This is not a post about how imbalanced LD is, nor am I talking about the economic impact of LD on the game, although since it’s nearly free to play, I can’t see how it really helps the economy either except in the sense of wealthy players spending hundreds of dollars buying to crystal energy so that they can Punch craft multi-Max UV gear or buy such gear from other players.
This is more about how LD, and maybe most forms of PvP play, destroys the community itself.
Hours spent trying to kill other players creates a callous, arrogant, enraged attitude among the player base. Players who bathe themselves in this environment for hours on end each day emerge from Krogmo’s arena with a stench of vicious vindictiveness that overflows like a sewer in heavy storm and spills out into the rest of the game as a whole. Compound this with a voice chat that allows, and may even encourage, other players both individually and as guilds to belittle and deride other players in the coarsest foul language and sexually explicit terms, and you end up with truly horrific characters who both individually and in groups are warped into creatures who derive pleasure from antics that intentionally attempt to inflict emotional pain on other players, and who then can walk away afterwards feeling perfectly fine about themselves.
I mean, I know the internet often brings out the worst in people, but LD seems diabolically designed to do so. Bearing in mind that we have players as young as 13 (ahem, and often younger), OOO might want to reflect on how this is truly affecting their game since the players who spend the most time in LD seem utterly incapable of even the slightest introspection of their abhorrent behavior.
And that is How I think Lockdown Is Destroying Spiral Knights.
That's what it does to ya.
I wonder if BN is the same.