Originally Posted by
Primal Zed
I don't think they are the majority in WoW. It's just that WoW has greater number of people to begin with, and you're more apt to take notice of a person who's being a troll or similar. You can be in a 5 man group and one person in that will be obnoxious, exploit loopholes, and throw his weight around. Your takeaway from that won't be "Man, those three people in that group were really helpful and well behaved, it's too bad that one person ruined it for all four of us." It will be "Man, why are people in this game such jerks?"
This is especially poignant when it's in general chat, like you described - you never think to compare the number of people being obnoxious in the public chat to the number of people in the zone.
Sorry to disagree with you, DiamondDust, but as demonstrated in this thraed, the overall impression of a very large community isn't going to be how many well-behaved people there are, it will be how the loud, poorly behaved people are dealt with.
edit:
It's also a self-propagating problem as the size of the community grows. If one person with bad inclinations see another person engaged in it, the first will be encouraged. Say one in every fifty members of a given community think 'Anal ___' spam is funny. If there's fifty people online, and only one 'Anal' spam person, he'll do it on occasion but without anyone else participating he'll get bored pretty quickly. If there's one hundred people online, and two 'Anal' spam people, they'll feed off each other. If there's 150 people online, and three 'Anal' spam people....well, you see where I'm going with this. Then, there's going to be some in that other 98% that decide "well, everyone else is doing it, I might have some fun doing it as well." (Of course, 'everyone else' is not doing it, but as in my previous point it will generally seem that way.)
It doesn't matter how many nice people there are. It matters how the moderators deal with the people who aren't so nice, and where they set the bar.