I can't speak for other online games, as my gaming time is very limited because of work. While I have had some bad experiences and have ran into some real jerks, I can confidently say I have had way more awesome experiences playing DCUO than negative. Over the years I have learned very effective ways to deal with undesirable gamers. When I first started playing I would continue to play in a raid or an alert with these people, trying to mentally block out all the cursing or insults or just plain ignorance. Most of the time these hostilities are not aimed at me, but I still take great offense to disrespectful players. Now if a run into a player or player(s) I first: 1. Politely ask them to tone it down. We all have a job to do on this raid/alert, lets finish it and we can all part ways with our rewards. Then I tell them that if they continue, I will leave. 2. If #1 doesn't work, I leave. I value my DCUO gaming time too much to let it be ruined by someone(s) who are not on the same page. You don't have to be an Angel, I'm not, I'm a Villain for crying out loud. All I ask is that you respect others and communicate effectively without resorting to insults or/and ignorant behavior. As an "Old School Style" Controller, I have no problem finding games. Half the time, #1 gets the job done. Whether the unruly player(s) chills out or someone else in the group places a vote to kick. I truly believe the majority of the community are good folks that just want to have fun playing DCUO. There are some terrible people online, but that's the case with every game. DO NOT let these people dictate your gaming experience.
I think assuming that ones experiences, either good or bad, translating to what others experience, is just not realistic. There are a whole host of factors that could come into play, too many variables to take into consideration, and outside influences that can creep in, to make it that simple. I wish nothing but the best for my fellow gaming community, but I also realize, not everyone is going to share in this utopian view.
The community is decent not my best experience but far far far from my worst. Far from "new" to gaming. Been around about 13-14yrs in various MMOS. Not as long as some but enough to weigh in on this community. Some people do get bad experiences and that reflects directly on all of us. The most vocal are toxic. Take the USA for example. Are they really that toxic and hate filled? Or is it the most vocal. If we have any brains we would know that its the vocal few that think/act/talk this way but we all take the blame.
I tend to make more comments about the toxic nature of this community. But truth be told, there are plenty of civil, smart and articulate people that also post here and they can be drowned out by the negs. Same thing in game. So overall it books down to how you want to represent yourself and who you want to associate with.
I am French Canadian and I learned most of my English with CoD (swearing in the majority) ahaha, but it is not the best example to compared
Okay lets start by saying I am not NEW to On line gaming. I have been playing MMOs online for 10 years. And I will not say that DCUO has the absolute worst community in the history of MMORPGs but it is hardly a well behaved and friendly community.. of course when you throw that many diverse personalities into a game I doubt you'd find one that truly is behaved and friendly. That said painting any kind of picture of the people playing DCUO as friendly and helpful is stretching the truth quite a bit. Want examples? Okay... Just last night I was on a Strike Team alert and we had done okay until we hit Guy Gardner. Now I was the lone healer teamed with 3 DPS (not a troller in sight to help we keep up power so I could TRY to keep these folks alive). We died and died and died despite me constantly cast protective shields and using both of my team heals as quickly as they recharged. The only attacks I fired off were from my hand blasters in an attempt to actually regain SOME power. I used up almost an entire stack of Next Soda trying to keep power levels up so I could keep healing and positioned my supply drop to help me gain health ad power along with team mates. At one point after a number of team wipes in this area I checked and I had over 400K in heals and despite hardly using any attack powers at all had managed 100K in damage out. And then the talking began ... what do we NEED to succeed. Next thing I knew I was standing outside. Now in the one guys defense he actually sent me a private tell and informed me that they had kicked the wrong person.... apparently the Jerk that started the vote meant to kick on person and "accidentally" clicked the wrong name.... but no one else on THAT team even bothered to look at my stats. We are dying it has to be the healers fault.... Yeah the one guy flying around the room, grabbing agro and dragging Gardner to where we were all trying to stay at range had NOTHING to do with that. That's just one thing about this game that sucks... I haven't been kicked a lot but one time a long while ago I know perfectly well it was because a guy on the team had a buddy that had just logged on and I got kicked to make room for him. How do I know? Because I had a good friend on that team that saw what happened before he left as well. This happens way to often here especially when LEAGUES are involved. A league forms a team for a raid or alert and they are short a Troller or a Healer and a call goes out over LFG. They grab whoever they can find and then when a league mate logs on that can heal or troll.. POOF the guy that was helping them for 10, 145, 20 minutes? is just gone. That's real good sportsmanship. And don't even bother denying it happens I saw it happen when I belonged to a league myself which is why I now have my own. Let's talk about showing players the ropes... On these very forums players are constantly complaining about other NOOBs that don't know how to play the game right.... But go log on and try to join a team through LFG. Way too many of these so called leaders want a team comprised of nothing but CR 100+ to run content a CR 70 can handle. No one want to take time to show anyone anything .. they want to rush through content as quick as possible , grab their reward and run to the next overpowered team. I think that is one of the biggest problems with this community.. everyone is in a huge rush. A team wipe doesn't result in a strategy session to figure out what we are doing wrong and try to fix it.. it results in glancing at a stats sheet , deciding who we can point a finger at, kick them and then .. stand around like idiots hoping the que finds us someone better. now lets add in the players just TOO lazy or in too big a rush to actually lend a hand anytime or for any reason. By this I am talking about the jerks in GUS that will wait until I am battling a mob to free a prisoner, jump in while I have agro, click and free the prisoner and then rush off leaving me to beat the mob while they find someone else to do "THE DIRTY WORK" Now in that instance its not totally horrible because I still get credit for releasing that prisoner but when stuff like that happens again and again do you know what it produces? Even more players that do exactly the same thing. Why bother to actually battle anything when you can let someone else do all the work? And this sort of attitude helps create teamwork needed to succeed in the raids and alerts HOW? While not every player is like this ... In the year and a half I have been here since City of Heroes ended I have seen enough of it to know its not isolated. its an accepted part of the game.
