SoaSE in particular just has a weird history between MP players and modders (probably SP would be better) for some profound reason.
I still fail to see how the two communities produce any symbiotic relationship to each other since they just keep to themselves in the first place. There is no interaction barring a few exceptions as Stilat would have us to believe. Is it as wide as psychoak makes it out to be? Most likely not. But there's was a pretty clear dividing line between the two groups.
Its amusing how when one of the rare times Seleuceia isn't trolling, nobody is listening to him. He has experience in all three subgroups of the community; as in modding, MP, and SP. You would be wise to heed his words.
Well I have nothing to comment on half his entire post is the condition of players of SP and MP on this forum and why SP players have tendency to be hostile to MP players. Same way MP is hostile to SP, there's probably some irrational reasoning behind a few jaded individuals.
This however would detail everything as to why the MP scene is dead in the water.
Games are relatively long -- even on faster speeds, a "quick" team game (ignoring MDs and the like) will last 45-60 minutes...most games usually go for around 90 or so minutes, with some getting to the 2 hour mark...FFAs, multi-team games, or your casual LAN game tend to take much longer, especially if you use slower game speeds...
ICO is relatively unstable -- people crash a lot...the MDs, the runtime errors, the DCs (and occasional CTD) are terrible...it is easy for people who don't experience these things to push the blame on the player -- their computer sucks, their connection is wonky, their drivers are out of date, but all that is really just BS spewed by people who don't know what they are talking about...the stability of this game on ICO is terrible, the "mega-dumps" of 2+ people crashing at the same time are common and affect all games, not just 5s on faster...that there are now multiple accounts of stability issues in singleplayer points even more to the game, not the player...
There is no rejoin feature for this game...
There are autosaves, but they can cause lag spikes and crashes, so many players turn them off (as well as auto-recording)...
Kinda have to add that SoaSE in itself isn't newbie friendly though. The tutorials are extremely basic as Hydraling mentioned and tell you nothing of the strengths or each unit and force each player to drop in and figure out for themselves based on various descriptions and arbitrary numbers. And frankly the majority of people who come to SoaSE don't come for a competitive scene at all. I guess you would call them a group of casuals.
The long setup times combined with the lack of stability and inability to rejoin frustrate players even more...it makes each opportunity to play a nice, well-balanced game even more valuable, and this is why a skilled player is going to be unwilling to tutor some noobs when a 5s game has just been hosted...
The players who are asshats to noobs are generally asshats to everyone, which is pretty much how life is on the internets....of course, even "nice" players will kick noobs out of lobbies, but this is only because of the reasons mentioned above -- the games are long and thus people want to make damn sure they are balanced...in fact, kicking noobs is to be expected when the title of the game includes "skilled only" -- the noob has no reason to complain at that point...
Of course there's the counterargument that this is just an elitist atmosphere that, while not intentionally malicious, is still essentially anti-noob...that, however, is incredibly (or conveniently?) ignorant...noobs host games all the time, and kick players with too many games (even if the game title doesn't include "noobs only")....their reasoning is the same as the skilled -- games are long, and they want to make sure their time is spent playing a well-balanced game...just as a noob can throw an entire skilled game, a pro can throw an entire noob game...in other words, it works both ways -- the noobs can be just as unfriendly as the skilled players...the core issue is not the friendliness of the community, but rather the time it takes to play a game, the difficulty in actually getting to play a full game without crashing, and the inability to rejoin a game if you do crash...
Smurfing was the devil though. I think that alone made us extremely paranoid of any supposed "newbie". You could truly be a "newbie" but every regular would look at you as if you were a monster waiting to be unleashed due to prevalance of smurfing at the time before Rebellion. We couldn't trust anyone with 0 games. I remembered when I first joined, the first question I got "who's smurf are you?" At the time I didn't know what the heck they were talking about and I thought they were just jaded at me for no good reason.
Unfortunately this has garnered an extremely poor reputation for the Competitive Community of SoaSE. Those few "asshats" really produced a negative impression on those who initially tried to a point that when someone asks them about MP in SoaSE. They'll just tell people that it's a load of crap due to its small closed off community that takes an arm and a leg to break into. Looking at the Steam Discussion Forums for SoaSE alone.
People nowadays don't even bothered to try for the MP scene just because they feel it isn't worth it at all. People are actually actively telling people before they even buy the game that the MP scene is a complete and utter joke. This isn't true but that's the impression that the community has created. Most would fail to see the reasoning as to why the community is as anti-newbie as it is. Even if it's well within reason that those "asshats" kicked them, they don't care. All they see was a bunch of "asshats" kicking people consistently considering how often it happens. They don't know the reasoning of why we did what we did but frankly they give zero shits for it.
