Arnoxthe1 said:
Tom_green_day said:
I think the thing to remember is that while it may seem everyone is complaining, this is because not everyone is saying something. The complainers are a vocal majority but actual minority.
It's kind of weird though that game companies like to use forums to listen to complaints if they ever want to listen them at all. But then, what else can they reliably use that gives them ideas on what to improve on since a lot of consumers won't take the time to tell them?
I'd say that's a rather big part of the negativity around here. Not that we know that game developers are coming to forums like this to read through complaints, but more because we want to talk about how the industry can improve itself. It's kinda hard to do that by discussing what the industry is doing right...if they're doing something right, there's no need to address the matter. Or at least, less reason than there is to address when they do something wrong.
People often get VERY heated when discussing things that they're passionate about, and clearly we as gamers are passionate about gaming. So when we feel that the people who control the industry that we're passionate about are giving us the shaft it really lights our fuses. What's been garnering the most hate recently? Stuff about the Xbox One. Why has it been garnering so much hate? Because of quotes from people like Don Mattrick that have essentially been direct insults towards us, as gamers. I'd argue that when a higher-up in industry that you're passionate about comes out and insults you and/or your intelligence by staying things like that infamous "nuclear sub" quote, you have every right to get pissed off.
Are there nit-pickers out there? Of course, there's always going to be the people out there who just can't seem to see anything but the negatives, but even that's coming from a good place: they want what they're nit-picking to improve. Beyond that are the fanboys/fangirls who will ALWAYS get upset whenever a game or company does something that pisses them off. "Dark Souls 2 will have an Easy Mode" nearly started riots in the streets! Buuuuut that was only with regard to Dark Souls fans. Anyone else who didn't like/play Dark Souls likely didn't care, and anyone who wanted to enjoy Dark Souls but found it to be too difficult would actually be happy. The problem is, the passion of the fanboys/fangirls often drowns out everything else.
The real point that I'm getting at is that, deep down, we're all critics. And while critics do point out the good in things, the best thing they can do is point out the flaws, that what the person/product they're critiquing will know what they need to improve on. Just as a little anecdote: back in high school I was in the chess club. We'd have to make sure that at tournaments we took proper annotation of all the moves in each game we played. If we won the game, we could throw it out. Clearly, since we won, there was nothing to be learned from it since apparently we played the game "right". But if we lost, we'd go over the game move-by-move to find out just where we went wrong. In terms of videogames, I'd worry that focusing too much on what a game did right will lead to a "too much of a good thing" scenario...which is pretty much where we're at with games like CoD. CoD used to be a simple shooter. Speaking from personal experience, I started with the first Modern Warfare and had loads of fun with it. Back then it was simple and that made it very competitive: everyone got three killstreak rewards and that was it. Now due to it's popularity, they've felt like they needed to give us more and more and more, and so now we've got a game that a lot of people (well, at least in my circle of friends) are getting sick of because it's less about your skill in a shooter and more about how many killstreak rewards you can decimate your opponents with. And so by focusing too much on what made their games so good and popular, they've now turned that good thing into a flaw.
Annnnnd there I go inserting a criticism into this...well I guess at this point it's almost an essay. :3
But that does bring up that there's a difference between constructive criticism - as I gave about the CoD series - and just flat out hate. That's where you don't have an actual discussion and just say "CoD frickin' sucks! It's just the same game over and over again and it's getting old and lame!" While there might be validity behind saying it's the same kind of stuff over and over, the fact that the person doesn't go into detail talking about what's specifically wrong and how it effects the game to make it "old and lame".
Let's see...I've covered gamers in general...fanboys/fangirls..."we're all critics"....
Oh, I guess I should mention one more thing about the fanboys/fangirls that really helps to explain the proliferation of negativity. Obviously fanboys/fangirls are the easiest to piss off regarding any given subject. But getting back to what the first response to this topic said: they're a vocal minority. The reason they seem like a majority is because EVERYTHING has fanboys/fangirls. They're there for Dark Souls, GTA, CoD, Microsoft, Ubisoft, there's even a couple out there for EA. Any time something pops up regarding anything, the fanboys/fangirls for whichever specific thing they're fans of and rip it to shreds or hold it aloft while the rest of us don't care nearly as much. It's not all the same people, the people who love Dark Souls and are pissed off about an Easy Mode aren't necessarily the same people who like GTA and were pissed off about how GTA IV had lousy driving controls and you couldn't buy businesses. Still, both of those topics got just the same amount of hate because the fanboys/fangirls for each game gravitated towards topics that relate to the games they love.
In the end, I'd say the best thing to keep in mind is that we're all critics and critics are used to point out negatives a lot more than positives. To be fair to your point, though, there are a saddening amount of people who do slip away from constructive criticism and become flat-out haters.
