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Playing with ‘tude…

Anyone notice that ‘tude rhymes with rude? Yes, I’m talking about courtesy and civility and their wide-spread death in the game. It’s frustrating, it’s problematic and it’s lamentable… it’s also a fact of life.

Players just seem deliberately oblivious of the needs of other players now. People sync to level 10 and kill everything with a power level in areas where people that actually are that level are trying to XP so they can kill the mobs for their trial weapons. High level characters come through low-level areas and wipe out everything when they are farming, or just kill things out of boredom when they are waiting for a party to arrive. People with raise just walk by dead people without even offering. People will run by lower-level players that are in trouble from links and not help at all. Japanese players pretend not to speak English even though the majority of the population has studied it and speaks at least some English.

Don’t get me wrong, there are still some decent people out there. Soloing I have often had a nice random player come by and toss me a protect and shell, maybe the odd cure, occasionally a much-needed raise. But the number of times I am passed by without these kind of assists far outnumbers the times when they are received. It’s really a shame. When I 1st started playing, and for the 1st several years, people would just do these kind of things. If they couldn’t because they were the wrong job or whatever they would still ask if you needed help if they saw you lying there or being pounded by multiple enemies and they would see about finding it for you. That doesn’t happen as much anymore.

Now players brought this on in 2 ways. Lower-level players started looking at assistance almost as if it were some kind of entitlement instead of just common courtesy. The higher-level player is not obliged to help you, they can if they choose to. By the same token, higher-level players started to look at things like assisting lower-level players as being a burden and would simply ignore requests, and I’m not speaking about the nasty veiled demands masquerading as requests (the entitlement people I mentioned a second ago) but polite requests for help. Some players have no doubt been burned by scammers, others just frustrated by seeming to have to spend their time on everyone else but themselves, everyone has a reason.

We’ve all had the experience of being in an area long before anyone else and having someone else move in and just take over, expecting you to leave. The RMT crowd were the worst, but they were looking at it as “I’m here feeding my family, you’re just playing a game”; that attitude is probably at least part of why they don’t have jobs and need to play a videogame to make ends meet. As a beastmaster I caught this more than most players, I’d be soloing in a good spot and some XP, NM camping or farming party would just show up and expect me to leave since “you can level anywhere” even though that is NOT the case. We’ve all been in the Dunes when yet another party shows up but the zone simply can’t support another group. Most of us remember the days when MPK was still common and some jackass would stampede a group of enemies through your party just because it was “funny”.

I used to belong to a good LS before I found SK and after GoH had suffered it’s 1st serious dissolution called PayitForward, which is a nice English reference to karma. They really were a good group and the golden rule was alive and well there. I both gave and got a lot of help from the members and I was sorry to see the leader quit and dissolve it. I think we really need to bring that kind of thing back. These days it is all to common to see LS’s acting like little armed camps fighting against the other LS’s out there with no respect or at least courtesy between them. Granted, everyone should give Trevino’s LS shit, he’s such a flaming asshole that he deserves it. But other than that we really need people to realize that—for example—your LS doesn’t own Charby and another group aren’t jack-asses for showing up to get a joytoy for one of their members. Point of fact, that’s one of the reasons I don’t come running when one of our members gets the claim on him; if he wasn’t prepared to take him out he should have let a group that was have him.

Now I don’t know if it’s even possible to start a courtesy movement on the server without just being flagged as Caitsith’s doormats but I’d sure like to try. I think it would have to be a grass-roots kind of thing, and noone would be served by acting like doormats. For example, many is the time that NewDawn lost a desired zone for Dynamis, but if the other LS showed up on-time, prepared and ready while we were just straggling in for a 20+ minute late start as far as I’m concerned they deserved the zone; after all, all we were doing was making things worse for the group that wanted the zone at 11:00 EST but couldn’t as we wouldn’t be finished until about 11:30. However, if we were already there, had scheduled it in advance on the voluntary sites and had people ready to go then we should never give up the zone. What we should have done is enter on time and the rude dicks in the LS who showed up late could simply join us at their own risk, and hopefully the relic they needed had already dropped and gone to someone else. Whatever, I have opinions and I’m not out to win any popularity contests here.