Hi all,

Her are some personal thought of an old mmo player.

History of my mmo playing:

Started with DAoC, then EQ2 and after that WoW (from TBC come out). Between those I also tested: Lineage II, Rift, SW:ToR, GW2

When I start playing DAoC I had none what so ever clue what an mmo was about, but I still like to test it.

As an total noob and not to social I hesitated to join a group, but one day I took the big step an joined a PUG. I of course did all mistakes it is possible to make in a dungeon, but the people in the group took there time to explain how things worked in a group in an mmo, and things got better

After this I did more PUG and all went well. Same in EQ2. If some one did a mistake people explained what was wrong and no hard feelings.

In WoW things start slowly to change. Things was still good in TBC, but when WotLK came, PUG was more or less impossible. All was a speed run and one mistake, boooooom, kicked out of group.

The above is of course just my personal experience, but I like to hear from you: do you recognise the above, and in that case: will trend continue ?

Yep, DAoC had a great community (especially Midgard on Guinevere) and WoW rapidly devolved. i once got kicked for not having all rare gear even though my gear was better than the guy kicking me. He just saw the green color and booted...

I predict TESO will lean more toward WoW in that respect simply due to the morons that will show up. Some otherwise nice people will get irked, and stop being quite so nice, etc.

Which is why we need unlimited space on our /ignore lists. I am currently testing Neverwinters /ignore. If I see a name in chat that involves six, underwear, race etc guess what?

In all seriousness, find a large, non-elitist/jerk guild, and don't worry about the rest of the players

I started playing MMORPG's seriously with WoW.

Played some MMORPG's before that but I got no idea what they were because I didn't really get into them yet at that point.

It was completely different during vanilla.

I remember a time when I entered Maraudon (or something like that) for the first time.

And I came out of there 9 hours later and still not finished the place. And it was only because 9 hours is a VERY long time to do a dungeon and people really needed to start logging out.

Oh well, those days will never return. And it's not only because of what the MMORPG's are like these days.

It's also the fact that the number of people playing MMORPG's nowadays is a LOT bigger. There are more different kind of players.

It really just depends on who you play with. Part of the issue in WoW is the instance finder. While I like having such tools they also come with a price. In my experience games where either by tech or choice players still actively look for groups there is less of the speed run factor. However, this still comes down to the maturity factor of a game community. We really will not know what type of community we have until about 3-6 months after launch.

But my personal preference is to find a medium, non-elitist/jerk guild.

i most definitely can relate to what you said OP.

My first mmo was Runes of Magic, but there i never really got to do much raiding or pugging.

My second mmo was Rift, which i quit two months ago. Some groups/pugs were really unforgiving, screw up one little thing because you're new to the dungeon and all hell breaks loose, even if you said at the start that it's your first time in it.

However not all were like that, luckily. There are a lot of examples where the group was great and tho sometimes the progress in a dung didn't go that fast it was still fun due to fun people.

i guess it's just a matter of luck/bad luck if you get a fun or [censored] pug.

I think you're going to find those kinds of people in every game. I mean, everyone wants a successful group, but why would you not want to at least show new comers how to also be successful in that dungeon instead of shunning them? Beats me. I try to find a like minded guild or group up with friends that live close to me

Another thought is that none of will know what we are doing when this game starts. With the reduction in class importance, eliminating the aggro mechanic, and adding an action based combat system we will all be a bit lost.

True except for those invited to beta which includes a lot of those elitists that were previously talked about.