Rant Time Again! Why Bro Gamers Ruin Gaming (Warning: Big Wall of Text Incoming)

[Val the Moofia Boss]

If your gonna post to this thread, please read the damned OP!

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It's that time of the week again when I just...well...get PISSED OFF and must channel my anger through cyberspace in the form of thousands of thousands of words of ranting.

Today's blasphemy which I shall rebuke involves those sacrilegious bro gamers (aka, the casual middle school students who scream everytime a new CoD comes out) are ruining gaming. Actually, before I delve into their sins, I shall point out that not all bro gamers are, in fact, just middle school students who scream everytime a new CoD comes out. Bro gamers make up 80% (Correction: The number is actually 65%) of all gamers. Who are these patrons? Bro gamers can be described simply as casual gamers who only play the 'best' games (Whatever their definition of 'best' games is). They don't have the money to go out and buy twenty different games a year. They don't have the time to play four hours a day. They only get one or two games that they really want a year, and they spend their hour of game time a day playing the best/their most favorite game they have. These guys don't really want to spend 15 minutes or so going onto [Insert Game Here]Wiki to find out how they can be better. They just get home, undress, toss a potpie in the microwave, turn on their console, put in their best game, and just jam for the little time they have. They want to maximize their fun in the little time and skills they have.

Now that I have cleared things up a bit, back to the rebuking. As I was saying, this class of gamers are, in much part, ruining gaming. I am not saying that all of them are. To the contrary, I say that most of them mean well. But...there are many who are doing otherwise, and their actions are helping to ruin gaming. They are 1. ruining games for everyone by encouraging the industry to unilaterally change their policies and mechanics to cater to their whims, and 2. they are ruining interactions with other players.

This is something pretty bold to say. Yes, I know, there are several other reasons why these changes in the industry are happening. (For those interested, you should read one of my previous rants about the nasty changes being made to the industry: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...-of-It!-(Rant)

First of, continuing off of my I'm Sick and Tired of It thread, I will say that bro gamers are heavily contributing the changes in the industry. There used to be a time...there used to be a time...oh right! Yes, I'm not so supposed to be remembering the good ole days and to be prophesying. There used to be a time when developers didn't make games with the sole intent of making money. They didn't just go, "Hey! I wanna make money. I'm gonna make a video game. I'm gonna steal all these other ideas, looks back into the 'Great Book of Stock Video Game Essentials the Supposedly Everyone Must Get', put up a big, huge advertizing campaign and 'wow' people by pushing all their buttons with nice sounding lines. (I ripped this from the above link). ''What your about to see is a non scripted event that has occurred in our dynamic, living world,'' (which actually happens because said event only takes place there once has done X, Y, and Z, and never repeats itself afterwards). ''What your about to see is the culmination of (insert imaginary number here) years of professional, dedicated work that has finally come to fruition.'' And then they whirl up a gigantic hype storm, get people to buy hundreds of thousands of preorders; they start announcing expansion packs (actually cut from the vanilla game to be sold as DLC later) before release even happens...yeah, you know the drill.

There used to be a time when game developers handcrafted their products with passion. They wanted to pioneer new ideas and try new things. They took risks. "I don't wanna use that classic, 'kill 10 mobs to level up' formula anymore. I want to try a system where your character is developed reflective of how you play. I want to try out a system where each of your skills has it's own XP bar that is progressed through using them, and leveling up a few of these together levels your character up." Or, they went "I'm gonna spend weeks on my own time developing my own, unique art style. I'm going to ask for feedback on this artstyle, and once I perfect it, that artstyle is going to be the imagery of my game." Or, in a much more recent case; "I'm not going to compose typical fantasy music for this game. I wanna do something original; I will use a clever combination of oriental, African, and Nordic music concepts. Even if most people don't like it, I don't care, because they are not my target audience. And my target audience will praise me for this originality."

It was an age...an age long gone; forgotten by the generation of today. An age where quality was held over quantity.

