First of all, I'd like to apologize for generalizing the entire community as "elitist jerks". It was posted in a fleeting moment of frustration and anger. I've had a few bad experiences with people I've played with (alienation and elitist attitudes), but clearly that isn't the case, at least not with everyone. I've had some positive experiences as well, and people have shown willingness to help new players in this thread.
The reason I haven't posted is because when I first made this thread, I was initially blowing off steam from my experience and expected the discussion to be over after the first few replies. I got the hang of Project Reality throughout the rest of the day, and had no reason to be frustrated. After Psyrus at least recognized his misidentification of me, I had some closure. I didn't feel like taking the effort to make an elaborate post defending my POV or anything like that, because there wasn't a point, whats done is done and it was time to move on. But the thread then went on for four pages. People started to make character judgements against me based on the "OP not replying".
So whether I'm in the right or in the wrong, I'm going to give my point of view on what happened, and how I personally feel PR veterans should deal with it in the future.
The reality is, memories can tell lies. Memories are colored by bias and perspective. That of course applies to everything I'm about to say as well. Psyrus, you and I have a very different definition of the word "spam". At the time of course, I was brand new to the game and didn't understand some veterans perceived importance of chat due to chat only showing 4 unscrollable lines at a time. But when you say the word spam, I think you've made certain implications in peoples minds. The visualization would probably be something like this:
Rou: Hey can someone help me?
Rou: Hello?
Rou: Hello????
Rou: Hellooo???
Vet: Yes.
Rou: Hey can someone answer this question?
Vet: Yes.
Rou: How do you do this?
Vet: This is how.
Rou: How do you do that?
Vet: This is how.
Rou: Why is no one answering?
Rou: Wtf someone answer me.
Rou: Fuck this community.
But this visualization couldn't be further from the truth. If chat logs were posted, I think they should be pastebin posted from the very beginning of the game when I started asking questions until the end to avoid inaccuracy and biased vertical slice.
Psyrus says I was spamming for 10+ minutes. The reality is, some of my questions were 10+ minutes apart. The second I asked one question on chat, Psyrus would reply with things like "I've seen you on the forums Rou, you know this stuff. Stop trolling. -_-", "!r RouXanthica spamming", "You're still spamming.", "Stop trolling.". If spam is sending one message over decent intervals of time, then I think you have a very strict definition of spam. However, I believe that your concern was actually much more over your misidentification of my name being someone else's whose been on this forum for many years, therefor any question I asked was "trolling", therefor any post I made was "spamming".
Let me talk about my first experience (being this experience), playing PR. I come from playing a lot of Arma 3, I game I learned (for the most part) by playing the game. It's a military sim that relative to other games, has a steep learning curve. But I like to learn by playing, and the basics I picked up pretty fast, and things I didn't know I asked people on servers, who would tend to quickly answer me (or ignore me) and then that as the end of it.
When I first logged into PR, I was told to join the other team because the team I was playing on was all Russian speaking and was kicked from the squad. Okay, simple enough. Pressed caps lock, clicked the other team. Then I joined a squad, and spent about 15 minutes trying to figure out how to spawn near my teammates in utter frustration. I mostly just gave up and pressed done and it auto spawned me somewhere and I had to walk all the way there. It's one of those things that are clearly very simple, but you're missing that one simple thing (like some logic errors in programming). So I ask on chat "How do I spawn near my teammates". Several replies were posted on chat, and they all said one thing. "Read the manual". Despite that NOT being the way I learn how to play a game, I did it anyway. I alt-tabbed and couldn't find a link on the site. So I searched on google "Project Reality Manual". What I was met with was what I perceived to be a or outdated buggy PDF, because it didn't show
ANY OF THE TEXT.
