Parsers add replayability for casual players

[Shurrikhan]

I don't want to be silent in group content. I suggest users stay silent 'IN GAME', so they don't risk their account over some player they probably won't see ever again. Intentionally griefing or not. A warning even is a permanent mark on your account. It's just not worth it, and in not being able to speak up (EVER) due to everything being taken as a personal attack, it enables more of this sort of play.

Yeah, I'm not going to risk that, and I will never suggest anybody else risk their account over it. All it takes is one time for a GM to act on ANYTHING said, and that's a STRIKE on your account. Again, not worth it. It's better to keep chatter third party, and never risk having to deal with someone who thinks the whole world is out to get them, and you just popped on their radar after having the gall to suggest they use aoe or whatever.

While I'd never try to push people towards danger of a strike against their accounts just to try to make the game a generally more friendly place (though I'd hope they'd consider that a benefit worth their consideration), I'm kind of the opposite in that I can't wholly forgo giving advice when it seems lucrative and the friendly, pleasant, sociable thing to do.

It feels bad enough that tactful, cheerful, or otherwise polite and well-intentioned advice is much more often met with hostility here than in the other MMOs I play, but to let that sort of letter-of-the-law (over its spirit) or conflations regarding player engagement to blanket any and all attempts to help others with something you've found engaging (and the excitement of which you have, many times past, successfully conveyed to others to their benefit)... that just seems too ominous, too pacifying, to continue playing. So, for me, it's either 'take the risk and shrug off the occasional disproportionate backlash' or just hop back to WoW where, oddly enough, my average experience in group content has been at least a bit more friendly and the occasional friendship formed from random matchmaking.



:: To be clear, my advice is still met with hostility at most a third of the time; it's not as if the whole game has gone sour. It's more a matter of comparison, as the same quality of advice (or even that which is less tactful), tends to be more readily absorbed in other MMOs I play; in WoW, for instance, other players seem more willing to give me advice (though perhaps that has much to do with how much Details, WoW's most frequently used parser addon, facilitates that process), and less than a tenth the time am I likely to encounter any hostility when giving advice or making a reasonable request (even as each of those tend to be more complex, as WoW's 'light party'-equivalent content simply tends to have a fair bit more going on).