This really should have been posted on a general forum of some kind, but you guys are the ones I wanted to talk to about it so here goes...

What is it with gamers and their constant whining, I mean I know that we are geeks and nerds, we over focus. Thats what makes us what we are, the ability to obsess over something to an almost pathological level. However it also breeds a lack of manners and elitism that is not only disturbing, its counter productive for our hobby and these forums, not just the Warhammer related ones, but all of the FFG forums seems to be populated by people who are over entitled, now what do I mean by that?

Well it seems that most of the posters here are of the opinion that their little narrow scope of things is more important than everyone else’s narrow little sphere of interest. A very on the ball remark was by a poster on the board game forums that said that FFG was a board game company and should stay away from what he deemed crap, which seemed to be everything that had a warhammer lable on and/or wasn’t a board game.

Same view goes for a lot of the RPG people, we want to see more books for our products, of course, we love the game. But it’s the attitude we present, even sometimes to potential new players, a good example of this is a female friend of mine (hai Kat) who is pretty much an every kind of game gamer, she plays RPG’s, MMO’s, Card Games, Munckin, Mini Games ect. But back in the day when she asked some male friends of hers if she could join their game she was told no because “Girls just play better endowed versions of themselves”.

So my question is, are gamers rude?

From what I see yes, we are not above calling anything that we are not interested in “shitastic” or belittle other gamers making distinctions between Role and Roll playing gamers, saying that one game is better than another just because of the company publishing it.

Rude, invasive, ungrateful, obsessive, egocentric and self centered. We sit here whining about a book that is not even in the stores yet, make long, sometimes aggressive posts about it, email the company (taking up resources that could be spent making games) to get shipping dates and so on. We are in other words the worst of the to begin with overprivileged western culture. Funny thing is that we are also as an almost general rule well educated, well read, well spoken and intelligent people. so how do we change this attitude, how do we make our hobby more inviting to outsiders, how do we move it out of “mom and dads basement”, discuss?

Ah! A very interesting post I have to say, Uncle. I do like a good mass debate once in a while (fnar fnar) and I feel we may get one with this...

I see your point in some ways, but I've always been of the mind to never sectionalise a group of people for what ever half-assed reason others do. I see individuals as individuals and always have. So saying "We as roleplayers are arrogant and childish" for example doesn't sit right with me.

I agree that some roleplayers are arrogant and selfish, but I don't think it's roleplay that makes them that way. They were probably like that long before RP came along. It's like saying that, for example, because some people who are ignorant just happen to hold a driving license, all car drivers are ignorant. This is obviously not true (though many of them are ).

I agree that the behaviour of a select few on these forums has been totally uncalled for at times. I am guilty of it too. When I've been angry, my posts have been sarcastic and confrontational (mental note to self: try not to write a post when angry...), but I don't feel that "as a role-player" I'm sarcastic and confrontational. I simply believe that when I'm angry I'm sarcastic and confrontational, but just happen to be a roleplayer too

I have to say I'm quite looking forward to the arrogant, selfish forum go-ers posting their responses on this thread just to see the crap they come out with to "defend" themselves. Should be good for a laugh for a couple of minutes at least.

To summarise, I don't think RPers or RP forumites are selfish and up their own arses, I simply think that Mr X and Mrs Y are, though I agree that their behaviour could repel others from the boards or even the games.

UncleArkie said:

Nope. Not necessarily. It's just that dicks can be found within any subculture or group, including the gaming world. Dicks can't be escaped from. Nor can you really change them into better people. Just ignore them and think happy thoughts.

As for making the hobby more inviting, I think you have to just face reality over this issue. The "gaming community" isn't really a community at all. It's just a bunch of people with roughly the same interests, but that's all. So you can't really do anything in making this non-community work towards a common goal, because there isn't really a common goal shared among all gamers.

If you want to be associated with being an inviting and friendly person about your hobbies, then by all means, be friendly and inviting towards people. But you can't expect every gamer to do the same just because you want to. We're not a community after all, just a bunch of people with roguhly the same interests. And like I said, within every group of people, there will be the odd **** or two...

