Why are twink players such assholes and douchebags more often than not? I've been in many brackets, since early TBC, and every single one is filled with these mouth breathing children. I've played 19s, 29s, 39s, 60s, 70s, 85s, 110s, and Vet/f2p.
I don't know where I'm really going with this, but will y'all just chill the fuck out? Also where do I find decent people to talk to?
tl;dr twinks are kinda dicks
I share most of your WoW history (twinking since mid-TBC, with experience in the 10-14, 19, 29, 39, 49, 59, 60-64, 69, 79, 80-84, and f2p brackets at various points in twink history. In my experience, most players are actually neutral to decent. But by design evolution, WoW emphasizes some negative aspects that Blizzard never took interest in resolving. You flipped the Rise Rant switch, so strap in and hang on for some long-winded historical analysis, or skip to the last paragraph for the TL;DR version.
Twinking shows the darker side of people for three main reasons: conflicting expectations, Blizzard-developed cultural impact on WoW, and interface implications.
Starting with conflicting expectations, players often talk about why they get into twinking, they don't often discuss how they twink. That second question typically sees two answers. Players twink to build characters that they can then take to the battlefield, and players twink to enjoy PvP at the highest levels of skill they can reach. Some players pursue both, but they're in the minority. The rest of us simply seek to build and play with our remote control characters, or push PvP as far as it can go, in a smaller pool of players than the mindless and faceless fields of endgame play.
This sets up a conflict between the build-a-twinkers who look to be as inclusive as possible, and the hardcore PvPers, who seek to be exclusive as possible. Build-a-twinkers want more games to use their toys to play with others, and the hardcore PvPers assume that only the best will survive getting weeded out, and a dead bracket means there wasn't enough worthwhile competition. They're both right, but their approaches fundamentally conflict.
Inclusive approaches will do things like encourage non-top tier classes and criticize FotM builds, and bracket bans on particular consumables. Whatever it takes to lower the barrier to entry, they will do. The hardcore PvP'ers don't care about FotM characters, recognizing that as part of twinking, and don't believe in banning or restricting anything in regular games. If Blizzard made it technically possible (even if Blizzard didn't mean to), then why artificially restrict people? They have no problems with restrictions of all kinds for full 10v10 premades, but that's a different context. Making competitive games even more competitive via highly structured plans, fits right in with hardcore PvP. Following "community standards" in PuGs that nobody agreed to in advance...that makes no sense to much of the hardcore PvP'ers.
Again, inclusive and exclusive approaches both have their place. My favorite example (which I personally missed the opportunity in which to participate) was the "summer of 19s" from a few years ago. Recognizing that 19s had a population problem where players could choose between awful PuGs and high-end full premades, some 19s took it upon themselves to organize PuGmades, where games brought greater organized 10v10s than just queueing for PuGs, but didn't carry the competitive weight of the higher-end full premades. 19s saw participation swell, as a lot of casual twinks took the opportunity to experience more organized PvP for the first time.
Blizzard contributed to conflicting expectations in multiple ways. We talk about how games dried up when the "no-XP" 3.1 patch first landed in Wrath, but that label misidentifies what really happened. It should really be called the "yes-XP" patch, because before then, no battleground provided XP. Instanced PvP made for a separate activity, and enough people experimented with it (and enjoyed it) to participate and pop games in all brackets. Once Blizzard created separate queues for people to leverage battlegrounds as a way to level and set that as the default, interest in regular battlegrounds evaporated. Only through tremendous concerted, coordinated efforts did non-capped brackets see games.
For the couple of years when Blizzard re-merged XP-on and XP-off instanced PvP, Blizzard put interests of levelers (looking for the most efficient and/or least-boring way to level) at odds with twinks (looking to play their characters and/or dominate battlefields). When you hear twinks complain about lousy PvP levelers, this is part of the cause. But remember that many twinks mistake their better-geared toons for better PvP. That's partially true (after all, better gear does lead to more effective play), but ignores the fact that in terms of player skill, most twinks PvP only a little better than levelers. Legion's dabbling with PvP templates revealed this uncomfortable truth. Again, that's fine -- most of us (myself included) make for more casual PvP, but the misunderstandings and mismatched expectations cause conflicts.
