MMO Drama Storytime featuring DAoC

I have no idea what a cloudsong is. Never played Dork Age of Camazotz.

Having your Cloudsong stolen is serious business.

If it's the Paladin TL I'm thinking of, the man was an idiot. Like, holy shit. Pages of tests to prove that Quickness improved runspeed!

Most of my drama is lost to the mists of Therapy. I recall our elite pvpers (GO AHEAD AND LAUGH, INGMAR!) getting into a huge clusterfuck of a fight with me on the boards and in realm about MLs and why my quest to get everyone to at least ML5 was a waste of time because our elites had MLs covered. I recall someone cross-realming with me in IRC once to kill someone who had an alt-account (Nate? Something. They just sent me that he was farming his alt in one under-used zone, so I went and camped his ass). I recall a whole mess of internal drama between two women that somehow involved me, then years later out of game finding that other person and we had a heart to heart. Found out she had no idea what I was talking about and had loaned her account out to someone for a bit while on vacation and they'd caused a giant alliance clusterfuck with it. I found out a month after I quit that someone I respected quite a bit as a good friend and had even met in person had been spreading a rumor that I quit because I was sleeping around with the alliance (still don't understand this one)

Igraine was serious fucking Drama. Hib/Bors never had much bullshit. Igraine was wall to wall idiocy most of the time. From my later perspective, it was all pretty much half a dozen people who were simply fueled by drama and running our alliances. The guild leader checkbox apparently had an emotional issues requirement.

edit: the only MMO Drama I really sort of enjoy looking back was when our tiny guild had someone decide I was an intolerable dick, call me a Petulant Child and quit the guild, having never before said a word to me. Admittedly, it was over me giving Ingmar a bunch of shit over warriors sucking (IIRC prot warrior leveling did indeed suck at the time), and my inability to remember to not use the term "retarded" to describe the various groups I joined. That's like, the one shit word I can't remember to stop using.

I wasn't really personally involved in any drama in my EQ days, but I remember a few stories. A guild that I had been doing some grouping and raiding with had their old guild leader return to the game after some time away, and he asked to be given the guild leader flag just temporarily, just for ol' times sake, you know. As soon as they gave it to him, he disbanded the guild, and back in those days, that was permanent and irrevocable, and the GMs would just say "too bad, your trust issues are not our problem." Turned out he didn't like the direction the guild had been heading without him, and that was his solution to the problem. Looking back, some of the members later said that it might have been for the best after all as they wound up splitting into a few other guilds, each with a clearer focus (EQ at the time was still a hotbed of raiding-vs-pubbing, hardcore-vs-casual, order-vs-anarchy struggles), but at the time it certainly pissed off a lot of people.

Another weird case involving guild leaders was when it was reported that the leader of one of the biggest raiding guilds was killed in a car accident. For a while after that there wasn't much drama besides some hand-wringing about the direction of the guild and what-would-he-have-thought-about-this, but about a year later, the guild leader suddenly resurfaced. He had some crazy story about how he'd been in the hospital for so long and it was actually his roommate who had died in the accident but their third roommate had deliberately misreported it because he was jealous of how he spent all his time in EQ or something, but they were sharing accounts so in a way it was kinda true, and none of this had been reported or cleared up any earlier because SHUT UP aren't you glad to see me again? He rejoined the guild, but I don't think many people took him very seriously after that.

Edit: Also, I have no idea what, but something seems to have happened to my old WoW guild. It went from the usual couple hundred members down to 3, none of whom are familiar to me. Not even the barely-touched bank mule alts of long-lapsed members were left. Somebody joined, took over, and then proceeded to purge everyone else, I guess.

You and I are very, very different people.

Do entirely VN Boards dramafests count? Because I'm pretty sure most of us from Igraine played the boards more than the game in the end.

When I first started EQ2, I was playing with some coworkers - a woman in my department gave me one of those two-week trials or something, so the only in-game people I knew when I started playing were RL acquaintances that I knew through my job. Protip: Don't do that.

None of the inevitable drama reflected on me personally, and we were all in different departments at work so it's not like any bad blood could really impact anyone's job, but it did (eventually) make some things weird. We'd have some meltdown over raid loot one night and then you'd see your raid leader or the emo druid in the halls at the office the next morning, looking sheepish or righteously indignant as the occasion warranted.

