Does anyone plan on trying Project Epoch?

[Danth]

It's the culture of that game, one that apparently solidified after its popular growth period once the population declined to the die-hards. I tried several WoW servers with my family over the past year and a half or so and found the culture pretty much exactly the same on all of them.

They're obsessed with cookie-cutter min/max builds to an extent never seen in most other games of this type. This is, I suspect, what happens when your community is taught to look up their builds on websites--any deviation from the guide is seen as 'wrong.' They're also obsessed with UI mods, to the extent that a large portion of the user base can't comprehend playing the game effectively without them. Many guilds won't invite people who don't use them. I had the strange experience of numerous people calling me a liar when I said I played with no mods--since I did not suck therefore must be using them, or so the logic went.

Relating to the above, the obsession with babysitter mods became apparent when I noticed the woeful degree of ineptitude among the rank-and-file players. Quite usually, random invite players made stuff outright harder than doing the same content shorthanded with just the wife, kid, and I. My daughter, aged 10-11 at the time, easily outperformed the average there as an outright newbie to that game. The high-end players are uniformly excellent as they are in any game, but otherwise the average was among the very worst I've ever seen. I counted myself lucky if I invited someone who could at least talk in chat and display even the simplest degree of teamwork.

There's also a substantial degree of hostility towards women and families, much more than I've ever encountered anywhere else in some thirty years of online gaming. Across numerous servers, a straight majority of guilds I talked to more or less told me to get lost as soon as I mentioned having a wife and kid who also played, and even those that offered to take us did so only hesitantly. This one wore on the wife and I so badly we've given up on our "WoW experiment." They can have their game. We don't need to be there.