Why does wow's community come off as so entitled?

[Narzok]

just look at how different the time and energy spend on the game is for different people.
some think playing the game for 4+ hours every day is normal, others think more than 6 hours a week is too much.

just take m+ as an example: when the dungeon is new, people learn the strats, routes and tricks in the first weeks. at a certain point, these people are good at the established ways to play a dungeon.
then comes a player that rejoined late in the season. that player makes his own groups, slowly climbing up, and at one point tries his first +10.
and gets immedeatly slammed for not knowing how to play the dungeon that is suddenly played entirely different due to season affix.

is the new guy entitled because he made a group/joined a group for a +10 without much experience, or is the group toxic for complaining about his lack of knowledge?

[Skildar]

It depends on where you look. FFXIV's fandom on reddit and twitter is 100% cultist, but if you look at the official forums or the 4chan general or the FFXIV subforum on this site, you find that most people are in agreement about the flaws and would should be improved. Whereas it seems to be the opposite with WoW: there is a lot of criticism of WoW on reddit, while on the official forums and on MMO-C, you see a lot of bootlicking, and what criticism is offered is often met with condescension.

it's been a while since I've seen anything close to boot licking on wow. But I seldom see people putting context and call for reasonable change when most of the criticism is unreasonable or out of touch with the real issues.

You talked about people being condescending, but what I've found is that this happens with the opposite crowd that you've described. Just like OP described, entitlement and being condescendant is the norm. People think that they are owed better and that they would do better themselves.
Think about how many times you've seen people say "here I fixed it", "the lore guys at bli don't know shit", "there is no balancing", "fire ion", "fire danuser", etc. People expect the impossible out of this game, there are no goals that can be reached that will sufficient and the developers will always be wrong.

[MoanaLisa]

Agree with this - you mean exactly like the person claiming raiding should be removed to introduce player housing, right?

Yes, of course. My position on all of this, repeated endlessly because there are those who deliberately misunderstand what I'm saying is pretty simple:

• Major features from the game that have been around since the start should stay. Professions should stay. Dungeons should stay. Raids should stay. M+ should stay. For that matter LFR should stay. They all have audiences of different size and they all attract trolls who say that one or the other should be thrown out. That's not my view in the slightest. It's a big game. There's lots of room for everyone. And yes, I would call out anyone that I see saying raiding should be eliminated. That's just stupid or trolling.
• With that in mind, it would be great for players, casual or otherwise, who prefer not to run M+ or organized raiding to have a way to progress in a meaningful way throughout an expansion and its patches. Progression is fun. It keeps players around. There's a strong business case that in the past Blizzard has designed expansions, especially patches so that there is a certain amount of content that gives power progression and then you either move on to raiding (or more recently M+).
• Because the content is generally less difficult that progression should take longer by an order of degree but could still be steady, just slower. The notion that someone logs in and at the end of an hour or so feeling as if they've done something that progressed their character should be a design goal. Hitting some wall that can only be scaled by M+ or raids is the nature of 'raid or die' which historically Blizzard has been all too happy to do and then just accept that millions of people will quit for a few months. It's bad business; it's bad design and demonstrates all too well that the game is in a design rut. SL has been slightly better about that and there are signs that maybe they are at last waking up to the opportunity to keep people around longer.

It's not complicated as I see it and I don't think it's asking for too much. Most suggestions I've seen about removing X or Y to do housing or "I should have mythic level gear for doing nothing" are few and far between and of those, most of them are trolling. They are totally swamped by the number of posters and posts that falsely claim this is what they want. I think most people want to play the content they prefer and get some reward for doing so other than their 300th pet and 250th mount. Power is where it's at. Progression should never hit a wall. If over time people put in the many hours required to achieve an ilevel that is up there with everyone else I fail to see how that harms anyone given that it would take weeks or months to do so.

