I’m a college student and I’m writing this post to make a little bit of research for my Bachelor thesis and I decided where should I look for some information if not on the forum of my beloved game, right?
So…
In my work, I’m trying to construct the identity of an elitist user in social media discourse about gaming, and I decided that the gamers themselves will have the most appropriate knowledge about this matter.
Here are my questions for you:
Who in Your opinion is an elitist?
Do you have any experience with the elitism during your journey in World of Warcraft or in gaming in general?
All of your answers will be amazingly helpful and I will appreciate every one of them. <3
Not personally, this is largely because i don’t do current raids and high mythic keys. I think the general rule of thumb is, the higher the content and the more random the group then the chance of an elitist player is increased.
You generally don’t see them in friend only runs and you’re less likely to hit one in older or less challenging content.
Elitests are generally highly competitive players, who believe anyone below their level should a) Worship the ground they walk on and b) Are bad players. They also seem to think the entire game revolves around only the high end content and that it should be as difficult as possible, so only a select few can be the best and others who don’t have the time or like that sort of content should go play something like the Sims.
Idk, only elitists I’ve met so far are guild leaders and officers who turn guilds into jobs
and I guess a person or two in Mythic plus - but its in game and 1-2 report dont get you banned so I deal with them easly… with words!
and other case would blizzard support/moderation of forums - a lot of elitism there.
IMO an elitist is someone unable to put himself in another person’s shoes. For example he doesn’t tolerate casual players, refuses to take into account that someone might not have enough time to put into the game, or skills, or has a completely different approach to gaming. As Nimrhys put it very precisely, “content should be as difficult as possible, so only a select few can be the best and others who don’t have the time or like that sort of content should go play something like the Sims.”
An elitist can be seen in comments like "You want it, you have to work for it", "You do not deserve it", "filthy casuals", etc.
There is a difference between a very skilled player with normal attitude to people and an elitist. A lot of elitists might even not be highly skilled, they are rather intolerant and rude.
The most ironic is that they behave like this in a game. They place too big importance on the game. This makes me suppose they don’t have success in real life and are trying to compensate here. They don’t realize that a lot of people are not taking them seriously and are mocking them, but they live in their own imaginary world where they believe themselves superior to everyone else who is not like them.
Hi Queralius, I hope this post finds you well and good and your studies are all on track.
I have experienced this kind of behaviour first hand and let me explain how and why, I am one of the more mature players on the servers (Im 63 years old and have played this game since about the second month it came out) but I am also disabled, in the fact that I have Osteoarthritis in both hands and in my knees.
so the two coupled (age and disability) make me a bit of a slow player in the fact that I do get killed because of slow reflexes and pain in my hands, I have overcome this quite a lot by using Lazymacros (one button spamming or whatever people call it these days).
The abuse I have received and the times I have been kicked from groups screaming “get this f***g noob out of here" and "what the fk is this Huntard doing in the group” it can be very hurtful because I used to be a good player back in the day and loved the game, but now I have to play solo or with the help of my guild if I am really stuck on something, I will never be top of anything, and will never see the proper end content, but I am happy to keep plodding along, I will not and will not ever go into a “PUG” group, I would love to have a go at mythic+ I would love to try out heroic and mythic raiding but its not to be.
But the elitists need to be aware we cant all be good at something, we cant all spend the time making a video game second nature as we have real lives and have to pay mortgages, and bills and bring up families, some of us like to be casual players.
I hope this helps and good luck with your paper sir, and good luck to you
I did encounter elitism. Altough it wasn’t here but on the GW2 forum.
The concept isn’t really specific to GW2 though, so I will try to explain it here and use the GW2 system he talked about to make it more clear.
In GW2 you have a achievement system very similar to WoW. With the difference being that for every 500 achievement points you get a reward chest. With a huge reward every 5k points.
These huge rewards consist of store currency and gold, aswell as some unique armor and weapon skin every now and then.
Great “veteran” system, right?
If you are a veteran you played a lot and can get some of those unique items.
Now for the Elitist part:
On the forum I saw a past of someone saying there should be a veteran reward system.
But he used “veteran” in a wrong way.
You see, the requirements you needed in his eyes to be eligible for these new veteran rewards (a currency to buy the most expensive store items) was to have done pretty much everything in the game.
PvP, Raids, Dungeons, WvW (structured FFA pvp of three servers against each other), and many more different aspects of the game.
If you would translate it to WoW you’d have to have:
Mythic raiding achievement, of the most recent raid.
Rated BG highest rank
Arena top rating
Loremaster
All pathfinder achievements
etc
etc
You probably get what I mean.
I don’t know if you say this is elitism. To me it definitely feels like it.
It could be argued that it’s more like a “special no-life snowflake”.
I thought I’d share it. Maybe you could do something with it for you project.
Anyway, Goodluck with it!
I meet up elitists mostly in IE, they want to order other 2 what to do, because they have larger health pool/ilvl. It would be good as organisation to complete IE faster, but agreeing on something and being ordered to are two different things.
When I read your post I almost had tears in my eyes (I also have health issues). There is a community (Alliance) Scared of Dungeons EU EN I haven’t tried it personally but hope it might fit you.
Elitists are just players that have set a personal goal
They refuse to play with players that in their eyes are lesser geared or/and experiened players that makes them stomp at the same place instead of moving forward in their desirable speed
I lost interest to current raid/dungeon content long time ago because people act like complete momos in the instances and haven’t looked back generally i prefer to play by myself rather that torture my self with playing with the “new” generation of gamers.
10+ years ago online gaming might have not been so popular but it was hell of a lot more fun back then.
I’ve encountered it many times over my years playing wow. Vast majority of time it is rooted in people who don’t have the ‘credentials’ to justify it. As in, they act like their gods at the game and may be good at acting good but in actual fact they’re trash and use elitist mannerisms to mask it.
Let’s say you have 410ilvl, i have 350ilvl, why do you think you are better player? because you put more time into game? I’ve seen many lowbies who were perfectly avoiding deadly mechanics, and high end geared players who stood in fire doing ~10k dps.
yeah I agree. people who think they’re good cuz of ilvl are bad at the game imo.
simply because stats > ilvl.
its more like, I have Mythic+15 meta achi and you dont, so im better type of case
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