Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

A bad MMORPG day

I tend to spend a lot of my spare time playing computer games, and especially Dark Age Of Camelot, which is one of those massively-multiplayer online roleplaying games (an MMORPG - try pronouncing that as one word). It's quite fun - you get to kill mean and nasty monsters, and ultimately you get to kill mean and nasty fellow players as well, as the game concerns itself mostly with the eternal struggle between the three realms of Albion (snooty tea-drinking zerg merchants), Hibernia (damn hippy elfy tree-hugging hairspray merchants) and Midgard (super brave Nordic dwarfs and trolls and stuff, hurrah!).

But this evening I found myself wondering why I bother to play something that's supposed to be a game, something you play for fun, when some peoples' behaviour in-game makes me so cross. After a pretty bad day at work (don't even ask), I logged on for a bit of light monster-killing and such fun. Firstly, I found that the rest of the council in my guild had called a snap vote on a pretty contentious issue and forced it through without any prior warning or discussion while I wasn't even there, so I felt pretty angry and betrayed by that. Secondly, I found a group to kill things with (hooray!), but by the time my little healer got to the right place, they'd just all died and decided to disband, leaving me in the middle of nowhere. Finally, some jerk messaged me with a bunch of questions using nothing more than monosyllables and leetspeak ("spec m8?"), and mostly asking for information which was easily available using a simple game command (such as what level I was). Against my better judgement, I answered them because, hell, I didn't have anything better to do and it was better than no prospect of finding a group anywhere at all. Evidently after a couple of rounds they decided they didn't want me and just dropped the conversation without so much as an apology or a wish for good hunting elsewhere or, well, something even slightly role-playingish. Pretty damn rude behaviour really - after you've hassled someone like that, you could at least be polite about not needing them after all.

I mean, bloody hell. Why do I keep playing if I get so frustrated by it all? When it's good, it's great - I really enjoy it - but right now I feel like deleting my characters and throwing my PC out of the window in frustration. Maybe I will. (the former, mind, not the latter - that would be kind of an own goal as I'd have to buy a new one) Posted by mpk at February 16, 2004 10:53 PM | TrackBack