With the recent ruination of Project Zomboid, I got to thinking about the backlash, whenever gamers are feeling overly-entitled or not, and from the more vocal ones, I believe that they are. A handful of people pledged a bit under ten dollars, which is less than what minimum wage pays per hour in the United States, and can buy you something to eat at KFC, but the amount of fork-flipping has made me rethink how immature some gamers can be.
During my time on League of Legends, there was an extensive amount of downtime. The ones running the show gave out a nice amount of Riot Points that could be redeemed for some cosmetic features as an apology for the outage. Very nice. However, every time, and this is one of the reasons I quit LoL, EVERY time a server went down anywhere on the planet, the forums would turn into a massive fest of whining, moaning, bitching, QQing, and people threatening to sue. Yes, really. They feel entitled to 100% uptime just because they added a piddly amount to Riot Game’s coffers which is probably enough to keep a server up for fifteen minutes.
When any MMO has a problem with it, suddenly the entire playerbase who actually post on the forum pull out the big guns and claim they are entitled to updates, nerfs, balance fixes, new areas, new skins, all because they pitched in five bucks for a premium item automatically giving them presidential levels of say. It ends up making the entire community look bad.
As for how far some over-entitled idiots can go, around this time last year, Minecraft was smashed with a DDOS attack from scumbags who thought they were entitled to more updates, attacking an indie developer who has enough money in his holdings to hire a professional assassin, the greatest legal team on the planet, or to commission an ion cannon strike.
In recent years, this has gotten worse with DLC becoming a common feature of games. I balk at the idea of entitlement, but I do feel that when I pay $60 for a brand-new game, I shouldn’t have to pay more a week or a month later to unlock all the content, especially if that content is already on the disk and isn’t downloaded at all. This has made gamers even more vocal on the subject even when the DLC prices are quite low.
The problem is even worse when you look at the ban appeals forum on various sites. You will see plenty of 12 year olds saying that it’s ‘illegal’ to ban them because they contributed money to the game at some point in their lives, and they feel entitled to a form of impunity from the rules. If things worked that way, I could buy a soda at Walmart and proceed to wreck the place.
I don’t think the problem is going to get any better in the coming years, in the MMO or singleplayer world. As a gamer, I know that I am entitled to absolutely nothing whatsoever unless I’ve signed a contract in ink. Have I done such a thing? Never in my life.
Chris Hernandez
I think what causes people to feel this way is the lack of other interests in life, which is a real shame for them.
Even if I pay $60 for a game and the servers are down for a day then I will go play or do something else on that day. problem solved.
Now I can understand if there is a months long blackout for a game that just came out. That would make me very upset.
Rian Quenlin
Yeah, at times like that you have every right to complain, but if that’s the only game you have, then you need to get yourself a better job.