[KayRule]

It is always strange to me, WoW's userbase does have a massive entitlement issue, and it makes no sense. Blizzard has been consistent in ignoring, paying bare minimum lip service and gaslighting it's userbase since Burning Crusade, so it's not even like they've indulged the userbase enough to make them behave this way. It really is a mystery.

[Cyanu]

they've been playing since beta

do you know what it means sucking at a game 15 years straight? it gives you special rights

[Osmeric]

It is always strange to me, WoW's userbase does have a massive entitlement issue, and it makes no sense.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with entitlement, in the sense of a player requiring that the game conform to their demands or else they walk. Indeed, it would be absurd to think otherwise -- players have some sort of moral obligation to not look after their own interests??

Entitlement in the sense of "do it my way or I sue" is of course silly, but almost no one is saying that.

What's deplorable is fake entitlement: "do it this way or I'll walk" and then not following through. The problem with that isn't entitlement, it's dishonesty.

[Chadow]

Reason = We are spoiled with constant updates and changes to the game

Is the only explanation
We are so spoiled...we become toxic...like little babies.

MMO-C in particular has become really toxic along the years
I remember 10 years ago here, the positive wow fans were overwhelming the hater side of things.
Nowadays...is the opposite

[Khasim92]

The old-school boomer gamers who played the game for fun have mostly died out and have been replaced by tryhard minmaxers whose only goal in the game is to replace their +10 strength item with a +11 strength item every time they play. This attracts toxic and elitist douchebags who want to optimize the fun out of the game and get mad when somebody dares to interfere with their plans of doing a perfect dungeon/raid. This is why you have people going batshit when a new player underperforms in a leveling dungeon or why they require you to kill a heroic boss to a pug a normal one. And they know they can keep doing that because you have to do some sort of group content to improve your character no matter what.
The only solution is to allow people to easily progress in power solo until Mythic level, and by that point it would be fair to require people to know what the fuck they are doing, but only the people who like doing the most difficult content in the game would care about this, so you could just ignore the toxic assholes.

[A Chozo]

I look at the opposite and don't understand how people can accept the elitistic game that this has become. And the insane requirements that people ask for.

- People asking for Ahead of the Curve for Normal raids
- People asking for Keystone Mastery (+15s) to join +10s
- People asking for full Heroic gear to do Normal raids

etc etc, it's become a joke.

lmaaaaao op's point got proven in the second post

[Lolites]

I look at the opposite and don't understand how people can accept the elitistic game that this has become. And the insane requirements that people ask for.

- People asking for Ahead of the Curve for Normal raids
- People asking for Keystone Mastery (+15s) to join +10s
- People asking for full Heroic gear to do Normal raids

etc etc, it's become a joke.

this happen VERY rarely, but how is it anything new? back in wrath people asked for achi and gearscore so high you could only get it by being almost fully geared from raid to take you into raid...
idiots were always there, and they still are, same as people who have much lower requirements, so go with them or make your own group, im sure you will invite into it only people who never done the content...

[mrgreenthump]

It's not only WoW. It's most popular games now. Pugging is just the absolutely peak of toxicity as everyone with a brain avoids them having a weekly group that gets minimal changes or are in a guild. Outside of that you are left with those who can't be arsed to find anything organized and those that can't hold on to a spot in anything organized.

And it is getting worse. This raid is probably the hardest they've ever done. And as a player you want your group to do as good as possible. So leaders are finding people that are at their level or better.

There is a reason why I stopped doing any dungeon finder content in BFA.

