I GIVE UP.

I recently quit playing a video game.  Not because the game wasn't entertaining, not because the game was flawed, not because of anything to do with the game - or the developer.  I recently quit a video game because a vast majority of people I met were COMPLETE MORONS.

My character was Tayr.  This is a chart of the damage output of my group for a 90+ minute dungeon.  The typical group composed: 1 healer, 1 tank, 1 off-healer, 2 people focusing on damage.  (I've done these dungeons in LESS THAN 20 minutes with a good group).  For the dungeon we were in, the other player who was focused on dps (damage per second) should be 65%+ of what I was doing.

This isn't even the worst of it.

I played a healer as well.  My old guild leader was a tank.  He wanted to be a "dps tank".  Which basically meant that instead of taking skills that reduced the damage he took, he took skills that increased his damage.  So I spent my first few weeks in this new game as a healer, trying to figure out why the hell this game was so ridiculously difficult (I didn't know his theory about tanking until later).  He spent a lot of time berating everyone else because he thought they were at fault.  It wasn't until I really learned how everything worked that I saw how utterly MORONIC this guy really was.

I had a friend in the game and he and I tried playing on other servers, mostly, everything was the same everywhere.  There were only varying degrees of stupid.

Of course, there is oh so much more to this, there are months worth of anecdotes I could discuss, but it all leans to one single thing; I quit playing "Rift" because people are complete fucking morons.

I struggle with this.  I try to imagine what it would take for me to do some of the things that I've seen people do.  This is how you help people learn - you imagine the circumstances that would create a situation where an action that might seem logical, isn't, and then you explain WHY it isn't logical or what is better.  The type of stupidity that I've witnessed can only be explained by retardation (any/all mental deficiencies), alcohol or drugs.  At no point in my life, not even at age 5, would I ever do some of the things that these coherent adults, that I'm speaking with over the internet, do.

How is this even fucking possible?

Here's a link to an MMORPG website to a post I made about quitting:
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/431/view/forums/thread/323790/Average-player-in-this-game-is-really-stupid.html

"I do nothing but scratch my head, and wonder how many of these people even manage to successfully put food into their mouths and chew without choking to death."

The sad thing is, I recently picked up another game and I'm running into a lot of the same things.  How the fuck are we even surviving as a species?

One last note, I know the difference between stupidity and simply not having enough/wrong information.  These people, are stupid.