incoherence.net

In my ongoing rant against idiots in general, let’s spend a little time to talk about…idiot gamers.

If you haven’t heard, we at LOLapps have started experimenting with gaming, specifically social games on Facebook. I’ve made the lateral move into our gaming division, and of course with that comes plenty of complex front-end graphical and UI responsibilities.

It’s a measuredly harder task than building a blog or simple one-time apps on Facebook. Implementing rich, engaging, user-friendly interfaces is hard work.

Not that our users would notice. I’ve spent a good amount of time over the years on gaming forums and communities, so I didn’t have high expectations dealing with Facebook’s breed of gamers: they’d whine, complain, and think of only their own experience and enjoyment. Any feedback would have to be taken with fistfuls of salt brined in seawater.

What I didn’t anticipate was the persistent amount of entitlement these “social gamers” still held for a free game.

To be clear, the type of game we’re trying are of the “X-Wars” variety – RPGs-lite with plenty of items and missions, with player-v-player battling and friend tasks rounding out the social content. This simple formula has been spawning a growing number of successful games, and with such an expansion breeds the mystical X-War gamer.

1. They’re the ones who’ll spam the forum boards for strangers to “add” to their family.
2. They’re the ones who’ll speculate that the “lazy developers” took a weekend off instead of attending to a small peculiar annoyance.
3. They’re the ones who threaten to quit – repeatedly – when the game is changed for balance reasons and their character gets ever-so-slightly weaker as a consequence.
4. They’re the ones who have absolutely no intention of spending any money on the free game, but will immediately – again – threaten to quit when monetization features start creeping into the game so the lazy developers can afford their ritzy ramen.

X-Wars gamers have got to be near the bottom of the barrel of the hierarchy of annoying gamers ⁽¹⁾. They also serve as living proof that stupidity easily transcends the anonymity boundary: Facebook is the biggest place on the Internet where having a real identity is advantageous, and that hasn’t stopped players from continuing the idiocy above.

Here’s one lazy dev who’d love to see the reaction from hitting the hidden reset button.

1. Beating out Wii-Sports-only casuals, snotty “My PC can render everything at 120FPS” graphic whores, same-overpowered-move-to-win sports cheesers, and possibly crappy-agnsty-music-over-voice-chat teens (↩)