Faction Attitudes

I've been playing some of my Imperial max-level alts lately. As my fourth Republic character slowly makes her way towards Command Rank 300, I figured it was about time to give the other faction some love. (And not just because yesterday's patch introduced an achievement to get all eight classes to 300. Only mostly.)

However, I've also found that for some reason pugging on Imp side is a bit more likely to frustrate me. I keep running into attitudes that annoy me, and I wonder whether there is some truth to my perception or whether I'm just biased.

Actually, I think there can be no doubt about character distribution in terms of light and dark side at least. Go pug the Esseles five times and tell me how many times you got to sell out Ambassador Asara. Zero, right? Now pug the Black Talon five times and tell me how many times Captain Orzik survived. Maybe once - if you got lucky.

It's understandable though. While the game allows you to play a kind Sith or an evil Jedi, it's more natural for people to choose the Republic if they want to play a good guy and the Empire if they want to be evil.

However, people don't just roleplay differently. I've also found that Republic players are more likely to at least try to be team players. Now, I'm not claiming that all Republic players are one way and all Imperials another. I'm not even saying the majority on each side is one way or another. But at least to me it seems that attempts at team play are a bit more common on Republic side.

While doing warzones as an Imp, I repeatedly found myself abandoned guarding a node or door, my cries for help as I was trying to stay alive in the face of two or three attackers soundly ignored. Whenever I died and watched the enemy cap, I couldn't help but think: "Typical Imps". On Pub side I almost always get support. People may be slow or run around like headless chickens in other areas of the map, but usually someone will at least try to help.

Imps are also perfectionists. In a Lost Island hardmode run the other night I was healing on my Sorc, when the tank suddenly started berating me for my healing, even though we had a great run with no deaths whatsoever. Earlier he had also moaned about how slow everyone was when I hung back to help a party member who didn't know how to skip the trash at the beginning and pulled something by accident. (Note that the tank himself didn't lift a finger to actually help kill things or guide the person through!) I couldn't help but think about how a Rep pug would most likely just have high-fived each other for having had such an awesome run. Here it was nothing but moaning about how we didn't quite meet the tank's standards for perfection. Again, I see similar things in PvP. People get angry in chat on both sides when they are losing, but it seems to be mostly Imps who start shouting at people for playing sub-optimally even while their team is in the lead.

The one thing I will hand to the Imps is that they seem to have more of the really good players. When I see truly outstanding play in PvP, it's almost always from an Imp - as long as we're talking pure duelling skills, that is. When it comes to objectives, their disinterest in team play (see above) sometimes gets the better of them and they do things like run away from objectives just to get one more killing blow, resulting in a loss despite of their superior ability to kill the enemy. Again, I'm not saying that I've never seen a Pub player do this - it just seem to observe it on the other faction much more often.

Still, in the end I have no numbers to back up my observations either way, so it might just all be bias. Do your experiences with the two factions match my own perceptions? I would expect Imp players to disagree that they have more unpleasant individuals among their ranks, though I'm sure they'll be happy to accept the compliment of supposedly having the better players...