The following was written quite a while ago and uses a Battlefield 2 reference for explanation, but I think the point is clear nevertheless. I do firmly believe there’s a difference between n00bs and newb(ie)s. The latter group consists of people which are new to a game. They display a good sense of teamwork, battlefield overview, have an idea of attacking and defending… what they don’t understand might be the game mechanics and how in detail things work out in a particular game. That is what comes as time passes by. Players like these do well on their own or with random like-minded players. Put one of those in a good community and you’ll still see them improving, exceeding any expectations they themselves might ever have had.

The first category, however, the n00bs, are those that lack some or even all of those very basic skills like battlefield overview or sense of teamwork. They don’t see that it’s stupid to spawn as sniper (or even spawn at all) when armor is camping their spawnpoint. They might see that it can be fun to camp the Palace Security Office on “Warlord” from the roof across the road, for example, but don’t see that someone will have to move and capture or recapture flags every now and then.
They’re the kind of players that let their squadleader go down next to them and can’t revive because they spawned as assault, spec Ops, support, sniper and don’t know that pressing ‘G’ picks up the other guy’s kit to revive them, because they didn’t take a few minutes to learn the controls.

That kind of players never gets into good communities because members of good communities forget about them once a round ended and kick them from squads because they turn out to be non-supportive. That kind of players ends up in mediocre clans, if at all, groups of like-minded people who spend more time complaining about others, accusing everyone and their aunt of hacking and cheating, instead of learning the game, it’s controls and mechanics.

Those players can’t be helped by good communities because they don’t see they need to practice and improve their abilities and good communities won’t give a shit about yet another (below) average player who responds unkindly or downright hostile to constructive criticism and suggestions.