Quote Originally Posted by Liam_Harper View Post
It's also very unrewarding for the skilled player to be constantly putting in work carrying the casual playerbase, yet rarely receive recognition or their own content and are often shunned as a "tryhard" or "elitist" by the very players they carry. Why bother?
This kind of stuff genuinely erodes my interest in the game. I've joined random mostly-casual FCs a few times, only for people to immediately develop a negative predisposition towards me as soon as they find out hardcore content is my main interest, even if they're people I've never personally interacted with. I've taught people to raid, only to have their friends accuse me of "ruining" or "tainting" them. I wish I was kidding. If you spend time on twitter or in facebook groups for this game, there is genuine "beware of raiders" and "don't befriend raiders" discourse pretty frequently.

When I started playing the game in HW I was fed the same kind of stuff by my gr00mer FC leader at the time, and embarrassingly ended up engaging in 'you pull it you tank it' behavior under his encouragement. Newer players are trained to be in a state of constant insecurity and told that the elitist boogeyman is constantly watching them, when in reality truly elitist interactions are extremely rare in game, even in higher difficulty content. This insecurity and frankly, paranoia, is what causes casual players to lash out when they feel they've been slighted or demeaned, even if they're just reading something completely incorrectly.

I've had to talk grown adults down from literal hissy fits in voice chat, simply because they misunderstood a literal compliment someone else in the group gave them, and assumed they were instead being criticized by an "elitist".