The abusive bro gamers of today have been whining. "But I don't want to have to play through a short, twenty hour long game where there are only three major, awesome battles in it. I don't want to play through a 50 hour long story that's mostly talking. I want instant action right now, all the time! And I don't want to ever lose. If the game is going to be fun, I have to win all the time, and the game is too hard if I can even die once. Because I'm too awesome to die! And speaking of awesomeness, I want to be able to get headshots all the time and smash people's skulls all the time. I don't want to walk for a half an hour journey to the mountain to fight the dragon; it should be a hundred feet away at the most. I want this! I want that! Gimme!" ...

They missed the point.

The twenty hour long game...it was a build up. It was a build up to a climax. You don't need constant awesome battles all the time to have an awesome game. The twenty hour long build up was enrich the climax. And alot of people thought it was well worth the wait. If you played a 50 hour long story with mostly talking and you just wanted action, you obviously bought the wrong game. It was a drama. An immersive drama. Some people like dramas. Dramas don't have shooting all day long. Shooting all day long is an action game. If you don't want to lose, play easy mode. If there is no easy mode, use cheats. If you can't, or you won't use either, your playing the wrong game too. The point of possibly losing is that there is tension - your not invincible. You can die. You can fail. Success not guaranteed makes for an interesting story. And headshots are not owed to you. They are earned. Earned with skill. Develop that skill or don't get headshots. If you want 24/hour awesomoness, you should've bought CoD. If you can't endure a journey that the developer spent hundreds of hours refining that was supposed to meaningful, all because you just want instant action, your in the wrong game. Need I continue?

But these bro gamers...they whined. They complained. The succeeded. They succeeded in goading the developers to their whims. At our expense.

The devs, or publishers, or whoever is in charge of running development of the game (Fact: Developers don't necessarily get a final say in what's in their game), couldn't discern their audience. They couldn't discern their goal. The goal was to make a game that would work like this and would be sold to these people. But the devs couldn't see; they thought that the way to make their game better was to make everybody happy. They had to change X feature to work according to their complaints. They had to delete Y feature to make it simpler. They. Gave. In.

Change isn't necessarily bad. Change can be good. But here, change was made to make it appealing to everyone, not to make the game better.

And now, here we are.

What happens when you give in? LFR happens. WoW used to be great (And is still great). But it was warped to cater to those who couldn't take the time to read a short guide on how to be better; to those who couldn't even watch a 5 minute strategy video but had hours to right up and whine about their complaints. What happens when you give in? CoD. CoD was great. It had skill. There was a time when you played CoD for a highly realistic, skill based WWII simulation. Now all it is a game of "Who can aim their target reticle the fastest". What happens when you give in? Skyrim. There used to be planning involved in developing your character. Before you started an ES character, you planned out all his skills. You gave thought to it, and when you selected his skills and created the char, you committed yourself to that line of skills. And you had to actually walk to places. You had to actually journey to those places. But now, it's just a 5 minute run up the mountain to slay the dragon.

We live in a new age my friends. The age of LAZINESS!

The devs catered to them. They loved it. They became used to it. They expect it. To those misguided bro gamers I speak of; ideas such as the risk of losing is alien to them.

They are sitting down at their tables, talking about all the glorious heads the broke today over the internet, how they never died and so on. Then they look over across the aisle, and see our table. The see us talking about how we made this decision to comfort a friend NPC, and this other NPC died for it, and why we feel guilty about it. We talk about how we got millions of souls, ran with them to the vendor, and then was stomped on by a dragon, and lost all those souls. We talk about spending months at a time developing a character - not just his skills, but developing him, his personality, who he is for the next RP event outside the orc city online. We talk about how we got the boss down to less than 1% on heroic, then the tanks became overcome, and we all wiped.

And they are amazed.

To them, the idea of actually losing in a video game, or having to do something difficult, is unfathomable. Just in the same way trying to aim a gun with a console controller is unfathomable to us. And they are disgusted. Not because there is anything actually wrong with losing, because there isn't. They are disgusted because they heard us enjoying losing. They hear that tone in our voice...the sorrow of making that fateful decision which caused that NPC to be killed. But they enjoyed the game thoroughly anyways, and the loved the game because of it. They see us enjoying losing millions of hard earned souls because of it.