Nah, I think what the OP describes happens in pretty much any spectrum, sports fans are no different for example. People tend to be more vocal when complaining than when they're happy, that's just human nature.

I think what you're actually saying is people shouldn't be complaining about the ever backtreading release date of RT, and I don't think that reasonable. FFG have not handled the release of this game well imo. They've seemed inefficient in their business practises to me. That's not saying they make bad product, just that they aren't very good at releasing said product, or at least haven't been in this case. They also haven't handled public relations with their customers particularly well, it wouldn't have hurt and might have soothed some annoyed people to explain why we still have not been able to buy a book that they have already been selling at GenCon earlier this year.

I'm also into Battletech, now when they release a new book they always release it on PDF first, about a month before the hardcopy. To me that's good business sense in this day and age. Now you might not want to pay for the PDF and then the hardcopy again a month later, but at least you have the choice whether to or not, depending on how keen you are to read said book. The RT book has been finished for ages, they sold 500 copies back at GenCon (iirc) weeks ago, they should have at the least have got a PDF up and for sale imo. Not to do so only risks pirate copies getting scanned and onto the download sites before the bulk of us have even had a change to buy the hardcopy. That risks people who were going to buy it, not doing so after checking it out on illegal download and then for whatever reason not bothering.

Hey ho, moaning I know. But this is an instance where perhaps some moans now might avoid long delays for finished books to reach us in future.

UncleArkie said:

As stated above, you're making a blanket statement based off your observations of a few.

First, its not just gamers, it's anyone on practically any forum, though more so on any forum dealing with a topic, product, or way of life that the forum users care a bit about. However, you shouldn't base your judgments of the group on the whole off of the conduct of the forum users. In most cases, this forum being one of them, the forum users are the very vocal minority, not the majority.

Now, in order to post a message, it takes a small modicum of effort (very small, but it still requires some). As such, the majority of the above mentioned vocal minority are only vocal if they have something to say and, in most cases, if things are going the way they should in the forum users opinion, they will have noting to say. It's usually when things, to their view, go wrong (or if another poster is wrong in their view) that they have something to say and proceed to quickly say it. Heck, the only reason I'm posting to this thread is because I percieved something you had said as being incorrect which prompted me to post. If I had completely agreed with your statements, i would have just nodded my head, made a positive sound in my throat, and clicked on the next thread to read.

While science has not yet proven anything, I'm of the firm belief that radiation from your computer monitor short circuits your frontal lobe shutting down your internal filter, the part of your brain that says good idea/bad idea, good way to say something/bad way to say something. Or it might just be the anonymity most forums provide to the poster, but computer radiation just sounds cooler, so I'll go with tat one. Either way, posting on internet forums seems to weaken our good idea/bad idea filters. So, in the end, with most forums we get a small sub-group of a larger who care enough about the subject to which the forum is dedicated to be a part of said forum who usually only have something to say if things are going wrong in their eyes and who very well might be a little more careless due to a certain degree of anonymity.

In other words, it's not most gamers that are rude but most forum goers ;-)

An online environment releases people from some responibility for their behavior and makes it possible for otherwise meek and cowardly individuals to be just as agressive and self-promoting as they want. More often than not, gamers are not individuals with the most sophisticated social-skills to begin with, and are often people who have therefore gone through life unable to get in the last word or defend their own interests confidently from more agressive parties. The internet provides a surrogate social environment where the fear of getting shouted down, beaten up or humiliated no longer exists, and folks feel the heady rush of free expression, sometimes for the first time. The reaction to this freedom can be all the more unsettling after a life of getting bullied and laying up at night pondering things one should have said but didn't.

This is similar to the phenomena of road-rage. Ordinarily cowardly individuals suddenly begin honking their horns and shouting violently at eachother over matters of no consequence because they feel safe and separated inside of a locked car. This is the sort of invulnerability that people long for and envision in superheroes and other surrogate power-fantasy characters (often a favorite fantasy of the very same gamers we're talking about).

