “No life power gamer” who abuses bugs to level so fast.

In my opinion, PvP brings out the worst in everyone.

11

I finally gave into my nerd instincts and joined Star Wars: Galaxies. I’m playing as a crafter (a droid engineer, actually) and have found it to be a very friendly, supportive community. I’ve been helped by higher-level players and encouraged by fellow guild members. One time I was invited to Talon Carde’s birthday party. We rode go-carts and had ice cream. Some Bothan’s were like, “Look at those losers on go-carts!”, and Talon was all, “Yeah, well you’re dumb!” It was awesome.

12

That meandered a bit.

13

What I find amusing is that PvPers do not want dedicated servers for non PvPers.

In essence, they don’t want everyone to be happy.

That’s just bull. What it really means is that if PvE folks are somewhere else having fun, there are fewer players to bully.

And while I’m ranting, I hate it when players do ridiculous things and then blame it on the fact that they are RP-ing a bad person.

14

You think the PvP vs PvE crowd is bad, try playing on an RP server. :eek:

Two variations here. I was in an RP city in Star Wars: Galaxies that got into the silliest power struggle I’ve ever seen. Now, basically the players, either alone or in groups, would come up with storylines for their characters. Sometimes they would try to include other characters in thier stories and sometimes the other characters would go along and sometimes they wouldn’t. No problem so far.

Then two groups starting trying to steer the whole city along two different storylines. This got to the point where they were taking turns taking over the city govenment and banning players who wouldn’t go along with “their” storyline from the city. Finally one group got fed up and left, then the remaining group split in too. The battle continues to this day as far as I can tell. (I live on my starship now :wink: ) You would not believe the yelling matches both in-game and on our boards (we had our own message board) between the groups. Remember, this is over a fictitious city in a game!

The other variant occurs in World of Warcraft. I’m on one of the RP servers there (Scarlet Crusade) and in a fairly strict RP guild. Now, my guildmates aren’t bad, the problem is the other players. We get derided quite a bit by the other players for trying to maintain character. (And, no, we aren’t demanding that they RP but we do try not to drop character when talking to anyone; we are on an RP server after all!. ) The typical response seems to be anywhere from “WTF is wrong with you people” to the one guy who did nothing but follow us around for what seemed like hours shouting insults at us. (A GM actually eventually showed up and kicked him off the server; we were amused.) And all of this is on a designated RP server!

The other problem I have with PvP in WoW is with what I call the bait trick. I’ll be running around a zone with my level 17 Hunter when a couple of similar leveled Alliance characters start attacking some NPCs and trigger their PvP flags. I and a few others in the area attack them, only to be one-shotted by the level 60 characters who were following them around and just waiting for us to attack them and so trigger our own PvP flags. Then they camp our corpses and the graveyard for the next hour. Can somewone explain to me how it is fun to repeatedly kill other characters a fraction of your level?

15

tanstaafl, you can wait out your PvP flag in ghost form, so there’s no reason to worry about corpse-camping on non-PvP servers. Also, if you don’t retaliate, even if they’re attacking you, your flag will go off at the 5 min. mark.

I love the people on WoW who only play on PvP servers and think everyone on a non-PvP server is a carebear and that we can’t do any PvP on our servers. They don’t realize that we are able to do PvP at our convenience, and we never have to worry about trying to finish quests because some lvl 60s are dominating a region.

I’m a carebear, by the way. If my or their flag isn’t on, I’m likely to help the other side. I don’t steal herb nodes or chests from other people if they’re fighting to clear the area around it, either.

16

You know, that never occured to me. :smack: Obvious though it is. Thanks.

17

Total carebear here. I’ve barely even duelled my own side, let alone pvp’ed with the other. I’m even disappointed that you can’t heal or buff the opposite faction, as there have been plenty of situations where I wanted to help some poor orc who was getting pwned by a mob.

18

I’m over on CoH right now and I like their setup.

PvP is only allowed in the Arena.

And near as I can tell, the arena is not a popular part of the game…

19

I played it for about a year and a half when it first started. Yeah, it’s not so much elitist as just very different. The realistic game mechanics pretty much ensure that 1) you can accomplish just about nothing by yourself and 2) you will die fast doing it. Therefore, you pretty much have to join an organized squad to do anything significant. Fortunately, squads are usually very open about working with new people (they need the cannon fodder :slight_smile: ).

Flying planes is particularly difficult in this regard, but I wouldn’t call forming air squadrons and utterly crushing any other players in the sky anything other than a good way to win the war. There’s an offline mode for practicing flying, but you’ll need to join an air squadron to have a chance surviving long enough in a dogfight to get real experience.

And it shouldn’t take you an hour to walk to the battlefield because you should be catching a ride instead.

Still an amazing game, wish I had the time and money to play it again.