Why Does It Feel Like Poor Play Is Acceptable (I'm Venting.)

[RiyahArp]

Sigh...look, once you start obsessing over shoddy play and wondering why others aren't pulling their weight, you start viewing the game as a job. You invest way too much significance into it and get bothered way too much by the actions of others, in a way you simply shouldn't as a game.

When I play this game, most of the time things go fine. I do all my content ok in a decent timeframe, I rarely see any real trolls, and probably the most issues I have is with PvP, but a lot of that is due to how the developer designs content. If they don't go fine...well this is a game, people aren't going to always be good, and at worst i'm out ten minutes once every 100 tries when I leave duty.

But because for a lot of people this game becomes a job, they end up just taking everything so serious even beyond what they should. You see it in Overwatch too, people so concerned with how others act because that simple end of season number is so vital to them that they create these huge myths of bad play and demonize sectors of the playerbase to deal with the stress of their job. There's some extent of developer blame as well...you don't throw random people of varying skill levels together to require high levels of coordination and play.

But ugh, I've seen years of this kind of griping. And it's dumb. People's solution to this is essentially to make the game not fun enough as to drive bad players out through game design and training. They tried that in FFXI, and yeah, a lot of people left as early as valkurm dunes. Not sure why that would work here.

And it didn't solve anything either, people griped as much there, and they completed stuff a lot less to boot.