Friday, February 12, 2010

Bleh - Rant

To be honest the PUG community in WoW has made me want to stop playing again. The lack of respect drives me nuts. People only care about themselves and it is making my gaming experience less enjoyable.

MMOs have always been built around the idea of working with other players, in fact older MMOs had people working together in large groups numbering in the hundereds just to kill a dragon. People stopped playing for and with their friends and started playing for themselves. I'm sure alot of gamers always wanted too but the way the older MMOs were designed it was very difficult to get away with being selfish.

EverQuest required you to work as a team or you wouldn't progress. If you ninja looted, were bad at your class, or just a rude person you would get black flagged by your server's community and would no longer get groups. This was back when the idea of a server transfer was unheard of, even when Sony did allow them your chacters transfered naked and penny less.

I don't think it's Blizzard's fault for desiging World of Warcraft in a way that allows the gamers to be selfish anti-social gamers. Nothing is stopping every person who subscribers to WoW from helping their server and community, they just choose not to. There are however no artifical barriers discouraging this from happening. So while Blizzard doesn't encourage this, they don't discourage it either.

World of Warcraft gives everyone of it's gamers a chance to be the stereotypical selfish only child who can't share and only cares about him or herself. I know not everyone in WoW acts this way and I'm sure there are some guilds out there who are very helpful, however the vast majority of the PUG community is not. The PUG community is the first thing a new player or a return customer experiences.

It's been a month now and I've done about 14 levels on my Warlock dealing with this pug communtiy. I am honestly considering canceling my WoW account, not because of any one game feature but because of the community that plays the game.

Sometimes I feel like a niche game is probably more my style but most of them implent high time sinks in order to keep the "riff raff" out. So I'm not sure what to do. I like WoW, I love running 5 mans in it. I just typically can't stand 2-3 people out of that group every time I run one.

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