MMO Drama Storytime featuring DAoC

Spawned from the depths of drama-llama kvetching, we gather here to hear and share dramatic tales of love, deceit, and betrayal that can be found only in the hellish environs of the Massively Multiplayer Online game.

Summoning: IainC Thoro Sjofn Ingmar Guido Jones Neopythia Athryn Carnifex

We start with the aforementioned Alliance drama from Dark Age of Camelot. Here we are now, entertain us.

Sadly, most of my best stories are blurry with age. But it was always super entertaining when some purportedly upstanding guild leader and realm leader turns out - shock, gasp, and amazement! - to have been using radar since approximately forever.

Radar is... bad?

Radar refers to third-party utilities that give you a map of nearby enemies beyond your in-game sight range (it's possible because the game is designed to preload textures into your client before they come into actual view). It's outright cheating.

No sex in that story. Try again please!

All of the stories I have that involve sex are from Guild Wars and World of Warcraft, not from DAoC :(

My favorite was me getting into it with some Texan asshole on the VN Boards about Hilary Clinton, which devolved into him calling me a hairy-legged feminazi at one point. He then went on to apologize to me, not because it was out of line, but because he realized Ingmar was my husband and "I wouldn't want someone speaking to MY wife that way." It's not like *I* was a real person or anything, but Ingmar. Man. His feelings must be considered.

How is this alliance drama? Well, a year or so later, the guild I was GMing, which had become, essentially, the Mid/Igraine Homeless Newbie Shelter for new people to hang out in before one of the "real" guilds adopted them, was being considered for being allowed into a Big Boy Alliance, because my newbies were being fed mostly into guilds from that alliance, and I pointed out it might be a good way for the newbs to get to know people faster (and thus be placed in their Forever Homes faster) if they could at least SEE the alliance chat. The person most passionately arguing against my guild being let in while simultaneously giving no reason other than my "attitude?" My Texan buddy.

He also turned out to use radar. This was apparently well known on the other two realms long before WE actually realized it, but no one reported him or cared, because he was such a shit skald, he was free RPs for anyone he beelined to anyway.

Shouldn't this drama-llama thread also be in the drama-llama forum?

Had to dig into my geriatric memory for any DAoC related stories.

I had just started working for Warcry when Shrouded Isles went into press-beta. I got a couple of copies at my home address along with a Prima guide with a personal note with a little heart in it from Sanya. I felt pretty special. I started in playing a Necro pretty heavily. Like -- forget actual game play, forget playing through the content of the expansion, forget gathering material for a review or doing my job as a member of the press -- I was hooked on the class. Every time I tried to play with a group, it was an absolute frame-killing mob of devs and beta testers anyway, so I found my best experiences just soloing the mobs around the various islands.

And then comes the day when the expansion already hits. By that time, I'm at or very near to max level for the expansion. To my chagrin, people start doing a "/who Necromancer" with a level range, and outside of some dev accounts, I'm at the top of the list. Me -- the press guy who plays alt-tabbed while updating 3 different sites and doing his day job. I'm spammed almost immediately by level 1 Necros looking for tips on how to play the class. It got so bad, I could no longer actually play the game -- all the tells got in the way.

A week or two later, it was all moot. People had reached max level and moved on from the area, as it was either too hard or too easy. But, for a few shining moments, I was the Belle of the Ball.

WELL FINE THEN.

I was derping around in some trash Guild that ran a lot of Tombs back when it was still actually Tombs instead of Heroes' Ascent. We mostly ran dumb gimmicky builds like airspike and bloodspike but whatever, it was Guild Wars and Guild Wars was awesome and fun. I was about... nineteen at the time?

Entertainingly there was some mega dramasplosion that blew up the officer ranks and caused a full guild disband. Turns out that the British lady (in her thirties) that main'd Necro who left her husband to move to the US and be the, uh, 24/7 TPE submissive partner of our mid-twenties GM learned that he'd been sleeping with about a half-dozen other young women, most of them 18-19 years old, and had no less than three venereal diseases he didn't tell her about.