Proof:
What I later found out was that it was my browser's adobe reader that didn't show the text, and I just had to download and open the PDF document. But at the time this led to more frustration in-game. I asked in all chat "Can someone tell me how to spawn near my teammates, I've been trying to figure this out", and finally non-manual reply came which was "Usually they'll set up a rally point you can spawn on.". So I spent a good bit of time highlighting my squad and clicking every single object on the map in a frustrated manner trying to spawn. Every single time I spawned (I suicided and had to wait for respawn time MANY times), I just autospawned in the wrong place. I just decided to continue auto-spawning a long ways from my squad until I "just figured it out on my own". After getting tired of that, I decided to just download the PDF and open it on my computer, to see if that would work and it did. I pressed control F and I searched "rally point". It brought me to First Minutes on the Server and it said:
"Your squad's rally point (RP) is a green circle surrounding a spawn point with your squad?s number adjacent to it. Depending on the location of your squad RP in relation to a teams FOB will determine its longevity. Note: If you spawn on another squad?s rally point, you will automatically spawn at main base. If overrun by the enemy, your squads RP will disappear. RPs are only available to conventional forces."
Which at the time wasn't helpful to me at all. I posted on all chat "I don't see the green circles on my map that are supposed to be around the rally points". I believe either no one replied, or this was the start of Psyrus reporting me for spamming. I believe at this point he had already identified me as a troll who "knows this stuff". After spending about half the game fiddling, I realized that I had to be on the KIT menu in order to spawn on the rally points. Something either no one told me, or I had missed. A simple thing, but keep in mind I was brand new an unfamiliar with the (clunky) BF2/PR UI. Okay cool! I can finally spawn near my team. Now, there was two more things I was curious about, which I asked despite Psyrus's all-chat complaints that I was spamming which I ignored because he kept calling me a troll and misidentifying me as a completely different person. (I didn't think his reports would actually get me kicked, I didn't think I was doing anything wrong occasionally asking questions and that he was just a vocal minority getting annoyed by me).
One was something I read on the same page of that manual "When you begin playing, it is recommended that you spawn as only a rifleman with a sight of your choice.
This way you can better learn the fundemental basics of gameplay." which I made a shortened quote of in all-chat and asked "How do I change scopes". I thought it was a submenu or something, which is why I didn't understand. I believe on guy said alt and I either missed it or didn't understand, because in most cases pressing alt changed it to a different gun entirely, not scope. Which is where the confusion lied. One guy said kit, which I obviously knew it was in kit, I just didn't know where in kit to click to spawn with a different scope. After making a post expressing my confusion, saying something along the lines "Yes, but where in kit", someone finally explained to me that sometimes it isn't scopes, it's different guns. That ended my curiosity.
The final and most important question I had to ask was how to differentiate between someone who is an enemy, and someone who is friendly. This one was answered fairly quickly with replies like "You'll learn to tell the difference over time, it's deliberately hard to tell. Pay attention to your map." which was a good enough reply for the moment. This might have been before the scope question.
Regardless, I was finally kicked from the server, and every time I tried to log in for the next few hours I was eventually kicked from the server, even if I had said nothing in chat, was getting the hang of the game, was trying to help my squad, ect. Which led me to the fleeting moment of anger and frustration for perceived veteran abuse and massive amounts of wasted time being frustrated with the game and not getting direct or helpful answers from most people, even though I felt I was genuinely trying to learn, and led me to make this post.
I suppose some could even say it's no ones responsibility to help newbies, that people have little patience for them, find them annoying, and are simply trying to play/win the game as they have the right to do. After all, they're just people trying to unwind and play video games. But personally I think if you care about a community and its growth, that you DO have responsibility. I don't think this specific situation could have been avoided, but if you're going to answer someone "Read the manual", you might as well have "*Answer to simple question*, also refer to the manual from now on for these kind of simple questions". I think that would help a lot of newbies avoid simple frustrations, and not feel an elitist or actively discouraging tone from veteran players.
Anyways, that's my point of view, personal account and take on the issue. Is it 100% accurate? Maybe, maybe not. But it's my personal account of the situation, take it as you will. I'm getting the hang of PR, and I'm having a lot of fun now. At the very least, I hope veterans who've read this thread will think twice before immediately dismissing new players as annoying, lazy or trolls.