[Celement]

Yes, of course. My position on all of this, repeated endlessly because there are those who deliberately misunderstand what I'm saying is pretty simple:

• Major features from the game that have been around since the start should stay. Professions should stay. Dungeons should stay. Raids should stay. M+ should stay. For that matter LFR should stay. They all have audiences of different size and they all attract trolls who say that one or the other should be thrown out. That's not my view in the slightest. It's a big game. There's lots of room for everyone. And yes, I would call out anyone that I see saying raiding should be eliminated. That's just stupid or trolling.
• With that in mind, it would be great for players, casual or otherwise, who prefer not to run M+ or organized raiding to have a way to progress in a meaningful way throughout an expansion and its patches. Progression is fun. It keeps players around. There's a strong business case that in the past Blizzard has designed expansions, especially patches so that there is a certain amount of content that gives power progression and then you either move on to raiding (or more recently M+).
• Because the content is generally less difficult that progression should take longer by an order of degree but could still be steady, just slower. The notion that someone logs in and at the end of an hour or so feeling as if they've done something that progressed their character should be a design goal. Hitting some wall that can only be scaled by M+ or raids is the nature of 'raid or die' which historically Blizzard has been all too happy to do and then just accept that millions of people will quit for a few months. It's bad business; it's bad design and demonstrates all too well that the game is in a design rut. SL has been slightly better about that and there are signs that maybe they are at last waking up to the opportunity to keep people around longer.

It's not complicated as I see it and I don't think it's asking for too much. Most suggestions I've seen about removing X or Y to do housing or "I should have mythic level gear for doing nothing" are few and far between and of those, most of them are trolling. They are totally swamped by the number of posters and posts that falsely claim this is what they want. I think most people want to play the content they prefer and get some reward for doing so other than their 300th pet and 250th mount. Power is where it's at. Progression should never hit a wall. If over time people put in the many hours required to achieve an ilevel that is up there with everyone else I fail to see how that harms anyone given that it would take weeks or months to do so.

The issue that comes up is wow caters to many different levels of difficulty for long grindy progression to not inflict a lot of harm to it. Take pugging right now. If you ignore raider io anyone below 270 is a complete coin flip in terms of it they can compete their role or not. If you make that worse by allowing people to mindlessly grind like a korean mmo you utterly destroy any new player ( new in terms of returning to the patch) or players making alts.

If you reduced wow to 2 progression modes. Progression and fluff it might work but without that you gut the entire mid game currently from mythic +5 onwards and normal and heroic raids.

[potis]

If you reduced wow to 2 progression modes. Progression and fluff it might work but without that you gut the entire mid game currently from mythic +5 onwards and normal and heroic raids.

The game is already like this, thats why addons were created in different periods to counter this problem, this isnt anything new.

Depending on the period of the game, usually the first 3 months of every expansion release and averagely the first month or two after every major patch, and if you are good/knowledgeable enough you can see how the game is truly unplayable at some points, which is when addons bloom and are created, whether its Gear Score, Open Raid back in MoP, or raider.io nowadays.

Gear Score was created cause Pugging first few bosses in ICC became a thing, but then you had a major amount of people that couldnt even turn their camera wanting to, thats why Gear Score was created, to filter them out, Open Raid was the same, you had to have the knowledge and will aka , be good enough to look outside of WoW to have success, cause it was full of terrible players, and finally raider.io and M+, cause you had someone with the ilvl of a Mythic Raider with 0 experience in M+, ruining keys, cause gear is not as relevant if you dont know what you are doing.

I used to call this "Swamp", and its a joke between friends that if you level even 1 day late you are fucked cause you are gonna be stuck in the swamp of bad players and unable to progress, this was obviously semi-true, but not to such extremes we were joking about, but generally it exists and it goes with the period.

In terms of M+ you can even see it on the complains here, everyone is complaining about +9-10s after the first couple of weeks of a patch, then its +12s, then its +14 a few weeks after, cause its when the masses are slowly progressing in game and the toxicity and terribleness follows them.

Difficulty and Progression modes arent the problem, its the fact people believe they are entitled to skip on things because Blizzard allows them to catch up, someone cant understand their 250 ilvl character is just a useless piece of trash when there are 200 more people with 275 applying, because it took him 3 months to get to 250 ilvl, something he should already have been before the patch hit.

But Blizzard cant come out and say that, thats why the community does, thats why filters exist, and so on.

[cparle87]

Blizzard decided to listen to the % of players about RPG choices from inside those 20 million players, and the rest people simply got annoyed, cause no one asked for RPG choices, if covenants was made differently from the start, SL would be better by default.