And they look back towards their games, and see how empty their enjoyment with the games truly is. There was no threat. There was no risk of loss. There was no challenge.

So they try to come over to our games, and try to fit in. But sometimes...they can't. They keep dying and losing all their souls to the dragon, and they scream NERF! They play half way through the RPG, and they don't like the skills they committed to, and they say "I'd like you to please removed the entire planning process of our skills and just make the next game in series so that we can switch skills any time we like." Then the game gets dumbed down to a challengeless existence, they see another risky game, and they go to that, and so on.

But we can stop it.

We just have to affirm the devs that saying "No" isn't a crime. Because saying "No" isn't a crime. We need to guide them back, tell them that we are their customers. We are the people they spend 60 hour work weeks trying to please, trying to deliver a product that will make us happy.

And we can try to convert the casuals too. We can tell them of all the wonderful feelings that come with the risk of losing. Sure, some people honestly don't want to play our games. Some of us don't want to play theirs either. But to the gamers who do want to try out our games, we must tell them the truth: that the game is going to work like this, and if you don't like it, don't play it. Because the game is going to remain that way. But if they can see the game for what it is, they can like it. And they can appreciate it like us.

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So - I'm not going to do a TL;DR, because I don't respect people who didn't read everything that I had to say. Yes, I sound like an idiot, and I know that most of you right now didn't even read my OP because you were too busy retorting my opening statements. But to those who did read, I thank you. And I'd like to hear your thoughts as well. Come one! I don't bite. We might disagree, but I will listen.

And now, I will l receive everyone else's blatantly nasty and snide remarks about my rant. May the flaming begin!

[Solidsteel]

Holy shit.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

...Indeed...

[Duronos]

I'll read this entire book later, I'm starting to love these threads.

[Erolian]

Seems like you're upset that developers are targeting audiences that don't include you when they used to. What you described as greatness and fun in video games is a niche market and no matter how much you and me like that style of gaming it doesn't apply to most. Can you really get mad at developers for following the money? I guess you can but that doesn't make it change. We can't really tell them "But to the gamers who do want to try out our games, we must tell them the truth: that the game is going to work like this, and if you don't like it, don't play it. Because the game is going to remain that way." because that isn't our decision. It resets solely with the developer and they want maximum profit in this day and age otherwise they don't have a job and cannot support the many people studios now employ to create the game.

[Tech614]

And... at the same time you want to get rid of exclusives when exclusives are the vast majority of games that get away from this formula anymore.

BRILLIANT!

[Lyese]

Supergiant Games has put out 2 extremely amazing titles in spite of the "genre conventions" you're talking about. Transistor has easily surpassed almost every game I've played in the past couple of years, and I've done a lot of gaming. In fact, I give it an 11/10. Other developers are taking this path as well, albeit with smaller, less risky titles and IPs. Far Cry Blood Dragon is a great example of a game that was crafted out of passion and a genuine sense of fun. Borderlands 2, although many could say it's pretty much a retread, is a game that had a lot of its creative energy channeled into making a dystopian world where guns shot guns that shot other guns. X-Com Enemy Unknown is a tribute to the super old 90's games WHILE still managing to evolve with the current times. You forget the "gaming bubbles" that existed long ago (the Survival Horror explosion after the success of Resident Evil, the RPG over-saturation with the success off FF7, the music gaming bonanza that stemmed from Guitar Hero, the current FPS cornucopia thanks to Halo/Modern Warfare, now MOBA/ARTS boom that was fathered by the DOTA WC3 mod.), and honestly, it's just another shift in the evolution of the gaming industry. Except, this time, you were one of the people left behind.

EDIT: Others that were left behind: Flight Sim/Dogfighting style gamers, city/worldbuilding gamers (that aren't into 3X), true adventure gamers (King's Quest, Grim Fandango), arguably traditional JRPG gamers, classic survival horror gamers (Fatal Frame, Dead Space, Silent Hill), classic FPS gamers (Duke Nukem 3D, Wolfenstein although the new one is decent, Half-Life). The list goes on.

