The hardest part is, whenever I give advice, people just accuse me of being elitist and refuse to listen.
The other day on the guardian forums I mentioned how it perplexed me that people would refuse to run wall of reflection, even in areas where that skill is incredibly useful. It does damage, protects the team, makes a light field to comb off of, and can be used in any build with no required traits to be effective. The responses I received were along the lines of:
“You don’t have a right to tell me how to play!”
“You have no respect for other playstyles!”
“I choose not to use it out of principle”
“If you don’t like how others play then you should form a static group on your own”
“If you didn’t check beforehand when forming a pug, you deserve what you get”.
“I’m not responsible for keeping you alive. Learn to dodge.”And so on. Of course, this just infuriates me. It always has, from videogames to real life.
I often say that reasoning is dead. For reasons unknown (though I could probably write a book about my theories as to this), people have stopped bothering to be self critical, and they lack the ability to respond to criticism meaningfully. The moment you mention anything, these people put up a defensive wall and spew a torrent of generic entitlement garbage from their mouths. Their standard practice in life is to surround themselves with yes-men, and to despise anyone who doesn’t unconditionally support them. They consider all those who don’t agree with them as less than human, and the thought that there is intelligence behind any decision contrary to their own never once crosses their mind.
In this sense, society has become more bigoted than ever. This is an issue that is far larger than just videogames, since it poisons society from the cultural level to the political one. However, it continues to leak downward into everyday lives, to recreational entertainment. I assume that the mass amount of information available at our fingertips has always left us with an excuse to refuse to listen, and with a prepared response for everything already said, a refusal to reason.
So, the big question becomes this: How do you help a person who refuses to be helped and fights you all the way? The answer is simple: you don’t. Instead, you exclude these people from your group, and then you only play with people who do listen to what you say. If socially ostracizing the helpless doesn’t instruct them on the error of their ways, then at least you don’t have to put up with their nonsense anymore. When someone justifies bad decisions in life with some grand philosophical statement, I don’t want to associate with these people. I don’t want to play next to a player who plays kittenome kind of political statement. It is worse than a regular bad player, because then a regular bad player can get better.
AKA: you surround yourself with your own yes-men. Negotiation and reasoning in general requires two willing parties in order to function. Either both sides are working toward an agreement, or neither of them are. When someone calls you a doodoo head and leaves the negotiation, what are you to do? The answer: the same thing. The breakdown in reasoning is contagious, and reinforces itself over and over until the whole social contract breaks down. Doing otherwise is difficult.
And yet here I am, constantly reaching out to people who despise me for it. The last reasonable man.
That’s all well and good, but there’s a difference between excluding the people that refuse to be helped from groups or dungeon runs or whatever and straight out shutting out EVERYONE but your own little clique on account of everyone being too stubborn to accept help, when said help is typically given in the form of massive walls of math that most people don’t give a flying finger about.
Unfortunately, pretty much everyone who adopts that “some people don’t deserve to be helped” mentality actually mean “nobody besides me and my buddies deserve to be helped”