I'm sorry to hear that WoW has started to annoy you.
What you could do:
- If it's your guild, make a rank called "No swearing" and untick the box for "allowed to speak in guild chat". If someone swears, demote them to that rank. Promote them to their old rank after an hour, or a day. If they keep swearing after having experienced that a few times, kick them. Be sure to state this beforehand.
- Raids are about taking down a boss. Bosses have mechanics, like a wave of water going back and forth. If you stand in that, you die. If too many people die, you can't kill the boss in time. If you choose to raid, you basically accept that you have to use tactics, otherwise you can't really get anywhere. So if you don't like being told when to move or cast, you shouldn't be raiding.
- Tell people to get lost if they bug you.
- Report abusive people to a game master and/or switch on the filter to block most of the swearing.
- Join a social guild to avoid all (or most) of the elitist junk. They tend to raid a few times a week, and they tend to avoid all that elitist junk. This means you can avoid the raiding with random people.
- If you plan on raiding with random people, either set up the raid yourself, or accept there being requirements. Nobody feels like boosting random (poorly geared) people, and only the elitist stuff like itemlevel averages and dps parses provide factual information about someone's potential. Few people speak the truth by saying "no" when asked "can you do x amount of dps?" As a result, people are pretty much forced to use elitist stuff if they want the raid to go anywhere.
- Join battlegrounds, nobody can make you play a certain way there. Some try, but nobody can force you. If the abuse gets too much -> ticket their name, realm and time of occurance to a game master. Of course, not trying to be the best you can be gets you killed fast and often. (this means using or at least looking at that elitist stuff to see if you can become better / PVP also has a -lot- of "move there now", "cast this spell now", and so on.)
- Join dungeons using the random dungeon finder (list as dps). This also has tactics like with raids, but to a smaller degree.
- There is a fine line between people wanting to help other people, and people ordering orders what to do. You could tell the first "Thanks, I might do something with that." or "Thanks for the input, but I'll stick to this setup". You could tell the latter "Go bug someone else." or something along those lines.
Alternatively, look for another game.
Guild Wars 1 is pretty decent.
Costs like 20 dollar/euro for the game + all expansions. No monthly fees.
You can get to level 20 in a week, and there is no higher level.
All max level weapons/armour are equal in terms of stats, there just are several possible models.
Which means that there can't be much elitist stuff as everyone has equal potential. You don't even have to play with other people, as you can take a full group of NPC's to fight alongside you.
Guild Wars 2 is in development. This won't have any NPC parties from the look of it. Groups will be just people being in the same area fighting towards a goal. Everyone gets points for that if they accomplish the task, and they can buy their own stuff off some vendor -> no fighting over stats with others.
I happen to play GW1 every so often. It's fairly nice. I'm in an alliance (group of guilds) that tolerates absolutely no swearing whatsoever.
13 Apr 2011, 1:19 pm
