Maturity returning to the Arenas?

My PvP has mostly been confined to Arenas, due the fact of me being in a very different timezone than my (former) guildies : Hence no GvG or Tombs. I did try Tombs with PUGs earlier with limited success, but it just didnt cut it.

So, I continued playing Random 4v4 Arenas. I liked the randomness part, because it tested my dynamic adaptability to my allies and opponents.

I've watched the evolution of the Arena over the last 3 months, and lately its been a pleasant suprise to find a lot more sanity and maturity there. I spent couple of hours there yesterday without coming across a single instance of "owned/pwned/leet/uber/n00b". Nor did I come across the "Rushing Warrior", "Suicide Monk" or any such folly.
I had 13 consecutive victories with my Me/W and 9 with my W/E. We had some closely fought matches with people making liberal use of wards, traps and interrupts.
I came across people saying "Hugs and Kisses All!", "Good Luck everyone", "Well fought" a lot.
I even had a WaMo saying "Damn ur good" to me when I took him out with a "Devastating Hammer-Crushing Blow-Heavy Blow-Aftershock" chained combo.

Do you share my views about maturity returning to the arenas? Maybe the 12year olds got bored and left already?

That's good to hear. Although I haven't been there in a while myself, I know the reason I left was exactly because of this problem.

Maybe things are working out for the better

Yup, I see the letters g + g more often than not now. Though some people can still be arses, you just ignore them. The 12 year olds are now in tombs. I was in tombs once, looking for a group with vent/ts. Found one, got on ts, and most people didn'thave mics, and the 2-3 of them that did had high pitched voices. I was like hmm..a group of gals. Then one of them (that I presume was older) asked how old they were over vent, and they replied with the casual 13, 14, 13. Then they started chatting a bit more casually and I found out they were actually dudes. After they couldn't even take down the ghostly team in the beginning (they were spikers, I was a prot monk), they started blaming everyone that was not a spiker.

Confession: You know how everyone hates runners? Well, I do too, but I was REALLY bored today, and I was running my prot monk (life bond etc), my team started dying (smiters) because they were too stupid to run from smiting eles + monks. I was the only one left over, and just started running around. The ele that was smiting was using a sword and I had balthazars spirit running, so I gained energy from his hits (which did like 2-3 dmg to me), and all I did was spam reversal while he tried to catch me with zealots + balts aura. After about 15mins or so, I decided to start tanking it. I used liberal spam of blessed signet + reversal + protective. Was tanking them pretty well, my energy sustained as each one kept hitting me with their wands and that sword. I could only spam reversal so much along with prot spirit before my energy gave out (reversal was usable, but was recharging), but that was another 2 minutes or so. xD

It's possible that, due to game fatigue, the "short attention span/ADHD" crowd is finally moving on and that the more serious, long-term players are surfacing. People who stick to a game for any length of time beyond the normal first-out-the-gate push are generally the more polite and mature gamers. This, of course, has little to do with age either so don't anyone get their knickers in a knot.

I recently fought in the random arenas and had a very good time. I was testing a revised build, inspired by the thread starter himself :P, and got a whole 14 consecutive wins! It was very fun, and there was alot of good sportsmanship there.

I've decided that the only 12-14 year olds who are impolite people who yell "0wn3d!!" after a close 1v1 at the end of the match are the ones from the USA. I myself am 13, but I'm from New Zealand, and after paying attention to which little a$$holes were swearing like there's no tomorrow and had more exclaimation marks than normal characters in their messages noticed most of them were American...

Eh...just because there are Americans that play this game doesn't mean they're all immature little pricks. However, I know that there are quite a few and I think that mostly all 13-14 year olds, no matter the nationality, are slightly immature because they're kids, even though I've seen quite a few that play like the best of us. I'm American, too, but granted I'm 19

I don't believe that making blanket comments about age or nation will constructively add to this thread in any way.

