Apologies for the possible mistakes, I’m not an english native speaker.
Also, don’t take this post as a generality, this is just my experience, and I hope this could be helpful to some.
I’m a long time Guild Wars player, started playing in 2007 I think, have maxed out HoM, etc. so I’m not “new” to the Guild Wars community.
I increasingly see people being aggressive, mean for things as silly as playing meta, or DPS, or being part of an event failure, etc.
I rarely get kicked out of groups, but sometimes it’s for nothing like not typing `/gg` fast enough when the group died and I was the last still standing with mean comments in the end when being kicked out. (like “you are useless”,“you are a waste of time”, etc.). Sometimes people join the group, take part in the group failings but leave as soon as they can with a nasty comment for the rest of the group. People seem to take the game too seriously sometimes as if their life was at stake, at the risk of being toxic to other players that by the way have their own personality, their own way of dealing with such behavior.
For people getting used to it and having a strong personality, this is fine. They ignore the nasty comment or behavior and move on without much impact on their health. For others, this could affect them deeply and they could have bouts of sadness coming back to haunt them (“you were useless”, “how could someone be so mean”, etc. like a bad echo).
And I’m talking from personal experience, I’m playing a game to enjoy my time and to bring me small moments of joy, not to endure someone else’s frustration.
I want to emphasize that this is just a game, no need to be aggressive to other people because their build was really bad or because they just kept dying in an instance or fractal (it happens to everybody at some point, this is fine). Offer kind help, propose suggestions for them to improve rather than immediately spewing your hatred and making fun of that player.
We don’t know who’s behind the screen, this might be a person with enough energy to ignore these comments, or this might not…
As it stands, from someone with medical depression: I’m not enjoying the game anymore. People are getting obsessed with meta, loot efficiency, or seeing high numbers in their DPS meter, rejecting how others are playing the game. If this was only a community split, but sometimes this comes with sensitive words, even insults. We ought to respect the fact that people could also be playing the game their own way and that they might still be learning. We don’t all need to play meta, as long as we enjoy our time. Maybe we won’t do CM fractals, or Raids, or high-level content requiring high level of coordination, but don’t go out of your way to make it feel like the entire game is like that, it is not.
We seem to forget that we are playing with human beings and not machines or bots.
Maybe this was just bad luck, but in 10 years of playing Guild Wars (and that much of dealing with medical depression), I have sometimes experienced toxic people, but never with such intensity. In just 2 months, it happened 3 times when I experienced toxic behavior that made me legit sad (like screwing up my day): I reported one time, I blocked one the other, and finally I tried to engage in a dialog for the last, trying to reverse the situation and ask for honest feedback (it took tremendous self-control to be honest).
You may think this is ridiculous, but we are not all equipped “all the time” to deal with such behavior.
As it stands, the game brings me too much frustration and days of lows that I can’t consider playing it anymore. The expansion announcement got me really excited, the work done by Anet is amazing, as usual but I’ll do my best to avoid it, take a long pause and come back at a time I hope will be best.
Anyways, no you can’t avoid toxic people, whether in real life or online. Yet I feel like this kind of behavior is taking place more often and with more intensity among the Guild Wars community and this is unfortunate.
Have fun and be kind folks.
o/