That sounds way more interesting to me, SuperJay. It reminds me of when we used to play Diplomacy* in high school, where we would only meet during lunch to play out the actual moves. The rest of the time during the day we'd have to track down various other players in order to try and make deals and plan strategy by quick meetings in between classes or note-passing. It was fucking awesome.

* Hi! I'm old!

I never played DaoC, but the Cloudsong video (back in those days, just an audio file floating around, and then I think someone put it to a WoW video to confuse matters) left a lasting impression. For awhile when City of Villains was brand new, my highest-leveled villain was a "stalker" (that game's stealthy bastard class) named Cloudsong Thief, with a biography blurb about how he was constantly on the run for fear of his nemesis finding him and breaking his foot. I'd get several random PMs every time I'd play from passersby expressing lolling for it.

The only WoW guild drama I was tangentially involved in was helping to recruit a priest player who I and several guildmates had a few good pickup grouping experiences with. It was a small guild, so anyone who could actually function as their class was in high demand; we were all still leveling up and doing dungeons as they came and she was usually involved. People started hitting level cap, and then one day she up and quit. Which was fine, but for the I'm Leaving And Here's Why! post she made on the forums we were using. Which is also fine (though such things are a bit attention-seeky by nature--insert "hiatus" in stage cough here), but the reasons were just remarkably incoherent. She'd joined a raid with her husband (also fine; the guild was casual back then and hardly territorial about such things) in a much more hardcore-dedicated-to-raiding-and-whatnot guild, ventrillo-or-equivalent in play, and there was the usual sort of bad behavior on it. Faggot this and lolrape that, the usual sort of 30-year-olds-being-worse-than-13-year-olds #1reasonwhy territory. Which, understandably again, she didn't enjoy being in the presence of, she said.

That's where the hilarity kicked in. Bear in mind this was some other guild entirely, of which she was the only player from our own guild. She had seen what people acted like when raiding, and she wanted no part of it! She knew we would do exactly the same, even though our guild was firmly aggressive about coming down hard on any of that kind of behavior (founding principles of being LGBT- and woman friendly because we all preferred playing with adults) but she knew otherwise! So she quit. To which the collective reaction was mostly summed up as "Huh. Weird." Then a few weeks later we started seeing her active and about on the server again, pointedly ignoring all of us...and a member of the guild she had raided with that had acted so terribly that it made her quit the guild that wasn't acting that way. To which the general reaction was more of a "What? Wow, okay. Turns out she was crazy!"

I took a brief break from my loving (GO AHEAD AND LAUGH, INGMAR) WoW guild to run around in a raid guild's leadership for a bit back in Vanilla. Somehow, I turned into the officer that everyone confessed their personal problems to mid raid, and also the officer in charge of making sure the GM didn't try to murder every single raid member through the internets. I presume this is Sjofn's role in my real guild, though thinking about it the reality may be more Ingmar holding back Sjofn's unchecked rage.

Speaking of which, this is less Guild Drama and more hilarious: We were doing some random WoW raid with two trash tanks (Sjofn and Ingmar), and we never really bothered assigning healers and such. So during this pull Sjofn does fine, and Ingmar dies a very slow and painful death, because apparently all of us healers had decided to heal Sjofn and nobody bothered moving to heal Ingmar. WE MADE OUR CHOICE, OKAY?

Well, then I must be old fashioned because we used to play Diplo on weekends in school with our Global History teacher. He was a cool guy. He even used Age of Empires as a teaching tool (Not teaching history, but teamwork and resource management).

The servers had their weird soft-merge thing and Nimue + Percival ended up sort of joined at the hip.

I mentioned this in the other thread, but my only real example of MOO drama came from EverQuest. For the most part my guild was pretty sedate. We didn't use DKPs because our guild leader felt that they lead to problems so he just kept track of who was most deserving of what and for the most part no one had any problems with it and it was all pretty fair. He was a good guy and people really did seem to get out what they put in. A benevolent dictatorship, almost like Broken Forum.

Then we had our meetup in Las Vegas. Three relationships that existed prior to the meetup were dissolved due to infidelity. Almost everyone got drunk, stoned, laid or a combination of the three. And this shouldn't shock anyone, cos while there were plenty of basement dwellers who played EQ, at that point the sort of people who played that early MMO and were likely to go to a meetup were the sorts of early to mid-20s 'living on my own!' individuals with lots of disposable cash and serious urges. Boys and girls. More notable is that one of our server GMs showed up, which was a big no-no. On EQ a server GM wasn't allowed to play on his own server, much less make friends with guilds and go to their meetups. She loved our guild though so came to our meetup and then basically made herself available to anyone interested in naked-times, male or female. Which was a lot of people. More than one at a time, from what some people were saying.