Flamingpeanut is 13, and acts mature. I am not convinced that all American 13 year olds are under some spell to impede their mental growth. In fact, I've met many 20+ year olds who act just as juvenile as stated. It's not a matter of physical age as it is mental age in this case.

There's a lot of factors that affect attitudes... let's not string it all up into something like age or nationality

Merely an observation, sorry if I offended anyone.

When I started playing a lot of Arena (random, of course) awhile back, I took with me the elements of good sportsmanship (gamesmanship?!?); I said "gl hf" at the beginning and "gg" at the end (habits from Warcraft III and other games. The translation for those not as nerdy as I are as follows: "Good luck and have fun"; "Good Game"). At the beginning, it started off rough. People would say a couple antagonistic things, immature things, etc. (Like "Omg I had fun with your mom", etc.). Then, after awhile, they started not responding at all, which I considered more positive then the previous reactions. And then, lo and behold, more or less every other person now is polite, says gg, and many say something along the lines of "gl hf". I haven't encountered any such immature speech/actions for awhile, and it is very nice

I think a lot of the immature people have gotten impatient with the game not being what they want it to be and have quit. I love it and plan to stick with it until the next chapter.

Good to hear, I like hearing about more than how bad things are for a change. It's the reason I don't read the paper or watch the news, I don't enjoy hearing about bad things, because bad things happen all the time...

PieXags likes it when good things come around, I'll be sure to test out more often in the arenas to see if it's true.

Exactly. o.o

Well, I'll admit, even though I'm not a 12-14 year old kid, I am American, and I do have a bit of a mouth on me...

But I will say this, I learned most of the obscene words I use frequently from british friends I had growing up.

I do hope this is true. People lose sight of the fact sometimes that GW is still in its "infancy" as a game. Maybe the griefers are starting to get bored and move on... we can only hope. It would give me a reason to go back to the arenas again.

I am also doing 99% of my PvP in arenas since I prefer the relatively relaxed attitude of the players there over the totally overserious stance of the folks in Tombs. And yes, I can totally confirm the observations of the OP. While some weeks ago you mostly encountered people who were either rude to the most possible extent and/or obviously doing their very first PvP match before heading to the "real thing" (Tombs), you now find very nice and very experienced players there. The occassional F-word guy is of course still among them, but nothing really out of the order. Random 4x4 PvP can be as least as fun as the Tombs. It's nice that more and more people actually discover that.

yeah, i always say gl hf at the beginning, and gg at the end, and theres definatly been an inrease in 'you toos', but i still manage to find some wally once or twice a day who makes some hilariously wity comment about my mom. lame.

i think not.

.....
For shame!

I havent had much trouble with the arenas..the worst experience I have had was a monk telling me to target the Me before the Mo everytime to which I told him I pick my targets based on whos going to make the fight longer or more painfull first. But I mean come on thats hardly worth getting into a tuss about especially since I probably don't know what I'm talking about.

Let's analyze this, shall we?
That being addressed to the thread starter means that you switched targets, which sadly shows a lack of concentration, and an offensive aura that will burn anyone that addresses you with a different point of view than yours.
99% of the time anyone states that, they're indeed immature, thus the defensiveness.
The urge to turn a mere observation into a patriotism crusade reflects that you do indeed lack the persuasion that your own statement is correct, thus the attempt to convince yourself by adding shininess to it. That's hardly mature.
Stating a point of view as being a fact, having a near naught tolerance to observations, and visualizing a fight in every word that you don't like is hardly the mature way to get your point accross.

Yes there are immature people playing the game
Yes some of them are American, and some are European
Yes it has been observed that on a scale of 1 to 10, at least 6 of the immature players are american, that my friend, can be interpreted by some people as "most of..", but that does not mean that anybody is saying anyone's "country is at fault" nor does it require "defending one's countrymen"

You pal are trying to turn a post with alot of positive and helpful contributions into a continental flamefest, which I shall (hopefully did) do my share to try and prevent.