Sunday, March 25, 2012



A Carebear!  What... in my MMO?  Seriously they are not who you think they are.

Before a post a clip from the chat, let me set the stage for you....You see I do some work for a Gaming Community site as a volunteer.  On this site I go by two names:  Triberius, and Nexus one name for each game I'm associated with, it made it simpler to keep my privileges in each section of the forums separate.

[9:35:40 PM] kelmo Siege: Why do PvP folk seem to feel threatened all of a sudden?
[9:36:04 PM] Nexus: Cause everyone else is starting to catch on they are more Carebear than any other group of MMO players.
[9:36:28 PM] Nexus: They are only happy when things are stacked in their favor.
[9:36:34 PM] STORM: yeh kelmo what nexus said


I really do believe this is actually true, I'm involved in the communities for many different games: Ultima Online, LotRO, SW:TOR, and I dip into EQ a bit as well.  UO and SW:TOR both have very vocal PvP Communities and they are the biggest bunch of whiners I have ever seen.  If it's not one template giving an advantage over others, it's this set of gear giving an edge.  Seriously how do they expect a game to actually get balanced, when they will go out to take every advantage possible, or if they can't cry to get it nerfed into oblivion.  PvE players well they get stuck dealing with the results of PvP oriented balancing changes, they adapt and alter tactics and carry on, with hardly a peep in comparison.

The groups that really should complain are verbally abused by everyone and no one winds up completely happy, let me give you an example of this.

In Ultima Online years ago there was a type of character known as the "Thief", they still exist in small numbers, and unlike many games they didn't get just a back stab bonus and stealth.. They have stealth true, but they can and did have the ability to view another players inventory, select an item then "Steal" it from the other player.  These days though that style of game play is almost, though not quite, non-existent.  Why?, because everyone is now afraid to lost that uber 1337 piece of pixel crack that had droped from a boss.  So in came "Item Insurance" and now the once feared thief is the bane of Bandage and Potions stacks everywhere.  It didn't matter that after a theft a thief is freely attack-able by the person they stole from if they fail a check to be noticed, and all those in the area that notice them stealing, or that a thief typically have no offensive and very little defensive ability.  They are Snatch and Run the majority of the time, but players whined and they were tossed from the top of the Nerf Stick tree hitting every branch on the way down.  The end result divided the community, old school PvP thieves, and those that followed the gratuitous alternative dished up as a peace offering in being able to use the stealing skill to acquire randomly spawning items from certain dungeons and monsters.

Now what does this have to do with PvPer's and Carebears?  Just this, the same is starting to happen to the PvP Community, it is getting divided between the vocal minority that want challenging PvP, where skill outweighs equipment, and the vocal majority, that want to whine and complain when every advantage they can eek out of a template, piece of gear, or combination of buffs, is threatened.  These people are not the real PvPer's they are Carebears Cousins, they are a little bit wilder than the Carebears we all know and love, but they want their savannah to be a safe place for them and only them and to be able to circumvent the concept of Survival of the Fittest. 



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