We are you know, we're all mental. I reckon to be a gamer you need a serious masochistic streak. Here's my reasoning... we spend hours and hours beating our metaphoric heads against a wall trying to achieve things in a virtual world that a lot of people would assume mean nothing. We do this freely and of our own volition, and in a lot of cases we pay people for the privaledge! Stark Staring Box Of Frogs MENTAL I tell you!
And yet, despite all this malarkey we continue on, doing the same thing over and over. We also are willing to take a shedload of abuse from games companies in the hope that they continue to take our money. Over the past few months I have on occasion had the misfortune to encounter the community manager and customer support staffer (same person by the way, just different on-line identities in a lame attempt to disguise their self serving inanity) for an MMO with a less than stellar player-base. It's never been one of the big hitters as far as subscription goes , but the core player-base are deeply invested in the game, lore, and mechanics and have even stayed with it through multiple ownership changes over the past 9 years. It has some unique features and this is what keeps people paying to play even in these free to play days. This person has no customer service skills at all. None. Not a One. The few communications I have had with them have been obsequious, mealy mouthed drivel ignoring the points made to them and trotting out the same useless party line ad nauseam. Now this often is not a problem for the person on the player side of the conversation, you accept it, shrug and move on, but when you're trying to point out serious problems with some elements of the community of a game that only continues to survive because of that same community, there's something wrong here.
Let me ask you this, if you had just logged in to a game after creating a character and in the starting area saw a group of obviously quite advanced player avatars sat around talking what would you expect from those players? Some hints? A little help along the road? Some advice on levelling strategies and the like? At the very least some accurate information correct?
How about a wall of multicoloured spam in "txt sp33k" , obscenities and blatantly false information? Would that make you continue on in the hope of finding someone who didn't have their head up their arse or just log out and go back to one of the bigger games. Now don't get me wrong, there are players in this game that continue to attempt to rise above the scum and help new players on their road to success, but they are few and getting fewer. I can see a day not too long from now when the server side chat logs will be full of nothing but ERP (nothing wrong with that really whatever floats your boat, but for pity's sake keep it out of public chat... some of us are eating). I'm an obstinate old git so I'll still be there logging in and playing the damned thing until the lights go out, the office closes, and someone dismantle the servers but it's got to the point that until a new player has proven by their actions that they are not a complete waste of DNA I am no longer willing to even tell them where the button to open their character info is.
Oh and yes, a lot of them don't even know that because they can't be arsed to read the tutorial text.
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