"Blizzard decided to listen to the % of players about RPG choices"
"cause no one asked for RPG choices"

Well, which is it? You made a statement then immediately contradicted it in the next sentence.

[potis]

"Blizzard decided to listen to the % of players about RPG choices"
"cause no one asked for RPG choices"

Well, which is it? You made a statement then immediately contradicted it in the next sentence.

There is an "else" missing after no one, but thanks for pointing it out, my point still stands.

Blizzard seems to pick a forum post to read and focus on fixing each expansion, that forum post probably represents a % of players in those 20 mil active players in my example, since they do that, of course they are gonna fuck up.

No intelligent human being and decent player would give a fuck about "meaningful RPG choices" in a MMO in 2021, but they went and did that, despite everyone else, and their alpha and beta testers told them its a retarded idea to not be able to change Covenants on the fly, go figure who was right in the end, the idiotic % of players that wanted that, or everyone else?

They went and made 50 forum lurkers happy, and fucked over the rest 19.9mil players that told them "This is retarded, dont do this", comprendo now?

[Rayr]

Here’s what I believe creates entitlement.

Addiction. When someone becomes so heavily addicted to this game, they put their life into it, therefor they believe they are ‘owed’ to be listened to. Now there are some instances where the community 100% deserves to be listened to when there is a feature that is completely plaguing the game and it actually needs fixed. But once players start dying on hills of…. Oh idk…. Like whether or not the race has the class they want… that’s when we enter the zone of entitlement.

Once they break this addiction and they start playing other games, doing other activities, finding other hobbies, then the minor stuff like asking for a descaled human form for dracthyr starts to become way less relevant in your life.

Also, the people who always say “IF THIS DOESNT GO THE WAY I WANT I WILL QUIT”, never end up quitting. They say it over and over and over again because in THEIR world quitting the game is a grand statement, when in reality it means nothing at all. If someone who isn’t addicted to a game dislikes something enough to quit, you know what happens? They just quit and play something else lol.

People feel like they are owed to have the game cater to them because they have catered their life to the game.

[NineSpine]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with entitlement, in the sense of a player requiring that the game conform to their demands or else they walk. Indeed, it would be absurd to think otherwise -- players have some sort of moral obligation to not look after their own interests??

Entitlement in the sense of "do it my way or I sue" is of course silly, but almost no one is saying that.

What's deplorable is fake entitlement: "do it this way or I'll walk" and then not following through. The problem with that isn't entitlement, it's dishonesty.

It is kind of funny to see people complain about entitlement for a… product we all pay for. Yes, I’m entitled to have fun in a game I pay for.

[Celement]

It is kind of funny to see people complain about entitlement for a… product we all pay for. Yes, I’m entitled to have fun in a game I pay for.

I mean by that logic are you entitled to being able to complete a model set you bought if you don't have the skill to do it?

[Ashana Darkmoon]

It is kind of funny to see people complain about entitlement for a… product we all pay for. Yes, I’m entitled to have fun in a game I pay for.

Are you entitled to like every show on Netflix because you pay for it? Or to like every song on an album you buy? Or like every book you read?

I think you are entitled to dislike paid creative content (movies, tv, music, whatever) or leave a bad review or stop paying for it, but not necessarily "enjoy it."

It's not like a water heater that works or it doesn't. This is all subjective opinion on creative content. Doesn't seem the same at all.

[Apatrida]

I mean we are constantly paying for a "game as a service" basically so one could expect some standards, right? I am not talking about "the story is bad" but overall the sum what you want to get out of a box + 12x 13 USD per year. Some people are happy just to be able to play PvP arena, some want everything AAA+++ content patch every month to be able to consume 14 hours of fresh wow everyday.
You can't make everyone happy but again: what you are reading here, on /r/wow and the official forums are usually the complainers. Complainers are never happy. Critics jsut want their important game aspect prioritized but complainers, well are complainers.