Stop Stereotyping MMO Communities

Perhaps I’m preaching to the choir here, but I am getting absolutely sick and tired of going to forums and reading about how this or that MMO’s community sucks and they ruined my gaming experience. Just stop. Please. We’re sick of hearing it and frankly you don’t know what you are talking about. For one thing, there is no possible way that you know that an entire community “sucks.” You are only playing on one or three of a multitude of servers, in WoW’s case, over 200. There is no possible way that you could make such a sweeping assumption about such a wide range of players that has any validity at all to it. If you are such a mature, helpful person, surely with as many other subscribers, there are bound to be some players at least who are worthy of your intelligence, skill, and generosity. Some of the best people I’ve met in MMO’s have been in my guilds in WoW, I was simply willing to wade through some of the muck to find them. There will always be ninjas, griefers, spammers, and whatever else plagues these online spaces, but you need to get over it. No community is perfect, this comes with the territory though. You open yourself up to this possibility when you start playing a game with thousands upon thousands of players. You don’t like everyone or get treated well by everyone you meet in the real world, so why do you expect to in a game? Asheron’s Call was by far the best overall community I’ve been a part of (at least on my server) but I’ll be the first to admit that there were a lot of people who I wish hadn’t been there. If you like the game that you play, you should be willing to ignore a few jerks who get in your way to find a group of friends who you enjoy being with. If not, then there is no point in whining about how terrible a games community is.

WoW gets the brunt of the community slamming, but other games get it to. People complain about EQ2 a lot, and I have to disagree as within an hour of searching for a guild, I was able to join one who showered me with gifts and advice and immediately helped with with quests even though they were all well above my level. If it took that little time to find a group this friendly, it’s hard to believe that it was dumb luck and I found the only decent guild on the server (this was about a year ago, I’m looking for a new guild if anyone has a home for me ) There are decent people out there, trust me. Depending on the game and the server you choose, it might take more or less time than normal to find them, but again, if you like the game, you should be willing to put in the time to find them. If you took time to find them instead of telling everyone how aweful they are, I’m sure you would be successful. Good Luck.

~Kanthalos