Sour Attitudes of HA

After running out of things to do on my PVE characters, its been over a month since I went back to HA. Things never really changed much and there of course was a new easy no brainer, easy to form/win FOTM that was running loose in the area (VIMWAY).

My big concern was the attitudes of the players, namely in American D1. No welcomes to new players, constant fighting among party up groups, elitists demanding title shows and emotes to get into guild groups. Even on teamspeak things were just dirty.

Its like things have gotten 10x worse since the last time I was in HA. For a player new to the game, coming to this place without knowing friends would make you hate this game. Disgusting, and im just extremely disappointed in the community. We play this game to have fun, that idea was lost somewhere in heros ascent.

My advice to players new to HA is to find friends or a HA oriented guild. I personally will have nothing to do with the place.

Try again when the 6v6 patch happens, lots of new PvE'rs will flock in then.

HA is indeed not as good as it was when I got my sigil.

TIMELINE

The Golden Age

When everyone was accepted, balanced PuGs were common, it was noob friendly

Introduction of IWAY

Don't hate me for this but IWAY did change HA it took advantage of noob balanced groups and chased away many noobs

The IWAY hate period

Many people at first accepted IWAY as a cool new build at first but hate spreaded and people noticed that it became overdominate in PuGs. Balanced members and IWAY members begin flaming each other.

The IWAY nerf

Anet answers the calls of many whiners and nerfs IWAY. IWAY is surpressed and many of the noobs who converted to IWAY now leave HA

Elitism of IWAY

IWAY struggles with the nerf and it no longer is a noob build. Elite players figure out many new powerful builds. To replace IWAY in the mindlessness Vim-way comes.

The future?

the change to 6 man may bring back the noobs and recreate the golden ages. Vim-way is balanced and balanced may be able to function along side of it.

QTF to Guardian...

And flock straight back out when they see the huge amount of eliteist crap that goes on in HA as pointed out by the OP.

Seen it for myself and it's completely ridiculous.

sadly it will never matter how large or small the party group is as long as you get to choose your party because people will always be picky about your rank and how good you are. Noobs wont get accepted in many groups but that may be a bit better because the "elite" players usually wont teach you. The moderate players in HA that do accept you (the nice ones) are willnig to teach and turn the noob into a monster.

If you do get lucky enough to have someone teach you and accept you into a group dont forget it. If you get good in the future dont forget how you got good, we were all noobs at one point. Give the noob a chance and teach them!

It's not like the people dont give noobs a chance. Noobs will never admit their noobs, noobs will never listen, will always think they're noob, will always thinks they're right. Someone that willing to listen is not a noob. noob=w/mo using ressect spell in pvp and saids "I'm good, I heal, and I res" You want someone like that in your group? Just let noobs play with noobs, they'll learn from their experience

I think the discussion was discussing the unfriendliness of HA towards players relatively new to HA and hence lowly ranked. I guess your rant about "noobs will always be noobs" explains the scene.

No offense, but you sounded like one of those who will not let someone join the party unless he's rank 6 or something.

Where did this rant on noobs come from? This discussion was referring to noobs as someone new to HA, as evident from the thread above, not some stubborn stupid moron wammo you described.

IMO one forms a team, discussing builds and roles, and if anyone refuse to cooperate, ask them to leave. This is what MMS Dome meant by giving noobs a chance. NOT using rank as an entry requirement.

We all had to start somewhere, ie rank 0.

anyone remember the water trident spikes of the old old HA days?

Guild wars in general, but espeically HA was great before Rage Quitters... where exactly that came about Im not sure, probably about the same time IWAY hate did.

For the reason stated by the OP, is mainly and for some the sole reason why pure PvErs exist in this game.

Greetings,

Well, pass the bat, it's my turn .

There are several reasons, that I see, for the sour attitudes in Hero's Ascent. I'll try to list them out. Warning: rampant generalizations abound here, but it is necessary for the purposes of discussion.

* Competitiveness breeds smack-talk: The very nature of HA causes people to be competitive. Being competitive leads to high-strung people who are so wired up on adrenaline that they say the first things that come to mind, without the benefit of thinking about what they are saying. Have you ever heard how professional athletes talk with each other, especially their opponents? That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
* It's a mental game: The rough, coarse, immature talk is designed to turn away prospective opponents. Less opponents equals greater chance of being the one on the top of the dog-pile.
* No monthly fee = lower aged players: Since Guild Wars doesn't require a payment every month, it allows those who don't have a regular paycheck to still play in a MMO world. This allows younger players to save up their own cash and buy their own game, without letting parental types knowing about their online activities, via needing a credit card for fees. These younger players haven't yet learned how to be civil and polite to others.
* Anonymous nature of the internet: Since people have the illusion that they are anonymous on the internet, and cannot be held accountable for their actions, they sink to the depths of immaturity and childishness just because they can. This same attitude carries over into the internet gaming, such as Guild Wars, that these kind of people play.

To be fair about this, though, the problem is not as bad, or limited to HA, as it seems. I've noticed that the times I've played in RA, the same goes on in the outpost, but once I've started actually playing, the attitude seems to disappear. This leads me to believe that these kinds of people (the rude, immature kinds) are simply using the outpost as a kind of IRC or Yahoo chat room.

