I’m probably going to sound mean, so I apologize in advance because that isn’t really my intention, but...

Quote Originally Posted by RiyahArp View Post
Considering no one can even spell my name right it seems, I'm not sure.
I have always taken care to spell your name correctly, regardless of how well we get along on these forums; it’s common courtesy and I consider it a sign of respect even though you don’t seem to respect me (or people like me, i.e., “raiders”) at all. “Riyah.” So your “no one” is an exaggeration.

And I see a couple of us actually saying why we dislike things and giving reasons, and the rest of the people essentially just defending their own raids as well as essentially saying "You must clear OS4 to be able to talk on it." Not like me nor others have zero savage experience, nor that savage in this game is a long, multi-tiered fight that you need to do multiple steps that take months; we're talking four single bosses that you can spend a couple hours learning all of their attacks, and maybe 6 hours to 2-4 weeks to fully defeat. All of the fights you even prep by watching a video or faq to understand every attack in theory, then go in to do it in practice.
What I’m gathering from this, and I apologize if I’m misinterpreting it, but based on your previous posts in this thread, “non-raiders” or “non-serious raiders” are allowed to speak on the state of Savage raids and Ultimate, but when a raider wants to discuss the state of the more casual, non-raid content (e.g., difficulty curve scaling), they are told that they “don’t even understand the content” and aren’t allowed to have opinions on it because “they’re raiders”? How is that fair?

How can an individual that has never cleared V3S or V4S or even Ultimate talk about the state of the content? How can an individual that has never stepped foot into either of those instances talk about the state of it? Maybe this isn’t a fair comparison, but that would be like going to your dentist and asking for the latest cutting-edge developments in dermatology. Shouldn’t the dermatologists be the ones give you the low-down on those sort of things? Not your dentist who probably isn’t as familiar with them as a dermatologist would be? Sure, I suppose they could make presumptions about it (e.g., I don’t PvP, but based off of some hearsay, I’ve heard Frontlines is Bot City and Rival Wings queues are dying/horrendous on Aether; however, I’m not going to discuss the state of the content, nor its design because I don’t participate in it that often), but they cannot give an “expert’s”, or knowledgeable, opinion.

I have no problem with people disagreeing with my opinions and stances on things when they do so politely, and I welcome civil discussion that isn’t mudslinging and going around in circles for several posts. But you do not usually offer polite debates. You are just downright hostile and disrespectful a lot of the time to anyone that you deem “a toxic raider”—and that definition, based off of your myriad of posts in various threads ranging from the state of Savage to parsers, is any raider. I understand that you don’t like them that much; I don’t know why. But at least try to be a little bit respectful. People would be more keen to listen to you if you were...

To be blunt, it wouldn't matter if I was perfectly polite.
As stated above, it would.

Whenever you say anything that counteracts the values of people, they will always take the negative stance against it. People are too wrapped up in raids as a form of identity that no real challenge to them will ever be tolerated; any real discussion of them just warps back to reaffirming the shared belief, i.e. raids are wonderful and players just need to git gud.
The irony of you saying this... like dualgunner said, you do the exact same, just at the opposite end of the spectrum. That’s fine if you want to call someone out for something like this, but you should acknowledge that 1. It’s probably not the majority of raiders, and to stop making sweeping generalizations of a sub-group of players (however large OR small they may be), and 2. The fact that you practice it—just, again, at the opposite end of the spectrum—makes you hypocritical in your judgment of other people.

And when you get piled on enough, you really start to get annoyed with people and the whole shared belief itself. You get tired of people always overemphasizing ice mages, or complaining about the skill of the playerbase despite things going really well, or teh many little myths that build up and get reinforced, and it creates this big divide between the myth and what you experience in game.
I don’t know how big of a “myth” Ice Mages or, or how big of a “myth” poor performance is, but the Duty Finder thread is ~1,400 pages long. Maybe some are exaggerations, but most probably are not. Ancedotes being ancedotes, I have met my fair share of questionable performances. I’ve never met an Ice Mage, but I’ve met a lot of DPS that don’t AOE when needed, healers that don’t heal or DPS, but just stand there gazing into space, tanks that don’t mitigate, etc., and this ranges from baby content all the way to Ultimate Savage. I do not expect perfection from people; but I expect some semblance of effort and teamwork when grouped up with people, just like I would for a school or work project.

I just think that you should consider your last statement, though: people like to frame raiders as these “toxic elitists” when that’s not the case for a lot of them (I won’t say there aren’t some that are, because there most definitely are, and I have met them), thereby tainting the views of others that they “shouldn’t get involved in the raiding scene” because it’s so full of these “toxic elitists”. You want to apply your last statement to the raiders generalizing casuals, but it can go both ways—you yourself have been quite guilty of generalizing all raiders, when I hope that you know we aren’t all the same. Please consider that.


With that, I am going to bed. It is late, and homework is finally finished. Raid was...tiring. And I just want to go to sleep now. Apologies for any sloppy spelling or grammar mistakes I have made in my half-asleep state.