Recall that I spent a few hours redo’ing my EverCrack UI (user interface, noob), another hour redo’ing my hotkeys and checking my spell book … EQ is not kind to those that fall by the wayside … few more hours raising platinum by whoring buffs so that I could buy new and improved buffs, and finally, after about 12 hours prep time, I was ready to reenter the World of Norrath.
I disgust even myself.
A few years ago, I noticed an interesting phenomenom in online gaming; although it will be more conspicuous in the guild ecosystem, I have observed it also in the general populace.
One drama queen will be slain and finally, BLISSFULLY, is out of my gaming life, but, like lopping off a head of the hydra, another drama queen will arise to take the former’s place. After careful analysis (five minutes of drunken thinking one night), I concluded this was because nature abhors a vacuum.
Every stage must have a drama queen. WHY? I do not know, but drama queens are drawn to captive audiences like flies to shit. God love ’em.
Back in my EverQuest life, when I belonged to a high-end raiding guild, we had to endure a nightly live performance. For you noobs out there, a high-end raiding guild is like smoking EverCrack with a pressure cooker. I wasn’t really PLAYING EQ anymore, it was my second job and I was working it. Every night we had an assignment, and if it took two hours to complete (rare), I would get a full night’s sleep. If it took until 5 the next morning, then I got zero sleep.
I played with the same people every night, in just a handful of zones, killing the same handful of boss mobs, usually for zero personal reward, other than the reward of a job well-done and a guildmate pleased with his/her/its new elite lewt. (I am making that up … after about six raids, I was over the “helping others” thing.) Most nights we logged off barely speaking to one another.
Along the way, we recruited this druid, female (maybe), who, initially, was a valuable addition to our numbers. As time went on, my patience began to wear thin as she was CONSTANTLY chattering away in guild channel about her nonexistent sexual relations with her husband (did I need to know that?), what weird ass p0rn she had looked at while at work, or what her dog was doing at any given moment. And! she would end every sentence with lol.
Few days of that shit and she went straight to my ignore list. Sure, there were some embarassing moments when it was obvious that I had /ignored a guildmate, but the peace was well worth making up some bullshit lie why I hadn’t heard her seven responses to my question in a public channel.
Eventually, a few other guildies /ignored her also, to get some respite from the prattle, and it got so prevalent, that we had to arrange a system where we took turns taking her off ignore and reporting if she ever said anything important. I rarely took a turn — I couldn’t be trusted.
Fast forward a few weeks and the guildleader admits defeat in trying to reconcile The Ignorers and The Ignored. So he shitcanned her (after three hours of makeshift psychotherapy –comforting her while she sobbed, ranted, then sulked). W F E. Thanks for stopping.
NOT EVEN ONE WEEK LATER, one of our clerics starts up on the guild stage. How come she’s not the cleric lead? She’s just bitchy lately because she’s pregnant. Her hemorrhoids are so painful, she can’t sit through a whole raid (unless there was cleric loot coming up). Christ.
After a few weeks, I was begging for death.
I realize now that it IS too much to ask that we just play the game. Nightly dramatics, courtesy of the Queen Collective, are mandatory.
It’s always open mic night online. *insert sarcastic clapping*
Today is the final installment of my week-long series on the human refuse that enjoys online gaming (like me, but not like me … really!). I only had about 39,422 more assclowns I could have chosen for today’s story, but I settled on a real life married couple, that I met in EverQuest a few years back, whose tale of misery and woe even took a worldly gaming hag like me by surprise.
The Mr. and the Mrs. both played paladins. At the time, paladins were the whipping boys of EQ, underpowered and dangerously susceptible to being driven by roleplayers. Paladins have since come into their own, but back then … hot damn, they sucked!
Mr. Paladin was a more ambitious sort, however — he was a max level 50 and the guild leader of a respectable raiding guild (mine, at the time). Not an uber guild, by any means, but capable of farming the top-end zones if nothing (and I do mean NOTHING) went wrong. Mrs. Paladin, not as ambitious, was happily roleplaying her way through level 35+ and occasionally would join our guild for zone raids where she could be of any use. (read: not very often)
One week, we started noticing a regular guest at our raids: a dark elf female shadow knight. She wasn’t remarkable in any way; quiet, behaved herself play-wise and not being a skank-wise. But we did notice that she was invited along often and that Mr. Paladin was friendly with her and enjoyed her company … not overly so, however.
Being the shits we are, we would tease Mr. Paladin in guildchat all the time … saying he had a girlfriend, where was his mistress today?, and other asshattery. Even Mrs. Paladin would, good naturedly, laugh along with us and get her digs in also. Mr. Paladin would take only so much then tell us shitheads to knock it off, and the raids (or corpse runs, as the case may be) would go on.
My fellow shitheads and I left the guild at some point, mostly due to stagnating membership and boredom, and joined another guild that was doing tougher zones in Kunark (which had been released about that time). We remained friendly with the people still in Guild Paladin and expressed regret when Mr. Paladin left the game, apparently for greener pastures … or something.
As we found out later from Mrs. Paladin, we shitheads had hit closer to the mark than even we ourselves realized. Turns out, Mr. Paladin was stepping out to see his dark elf chum, in real life, while Mrs. Paladin was at work, also in real life. Mrs. Paladin came home early one day (o god, don’t ever go home early from work without calling first!) and found the Mr. and the dark elf making the beast with two backs. Ya, without any armor even!
They eventually divorced and Mr. Paladin moved out to be with his dark elf mistress 24/7, while Mrs. Paladin bravely continued managing their EQ guild and slowly leveling up her character in her spare time, of which she had a lot more.
As I said earlier, this whole episode took me by surprise: somewhat because I was still naive then, but also because Mr. and Mrs. not only seemed like normal, decent people, they were normal, decent people. Maybe their marriage was in trouble already and when opportunity knocked, it was inevitable that one of them would open the door. Or, maybe online society magnified and exploited some character flaw in the Mr. to their mutual disaster.
It couldn’t have happened to two nicer people. And that’s a shame.