I blame “Influencers” and third party apps like WCL for promoting toxicity.
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I’d say out of the several versions of WoW we can choose to play most of the classic brand has some rougher attitudes in it.
My opinionated and entirely subjective ranking from good attitude to worst attitudes:
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Retail - probably due to larger population size, but has consistently felt more welcoming and willing to help out in terms of encounter knowledge/class help. Very rarely, outside of high end, are people rude to you for mistakes or your talent choices. I can and have joined heroic raids with zero experience to show and have had 19 other people be hyper helpful and supportive. You do catch a few people who want to initiate a kick during LFR runs but those rarely pass and I have yet to see a kick in RDF for anything other than a disconnect.
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WrathC - There is a large jump here between retail and WrathC attitudes. Wrath has a bunch of overinflated attitudes about easy content, too much focus on GS, and will not hesitate to remove people from groups for pedantic reasons. People like to claim RDF caused the city sitting meta, WrathC was like this from mid P1 forward.
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SoD - For a laid back seasonal experience people are way to invested in parses and damage. The amount of times where CC has been asked for or some form of non-damage based utility is asked for you are met with silence or some smooth-take quip. Warlocks in my experience are the big offenders with paladins/hunters being next on that list. Mess up once in DM? That’s a kick. Players also refuse to recognize threat as a thing in SoD, even with runes threat is important. When asked to wait for tank to build threat the consistent reply from the DPS has been “git good”. Gear can make this less of an issue but it’s more the responses to me. Obviously I’m not crying myself over someone saying “git good” but I cannot post the more flavorful responses here. Generally has the attitude of “pay me to help” or people who won’t group for quests, or will wait while you kill things hoping you die so they can get the mob tag. Just noticing a lot of selfish behaviors.
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Era. I wanted to dive into Era, experience some fun content at level and try the classes in their most base form. The people I interacted with had zero ability to move away from a now 20 year gameplay mold. Half the specs are treated as untouchables and the community so far has more interest in raid logging than anything else. Asking for any help was met with “no, pay me”. If you even mention another form of WoW you get berated incessantly. The Era die hards like to believe every other version is dying and there are no improvements that should/can be made to an inherently flawed (yet fun) game. Era could have been fun had the primary player base that inhabits it just generally been more welcoming as a whole. Era could use a fresh realm, though I doubt it would avoid the same issues the current realms have now.
Those are my thoughts. I realize people are not all the same and I did find good, worthwhile people in all these versions. However the bad interactions have stuck with me as well. Feel free to pick my opinions apart, I probably wont respond.
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I’ve stopped posting in the forums for the most part. Everything you read is so incredibly toxic. I hope you delete your toon, I’m glad you feel like you can’t play the game… The PvP community in this game is the absolute worst. Then you have the retail crowd complaining about having to be in the open world do go places and do things. Lastly you have people trashing the game in general because they can’t deal with raid mechanics that require a tiny bit of thought.
This is an absolutely FREE version of the game that everyone knew when it started was going to be untested, unbalanced and constantly changing… Yet everyone here treats it like it’s so serious.
Enjoy your free content people, or don’t I guess and just go back to whatever you were doing that you thought was fun before. I don’t know how people spend so much energy being so angry over something that’s being given for FREE.
So you have only played single player games before?
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Sometimes one of the NPC’s yells at me and I don’t like it. /s
What are you talking about? Absolutely free. You pay a subscription for this game. A lot of us are not even playing retail so it is definitely not free by any stretch of the imagination. In fact it’s on the upper scale of cost in terms of games you could play.
Wow, SOD has the most cringe community out of any game I’ve ever played in my entire life
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Its not really toxic, all of the toxicity is from the gate keeping and gameplay exclusion.
the whole
“Be this X meta class or we’re checking your logs and if their below 70% your booted”
is the main problem in this version
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I play Wrath and I get SoD for free essentially. In fact, I run GDKPs in Wrath to buy tokens so all the content is essentially free. I suppose it’s possible some people activated new subs to play SoD, but I think most people are either from Era, or Retail, or Wrath, or Hardcore.
And if it’s cringe to say enjoy the unbalanced game everyone knew they were getting, my bad I guess.
People arent. Retail kids are.
They bring their ranks of extreme toxicity and self important main character syndrome into everything they do.
Its pervasive and unstoppable as long as parents cant discipline their children into proper adults.
People these days are just crap humans.
