Originally posted by Magoo
Doctor, it hurts when I do this....
I mean you gotta understand that the internet is a place where folks can attempt to acheive their little ego victories with aggressive speech and not worry about any negative consequences (like an arse whoopin'), so there's always going to be a percentage of the population that shows their maturity and shoots their mouth off whenever possible.
This is all true. However, since the Internet is, as you point out, so full of places where people can be a dickhead, the question is, why do they feel compelled to do it here? Just because you can do it somewhere doesn't mean that you should do it everywhere (OK, sex may be the exception to that statement, but you get the point!).
I don't advocate extra muting or anything like that. As many people point out, we have the squelch command (soon to be supplemented with a personal squelch list???). But we also shouldn't pretend that this kind of behavior doesn't have any consequences, or argue that the "problem" is with the people who get annoyed by it.
Because one of the things I've noticed recently, and this is new, is that what I used to think of as typical channel 1 behavior is now spilling over into the country channels. I don't know what it's like in rook and knight land, but if you're a bishop, god help you if you're new to the game and ask a reasonable question (I'm not talking about the people who haven't bothered to glance at the help files; even they, however, probably deserve a little more courtesy than they usually get): if you ask for help you will get crapped on from a great height; if you are lucky, you'll get maybe one person who will give you a good answer and 5 people who will try to impress you with their text-phallus. I'm not sure people who have been on here for a while remember what a steep learning curve this thing has, even if you are coming from box sim world.
BTW, what happened to the trainer option that we had to help people new to the game? Did that just disappear?
