Guild Wars 2

One of the greatest attractions to this game for me, has always been the community. If you whisper someone about their build, they usually respond in a positive manner and will even help you out with yours. People are just generally positive and helpful to each other, which has always blown me away because that sentiment just simply doesn’t exist in any other MMO I have ever experienced. The typical MMO community is hateful and toxic to each other. Even here on the forums, which is usually the hotbed of trolls and mean spirited people for any MMO, people have been generally helpful and communicative.

However, in the last few weeks I have been noticing a steady rise in toxicity from the community. More and more frequently I am seeing people respond to other players ideas and suggestions not with positive debate or conversation, but instead with negative remarks on the player’s abilities with little or no positive feedback, or really anything meaningful to add to the conversation whatsoever.

I think we all should chill out a bit, and try to be a bit more positive to one another. I think we can all agree that we would like to keep this community friendly and co-operative. Does anyone really want to see GW2 spiral into the toxic abyss that so many other MMO communities have gone down?

The people who are going to ‘chill’ after seeing your post are already chilled. The people who are toxic aren’t going to care.

There are a lot of new players in the game (due to recent sales, announcement of expac, etc) and they come with their own ideas about chat etiquette. It will take them time to learn this community is culturally different from a lot of other games.

The same thing has happened in the past: when the game launched, when there were sales, when the game added fractals, etc. Eventually, the ‘toxic’ alliance lost patience and became hardly noticeable.

My advice? /block the annoying, /report the truly offensive, and defuse potentially ugly situations with humor.

What Ill said . . . sadly.

Absolutely individuals are responsible for their behaviour, and if someone is a jerk to others its their own fault.

However, ANet are not helping. The SAB minis for me being the most glaring example. They knew people wanted SAB, they knew people were unhappy about issues relating to SAB (not just the box, but the coin and the communication), they knew people had their hopes up for the anniversary, and they knew that people would get their hopes up even further when they put the minis in the BLCs on the day before.

Players who are rude or abusive are in the wrong. But ANet doing things like this is not helping. If players feel angry and frustrated, and ANet refuse to communicate with them, then the next place for them to vent is at each other.

My guess is that you’ve been lucky heretofore and have been unlucky lately. Why? Because there have always been friendly, helpful players and players who are not so friendly and unhelpful.

Just ban all the SAB protesters and the game would be a much nicer place.

I believe the majority of this community are decent and respectful and respectable people. I have noticed less toxicity here than on any other game forum I have participated on. The FFXIV group on FB is extremely toxic… enough so that I have stopped participating there.

Recently, before WvW was removed from world completion requirements, I was trying to get the WvW maps for the achievement on my ranger. It was a very discouraging experience for me, as someone who doesn’t do PvP or WvW. I posted on here about it and most of the replies were from people who gave me encouragement and how-to’s on getting it done. There were a few very rude people telling me I was a bad player, but, because of the helpfulness of this community, I completed the WvW maps and got my achievement. And learned a little about WvW in the process. I couldn’t have done it without the advice I received here.

CrashTestAuto.9108:

Players who are rude or abusive are in the wrong. But ANet doing things like this is not helping. If players feel angry and frustrated, and ANet refuse to communicate with them, then the next place for them to vent is at each other.

would like to add to this is that anet communicated more with the players in & out of gw1 than they have with us with gw2, which adds to the fustration.

all those frog chats in lions arch that they let the players know whats being worked on etc

with gw2 now we are kept in the dark more like a mushroom in a dark closet!