Noobs, I Command You: Stay in WoW!

Case in point: this guy posts that WoW tourists (people who briefly switch from WoW to another MMORPG and back) are bad for new online games (such as Darkfall, EVE Online etc.). Then, this guy says it actually is good because said tourists bring in $50M. To top it off, this other guy says it's actually bad because $50M isn't enough for allowing a vast mass of idiots into new games who cannot withstand such quantity of stupidity.

So, my fellow WoW noob: are you or are you not a menace to the feeble breed of new games just barely making a living at 100k subscribers now? Surely you must think you are pretty important if you are a danger to the industry. Actually, you are not.

It seems to me that all of the above illustrious bloggers forgot one thing: the industry can defend itself. Perhaps the developers and game designers and producers and all those presumably smart people (they do handle millions in development costs) could defend their creations against you... if they wanted to.

To take over Gevlon's (@Greedy Goblin) metaphor of a nice restaurant where no unwashed can ever set foot no matter how much he would pay (for he would upset so many the restaurant wouldn't make a profit by allowing him in), I have to say MMO's arent fine restaurants. MMO's do not have any rules about how to play them. They have rules on not swearing and being an absolute moron, but they do not require that you play the game well or dedicate yourself to it as much as some people may like.

The fine restaurant on the other hand is a place that a specific type of people claim as theirs and only theirs and enforce that right with property laws and armed policemen if needs be.

If anything (and this is the point lost on the above posters), a heavily pvp MMO is best protected against 'carebears' invasion. In a game with impact PvP

• few inexperienced pvp'ers would even level or attain any 'false' symbol of status
• few people can be carried on their shoulders by others
• inexperience is more visible (than in pve), in the forms of just generally being dead and not playing or being almost always dead and not getting anything (gear, achievements, gold etc.)

So, if I were a pvp noob who would presume to take my business of pretending to be leet and trying to make it in Darkfall or similar, I think I would have a pretty hard time. On the other hand, it would take a particularly retarded experienced pvp'er to not notice how bad I suck at pvp (if that were the case). I would pay my subscription, be ganked, provide fun for the 'core' audience, quit in frustration and go back to WoW.

In this process, Darkfall would make $50 (or $50M if there are many like me) and the core non-retarded community of pvp'ers would suffer... oh wait: they wouldn't.

If the reverse happened, if a leet PvP'er somehow got into WoW (perhaps because he's not leet enough for Darkfall), then there would be a problem: he would start qq'ing non-stop about how WoW is not the game his mad skills require and how PvP doesn't get enough love from Blizzard. Good enough that doesn't happen too often.