"I play the way I want" -Randomperson

[Welsper59]

It's an MMORPG, and the grand majority of folks don't understand what that means and entails. There's no sense of responsibility anymore because playing a game online is such a commonplace activity. As a common activity, the most popular form of it requires no need to "learn" in an obvious fashion. Most people are used to games like CoD/BF/Halo/Dark Souls/etc when it comes to online gaming. Games that don't necessarily require coordination and knowledge of what you're doing to complete something. Yes, you need to have some grounds of play (especially with something like Dark Souls), but the consequences are most obvious there. You just won't progress (usually), meaning the game is basically forcing you to learn. With FPS games, you'll just keep dying, which generally doesn't cause any obvious consequences for your group (if doing a team game).

MMORPGs are a different breed of game that does have some learning involved to play right. The problem is that it's not an obvious thing to know if you are or not. This has been a problem that existed since long before the genre hit mainstream, so don't bother pointing fingers at anyone or any thing. What separates the past from how it is now is the mentality of it. MMORPGs are so abundant and readily available for anyone to play (computers in a household are expected or a norm rather than a "luxury", similar to a microwave oven), that learning about them doesn't seem necessary in this pool of online gaming in general. Things are not as slow paced as they were since it's all about the "now". What? Now? "Yesterday" WTF, yesterday? "Last week already, **** you're slow".

Personally, I don't have too much of a problem with new players. Most of them are usually friendly, even the ones with reactions like what the OP described. I just don't have respect for them in the long run for most cases. Doesn't mean I won't play with them, it just means I'll know what to expect and what I need to do to avoid any problems. I just tell them right off the bat, if there's a problem that's a result of their lack of understanding, that they gotta learn. There's no way around that if they expect to go far. If they get defensive about it, whatever. As an old-school MMORPG player, I've seen enough of those types of people to not really care what they have to say. They either do it or they don't. I'm willing to help usually if they want to take me up on that, but most don't.

One, a friend I knew since FFXI 10yrs ago, was never really the greatest of players. Always got hit by AoE, never knew a good way to do dmg, etc. Until earlier this year, he's always been like that. He really wanted to experience endgame this time though, under the pretense that the rest of us were doing Coil and such (we don't though), and had the resolve to learn. I spent a couple hours helping him learn dodge mechanics in general. Fighting simple open world mobs with AoE, running Ifrit story, Titan story, etc to help him learn basic dodge mechanics. Now the guy is capable enough to clear Coil stuff. Not exactly rocket science, but quite a lot of progress given the short span of time.