Whether Gamers or non-gamers, we are all Primates -selfish, stupid, agressive, demanding, poo-flinging monkey-things, and it is only societal norms that keep everyone in check. Once you remove those norms, all people revert to their natural behavior patterns, and the internet is the ultimate no-consequences environment.

Gamers are no different, and -if anything- are much more civilized than most posters on most forums on the internet. Just go ahead and read a forum for YouTube some time if you don't believe me. I'm not even sure I'm a member of the same species as the sort of people who post on there.

Nullius said:

Well that is a truth if there ever was one, as I said this is more of a discussion for the heck of it, but I'm not really generalizing, but neither is it a majority that behaves like this, but like most vocal sub groupings within a community they very easily come to define said community because they are vocal and others are quiet. How do we counter that?

UncleArkie said:

Why should we counter it?

I mean, if we have agreed to that dicks are everywhere (my simplified use of words for what Nullius said), why are we more obligated to making sure that the gaming "community" have a less percentage of loudmouthed dicks than any other spectrum?

I mean, if some people were to feel alienated from gaming just because of this, then these people will feel alienated no matter where they turn to. You know what I mean?

You guys havent seen bitchiness until you see a computer gaming forum...

Artaxerxes said:

Exactly my point. In fact, a couple of spastics aside, most of the guys in here are real gentlemen with the express intention of sharing ideas and talking about our beloved hobby. I love these forums. Sometimes we disagree with eachother about the finer points of our various arcane obsessions, and sometime debate grows heated, but that is the extent of it. I've scarcely ever seen a true insult written on these forums.

If you want to see stupid, just check out the white wolf forums.

Varnias Tybalt said:

Why do you keep bringing up people with the name Richard? What have people named Richard to do with this? I think making a blanket statement about people who were born with a certain name is not only ill informed but makes you seem like a...

Luther said:

Because every person with said name is a douchebag... This I base on absolutely nothing.

It comes down to a simple fact: People make a bigger deal about something they dislike than something they like. People make more noise when complaining than when praising.

Take any given action by a company - a release date, a new supplement, a new rule, choice of artwork. Let's take artwork as an example. You open up a new book, you see the art and you think "wow, this stuff is great!"

What happens next? Do you call up your friends and tell them how cool the art is? No. Do you go online to say how blown away you were by the picture on page 223? No. You go on to reading the supplement. You enjoy it, sure, but so what?

Now imagine someone else opens it up and thinks the art sucks. What does he do? He complains. He says in passing to his friends "man, the artwork on that last book was awful. They should totally fire the art director for that one." He goes online and starts a thread about how crap it all is. If he sees another thread complaining about it he joins in. A few people will chip in to disagree, but they are only a tiny minority of the people who felt positively about the issue in question - the rest just aren't worked up enough about it to post.

If you are ever reading a thread in which people are expressing negative and positive views, count up the number of posters who are postive, then multiply by 10, then compare that to the number of negative posters to get a rough idea of what the actual ratio of negative to positive is.

I think the OP is overgeneralizing or is very naive on the internet as medium of communication. Take anyone group of people and put them in a situation where they can "strike out" at something they disapprove at. Almost all of them would do it or at least consider it. That is why we don't all kill each other, because we all frankly aren't interested in the actual fight rather than the fighting. Add to this the fact that the most vocal people make themselves heard most in the minds of others and this is a very explainable phenomena.

I'd go even so far to say that this OP has caused more damage by discussing his generalities and stereotypes. Merely discussing them causes their continuation. You could use the "decline" in racism as an example. People may not think much of it, but the general feeling in culture today is that racist are to avoided. This avoidance causes people to help shunt these thoughts from their minds and go about their daily activities. For proof you can see how people react to "racist". Unfortunately their hate is usually meet with hate, purely as a defense mechanism.

But then again just to throw a monkey in the wrench so to speak, over generalization is what we do. As PRP gamers we use archetypes all the time to ease story telling, even when we say that we create characters and NPC's that are in the grey we'r doing this, it eases recognition and allows people to respond to it, everyone does it almost all the time. We know its bad and we do it anyway, like icecream.