Every part of that arc of events, from beginning to end, was just mindblowingly crazy and dramalicious. Being there to be emotional support for the lady was, uh, really taxing because I didn't want to be judgmental or anything, but at the same time, holy shit drama. Also kind of an education in terms of learning about how not to do relationships.

Ooh! In terms of DAoC "drama" I actually remember, though this has nothing to do with sex.

After I started leading groups with some minimal degree of competence (which was after ToA, so long into the game's life), I got a ton of shit for running a pickup roaming group / pickup gank group on Alb-Percival, both from the people we fought against (about half of whom would always beat us, about half of whom would always lose to us) and from my Realm. You'd think that most of the shit-giving would be related to my voice (which is remarkably youthful, may I say? that must be why I kept getting called out as a girl in voice chat over and over again), or related to Oda Hikaru (the leader of Hand of Fate, who was kind of an arrogant douchebag in-game but a pretty competent Sorc), or running an Alb caster group when that was considered kind of stupid, or just for rerolling from a Wizard to a Cabalist because Spirit Cabalists are awesome.

No, the one thing I got by far the most shit for was for running with the then-RP TL (why can't I remember his name? I don't know!) who played a Paladin. He had Bodyguard, he was willing to listen on Ventrilo even if he wasn't going to speak, and who cares if he types in-character in the middle of a siege? I can read it just fine, thanks. And he was plenty competent; twisted chants properly, BG/Guard swapped properly, etc. But nope, people had a hardon for giving me shit about it.

For a short period of my life, I was a Goon. I paid my forum subscription, and joined Goon guilds. I played Eve. It was pretty pathetic.

And then, they announced a plan to open PvP RP servers for WoW. The worst thing about PvP servers was the griefers: Idiot tweens that would find any excuse to challenge your sexual orientation while shoving a dagger suggestively into your rectum and then slowly teabagging your corpse. An RP PvP server would solve all of that as you could complain to customer service and get someone kicked from the server for playing out of character.

So, the Goons figured they'd exploit this, of course. They (and by they, I mean we, as I was surprisingly involved in the inception of this idea) devised to play a cult. A full blown cult with a crazy outlook on anything, with planned proselytizing in town squares (Crossroads was a favorite), repeated shouts across zone chats, and general trouble-making. I started a blog about it, from my character's perspective. CGM used some of my screenshots in their print media. It was fabulous.

And then someone in customer service got a bug completely up their butt, and people started getting banned. I got put on a 2-day suspension from the game (the first time and only time that's ever happened to me in any online game) after I claimed I was possessed by the spirit of my deity and began shouting (well, spamming) in local chat various things that came to mind as fast as I could type them, all while standing in the opening area of Ogrimmar.

I forgot there even WAS a RP-TL.

Good ol' Alb/Percival, that's where we slummed when we felt like being Albs. The only time I was in a real zerg was on that server, and it blew my mind. People giving you a 10 second count down to get out of the lord room and /stuck on someone, leaving tons of people behind and it not mattering, the Mids circling us like sharks and picking off the stray fish (we were defending against the Hibs, technically). It was amazing.

A Mid/Igraine zerg was like. Ten people, with eight of those people yelling at the other two to STOP ZERGING OMG.

Holy shit, you were mid/igraine too? Apparently everyone who was anyone was from there!

I think I had two level 50 warriors on that server, on different accounts at different times, and a 50 spiritmaster. Only one broke RR5 though. I wasn't dedicated enough. :(

I was in Blade Sworn for a long time. Hung out with Guda and Kingfisher and Lisch a lot. Later played in Dogs of War since they were running more stuff in RvR.

This probably doesn't quite count, but I thought it would be good for a laugh... When I was 15 (back before web browsers were invented) I got told about FurryMUCK. My understanding, not knowing was a furry was, was that it was a place where people pretended to be animals. I thought this was spiffy. So I created a character -- a giant snow owl -- and spent lots of time building a cool house, because every time I tried to interact with other players we both got confused and it wasn't until years later that I understood they were there for sex and I just wanted to be a big owl.

(And this wasn't me being a completely naive kid -- at the same time I was hanging out on BDSM IRC channels -- I just didn't know what a furry was...)

How do these guys collect jailbait like pokemon

how

How is it even possible to be nailing 7 women, presumably having a job, and still have time to be a GM in an MMO? Or am I just underestimating how much more free time you have if you don't procreate?