[vth99]

Seems like you're upset that developers are targeting audiences that don't include you when they used to. What you described as greatness and fun in video games is a niche market and no matter how much you and me like that style of gaming it doesn't apply to most. Can you really get mad at developers for following the money? I guess you can but that doesn't make it change. We can't really tell them "But to the gamers who do want to try out our games, we must tell them the truth: that the game is going to work like this, and if you don't like it, don't play it. Because the game is going to remain that way." because that isn't our decision. It resets solely with the developer and they want maximum profit in this day and age otherwise they don't have a job and cannot support the many people studios now employ to create the game.

I could not have said it better myself.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Want to know how I got indocrtinated? Here are some links to a few righteous testments,

http://www.theastronauts.com/#our-blog
http://angrydm.com/
http://kingdomcomerpg.com/?cat=4
http://notgames.tumblr.com/

[ophion1990]

Holy shit.

Yup..

Do you actually have some proof to back up all of these claims? I'm sorry but saying devs no longer try to be innovative, that "bro gamers" (is using the word casual too mainstream for you?) are the reason are the reason story driven games are gone,... I'm not gonna deny that developers cater to the more laid back/ casual gamer. Like you said yourself, they make up the largest amount of the gamer population right now. But it's not like hardcore games no longer exist. Clearing heroic raids in WoW requires dedication (I'm sure someone will deny this ofcourse), SC2 is without a doubt not a casual game, PoE is a hardcore game,... And these are just a couple of titles a "bro gamer" like me can come up with.

I don't even know what you're ranting about. Maybe try to cool your head before making a hateful biased post next time? :/ The other day I was playing foosball with a couple of friends and some dude asked if he could play. I played with him against 2 of my friends and he sucked ass. I didn't whine, we just had fun. Should I call him a casual foosballer and tell him to GTFO? :| You say that "bro gamers" are the ones (can't remember you exact words and cba to look through that wall for it) disrupting communication between players, but aren't you just as bad? You don't appear to be very tolerant of someone who doesn't share the same ideas as you.

As for the RP stuff, you really can't blame people for not being into that stuff. Like I said, not coming across as a very tolerant person here.

[ohshift]

Tried reading, stopped in the second paragraph.
So all I can say is: go choke on a bag full of dicks OP

Infracted.

[Djuntas]

And this is why I still play games that come out many years ago. What over forms off entertainment now days is like that? (movies??).

I agree that the bro gamer fueled the money pit off dev's way to much. One good example, witch you also mentioned from what I skipped trough is there way to interact with a game: When I start a game I've studied it, I know why I buy it, and how I'll play it. I take my time learn about it once I got it, and try optimize as I go along. I don't cry when a game is hard (I still see Diablo 3 on release as not broken for one example, it was great minus all the bugs and exploits people used ofcourse), I don't wondor why something is not working - I look it up...And so forth.

Anywho, bro gamers useally don't play the games I play, so its all good with me...They play there FIFA and FPS games, witch I will never play.

...The only bad part about bro gamers that can NOT be denied is that dev's focus on consoles last many years have taken over PC market, so we get all these shitty console ports...I will NOT play a shitty console port for christ sake...You AIN'T getting my money. So even if I found Dark souls interesting...Im not gonna buy it...I don't play a console port.

[Holyshnikies]

After reading that, I agree to an extent. I however, was 19 when I started playing WoW back in January 2007. I played all the way up until about Januaryish 2014. A few small breaks in between. 7 long years. As I got older, I had more priorities in my life. So that was another main reason why I quit.

But I think regardless of that, WoW got very... how do I say, casually dumbed down. The community also went to shit. I will agree that a lot of that CoD attitude migrated it's way over to WoW. More kids/and casuals started to play WoW. A lot of them just mean, childish, ignorant, bad people. Just awful human beings. Ruined the game for me. I think if the community was much nicer and wasn't half full of trolls, and the game was challenging, like back from 07-11, I think I'd make time to PvP or join a raiding guild just to log on and raid with good, nicer people.

