Completely New or Plunge in Midway?

I can't help but feel a little hypocritical. Or at least actions and emotional experiences not congruent with words. Tobold pointed out that Larisa was kinda down about coming in halfway into an established game, and feeling all excluded and unwanted by irritating vets who always seem to love to wax nostalgic about a time which you never experienced. So I popped on over to give some pep talk in the comments.

And while I do think that no one person can see it all (the entire length and time of a game's history / culture / development) for all freakin' games - because even if that hypothetical person had no life, they would be spread too thin to really experience and participate in the culture buildup of each game.

And I certainly do think that each person comes to a game differently, at different times, and by golly, it's a good personal story to trace your unique pathway through various multiplayer experiences...

I have to admit, on my own personal blog, that I kinda like getting in at the ground floor and experiencing it all from the get-go.

If only because there are no veterans to spoil it all... everybody learning the game for the first time, and everybody has incentive to group up and discover it all anew and get perplexed and run screaming from horrible things and encounter awesome emotional experiences for the first time, together, wowee.

It's not that I haven't come in to existing games. I can't claim that I was the first to discover Kingdom of Loathing. I came in midway through A Tale in the Desert's lifespan, though at the beginning reset of Telling 4. I believe I joined Team Fortress Classic and TF2 not quite at the start, even if I did manage to time my TFC gameplay to its heydays when the game was still popular. Ditto Natural Selection, I joined mid patch 2 or whatever.

I surely had FUN. I surely learnt many things in my time with those games and improved myself to the point where I didn't want to give up any more of myself and my time for increased mastery. I think I even successfully integrated with some of those communities - ATITD and TFC had nice local communities.

Contrast that with games like Guild Wars, LOTRO, AoC, Aion, (and to a significantly lesser extent CoH, six months off from launch date) where I did come in from the ground up.

I had fun too. I also learnt different things. I don't know that I integrated myself that successfully, but I did mix with some people and enjoyed my unique experiences with them.

So actually, they are the same. I had equal amounts of fun with them all.

But somehow, the atmosphere is more exciting when everyone is new.

But then even if everyone is new, they have different levels of experience because they bring in baggage from other games. So it should be the same.

But then the game culture hasn't begun to form. To the point where people start dissing other people as noobs and losing patience with them.

I wonder if that is what I dislike about games where I did not come in from the ground up?

Did the games I enjoy joining in half way somehow mask that away from me? Or did I just not take those people to heart and find folks who liked to help newbies generously?