Playing this game since launce, and I steadily have watched the community go down hill. What was once a great community bent on helping one another, it seems to have turned into a troll fest of Farmer Elitism vs the Rest.
It is not only the arguments in map chat, youtube videos and on the forums that makes me believe this is on the rise. It is also noticeable in the fights themselves. I see more and more often people not rezzing people because of loss of dps time which may cause the player not to receive their “chest” reward from the given Champion they are poking at.
I feel this is a cause for worry because I don’t wish this great community to degrade into a troll infested one like the LoL community did.
The only solution I feel might resolve this involves the way chests are rewarded to a player. Not only should it be based upon a set amount damage given to a Champion, but should also factor in the amount healed to surrounding players (which includes rezzing players).
The second is based on the current Living Story. Events like the Aetherblade and Molten Alliance should only have the correct amount of events necessary to complete the given task. What that means is instead of consistently spawning new ones, if the players need to defeat 10 spawn only 10. That way all players will actually assist in the defeat of Scarlet instead of being fractured between those that wish to play the game as it was meant to be played and those that wished to farm/exploit the system.
Grinders, farmers, addicts and exploiters are on the rise right now because they are ArenaNet’s current target audience. With the high influx of farming content (Southsun with 200% Magic Find, the Crown Pavillion with high Magic Find, the invasions that are basically farming grounds), and the fact ArenaNet cannot ban exploiters out of fear of losing too many players, it’s basically the designer’s fault that the community is becoming worse. I had made a post in jest about it, but I guess I was right.
There are multiple ways in which ArenaNet could make this issue “less bad”. They could:
Remove the champion boxes from champions, add the champion boxes to Dynamic Events (that have been successful), turn all Champions into events (even if only “Kill Champion X” events) so there are rewards for killing all champions. Farmers would still farm, but at least they would help people complete events, as opposed to exploiting them.
Change the invasions so Aetherblades and Molten Alliances only appear during their own wave (I have seen a map in which Aetherblades spawned during the first minion wave), and disappear once their wave has been completed (so people don’t continue killing pirates instead of going to kill the minions). Also change the way the waves are calculated, so killing Aetherblades and the Molten Alliance helps with wave completition, as opposed to only finishing events counting (while killing minions counts… Who thought this lack of consistency would be a good thing?). This would make the invasion give less of the boxes, so increase the reward for successful completition in order to make people actually care about winning.
And so on.
“I think that players are starting to mature past the point of wanting to be on that
treadmill, of being in that obvious pattern of every time I catch up you are going to
put another carrot in front of me” – Mike O’Brien right before Ascended weapons
It’s actually surprising that we haven’t seen more of this toxic behavior normally associated with LoL. Considering that the game has no subscription fees, it’s a testament to ArenaNet’s innovations in how loot works, how reviving works, how resource nodes work, etc. All of these things fostered cooperative play amongst players. Because there was no mob tagging you had a reason to help other players fight monsters. Individual resource nodes, individual loot, and other shared rewards took the every player is my enemy feeling away.
With all of that being said, most people who think that farming is contributing to the degradation of the community might be on to something. While not all farmers are bad people, the act of farming will induce sociopath behaviors in people that don’t normally display them. Farming requires efficiency and stopping to revive someone will slow you down. It’s not just a thought process; it’s a fact that doing so really will slow you down. It brings out the worst in people. You can blame ArenaNet but it was the players, most likely the farmers, that asked them to improve the rewards.
I don’t see much of that on my server; most people tend to be alright, and if not, they don’t do much of anything. Then again I come from battle.net, where there’s tons of malicious activity and griefing going on.
If there’s generally any trash talking, it’s 1 or 2 people that get ignored fast, and it generally happens in wvw, but that’s natural. There’s hardly any trash talk from what little I see in pvp, and that I found rare.
On these forums, there seems to be a lot of people with control freak tendencies— they tend to be so concerned with what other people doing, and often labeling people who do not play like them derogatory terms like “casuals” “no-lifers” or “exploiters”, well the precise words don’t matter, but there seems to be some kind of moral superiority complex going on— in any case other people are some plague that would destroy all of civilization if left unchecked.
For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards,
for there you have been and there you will long to return.
I always res when I notice someone is downed even to the point I dye for ressing only to be killed still waiting to be ressed until boss is burned up before getting a res(usually still getting the boss reward, so, no biggie). Not all are inconsiderate, but, a large part is.
Blackgate Megaserver – [LaZy] Imperium of LaZy Nation
Mud Bone – Sylvari Ranger
Sadly I have noticed these things slowly creeping into the community. It used to be when you went to res someone “too many rezers” would come up on the screen. Now when an event is up or even over its me and maybe 2 other people to res all of the downed people while everyone else races for the chest or next event.
Can’t say you’re lying, OP. And that’s a sad notion. Thankfully, most of the people on my server aren’t falling to this notion but I have seen it heavily in overflows.
Well more and more people are leaving to return to SWTOR, Rift, and play FFXIV, so hopefully only the dedicated casual GW2 lovers will remain before long
