I know I'm a n00b, you don't have to tell me.

I don’t play many online games, unless I’m playing with friends. I don’t have the time to play them endlessly (or even to write about them, hence the hasty disregard for grammar in some of my sentences) so I never really get a chance to practice. When a new game comes out the online crowd quickly outstrips my skill and I am left behind. Even so it's not that which stops me playing, it’s the intense aggression of some people which really pisses me off. 

This is Subspace (aka Continuum) in its glory days I was
actually surprisingly crap at this too.

I used to play a game called Subspace years and years ago. It was a really competitive and highly skilled 2D space shooter (I will probably post about it one day). But the community made Dota’s look like the Salvation Army. The learning curve was high and the irritation toward new players was vicious. Now the game is old and while it's still around it is decaying slowly into obscurity. It makes me feel quite sad, I played it in its hay day for 1000s of hours and loved it, but now whenever I go back, it feels bitter and resentful and  the intolerance is still there, but older and more ingrained. It’s a shame because it undermines the efforts of those working hard to save it.

I dabbled a bit with Halo 3 too. I remember a game I was playing with my friend, he was much better than me so we were matched with other really good players. After getting continually crushed for round after round I finally made some progress and strung a few kills together. I seemed to be alright with the shotgun so I stuck to the twisting corridors, surprising people as they chased me round corners. That was until I ran into one of my own team and shot him by mistake. He screamed at me over voice-com using all the profanities I could name. The worst thing was he sounded about eight, a high pitched, squealing, angry child berating me down his microphone. He verbally attacked me for the rest of the round and the whole of the next one too. In the end I got fed up, team killed him twice more on purpose and quit. I pretty much stopped playing after that. 

TF2 does seem a happier place, must be all the hats

I know there are people out there who invest a lot of time in teaching new players and there are lots of accepting and encouraging communities too. It just seems to me that I have a knob limit. Every time someone is a knob it slowly adds to an accumulating total until I hit a point at which I just get fed up and do something else instead. It doesn't have to be directed at me either, if it's just on general chat it still inches me closer to my threshold. I think we all have one too, it's just some peoples limits are higher than others. Mine, however, is particularly low. It's a shame because there are some great games out there I am missing out on. But equally, there are a lot of knobs too.