[Tech614]

After reading that, I agree to an extent. I however, was 19 when I started playing WoW back in January 2007. I played all the way up until about Januaryish 2014. A few small breaks in between. 7 long years. As I got older, I had more priorities in my life. So that was another main reason why I quit.

But I think regardless of that, WoW got very... how do I say, casually dumbed down. The community also went to shit. I will agree that a lot of that CoD attitude migrated it's way over to WoW. More kids/and casuals started to play WoW. A lot of them just mean, childish, ignorant, bad people. Just awful human beings. Ruined the game for me. I think if the community was much nicer and wasn't half full of trolls, and the game was challenging, like back from 07-11, I think I'd make time to PvP or join a raiding guild just to log on and raid with good, nicer people.

It's not the CoD community, it's the internet.

I would say the WoW community really tanked during it's biggest growth period which was Lich King.

When anything becomes super popular the community goes to shit, because you get all the internet trolls who can hide behind a different persona on the internet to feel better about their lives.

Say what you want about EverQuest games, but by never being super popular and being a niche game they have maintained a generally nice and great community across all their games.

Big time games attract big time trolls and the lowest common denominator of human life.

Just look at Dark Souls, I'm pretty sure your typical dude bro gamers don't even know what the series is but it is a popular game none the less. The communities for Dark Souls 1 and Dark Souls 2 are complete shit compared to the Demon Souls community which was much smaller and niche.

[Zulantu]

Laziness shaming laziness.

Edit: In your other rant, following the link you provided, you show just as much entitlement as the "bro gamers" you reproach.

It's as if your little brother stole your favorite toy.

[Tyris Flare]

This type of psychological tribalism/purity/hipsterism whatever you want to call it is prevalent in basically every social group, but it is really visible in fandom. Once a niche group reaches a critical mass of popularity, one faction inevitably starts to call themselves "hardcore" to try and separate themselves from the rest. Just imagine:

1) Readers, the difference between people who only read best-sellers versus those who are "real readers" and have libraries full of books (or the "the book is always better" crowd, because putting it on screen necessitates appealing to a broader audience)
2) Movies, the difference between people who only watch blockbusters versus indie films and documentaries
3) Music, listening to pop radio versus some band playing out of a garage that no one has heard of.

The list goes on and on. Eventually the once niche group feels alienated because [product] is no longer targeted towards them specifically.

Anyway, blaming customers for not taking a hobby seriously enough is pretty silly, and blaming businesses for wanting to get money from them is probably even sillier. What you should really focus on is the promotion of crowd-funded games so that they can afford to target a niche section of the market. I think you've done that a lot with Star Citizen, so that's perfect!

[Ghul]

80% of gamers cant afford more than one or two games a year? 8>

[draganid]

does this remind anyone else of the part in eliot rogers manifesto where he said he quit wow because too many normal people started playing it lol

[Immitis]

first bro gamers didnt play video games
then bro gamers played sports games. we all remember this, every time a sports game came out thats all they did, then that died out alot.
then bro gamers moved onto guitar hero and thats all they played, then that like completely died out
then bro gamers moved onto call of duty and call of duty is kind of dying out right now but they all kind of still stick in the fps range right now with their battlefieds and there whatevers.

i dont know whats next but i dont want no damn bro gamers in my jrpgs

[Ghul]

does this remind anyone else of the part in eliot rogers manifesto where he said he quit wow because too many normal people started playing it lol

now that you mention it, totally!
i'm never gonna touch any dark souls titles ever and i will never regret doing so. have fun playing your niche-games but dont force that stuff on the majority.

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first bro gamers didnt play video games
then bro gamers played sports games. we all remember this, every time a sports game came out thats all they did, then that died out alot.
then bro gamers moved onto guitar hero and thats all they played, then that like completely died out
then bro gamers moved onto call of duty and call of duty is kind of dying out right now but they all kind of still stick in the fps range right now with their battlefieds and there whatevers.

i dont know whats next but i dont want no damn bro gamers in my jrpgs

lol, dota 2, battlefield, the newest hyped mmo (wildstar currently) and dont forget watchdogs^^