DewiMorgan wrote: »

I had been under the impression that the community was divided into two camps, as cleanly as the US political scene is:

Group the first: Single-player gamers. Love the Ultimas, TES games, Fallouts, Planescape:Torment, all-out lovers of PvE, despise PvP and grouping and all that sociable nonsense.

Group the despicable: The MMO fans, who love WoW and LotRO and FFXI and so forth, noisy voices clamoring for speech bubbles and other ghastlinesses, who thankfully fling themselves directly into Cirodiil as soon as they hit level 10 and we never hear from them again except whining for nameplates on the forums, or rushing through our zone grinding for some impenetrable but certainly exploitative min-maxer reason.

This really made me laugh. I've been playing MMOs since UO too, my friends and I all take our time exploring, reading the story, and sometimes just goof off and chat. We're all mmo veterans technically but none of us are power players, min masers or what have you. So yes we do exist

I'd say its only in the last few years that MMOs have become more competitive and serious, if such things can be said of a game, a hobby. There are now players calling themselves hard core who like to play 'efficiently' and 'profesionnally'. I'm using quotes because I personally find it silly to apply those terms to a game but to each their own. If you wander into the alliance section of the forum for example you'll see an alien world where they talk funny and discuss endgame. Obviously I'm joking some but a lot of people now say the endgame is all that matters in MMOs and they rush to it to, err get to it faster I suppose.A lot of these players enjoy PvP yes.