The what now?

I would invite, to my roaming, 8-man murderfest squad, the person who at the time held the position of "TL", or Team Leader, representing the Roleplaying community (hence, RP TL).

I have kind of lost the details in my memory over the years, but we had not one but TWO large RVR alliances break up and dissolve because of the same one guy who hated seeing people talk on alliance chat. And I don't mean actual conversations, I mean someone logging in and saying "hello".

I started out in the Northern Reavers and then we had a slap fight over something I don't even remember (It ... it MAY have been about cussin' on the guild line. Guess which side I was on!), and a bunch of us split off into a guild called Hand of Tyr. Then eventually most of the HoT people went BACK to NR, but I didn't. I was a guild of one for a while. :D

I didn't hit RR5, too many nights spent retaking all our stupid empty keeps.

I was totally RR10 on VNBoards though.

Wait a minute, did you play on Albion/Nimue?

I ran the English language DAoC servers in Europe. This meant that I was the lead GM and CM plus I was responsible for localisation, QA, the scripted events that we did and all day-to-day server operations. While this sounds terribly impressive, what it boiled down to was that I was in charge of a team of three others who collectively got all that stuff done and wore many hats between us. There were separate teams for the French, German, Spanish and Italian servers but in some cases calling them 'teams' was stretching the term somewhat - the Spanish team was one guy for example.

We didn't have any of the GM tools that Mythic's CSRs did apart from a single app that would let us look at and edit character details. This meant that everything we did was done in game via command lines in chat. When we scripted events or applied hotfixes, we'd read these in line by line from the text file. All of our work was logged but it was fairly easy to obfuscate what you were doing if you wanted to hide your tracks. We had several bent GMs over the years who would spawn items for friends or edit their realm ranks or whatever. Mostly these guys got caught and fired. There was one guy however. who was caught abusing his position to boost his alliance-mates but not fired for some reason. He continued to work on Mythic games for several years. He's now the lead CM for another high profile MMO despite the fact that everyone including his new employer knows what he did.

Then there was the guy who got us to change out hacking policies. Originally we were pretty transparent about what we'd do in the case of a character hack, we'd verify through connection logs, trade logs, chat logs and so forth what had gone on, restore everything that was stolen or trashed and then ban the account who'd done the stealing or trashing. It was pretty trivial for us to see if someone was suddenly connecting from a different IP and that the new IP was exclusively used for a different account previously and we'd always give the benefit of the doubt to the victim. Enter this guy. He got hacked multiple times in the same month. Each time we restored his stuff, banned the hacker and gave him general advice about making his account secure. Then we found out that he'd figured out that this was a cast-iron way to get people he didn't like banned so he'd been setting them up through out-of-game chat, then reporting them. We banned him, unbanned a bunch of guys and changed our policy to be more discretion based. We were then naturally the bad guys because we significantly increased the bar to getting stuff restored. This was a big problem for the Greek community who almost all played from LAN cafés where account sharing (and the inevitable problems that arise from it) was rife.

There was the day that the inventory database on one of our English servers melted. Over that weekend we found out a lot of bad things about the way the game was backed up and that we had to spend 9 months repairing the damage manually because the fix that Mythic sent made it all worse by several orders of magnitude.

I used to play on Gaheris from time to time with an RP guild who included a lot of TLs. I was in a raid with the Paladin TL who insisted on stopping the raid because one of his Paladin abilities wasn't working properly and he not only wanted to bug it but also to see if he could find someone from Mythic to hotfix it right then. He described what the problem was and I told him that it was working correctly (my main in Europe was a RR7 Paladin at the time). He didn't believe me despite the fact that everyone on the raid who'd ever played a Paladin was telling him that he was wrong. We never did finish that raid. Afterwards there was a forum argument and his defence was that somehow I'd broken the server to make him look bad (he knew I worked on the Euro side). The fact that I didn't work for Mythic and didn't have any access to any of the account flags or databases on any US server didn't matter to him.

TL drama was the best drama.

