A Few Bad Apples....

So, I caught the news that Chronicles of Spellborn will be going free to play and changing to a microtransaction system due to the fact that the company has gone bankrupt. But, this isn't about Chronicles going free to play so much as it is a reaction to the current players' response to the news. What I saw was a pretty significant number of people saying, "I'm not going to play then. The free-to-play crowd sucks."

Part of me was a little taken aback because, well, I'm primarily a free to play player and I feel like I'm a darned good player. I'm polite and helpful. However, I also saw a glimmer of my own hypocrisy in that thought. After all, I, too have been guilty of groaning over the free to play crowd and the seeming immaturity of that group.

But, that's not the case. What you have to keep in mind is that in any game and on any gaming forum, the people you see actively chatting are only a small fraction of the people who are actually playing the game. Yes. They can often be the loudest, most obnoxious, most immature part of the community....but they are often the minority. So sure, there may be twenty people in world chat who are being complete butt ferrets. However, those twenty people do not represent the thousands of others who are playing, reading the same chat as you and, most likely, sighing as they put the offenders on /ignore and continuing about their day. In fact, if those people are like me, I tend to completely turn off world/general chat altogether. If that's not possible, I switch to /party even if I'm not in a party just because it's quiet. There are TONS of people playing that you never hear a peep from.

So, you really shouldn't let an immature minority of people color what you think about a group as huge as the free to play community. Really, we're not all rabid pant weasels. I promise.