I think the main issue is the general sense of elitism in the roguelike community as a whole (this is not isolated to Crawl).
From the start, roguelikes have been designed with very high difficulty in mind. This naturally results in a small group of players with much better skill than the vast majority of the gaming audience. Due to the large investment in time and effort needed to play well, it's not easy for a skilled player to resist the temptation to put down newcomers when they make mistakes.
Crawl can be just as difficult as other traditional roguelikes out there, but it's designed to be as fair to the player as possible while still sticking to the basic principles of a roguelike. This makes it a lot attractive to beginners than most other roguelikes, which means that there
will be lots of newbies making mistakes that, while blindingly obvious to experts, may not be to most players. It's important to realize that we were all beginners at one point and as tempting as it may be to put down players for silly mistakes, that there's ultimately a person at the other end of the conservation that deserves to be treated nicely.
I'm saying this as a beginner myself who has never actually won a game and only managed to get to my first runes a few days ago. My experience with this forum has been positive but I still can't shake that feeling of elitism. I've been able to get some good advice and have received constructive feedback and friendly responses as long as I approach the community nicely and demonstrate a desire to improve (hint to newcomers
). However, the tone of posts I often encounter here can be intimidating and has tended to be colder than most other communities I've participated in.
I realize that this is a very hard issue to address so I don't expect sweeping changes right off the bat, but perhaps better community moderation and reminders throughout the forums that we need to be nice to others would be a good way to begin addressing this issue.