Each time I pick up an MMO and get into it, I am quickly faced with the problem that the average player is a genuine retard. MMO’s as a genre are not difficult game. There is not a single one on the market that can or should be described as “difficult”, yet the average player still struggles to grasp basic ideas or concepts. As I dive back into EQ2 lately, this is even more apparent to me. Compared to other popular MMOs, EQ2 is not a well documented game. While there is an up to date Wiki available for players to utilize, actual guides are far and few in between. You can pull up a WoW raid mob and get a 3 page essay on how to kill it with 100% efficiency. You search for a raid mob in EQ2 and you may at best find a 1 paragraph guide from 2007 in which nothing is correct.
I was going to include a comparison between two websites, but of course the EQ2 2007 raid guide forum has gone offline sometime in the last month.
In fact, the actual wiki didn’t even have an entry for Sawtooth the Ancient until 2012 (5 years after his release), and it has a single sentence describing an AoE called “Rot Blood” which doesn’t exist.
https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/Sawtooth_the_Ancient?oldid=558781
My point with all of that is to paint the picture of the EQ2 player relying on their own critical thinking skills to progress through the game. There are no leveling guides, build guides, raid guides, or even system guides available to players. Therefore in a game in which the average player has been playing since mid 2000s, one would assume that the average player knows how to play the game, but this is far from the truth.
The only real way to succeed in games like this are to barricade oneself in a guild with other “smart” people (IQ 90+) and avoid the slavering maws of pick up group players. I have on many occasions encountered players who are 50+ years old, played the game since 2005, played the same class for 20 years, and still do not understand how their class works. It baffles the mind how someone can interact with a video game for so much of their life and just walk away knowing about the same as they knew on launch day.
I’d love for this to be a unique problem in the MMO community, but as I play Helldivers 2 and other games with random players I am reminded that it is a universal problem.