Isn’t the obsession with maturity a good sign that we’re immature? Reality check: This isn’t Teletubbies. A twelve year old could certainly not have written this. And it isn’t necessarily a bad thing that Guild Wars 2 doesn’t take itself too seriously.
This whole debacle reminds me a lot of when I was still a teenager six years ago. Honestly, I thought I knew everything there was to know about writing. I was embarrassed to be caught with anything that wasn’t worthy of Shakespeare. Everything else was full of silly plots and silly characters that made absolutely no sense. And silly things were for little kids. Me? I was an adult. An extremely precocious 14 year old.
I realize that criticism is an important step for growth, and it’s very admirable that so many people believe their opinions make a difference. However, enough is enough. Our individualism can only drive us so far before it becomes arrogance. We need to stop pretending that we’re tantamount to high-and-mighty college writing professors and accept that our rights as consumers only go so far.
For some reason, we are convinced that our role as gamers justifies everything beyond giving traditional feedback. We see ourselves as literary critics with an eye for only the most exquisite literature. But this isn’t the case. It can’t be. It is not our place to tell Arena Net how to do their job. Our role as gamers, as consumers, is not to tell ArenaNet how to work. Our role is merely the simple one of playing, testing, and giving appropriate feedback. Anything beyond that is either a mistake, an oversight, or an acute display of arrogance.
Our place is not to “teach” Arena Net how to do their job; our place is only to say, “I don’t like this. Here’s why,” or, “I like this. Here’s why.” We completely overstep our bounds when we say, “I don’t like this. Here is how it should have been done, and I want you to do it this way because I obviously know better than you.”
No amount of qualification will make this right. We can’t list all the complex, high-quality books we’ve read as proof that we know how things should be done. We can’t list all the examples of “good” story telling that we’ve seen or heard to qualify any sort of teaching degree. Unless specifically petitioned by ArenaNet to fill this particular role, we have no right to tell Arena Net what to do.
In this economy, the fact that we pay someone for a product demonstrates that we trust their competence. If we purchase something without first knowing their competence, then we ourselves are at fault for not knowing what we got ourselves into. In Guild Wars 2’s case, many people trusted ArenaNet to deliver a product with similar quality to Guild Wars 1. However, when these people decided that the two games were on different levels of quality, they became angry with what they considered “incompetence”.
Therefore, they have two choices and only two choices. They can either continue to trust the precedent set by Guild Wars 1, or they can choose to abandon their support for ArenaNet entirely. In other words, they can choose to believe that ArenaNet will deliver on their previously conceived competence, or they can choose to believe that it was some sort of fluke and that level of quality will never happen again. They are free to do either.
However, what they must do is keep their ego in check. They are not qualified to tell Arena Net how to become “competent”, and they shouldn’t assume that they know better or can speak for anyone else. They aren’t fit to determine who should and who shouldn’t enjoy a product. And most definitely they can’t think of themselves as the “savior” of either ArenaNet or any “poor soul” about to support Guild Wars 2.
Therefore, when ArenaNet does something that we don’t agree with, it’s perfectly acceptable to say that we aren’t crazy about it. It’s even better to explain specifically what we don’t like about it. However, the real problems begin when we butt in to where we don’t belong. Unless ArenaNet asks us what we would like in the game or how we think the story should pan out, we can’t assume to know any better, and we can’t assume that our opinion actually matters.
Simply purchasing the game doesn’t automatically give us a free-for-all pass to act as we please. Our role as consumers doesn’t mean that we are entitled to anything beyond our original exchange with ArenaNet. In fact, communicating with the developers is a privilege that many people never have. And by the very nature of a privilege, we ought to be thanking ArenaNet for this opportunity by observing a certain “consumer etiquette” in regards to our feedback.
Yay yin?
