Familiarity Breeds Contempt

A week or so ago, I got called arrogant and elitist for jokingly suggesting that people stop posting divisive threads on a forum. I chuckled. I've yet to venture officially onto the DCUO forums, deciding instead to lurk and read the madness as it develops. And develop it has. I wonder sometimes whether its my age, but I have never understood some of the practices that come about on these things. The levels of egocentrism and delusion that must exist in the minds of some of the posters is amazing.

I simply cannot fathom what would bring someone to waste their time posting with such passion and vitriol on subjects which anyone with two pence of common sense would know they are wasting their time contributing. Does WiggyBoggy276 really think that Sony Online Entertainment is going to completely redesign their game because he has a gripe with the way that the interface works? Do they really believe that anyone cares if they, singularly, threaten to 'leave' the game? Do they think that the best way to represent their customer service issues is on a forum where they type in l33t-speak and represent themselves as an image of the Mad Hatter?

Of course, these people have valid concerns... or do they? I mean the game is what it is, after all and whether you like it or not is the gamble the developers have taken. If you don't like it, you don't like it - thats always the case with any product. DCUO is a very different game from WoW. It has dispensed with some of the familiar tropes of MMOs and brought in some stuff from the console genre. In a world where games are readily disregarded as 'WoW Clones', this game is a very different consideration and some people could find that hard to handle.

Of course, there are also problems when it comes to expectation. A lot of people come to a game with very closed minds. Clamped down minds with deep set parameters that run from the way buttons should be pressed, the way the canon is represented and to some, the way that the game expands upon their favourite comparative game. So if the character generation isn't as intricate as CoX, the game is 'fail', if the powers cannot mimic every single power as represented in the comics, 'fail. If the game doesn't have exactly the right buttons in the right places ... fail.

I'm unsure what these ragers against the machine think they will achieve and I wonder whether they operate the same rules when it comes to other products? Do they contact the publisher of a book and demand that an aspect of character development is altered because they don't like it? Do they barrage their local supermarket with demands that the recipe on their pizza be changed, lest they cease buying pizza? Do they raise petitions for changes in the design of a new car, as they find the knobs in an inconvenient position?

And all this after less than a week. To quote a friend - People are weird!