Wednesday, October 24, 2007

The Other Side

Ozzy made a comment on my last post that I think is becoming far too common.

People are shying away from online gaming because they can’t be bothered dealing with the douchebags who play to talk trash or ruin everyone else’s fun.

Speaking from experience, I’ve played online games with people I know from real life, blogging or from elsewhere on the internet and it’s a hell of a lot of fun. I just think it’s sad that people are robbing themselves of that experience because of idiots.

This whole topic reminds me of a comment MC Etcher made after one of my posts on ‘internet predators’. I have to paraphrase (it’s been at least a year since I wrote that post) but if I remember rightly, he made the point that the internet is just made up of regular people. If the world is 20% idiots, 20% of the people you meet online will be idiots.

Of course, when it comes to plain old douchebaggery, this number inflates a little because the people who don’t have the balls to talk trash in real life have no problem acting like assholes with the anonymity the internet provides.

The worst thing about this is, the more people that turn away from online gaming to avoid those annoying people, the higher the ratio of ‘ass-clown to normal person’ online.

Luckily, idiots aren’t quite as widespread as you might think.

For example, here’s my experience playing WoW today:

First of all, I needed help with a quest, and a high-level guildmate helped me out. This doesn’t seem like such a big deal, but you have to understand that this was a long quest, taking a couple of hours and the person that helped me got absolutely nothing out of it but my thanks.

While I got lots of experience points, the enemies we fought were too low level to give my guildmate any.

Long story short, someone took a couple of hours out of their life, doing a quest they’d already done for no other reason than to help me out. Bear in mind that this was time they could have spent advancing their own character.

When we’d finished, I offered to ‘tip’ him for his help and he simply said:

“Don’t worry about it, I remember being where you are. If you need help on anything else and I’m online, just let me know.”

Secondly, in stark contrast to yesterday, I got challenged to a duel. This time however, I was waiting for a ship to come in at a port, so I had nothing else to do. My challenger was only a couple levels above me so I accepted.

It was a really close thing, but I got beaten. Half expecting a long tirade of “OMG u suck! In ur face n00b!”, I was pleasantly surprised when the guy said.

“Good match! Close one…you nearly had me right at the end. Rematch?”

“Sure.” I said.

That time, knowing his tactics, I scraped a victory.

After that, the ship arrived and we realized we were heading to the same place for the same quest so we teamed up. After a bit of travel, we fought through a cave system, killed the boss and came to a chest.

Normally, the ‘etiquette’ here is to ‘roll’ for the right to loot the chest. (You type /roll and it generates a random number between 1 and 100, whoever gets the high number gets the chest.)

“Wanna roll for the chest?” I said.

“Nah, you have it, I got the blue (high level) weapon the boss dropped, you take it.”

“Sure?” I asked.

“Yeah go ahead.”

Basically, when a bad guy drops a high-level item, the game automatically rolls to decide who in the group gets it. That’s why he got the good weapon, because he won the roll. Normal playing etiquette says that you roll for everything of value (manually or automatically)…if you lose every roll, too bad, better luck next time.

So you can understand why it’s a fairly big deal for a player to give up his chance to get the contents of a treasure chest, just because of their own sense of fairness.

Basically, I suppose my overall point is that the majority of players (at least in WoW) are just out to have some fun. Unfortunately too many people let the idiot minority spoil it.

All I’m gonna say is…ass-hats are what the mute button is for.

Anyway, if anyone feels like giving WoW a tryout, you can download the client for free and get a free week playing. I also got three 1 week “guest passes” with my retail version that I’d be happy to give out to anyone who wants them.

If you give it a try, let me know and be sure create your character on the Aerie Peak server.

1 comment:

OzzyC said...

It's good to know that a few decent people still exist in the online gaming community.