If you are not having fun, and it is just making you angry, why wouldn’t you quit? The term always carries the connotation of scorn, but I can only see that making sense from the perspective of the person making it not-fun, who wants victims to stay around.
: Zubon
If someone in a group is doing something to suck the fun out of the experience the leader should be taking the initiative to address it accordingly to hold the group together. Diplomacy first but if it comes down to kicking someone after talking to them about the issue, so be it.
If the group is generally ineffective or that one person keeps causing problems and you decide to bail it isn’t rage-quitting, imo.
A real rage quit is when someone gets emotional when they really shouldn’t, i.e. after one wipe or for some other simple reason. The reason it has a negative connotation is because much like the term “emo” people that are unusually emotional are derided in our society for being weak willed.
The negative connotation comes partly because it can ruin the fun for other people.
If you rage quit out of a 5 man maybe the other 4 won’t be able to finish the run. If you’re a member of my guild and we have to abort a raid because you rage-quit halfway you won’t still be a member next time you log on.
Next it’s about dumping your negativity on other people. You didn’t get the shiny you wanted off the first boss? Take out your frustration by being a dick to random strangers, after all your wife gets annoyed if you kick the puppy.
Lastly a lot of rage quitting is fake. You want to leave just leave. Don’t go nerdtastically angry then storm off as if you have the moral high ground.
IMHO, criticizing someone for rage-quitting usually implies that had he thought things through, he could have avoided the incident that triggered the rage-quit in the first place. While there is an element of “blaming the victim” in that argument, there is probably something that you can do to avoid a similar situation in the future. For example, being more strict in evaluating a PuG group can help rage-inducing scenarios such as wiping for the fifth time on a supposedly easy boss.
Also, there is a specific form of trolling where the goal is to make the victim angry enough to do something drastic and act against his long-term interests. Such as quitting a guild before the guild leadership can evaluate the situation and removing the real troublemaker. In Eve, one of the more common ones is to goad the victim of a PvP encounter into making real-life threats, which are against Eve’s Terms of Service and thus grounds for a ban. Taking a minute to calm down before acting can help in identifying and avoiding these kinds of gambits.
The style of gaming required for most MMOs can’t help but induce rage quitting in some segment of the population. The entire design of most MMOs is focused on delayed satisfaction, an absurd way to build a game IMO but common in MMOs non-the-less. They attract crowds who come in with the concept to invest first, then see the return. They come in to grind XP, Gold, Faction or whatever else in hopes that eventually the game will get good for them. The same applies for guilds and most interactions, they feel that if they get into something they’ll have to put in some time or effort before that structure pays off.
The the subset of players who don’t learn to have fun along the way, they usually can’t help but feel duped at the end of the day. Many of them invest a monumental amount of time into something and eventually come to the realization that there is no payoff. Something isn’t what they thought it was and they feel betrayed, foolish or angry.
This post isn’t defending the behavior associated with rage quitting and I definitely think people should learn to have fun along the way. However it is important to understand the psychology behind the whole thing. At the same time I don’t want to suggest the rage quitter is to blame either, rather I feel the whole design of MMOs are broken and self limiting.
Sometimes you log into the game and feel more immersed than other times. Things could be going on in the real world around you or even some private tell hell that pulls away your sense of immersion. It’s usually at that time that you find yourself being more critical of the groups effort or the game mechanics and that sets the spark that goes off in the game.
I far prefer the rage quit player or the Feigned Link Death any day.
Even though rage-quitting seems like an instant fit of rage it usually isn’t.
It is no different than dealing with stuff in a relationship, and after it has built up for months you may explode with something as simple as the toothpaste lid being put on crooked.
I really think no rage-quitter just randomly gets mad. Maybe it’s the tenth time someone ninja looted something, or lost a roll, or wiped. I think most people don’t have anger control problems.
I will give you an example of a rage quit I did a few years ago. I took a week off from work to farm honor in WoW back when it first came out. My guild leader said I wasn’t contributing to the guild by doing only pvp, and never helping in pve.
At the time the guild was preparing for Ony. I spent almost the whole week trying to find groups to do all the pre-reqs, and did no pvp.
About 3 hours before the first attempt at an Ony raid I told all the guild members online I was ready for the raid, but would log out at the Ony portal, and take a two hour nap to be rested for the raid.
Magically when I log back in I say in guild chat I am ready for the raid to have my guild leader say all the spots were taken. The sad part was half the raid was another guild he allianced with to do it.
So basically a whole week of me contributing to the guild meant nothing as he told me I could just do it next time. Do you think I really wanted to spend a week doing PvE to have that happen? I lost a pvp rank that week because of it too.
Of course I /gquit immediately. Was it really rage-quitting?
“I took a week off from work to farm honor in WoW back when it first came out.”
I think your first problem – is that you set a goal for yourself in your real life – that involved the game – and then compromised your own goal because of someone else.
Perhaps in the future if you invest your real life assets (time off is an asset and worth very real money – try leaving a job with vacation time left – they have to pay you for it) you should communicate that fact to others. I don’t know too many people that would take issue with you trying to meet a goal with so much invested in the goal – and if they did then you would have a dialog and possibly a reasonable reason to leave your guild vs the odd circumstance that you described.
Indeed, and therefore the problem often lies in a failure to detect and avoid/prevent counterproductive behavior. One would think that after the ninth time someone ninjalooted it might be a good idea to check what that mysterious “Master Looter” option does.
It depends. What were you, a PvP player, doing in a PvE-focused guild? Or did the GM just come up with some attendance requirements and started enforcing them out of the blue? In any case, what we had there was a failure to communicate.
My thoughts exactly, Zubon. If you want to quit, then that’s your right. I see too many people claiming “rage-quitting” when someone simply leaves a game. They are, of course, assuming the person is angry in most cases.
It irritates me a lot. As if they are saying, “What, you have something else better to do? You must just be an angry, emo kid.”
Yeah, or… I have something else to do besides play this video game. You also see it a lot in FPS games where there is no respawn until the end of the match. Apparently, quitting anytime except for between maps is seen as “rage-quitting.” I find it laughable, but that’s the reality. If you die during a round and quit before the next one starts… well you’re just a rage quitter.
I think the purest form of rage-quitting (as in something that deserves scorn) is when someone quits after a single unfun thing happens, when it should be reasonable to believe that things will improve if they stick around a little longer. Say, a combination of impatience and unwillingness to go through any hardship.
I agree though that there are many incidents out there where that is not the case, and people just say it out of frustration at someone bailing on an unfun situation.
I agree with most of the above comments, but I still think rage quitting is funny.
Seems like everyone has a different definition for rage-quitting. I usually use the term when I am getting extremely frustrated with a (usually non-MMO) game and need to take a break to calm down. So I quit because I am raging. A bad PuG certainly doesn’t make me rage, but it might make me quit if it just isn’t going well.