Conflicting player expectations drive the deepest behavioral problems I see in WoW. Blizzard made some mistakes over the years that either created or accentuated these conflicts (and they've said as much), and Blizzard did some work to repair the consequences of this work, or evolve WoW's endgame past the original causes of these conflicts. But these conflicts remain for non-endgame players.
The second factor in WoW that brings out the darker side of players are cultural artifacts resulting from Blizzard design decisions. When WoW first started, nobody had a clue, and every server was a world unto itself. The game made little sense, posed deep challenges, and basically created a community where people had to help each other to survive and succeed.
I remember when I first started playing in TBC, and a random guild was giving out free enchantments in Westfall. I didn't even know what an enchantment was, or how the process worked. The enchanter whispered me through the process of taking a piece of gear from my dwarf, opening the trade window, putting the gear in the bottom/do-not-trade box, and accepting the "trade" to receive the enchant. I couldn't believe the impact the enchantments made on my spells. Welcome to WoW. We'll talk more about interfaces in a few minutes, but understand that back then, learning WoW meant learning from other people in the game.
Guilds played a strong role in early WoW, as intentional sub-communities of players worked with each other to progress (in whatever way that meant for them). This is why a lot of players look back on vanilla and TBC with such fondness, and also why some people went too far and found themselves addicted to WoW, giving up years of their lives without realizing the consequences of overindulgence in a game that always rewarded you in some way, if you just put in enough grind. Whether you prefer working harder, working smarter, or both, WoW made a place for you.
Taking an hour to put together a group to travel to Uldaman meant that even if you had a crappy healer, you spent the time helping the healer learn their craft. Or helping the dps to understand threat management. Or giving the tank the time necessary to manage a pull. For every. single. pull. Bailing on a dungeon group had social consequences, and players thought very hard about those consequences. Likewise, when players found themselves with people they enjoyed, they made it a point to establish and maintain those relationships.
Over the years, Blizzard implemented several upgrades to help lower queue times and help players find each other and navigate the land. Merged battlegroups, merged realms, flying mounts, more flight points, LFG, and LFR all gave players much easier ways to reach each other and to travel through WoW. However, most of these "improvements" degraded the neighborly culture of WoW, encouraging players to treat each other and elements of the game as disposable. Realizing the consequences too late, Blizzard saw that by opening up so much of the game's population to each other, they effectively anonymized group play and removed social consequences. This also nullified many of the in-game motivations for people to join and participate in guilds, a social structure that in itself saw little support from Blizzard over the years.
To this day, we know that Blizzard puts hidden battleground and arena rankings on all characters of all levels, but Blizzard has never used those numbers (nor tried to do things like effectively balance the number of healers on a side). We can criticize Blizzard all we want, but the main reason I suspect Blizzard never pursued these options is that it would significantly increase queue times i.e. double or triple the wait, and I bet Blizzard's metrics show that today's players get more frustrated with longer queues than with misbalanced teams.
These cultural artifacts of Blizzard social design are a large driver behind insular player behavior. There's little to encourage players to value each other, and much to drive them away from each other, a problem that remains. I believe that Blizzard's most positively impactful recent change came in BfA with the introduction of much more advanced chat channels. Every bracket in BfA soon built de facto channels for alliance and horde, which players often used to help balance games during BfA, before twinks once again got split off from levelers. It's the single biggest positive social interface change Blizzard made to WoW in years.
You mentioned how PvE twinks often carry greater positivity. Consider that PvE twinks must operate much like players from WoW's initial years: no group finder, no clear information on how to optimize gear and abilities, no social support other than forums and joining the right guild and/or chat channel. The limited size and scope of PvE twinking provides the same collaborative elements that brought out the best in people in the early days of WoW, providing similar social results.
Some of Blizzard's quality of life changes made significant technical improvements in the game. But Blizzard didn't consider nor predict the social consequences of these improvements, many of which made people (including twinkers) act for the worse. While Blizzard reclaimed some lost ground by how they evolved the game, many social consequences remain.
