Allergic to Pomposity

After reading the most recent update on the Guild Wars 2 dungeons system and feeling mildly alarmed at the thought that dungeons may be (forced) group-only, I experienced a sudden revelation as to a/the reason behind my fear of forced grouping in general in MMOs.

Yeah, there's the lack of choice factor that bites.

But the underlying fear behind the lack of choice stems from fearing being essentially forced to listen to some members of the group lose patience, show intolerance, find fault, pick on, bully, abuse, brag, belittle, demean, or in other words, be a dick or a pompous ass, to other members of the group.

Oddly enough, I didn't feel this in Aion. Despite -very- forced grouping, there was always the sense of camaraderie, of determination, grit and patience, etc. Die, die, we're going to make this work. (Even if only because getting the group together was so bloody hard to begin with.) Then there was the ever-present factor of world PvP and the other faction being THE Enemy, not ourselves, so there was generally very little infighting.

The majority of the time, I haven't quite faced this in Rift. But I'm sure the elitists are out there, they're probably just in Tier 2 already, whereas I've been hobnobbing with the hoi polloi in normal mode and dipping a toe at best into Tier 1. There is the fear of it, which makes me reluctant to leap in headfirst until I really am ready. The good news is that so far, my LFG dungeon groups have been rather flexible, and not dissolving in a huff the moment there is a wipe. There's always one or two roles to switch, then try again, that sort of thing. rather than losing hope entirely.

Let's not even mention World of Warcraft, besides saying there's a reason why I don't play it, and the generally accepted culture of that game's community.

And that's probably what made me so allergic to City of Heroes' Incarnate Trials. Each CoH server has a really small community of 50s. One will probably keep bumping into the same damn people. Certainly you see the same ones going after Hami all the time. And oh god, the divisions between the CoH community have been so annoying to read on the forums that to anticipate the same braggadocio and "sit back, my defence capped, IO'ed, Incarnated and super-l33t build will pwnz0rs" or "I know what I'm doing, all of you follow my commands, go here, do this, do that now!" in trials left a super sour taste in my mouth.

I'm not sure why I hate it. But I do.

After too long with people like that (and five minutes is too long), I always feel I need a long time away from people in general. And it would really suck if my greed for a shiny piece of loot reward made me put up with behavior that annoyed me (and I can get terribly greedy, alas.)

So now I'm a little scared regarding Guild Wars 2. If the community takes a turn for the worse, and the dungeons are multiplayer-only, then I'm either going to have to have an unpleasant time grouping (which doesn't make sense for a GAME) or end up locked out of that delicious piece of content (which then makes me question why I'm playing that particular game just as much.)

That would not make Guild Wars 2 very tasty at all, after finishing up with the world content.