Alb/Nimue was my alt/social experiment server. I would only create characters that violated the naming rules for the RP server, but always give out buffs to every single player I saw. I never got reported. I think this was particularly impressive of theurgist Lando Calrissian, but hey, people like their damage adds.

I slept with a pkiller from the Chesapeake shard of Ultima Online, after she broke up with a guy we both used to run with in-game. He never really forgave me for that, nor did the guy she really wanted to sleep with but who was too messed up to do anything about it. Driving down to meet her taught me several things:

1) Western Ontario may be the most boring place on Earth to drive through.
2) All anyone does in Upper Michigan is drink, get high and then have sex/drive around/hit casinos.
3) Being in a car with someone who tells you on the highway that they're a combination of drunk, stoned and hopped up on pills is so terrifying that you lose any desire for sex, driving around or playing the slots.

I went back to Ottawa the next day and didn't return to the US for ten years. You people are fucking crazy.

Haha, Chesapeake was where I cut my teeth in PvP/PK. Well, outside of a text mud environment anyway. Had many good times there.

As long as you had nothing to do with the system that backed up the databases we can still be friends.

As an aside about your somewhat recalcitrant design colleague, I have on a couple of occasions simply not implemented a requested feature because I thought it was a retardation too far. I had one kicking around in my bug list, unanswered, for probably half a year. Admittedly, my rebellions are limited to much smaller issues than the fundamental design concept of the Trials of Atlantis, and being a network programmer gives me about a zillion other bugs that absolutely must be fixed that I can be doing instead (cable pull results in misleading error message! MUST FIX CLASS A).

When the inventory file for all the characters broke (it was our fault that it broke, a fan had seized so a server overheated and corrupted a bunch of files) we found out that the system that backed the game up was pretty messed up. The game would back up all of the database files every day overwriting the oldest one. There were four backups at any one time each representing a snapshot from ~7am on each of the last four days. We'd previously discovered that the backups by default were saved to the same drive as the original file which didn't seem to be particularly optimal to us so we wrote a batchfile that copied these daily backups to a different drive in our datacentre. What we still didn't realise was that the backup routine didn't actually specify a path, it just found and replaced all the files no matter where they were on the network. So, when our server broke and Mythic didn't get a chance to look at it for four days due to it being Labour Day weekend, the corrupted files overwrote what we thought were safe backups.

We got a cleanup script that erased all of the corrupted data from the file but it didn't replace it with new data so every item in the file got offset by a number of spaces equal to the number of deleted items so far. This meant that almost every character in the database had their items missing and random stuff equipped to impossible slots - like scrolls in the helmet slot or items their realm couldn't even own for example.

If you were ever in the Britain graveyard area between 1998 and 2000, I'm sure we ran into each other (I owned the house right above it). My main was Damocles, but I used Cato the Elder a lot too.

This right here tells you all you need to know about Broken Forum. I think we've found the new mission statement.

I never ran into any particularly exciting drama in WoW (a few of the usual people ripping off the guild bank while "hacked" or taking offense for some reason when told to DIAF) but my server in EQ had what appeared to be more than its fair share. I was an officer in our guild at one point when one member (usually quite a nice person) decided to tear another member (usually quite an asshole) a new, well, asshole in guild chat for no apparent reason. Cognitive dissonance time. (Thinking back, I just realized this story might be about sex; asshole was known to be into the cybering thing, and the nice member was a RL female.) Said asshole predictably escalated it and things got really ugly. Ultimately said asshole did something flagrantly against guild rules and dared us to kick him out. Now, you might think that would be the end of it. The officers' response to that is pretty obvious, no? But for whatever reason, resolution of this took weeks. Painful, tell-filled, officer-meeting filled weeks. Ultimately both parties exited the guild over it, along with various friends and sundry.

Our server apparently was a hotbed of cybering activity -- I'm not sure if all of EQ was like that or if we just ended up with more than our share. The biggest scandal I remember was something involving a well-known enchanter who ran around with her character "naked" (and in EQ that meant something) because her Master instructed her to. He also made her delevel her character if she was "bad," cyber with other guys, etc. This was all explicitly played out in the server forums where she posted her diaries. Her "Master" was not identified and guessing who it was became quite the thing.

Server populations were small enough that this was a thing, at least among raid guild members.