Official MMORPG forums and those who abuse it

 The forums in all popular MMORPGs like Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures and World of Warcraft are populated by different kinds of people. A sad truth we all have to face is that there are people who take advantage of their anonymity to say things they wouldn’t in a face to face encounter. To read more on this, check out the full article.

Ok, before you skip to the bottom of this article and post a comment, please read the post since I know that a lot of people who play MMORPGs will immediately have a knee jerk reaction to this rather touchy topic.

Now that that’s out of the way, I’ve always wanted to talk about how depressing the forums can be to a player. For the record, I know that it is pretty much the same in all popular MMORPGs like Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures or even World of Warcraft, but that doesn’t make me or any of the other players who agree with what I have to say happy about it.

Simple fact, there are people who feel that they can post whatever the hell they want on the forums, confident that their anonymity will protect them. For those of you who will protect these people’s actions by saying that they have the right to their opinion, yes they do have a right to their opinion.

However, stating one’s opinion by politely disagreeing with someone is not what some posters have been doing. Sense of decency? Who cares about that, I’m hidden behind my avatar!

I’ve heard people defend these individuals who are antagonistic by saying they are simply “passionate” about the game or what they are saying. Well, to be honest, being passionate about something doesn’t give anyone the right to act like a total jerk the moment someone disagrees with them.

Now moving on to trolls. These guys post things just to get a reaction from the community. Why? They give out different reasons but one of the more common answers you get from these individuals is they do it to “get a laugh.”

So if you hate these guys as much as I do, please ignore their posts and don’t reply. Let them have their brand of “fun” on their own. Hey, maybe they’ll start flaming themselves out of boredom, or even better, leave and never return.

Now, I’ve always been an advocate of the whole “don’t post if you’ve got nothing to say” school of thought but that’s just me. What do you guys think?