pbiggz, on 04 April 2022 - 09:57 AM, said:
I've had some thoughts on this particular phenomenon, because while it exists in almost every game, it has a very particular flavour in MWO. For lack of a better word, I call it mechdad culture, and yes, apologies to those mechdads who don't fall into this bucket. Don't take this as a generalization. Im a younger guy, but plenty of older guys are far better at this game than I will ever be.
Mechdad culture is a gaming counter-culture. Mechdad culture embraces a very specific nostalgia for a long gone and at least partially mythologized era of gaming when younger gamers had yet to pick up a keyboard or controller, and the games and technologies of the time were "pure". Nobody had to "practice to get good" and there was no such thing as being competitive. Therefore, mechdad culture views attempts to improve one's own skills in a game as "tryhard" and thus the trademark behaviour of "hard core gamers" who are viewed almost exclusively as being young, and a degenerative influence on gaming as a whole. In other words they are bad on purpose, and practicing to get good is a direct personal attack on people who are bad on purpose. The game must change to suit their needs, as mechdads should be the sole demographic this game appeals to. Any change seen as not suiting their needs is viewed again as an attack.
Mechdad culture is possessive and exclusionary. Those who play the game in a way they don't approve of are again ruled out as being "gamers". Their behaviour is maligned as cheating, their strategies decried as OP. Its these qualities that lead people to openly decry groups as a degenerative conspiracy, to decry any sizeable change to the meta as being a direct personal assault, to decry competitive players as lofty egomaniacs who are destroying the game. Efforts to fix pain points are viewed as attempts to "dumb the game down", and efforts to bring in new players are viewed as appealing to "gamers" over the mechdad group.
These are some thoughts. Feel free to poke holes in them because I expect at least part of this is wrong.
I mean, you're not ENTIRELY wrong. And I'm a 45 year old gamer/BattleTech fan who often calls himself a "Mech-Dad" in his unit Discord (even though our server uses the term to jokingly describe all the older gamer folks who are welcoming, and act as "unit-dads" to our younger members).
But that anti-change mentality certainly exists, because nostalgia is a powerful damn thing, but also my generation of non-power gamers cut our teeth on multiplayer Goldeneye 64, so it might not be exactly for the reasons you're thinking. Or all of the reasons anyway.
I do think there's a perception among the generational divide that younger gamers are all about power-gaming, min-maxing, and "getting 1337" (that isn't really accurate either), and that having fun in a game is for newbs, or that the only fun is "pwning or trolling". This might feel unnecessarily punishing to I think a lot of gamers my age or older, who work and have kids and mortgages and are otherwise just wiped out by their day to day, and want to play a game to unwind after all of that. But I also think maybe NONE of this is entirely accurate.
My unit [8DG] is composed of a very broad spectrum of gamers of all ages and skill levels, and I find that most of us find any sort of elitism or gatekeeping distasteful. It may just be that the loudest voices get the most attention, and create our perception of opinions, and generally speaking the loudest voices are those with something to complain about, justifiably so or not. The truth is, there are probably a lot more like myself and those in my unit. Willing to be chill, and learn, and play together to be good, or have fun, or even both.
As humans we tend to lean heavily into confirmation bias and anecdote, and none of this gives us informed perspective. At the end of the day, maybe what fuels this is, people just want to feel successful and good about themselves, and when something undermines or threatens that ability, it bums us out. Some people get salty (fair enough, we've all been there), but maybe more people don't, we just don't know that because they aren't bothering to come to the forums to tell us how #NOTUPSET they are.
But hey, who knows? lol