Discussion Main / SuffersNewbiesPoorly

Suffers Newbies Poorly was merged into Forum Speak per TRS

As was discussed here, I removed the following Real Life examples.

• The entire population of alt.folklore.urban.
  • They actually have a running joke about this tendency, sometimes asking "Whose turn is it in the Nicey-nice barrel this month?" What's really fun is that the same person who Suffers Newbies Poorly today may be The Shepherd tomorrow. It really depends on the quality of the newbie's contribution: Post to say "Hi, I'm new!" and you get deafening silence unless there's a Shepherd in residence that day. Post with a a substantial contributive post, and you'll find yourself in the middle of an interesting conversation.
• On NeoGAF, you are a "junior member" until you have a total post history of about 150 or so posts. Of course, most people don't make it that far because regular members tend to instantly dismiss or chastise anything juniors say, no matter how relevant, and the moderators are notorious trolls and console fanboys who goad people into getting themselves mocked or banned with wild abandon.
• Quite a few residents of the Dead Lounge forums for Goths.
• Somehow, 4chan manages to be this trope despite the fact that users are completely anonymous. Established users detect newbies with something akin to the Force.
  • This may be to do with the fact that newbies attempt to intergrate themselves by repeating old memes and such. When you try this on an imageboard that has a new meme every other week, detecting a newbie doesn't seem so hard.
    • Also look for people with a writing style that doesn't quite gel with the rest of the board, or people who aren't as jaded as the average 4channer.
• Shoryuken.com, a Street Fighter message board, is infamously rude to newbies to the point where if your Join Date is recent, it is used as an insult ("damn 09'ers"). Word of advice - don't make a "Hi I'm New" thread unless your intention is to troll.
  • Forumgoers on Facepunch, the forum for the Game Mod Garry's Mod, also frequently use joindates as insults.
• Any multiplayer game on Steam such as Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead falls under this trope whenever Valve decides to either make their games free for a day/weekend or hold a massive sale that drops the price of their games to insane lows (such as $6 for Left 4 Dead 2). Many veteran gamers of these games cringe and openly complain whenever these events happen because it attracts tons of new players and they rather not deal with people who don't know how to jump or use a grenade. The complainers may also become a Griefer for a day if they really hate to play with new people.
• Touhou fans in the comments pages of You Tube videos tend not to react kindly to people asking "what anime is this?" For the benefit of newbies, Touhou isn't anime. This isn't a reason for being as nasty as the occasional fan is.
  • Similarly, Vocaloid fans are exactly the same. Justified due to the fact that no matter which video you are watching, there are truckloads of related links and songs. Anyone stupid enough to ask "what anime is this?" obviously was too lazy to scroll down, or simply look at other comments.
• About half of the Battleships Forever forum.
• PlayDiplomacy.net .
• On the official forums of ZDoom source port, it is a rule of thumb that if a person has released something notable and/or praised, you can expect them to be this trope.
• The Siren Board, forum of Airraidsirens.com and essentially the only forum for outdoor warning siren enthusiasts, tends to be like this. As an increasing number of preteens/younger teenagers develop an interest in sirens and find their way to the board, each gets a fairly limited time to prove that they can be a useful contributor and practice good grammar and spelling. Unfortunately, like with any fan community there's a lot of noobish mistakes one can potentially make that the mods don't take too well, notably blind defense of the classic Thunderbolt siren and equally foolish insults of newer electronic sirens. To be fair to the mods and other veteran members, it's a small forum with an extremely devoted core community that's been running the board in one incarnation or another for years before it got as popular as it is now. Most of these veterans are adults who are really of an entirely different generation from the newbies.
• The Pokemon battling community Smogon tends to display this behaviour as a site. Woe betide you if you post something stupid in the Battle Frontier Records thread - 'Jumpman' lurketh there.
• Good luck getting any big furry artists to respond to you - partly because some of them may be too busy drawing to have any small talk, and partly because they abandoned their eMail, Notes, Instant-Messenger clients, Skype etc in favour of constantly updating their Twitter account. If the artist has gotten so popular that everyone wants to befriend them or mooch free art from them, this is understandable. Of course, some furry artists do act high and mighty once they have a following.
  • The above statements apply to internet artists in general, as denizens of Deviant Art can attest. The best way to get an artist's attention is to become an artist of the same level...
• The entire Defense Of The Ancients All Stars / Heroes Of Newerth / League Of Legends community. Both in game and the forums. The only acceptable place for newbies to post in the HoN forums is the Training Grounds
  • League Of Legends is a bit better with the forums, but if you're a newb or inexperienced player, don't be surprised to be cussed out at a LOT.
    • It's also not uncommon to see people trying to report you for being an unskilled player...at level one. Given that it is a Spiritual Successor to Defense Of the Ancients, itself a Wretched Hive of "Stop Having Fun" Guys and often has a fanbase overlap, even with Heroes Of Newerth...expect to fill your ignore list up a lot if you don't want to find enough insults and curses to make Jerry Springer blush.
  • Heroes Of Newerth has similar problems. You can be vote-kicked from Ho N games simply for being new. When you die, it helps the other team level up, so a newbie is a liability, rather than an asset to the team. This leads to experienced players vote-kicking newbies simply for being new, because it is easier for them to play without the newbie than with. Even when they can't vote-kick you, expect to be cussed out / told to leave by your own team, simply because you are new.
  • Really, we can add any Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game to this trope.
• A significant portion of the EVE Online forum community fits this trope, with concentration varying by forum. This is heavily influenced by the belief that most 'new' posters are actually shills, sockpuppets, trolls, or other alts of more-established players looking to cause trouble. They're not always wrong.
• More experienced players in World Of Warcraft can be hostile toward new players, particularly "Wrath babies" who joined during the Wrath of the Lich King era, and whom many experienced players look down upon as unskilled at raiding due to the "easier" content of Wrath.
  • This also led to a Can't Catch Up situation in Classic and Burning Crusade where you had to do all sorts of attunement quests and previous raid content to get to the next level or even get ready for the first tier of raiding. However, you couldn't do this solo and just about everyone who had already done it wouldn't lift a finger to help. If you were on one of the dozens of wasteland servers, it was nigh impossible to join the one or two guilds that raided everything because they would hold the mentality of "If you're not already highly geared, we don't want you" and "Why should I help?", which is part of why people were transferring to more populated servers.
    • This also occurs in Cataclysm for pvp, specifically for rated battlegrounds. The way the matchmaking system works, even someone 100 points lower than the rest of the team's average can drag down the team average (which determines what level of players you go up against.) This is less representative of skill and more of how slow rating grinds can get; if your personal mmr is higher than the opposing team's mmr, you're going to lose more points for a loss and gain less for a win, so people often complain when running with a team or even just one person who isn't on their level. Players don't like to lose 50+ points for a loss and only gain 5 points for a win.