This kind of problem also goes on in the presearing portion of Prophesies. Too many people, hormonal early teen children from my impression, just stand around outposts being rude and spouting out what amounts to toilet humor. Things such as having cyber-sex, /dance humping (warrior and ele) naked female eles who are also dancing, and saying derogatory remarks about everything from sexual preference to racial origins.

To be honest, if you wish to dare venture into these unforgiving lands, do as others have done. Go with people you know, be it from friends list or guild/alliance mates, and keep your local chat turned off. And, if you ever feel the need, take screenshot examples of these offensive behaviors and report them to ArenaNet. Enough reports about the same person/account, and the offending people will get perma-banned from the game.

Merry meet, merry met, merry meet again,
Wyldchild777

Balanced PUGs died long before IWAY because of other dominating builds

Air-spike (nerfed early summer'05)
Smite came in waves and was nerfed several times (stacking Balt's Aura...ouch)
Spirit Spam (until ranger spirits were totally changed end of summer'05)
Ranger Spike
and probably others came before IWAY.

I find it amusing how the smallest amount of Internet glory can go to someone's head.

Oh great Internet, give me sight beyond sight!

Sounds awesome.

Well, from the point of view of a teenager who got Guild Wars a month or two after it came out as an '8th grade' graduation present...
I've always been scared of HA and PvP in general. I'm pretty much a casual player, mainly focusing on PvE since the ordinary stress of life keeps me away from being competitive and therefore, away from high end PvP. I know that 'high end' PvP like HA and non-casual GvGing is for the people who really want to achieve something in this game, but the preparation and attitude you face once you get into a game (if you ever do) is just not worth the little amount of time I am able to spend.

So to sum it all up, just like everyone says, competition in games and pretty much everything in general spawns immaturity and a sense of superiority that if definitely not noob-friendly.

The ones with the sour attitudes are not high ranked players, but rather low ranked players who want to leech off of a party they are not qualified to be in.

All high ranked players earned their rank one way or another so it's really not fair to criticize them for not taking bad players. No one took them when they were bad players so why do bad players often expect that special treatment be given to them on a silver platter? Those who whine about rank discrimination have no legs to stand on in my view. If they wanna get into good parties then it was always their perogative to either earn that right by acquiring rank, or playing with people of their own rank - which they never wanna do because people of that rank suck (which makes it all the more hypocritical for them to complain about high ranked parties not wanting that rank level seeing as the low ranked players themselves don't want people of that rank in their party either).

It's not fair to criticize people for using FOTM builds either because the game is designed in such a way that making any good non-FOTM build and stocking it with the best players takes 1 - 3 hours or more just to start playing, third-party voicechat, and often even after all that then it will lose 2 rounds in in which case the party disbands and it is 3 hours wasted for 1 fame point.

I've seen this happen on several teams made up of the very best players in the game.

It is simply not practical for a video game to require the sort of organization that 8vs8 Tombs does in order to start a match. That is why FOTM has and always will always rule the roost.

Other poster is right that 6vs6 will bring back "the golden age of newbieness" but I'm not sure that is a good thing. There is already AB for scrub PVP, now Tombs is gonna be scrub PVP also. Easier to get parties, yes, but the actual game is much more shallow.

The good news is that you'll be able to get into a group faster with 2 less slots being filled.

The better news is that with the party size limited to 6, spike builds won't work as well and there should theoretically be more class diversity.

The best news is that the Hero's system is being released... it's always possible that ANet could add heroes to HA.

MEANING...
LESS ELITIST SPIKE TEAMS
MORE GROUPS TO JOIN
MORE BUILD DIVERSITY

Again, in theory

So being treated badly yourself means you're entitled to treat others badly?

There's another social phenomenon that follows that line of logic, it's called hazing. It happens to be illegal in most places.

"When I was new, I didn't get in any groups" isn't a valid reason not to let new people into your groups.

Thanks for giving everyone a good example of what the OP is talking about. The attitude towards people new to HA - aka newbies - are automatically regarded as noobs by elitist snobs. This is exactly why I don't bother with HA much.

The experienced HA players that don't fall into the "elitist snob" catergory are there, and yes, they don't mind showing newbies the ropes. The problem is there's so few of them in comparison to the rank-happy players.

that's a perspective of person who never played iway or never got immersed in iway.

iway became popular coz it's faster and (was) easier to get fame in there coz people who got fame from previous fotm discriminated against new players and lower ranked. them new players formed iway groups. few iway guilds manage to beat established ranked HA guilds coz of different approach,a select few dominated (coz iway haters and non fans were dreaming that iway can just win in first 3 maps) and got fame faster (and the noobs who benefited from spirit spam, smiting, airspike and who were trying to play balanced but get beaten by iway cried "iway destroyed the rank system", brainwashing even the newer players), thus the IWAY hate. it got so popular again (coz iway got shortlived popularity vs Smiting) that "all you see in tombs was iway". then it got a major build nerf (spread to the classes) but it managed to adapt on with the introduction of faction's skill. of course there are still players and it still wins.

iway will still be there and will still win in 6vs6 but itll be weaker and will have more chances of being beaten.


Vimway is quite similar to the old iway that rocked the tombs back then. just remove the 2 trappers and slap an oov+oop and a tainted necro.