Which subreddits have redditors turned toxic?

So, I just started playing WoW two weeks ago. My best friend has been playing since launch and I fancy an MMO on occasion, and he finally talked me into giving it a try.

I've been around the block enough to know how bad gaming subs can be and how long you have to have been playing a game, generally, before a lot of what the salty vets get upset about even touches your sphere.

So I avoided checking out the subreddit for 1.5 weeks or so, but eventually got curious and checked it out. And holy *shit.*

I messaged my friend the morning after essentially being like "I've been deep into games with passionate, negative portions of their community so was expecting it a bit, but the level of vitriol you guys have going on in /r/wow *shocked* me."

I was trying to explain it away by the sheer volume of people in that sub and the sheer length of years folks have been playing it compared to the two other games I've invested enough time in to be considered a "veteran." (Planetside 2 and Elite Dangerous), but right now, it is very little sugar going along with all the medicine in the WoW sub.

Planetside 2's community (played from 2012-2015, dunno how it is now) was salty and passionate, but highly self aware and created a great meme culture to lighten the mood between bursts of awful cynicism and jaded rants. Elite Dangerous, most of us will talk massive shit about the gameplay loops and about FDEV dropping the ball, while simultaneously humble bragging about how many 1000's of hours we've played and openly encouraging new folks to join the galaxy and not to listen to us "salty vets."

/r/wow is on pure vitriolic, catastrophic meltdown right now. I did recently see some positivity when some brave bastard basically asked "I just started this game and everyone is shitting on it, should I be concerned?"

Thankfully, I know how it goes and the time investment of folks who reach that level of negativity and know i've got at least a few hundred hours to invest before I start seeing where some of these issues are. So I'm having a good time, but I'm continuing to steer clear of that sub ftmp.

It's easy to not be able to see the forest for the trees after a certain point, but as an outsider looking in, yall have got an incredibly rich, deep game going on here, one for the history books, even if i'm mostly just a tourist in it right now.

/r/AskReddit Thread Parent