by Daniel Owens

Created on: May 28, 2009   Last Updated: May 31, 2009

The World Of Warcraft community over its lifetime has grown into a much more hateful and selfish community. This came mainly in the form of Forum Trolling. Players will now go out of their way to post comments about other players threads in an aggressive manner to get a reaction from them. It's pretty much plant the bait, and watch everyone go crazy posting about how much you "suck" and that you should "transfer servers".

It's online bullying in one of it's many forms but it's not usually just directed at one person, the art of trolling can be so subtle that people will not realise the original posters intent. Huge 30 page arguments can start from a cleverly placed idea or comment. Has society reached such a level of hatred that we now seek to attack others randomly online? Do us as people really need bigger ego's?

Common blatant trolling will consist of things like the following:

Player says: Naxx is too easy!

Troll 1 says: You haven't even cleared all the wings!

Troll 2 says: Cool gear bro...

Players will take a constructive post, and find something about the player that they can attack. For instance, making sarcastic comments on someones gear or achievements when they say something is too easy. The community during World Of Warcraft Pre-BC was a friendly, helpful community who would go to great lengths to help each other out. Everyone did everything together, instance runs were plentiful and Trade chat wasn't used to abuse each other server wide.

Common forms of trolling are making comments about gear, talent points, gems, and achievements. Other players will post big constructive threads, that irritates people to the point where the thread explodes into pages and pages of abuse and bickering between players. Trolls are becoming better and better at what they do, but should we be proud that we are now masters of making enemies?

The community began to die when the game strongly focused on marketing to pre-teens and younger teenagers. The huge amounts of kids that began to play the game brought along immature penis jokes, bickering about irrelevant topics, and i'm better than you rants. Now children are not the sole course of the community becoming what it is as there are plenty of grown men who are just as bad. The majority of the case though is the younger audience, behind a keyboard they are more likely to use anonymity to attack other people rather than use the game as the social entertainment tool it is.

How much worse can the community get before the player base decays into something not even worth tolerating anymore for a video game?

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