I think you'll find the good, the bad, & the ugly most everywhere. I'm pretty comfortable in this community of gamers...staying for the long run.
I've been a part of the following gaming communities: - Mech Assault (orig Xbox) - Crimson Skies (orig Xbox) - Madden non-casual - Street Fighter / Fighting Game - DCUO The most elitist community of those is the Street Fighter community. But that was mostly due to the release of SF4 bringing in new people who thought they knew everything so the vets had to put them in their place. That community is by far the best community I've been a part of. They do fundraisers for scholarships, people suffering tragedies, disabled players, etc. They put in tons of work and publish results for free with no concern for personal glory. That is remarkable given that the amount of work involved in testing DCUO pales in comparison to fighting games. The Madden community is mostly helpful but is very greedy. People put out guides but will try to charge for them. The players are often at one of the extremes. A lot of people are well-meaning, respectful and helpful. But you also get a ton of players who are some of the rudest and dumbest people you're likely to come across anywhere. There doesn't seem to be much middle ground in that community. When casual players try to mix in with the non-casual community and start crying about certain tactics and features, they usually get put in their place right away so they go running back to the casual community/forums. As far as rudeness and insults go, this community is rather tame. That said, this is by far the whiniest community of the ones I've been a part of. Even casual Madden players are nowhere near as whiny as this community. Part of that is because in the other communities, the players police themselves so the whiners get put in their place quickly. In the other communities unless you actually know what you're talking about, you don't really have a voice. Threads (and sometimes posts) with people crying and/or spreading misinformation are often closed and/or deleted quickly.
There is no such thing as a "good" online community. Everyone wants to measure dicks and yell at "newbz" behind a computer. Its not centralized to this MMO, but instead all over the place. I always laugh when I see people leaving the game or complaining about the community because they got cursed at or yelled at in chat. Welp, see ya man, have fun on the rest of the internet/other games where NONE of that ever happens... Its the internet.
I don't have a ton of experience with MMO's, the only other one I have played (outside of some Runescape when I was younger) was SWTOR. It had good people and bad people, people that enjoyed playing and people that always whined, just like this game. I do feel like DCUO's community has a greater sense of entitlement than most though, possibly as an unfortunate byproduct of having so much developer interaction. Many people seem to think they know more about the game than the devs themselves, as if they were the ones with access to all of the very numbers of the game. And when you have a lot of entitled people whose opinions differ collide, you get trouble. But that's only IMO, I haven't played enough MMO's (although I have a decent amount of gaming/gaming community experience, it's a bit of a different beast from a game like this) to act like it's in any way fact.
I feel the community as a whole has declined after almost 3 years of playing this game. I remember when I started playing that people could shout questions and get very helpful responses; people would shout for help with an instance and get it for free. People would even help you with how to arrange your SP, PP, and loadout without criticising or insulting you. As a whole they wanted everyone to be the best. Now we have a community that wants to exclude roles because it takes too long to kill stuff, it seems as though people forget that alerts used to take anywhere between 18 to 60 minutes back when we were in the gear for that tier. WM is a new tool and people need to learn the timing for their windows, but we're not given time to learn/practice because of our role. Many new members were in such a rush to end game content that they have very few SP and have no idea how to play their roles, in fact there are many terrible Damage players and a lot fewer of the Support players than I have seen at any point in this game. I have newer players sending me tells and putting me on their friends lists so that I am able to help them improve. Some will ask if I can bail them from a raid gone bad, others ask to be carried through content that they're not ready for (my answer is always "No "), and others just want answers to some random in-game question. Sadly, these guys & gals say I'm the nicest person they ran into and wish they would've ran into me sooner.