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back in my day
I do agree that the elitism and min/maxing are out of control. This has been a disappointing development that has really undermined P2 for a lot of players.
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Mr. Nightrogue -
I’m going to share something with you here that’s a bit personal. If it’s TMI, I apologize, but real questions deserve real, human answers.
I’ve been playing Warcraft from Vanilla through Cata, as a druid, then picked it up again when classic rolled around, and fell in love with Warrior. I’m a tank by nature and really experienced my first dose of weapons-grade toxicity when I started tanking 40-man raid content. One of the hallmarks of a guild getting better in Classic is using fewer and fewer tanks to pump up the numbers of DPS, and I didn’t want to play the games required, even though I was parsing decently (80’s-90’s). Parsing is really a symptom of a group doing well, not just a given person. As you’re leveling, tanks are really hard to find for endgame dungeons because they need to be 20% of the population, and when 40-man raiding, sometimes 2.5%. This leads to some pretty nasty interactions, and backstabbing. (present company excepted) I finally quit.
Next time I played a Blizzard game was Wrath Classic - which was fun, despite being told by the YouTube hypetrain that I was the least durable, the lowest damage, and lowest utility of all possible tanks. WCL had divided up warriors into Prot, Fury, Gladiator (prot, but playing support), as well as Champion (fury or arms, but tanking) which was really cool. There was some guild drama there as well, but I really felt unbreakable, and I had a good rep on Maladath - I just started having some health problems that turned out to be Young Onset Parkinson’s, and that combined with Blizzard giving one-way tickets off the server? It’s one thing to be part of a guild, and damaged, it’s quite another to say “hey, I want one of your really few tank spots, but I’m not meta, and I’m sick. My hands may screw up at a bad moment, or I could get distracted by something and roach your run.”
Then Season of Discovery came along. I was really excited because here was a chance to see some of the things I hadn’t (Sign of Earth, Crown of Will - all those really long quest chains that have decent rewards at 40, but in the normal game, you’re flying past them too fast to get to other stuff that’s ultimately better). But getting to do that with Warbringer, which is my favorite talent ever? Man, it’s awesome. But to someone’s point earlier in the thread, some specs are “meta” and others are not - and given how quickly someone can go from in to out, and how little supervision is given to forum threads, or live GMs because of the state of Blizzard as a company right now, there really isn’t any place to express for most folks to vent their frustrations except for each-other.
I’m really happy that shaman are in the place that they are right now, and I hope that they bring resto up to par - I don’t play shaman, but back in Classic Vanilla, you pretty much had to have one per party. I also understand the frustrations of people playing against them in PvP. I play against them on a PvE server during Bloodmoon, and generally speaking end up deader than Oldsmobile most of the time. I’m happy to see Paladin is getting as much attention as it has been, even though it’s not at the top of the charts. I have a druid I enjoy playing as well, and the attention Boomkin has gotten has been great.
There are a few things that, much like discussing politics at Thanksgiving that will always end in sorrow:
- “My class is the only one that’s getting screwed.” - there’s a lot of folks who really feel like they’ve had some targets moved on them. Hunter’s probably my favorite example where some part gets buffed and some other nerfed. I might as well stand in Ratchet and hand out pitchforks.
- “X class needs a nerf because I think so, and here are some numbers, but I don’t have a screenshot or link.” - Implying that folks have no skill because they’re doing well, and then not showing anything to support your argument really seems to get folks in a lather. Chances are there’s a grain of truth to it, but for the most part, if one suggests one is the Arbiter of Nerf, there’s zero chance you’re going to get a blue response, but about an Eleventy Brazilian percent chance someone is going to flame you.
- “This class is actually doing OK, because one guy topped the charts on one boss/PvP leaderboards.” - There are a lot of metrics out there - and some can be cheesed by idealized comps, specialized gearings, parse-chasing guilds, etc. As someone who’s in the percentile group who makes the top 5% possible in Gnomer, I’m probably not going to benefit from a post that starts this way, and there’s a reason WCL is constantly invalidating logs, like the ones with the Greench or Scarlet Hounds from P1.
And, to be clear, feelings are true 100% of the time, and we, as a community, could do a better job of that. I know people of every class and spec who put in hours of time prepping for raid, PvP, and showing new folks around. There is no class that is 100% populated by talentless, lazy assclowns.
