Going to the same route as WoW. The game is TOO easy

[Shurrikhan]

Further, even in those situations, only the uneducated would claim a repulsion to that as "elitist," and why would we heed what such individuals have to say?

Because they kick you when you dare to speak otherwise in any way that may somehow offend? Because, however unfortunate it may be, they have legitimate power -- as does any other stratum, fold, or opinion of player -- when a majority of a given group? That's their right, and thus one may say that that result is everything working as intended, but it's hard to believe the chasm that would lead to these conflicts is likewise intended or a result of well-functioning designs.

I've more than several times been kicked for merely asking my (other) DPS to "Please use your AoE skills when we're fighting 4 or more mobs at a time, or at least attack the same target as <the other DPS or myself>." About the same number have occurred from asking, as a healer, my DPS to dodge or the tank not to cleave the melee. Having played several MMOs each with significant skill gap and poor player learning support tools (apart, in most cases, from a better difficulty curve), I don't think I've ever seen an MMO where kicks so often occur, especially from poorer performing players onto those encouraging, shepherding, or pushing more optimal play rather than more competent players declining to make use of a player who is not yet prepared for the stratum of content they'd queued for.

Yes, we can avoid players not of our own skill level or with whom we do not share gameplay habits, and -- as in the above examples -- it will often time out such that being kicked from such a poorly performing group, even including the next queue time, may still lead to a faster clear if you random in with a better group next time. But this ignores a more crucial point.

By the time you have these kinds of conflicts to worry about, you have a significantly sized group that identifies largely antithetically (anything we don't do must be "them" and anything "they" do must be something we don't do) and antipathically ("Damn those elitists!"), causing significant polarization that only adds unto itself given (even fairly reasonable) reactions from those they then exclude. All this, when we should ideally instead be seeing a desire to improve and see others improve and ideally be open to whatever different means of enjoying the game where they do not have to be in conflict (as I would argue that enjoying RPG aspects of the game and its mathematical optimizations need not be)...

To a large group of people, improvement towards mastery is itself gameplay and content worth experiencing for its sheer enjoyment. To another, it's not that great in itself, but certainly extrinsically enjoyable in that it allows you access to so much more content, which the externally increases the size of the playerbase within any given tier or stratum of content. To the last, it's a distraction which stands in conflict with other activities that can be gleaned from the game. But while that may be three groups, one ultimately treats optimization (even in the vaguest sort of way) very, very differently from the other two, such that you end up with two (essentially boolean) stances. It's like if you took all values between 1 and 100 and then those under, say, 20 decided to treat all numbers higher as an irreconcilable monolith. And that number will of course shift. In later Ex primal content, maybe that's up to 35 or whatever, but the point is how much resistance we face for going, or more importantly suggesting that others go, those few numbers higher, since however small or tall the order, or how easily a significant improvement can be made, one is all too often called the same thing.