Blizzard design brings us to our third and final reason for bad player behavior: an absolutely terrible game interface. Before I sink my teeth into this one, let me say that from a technical standpoint, WoW remains on top of the world for player interactivity. I mean, it's been over 15 years, and still nothing comes close. Player options for hardware choices, mods, and (most importantly) spell/ability interaction still blows everything else out of the water.
It is the year 2020. How the %#$@ do other games still not have WoW staples like target-of-target, focus target, mouseovers, and targeting macro capabilities? Why does a 15-year-old game do a better job of handling higher numbers of players and NPCs on screen at once than any other MMO? Every time another MMO comes up in conversation, these are the technical aspects that bring people back to WoW. Some games do certain niches very well (I loved naval ship movement in Archeage Unchained), but daggone, I'm at an absolute loss as to why other developers haven't copied and/or surpassed WoW's interaction machinery.
With these accolades complete, let's acknowledge the problem end of WoW: the interface is absolutely terrible. I mean, what the actual %@#$. I just said how valuable mouseovers are for spellcasters. Nowhere, and I mean absolutely nowhere in the game will you find any indication or direction toward how to use mouseovers. If you don't run into information outside of the game on how to construct mouseover macros or meet someone who tells you about them, you'll never know they exist.
The same holds true for many macro options. If a player asked you in the middle of a battleground how you directed an attack to an opponent without clicking them first, how do you respond to that quickly, in any way that actually helps? "Go google targeting macros"? As a new player, how do you even come up with the right question to ask when you're healing a mage and you see them blow up an enemy, but it never shows that enemy as a target of theirs?
Certain spells change values in instanced PvP, and unless you read patch notes on the right day, or run into someone else who knows, or accidentally spy strange numbers on screen or in your spellbook while in instanced PvP, you'll never know. Why?! Why wouldn't Blizzard at least add that info to the tooltip?
Add-ons offer some great functionality and options that Blizzard doesn't offer in the default interface, and I truly thank Blizzard for offering such robust add-on support to begin with. But many players cannot bear to play WoW without their favorite add-ons. That says as much about the default interface's shortcomings as it does about WoW's solid technical underpinnings.
Blizzard's utter failure to document the marvelous player capabilities in-game that Blizzard created, not only impedes player progress and enjoyment of the game, but also creates a chasm between players in the know, and players with no way to realize that they don't know. Year after year, players new and old earn the scorn of those of us who crossed the chasm and figured out how to actually interact through the game, because we forget what a royal pain in the ass it was to get here, and we assume everyone spent the time to figure it out. It's not just the technical hurdles (which by themselves can pose significant challenges), but also the conceptual hurdles of reframing how to play this game. We joke about "clickers", but graduating to keyboard casting takes a paradigm shift that often requires players to first un-learn bad habits.
Overcoming these challenges was easier in the early days, because other players depended on you to figure this out for them to succeed, so they helped you. Whether directly in game, or indirectly via guides and forum posts, we all got help. Nowadays, the stakes and needs are lower, so it's harder to find good help and information.
Compounding the problem of interaction interface, Blizzard's game interface remains fraught with design issues. A scoreboard redesign would work wonders toward changing player behavior, by providing and scoring performances with stats that we normally have to use add-ons to track. Showing the actual number of people queued up for instances (both PvP and PvE) would help players coordinate with each other, a transparency issue Blizzard avoids to this day. The best they ever did was back when WSG and AB first came out, when Blizzard showed how many battlegrounds were active (and let you join a specific WSG or AB from a list!).
Tracking target conditions like stuns, slows, HoTs and DoTs, etc., can prove a burden. That's one of the reasons why WoW makes for a terrible esport to watch, even though it's fun to play. WoW's game interface divides attention all over the screen, and unless players spend significant time with at least a couple of add-ons to rectify that, they will remain a step behind players who do.
There you have it. Start with various player expectations, all of which are legit, but some of which conflict with each other. Frame these with a degradation of player community as a result of well-intentioned quality of life changes. Mix the expectations with a terrible game interface that necessarily divides players, and simmer for a few years. This yields some bitter players that influence the experience of the game. These bitter spots show up very unevenly, so it's still possible to find players with an upbeat attitude, making the most of what the game offers. Like anything, it takes work and luck to find them, but they do play.
s.
, I think @Anexa 's take is probably most accurate.