But the common thread through which all of these run is that all of us who are playing this game who are veteran WoW players have either been denied a position on a team, or suddenly lost our jobs because we weren’t meta, or had real-life problems, and moving targets, and coefficients, and hearing things like:
"In the interest of transparency the following was an undocumented change that we implemented in today’s update:
Living Flame’s duration has been reduced by half to 10 seconds.
The motivation for this change was to reduce the viability of the Mage hero-class in farming PvE content."
The movement speed of the projectile was reduced by 14% as well. And the CD was also reduced by half. And this was on Aggrend’s Twitter of all places. Which has now been deleted. So it was 1/3 of what happened, kinda a rude thing, and now deleted, with no apology in its stead. Which is fine. It’s his Twitter account. He can do what he wants with it. But his Twitter isn’t an official channel. I’m glad that information has migrated to where it should and has lost its snark.
https://imgur.com/a/jU9oLIr
Apologies for the cut-n-paste URL here.
Dunno about you, but that seems pretty angry to me, almost like someone yelled at him because he put a change into production without telling anyone? One of the lessons Blizzard “learned” in Diablo IV when they nerfed everything two days before season 1 started was “we’re going to put patch notes in, in full, in advance, rather than just have people wake up and find out that two of the five classes got dunked.” This was after they nerfed everything that had cooldown reduction and critical strike as a base stat to “improve weapon diversity.” They also said they were going to let OP classes keep being OP until they came up with a sane fix for them.
That said, Aggrend seems pretty exhausted too.
So to me, most of the toxicity reads like fear, that we could “lose” characters we’d invested WSG Exalted grinds on. Or classes and playstyles we enjoyed. And I’m sorry to hear you went back to retail. And thanks to anyone who’s survived to the end of this post. I want everyone to be happy with their favorite class, ESPECIALLY if that class wasn’t “viable” in Vanilla or Classic Vanilla.
I hope you come back soon. Horde on Wild Growth welcomes you with open arms, sir.
(Also, I’m Tauren, so you can make all the beef jerky jokes you want. 
)
Hi-yo Silver!
Signed,
Bad Horse
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Starfire hits you for 1600 (critical).
WCL is a tool, the way some people use it is just ridiculous, but it’s a great tool to improve your own game play.
It becomes sad when you won’t accept specific classes because having them in your raid won’t make you cut the 2 seconds in the kill time so you won’t go from 99.2 to 99.3
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lol, that 8% crit chance really got you down huh?
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In game the average player is fine.
The forums is a different story.
Seems like the same player base that had moved from original classic to TBC to WOTLK, just a higher % of the minmaxers from classic are now on SOD.
Agree, the player base can have quite a few toxic players in SOD. There’s a horde guild QQ on crusader strike that inspects gear and looks up parses of random players sitting in Orgrimmar, and then they try to publicly shame the randos/accuse them of being gold buyers etc. (saw it happen in Orgrimmar a number of times the other day). Good thing is, there are a number of normal players as well, and most of normal players try to defend/shoot down these public shame accusations when they see it.
My interpretation of it is that retail players have come to what they feel should be an “easier environment” aka classic era… and they’re trying to flex their egos about how good they are with retail mindsets (gearscore, CHECK MUH LOGS, U MAD? GIT GUD) etc attitudes
and it does not mesh in with the pre-existing classic community at all. The retail reroll andy’s think they’re the best thing since oxygen because this one time they totally timed a +27 bro truuuust me bro im a PUMPER broooo. Classic era players generally do not care about that attitude at all - so they just roast them for placing so much value in irrelevant things.
Retail rerolls chase FOTM extensively, and want their favorite class to be overpowered. Classic era players are playing suboptimal dog-water classes wanting it to be viable, but because “bro i’m 4.7k in 3’s trust me bro 96x gladiator exp only” 1450-lifetime-highest players with that one participation trophy shadowlands gladiator mount hate hate haaaaaaaaaaate anything that’s able to kill their precious baby druid wait no hunter crap no… shadow priest dag nabbit Shaman alts… they want it nerfed into the dirt ASAP - regardless of game balance.
Retail players are also incapable of separating class from specialization in SoD. They’re used to retail where every spec is a unique snowflake - but in classic era classes and class balance is based around the entire class.
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[Citation Needed], as usual
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Starla spamming me again, in a completely new thread
Citation: You insisting Druid isn’t a class, but Balance Druid is a class and needs to be treated independently/individually in terms of game balance/design.
Source: Your post history, over 500 posts crying about balance druid nerfs.