My roommate and I were in the same guild, so we booked our tickets together and planned to stay in the same room. Except his wood elf druid friend showed up and she hadn't even booked a room and suddenly I had no room and he was pounding Kelethin ass while I sat in the hall. In the end I had to get my own room, which pissed me off immensely. Years later he'd apologize. Though that would be after he let her move into our apartment. And her kid. (There's a whole other non-MMO story related to that. One that lead jerri blank to once call me a serial killer in the making! But that's a whole different shoe full of shit.) That wasn't the worst thing he did to me on that trip, though.

I head back to my room after a night of guzzling redbull and vodkas 'til I felt a little too good and about an hour later there's a pounding at my door. I get up and answer it and there's our guild's lead bard there, crying. Her ex-husband, our guild's lead paladin, had also come on the trip. And he'd gotten drunk and decided to rekindle their relationship despite her repeated cries of no. She'd gotten away, but wanted some place to hide, so I let her hang out in my room. Eventually she went to clean up in the bathroom which was when there was MORE pounding at my door. There was the paladin, drunk and super pissed. "Hey, is <ex-wife's name> here?!" Me, "Nope." Him, "Who's in your shower?" Me, "A prostitute. What's up?" Him, "You're fuckin' LYING to me!" this said as he shoves hard on the door, trying to get in. "Your fag roommate told me she was in here! He told me she came to your room!" He starts swinging at me through the cracked door and manages to catch me in the chin before I slam the door on his wrist. He screams, ends up banging his head on the door (through no cool action of my own, he was just that drunk, one should not assume I did anything heroic here, I was drunk and terrified and had a bruised face), flops to the ground and crawls off, howling about how he's going to kill me.

The next day I heard nothing more about it. Though I gave my 'best friend' a fucking earful. He was highly apologetic, not havng realized the exact circumstances of the situation.

I never went to another guild get together again.

First of all, this is the mildest (though perhaps silliest, in a nice way) FurryMUCK story I've ever heard. But if we're going to talk MUCKs, then we might as well talk MUSHes and if we're going to talk MUSHes, then just stand back, cos I'll win this game. Like there's the guy who first got me into MUSHes. He'd been a friend of mine on The Sierra Network and when it started folding we moved to playing on a World of Darkness MUSH where he played a Catholic priest and Celestial Chorus mage. Except he didn't let this character concept stop him from being a massively horny dog, so his character was constantly TSing (TinySexing, the MUSH term used for hotchat/cybering, so named cos the most popular MUSH client at the time was called TinyFugue) a parade of girls. Eventually his character married one and they adopted a homeless girl and then he TSed with the kid. So. You know. But all that's IC, so it's not all that interesting. What's better is that he wasn't sated with tinysex, he needed hot, blistering phone sex. And he had his favorite. So he gave her his phone card information cos she didn't have long distance (or something, it was the 90s, I forget the small details) so she could call him any time day or night so they could rub one out together. Except she wasn't exclusive and she ended up using the card to phone sex some other dude. A lot. Eventually my friend (who was less a friend by this point and more the punchline of a joke I loved to tell) got his bill and discovered to his dismay that he was suddenly destitute. Now, imagine I am walking out of the room, all satisfied that my story was awesome. Wait, no! I stop! Peter Falk-style, I spin back to you and add, "Oh, did I mention he was engaged to a girl who played on the game and had no idea about any of this?" Cue sting!

And this is just, like, one of a million stories. Many of which are way worse. Like, I knew a guy who got involved with a married woman through a game. She ended up so certain she was going to leave her husband for him that she aborted the child she was having with her husband. They ended up spending a week together, during which she remembered that her husband is filthy rich and her new boyfriend lived with his wife in an apartment rented from his father-in-law above his father-in-law's electronics store. So. Yeah. She went back to her husband. MUSHing was fucked, cos there were far fewer people than on an MMO and everyone ended up intertwined and eventually the dirty laundry would air.

IainC, did you ever get a call to investigate a certain ex-guildmaster of Purple Warriors on Midgard/Excalibur?

There was a middling amount of drama, mostly created by him, around the fact that he was taken down from the role of guildmaster because, well, he hadn't been doing shit as an actual officer and only used the position to lord it over the lowly peons in the guild, and had only been made co-GM in the first place because he was one of the original founding eight.

Anyway, after a fair bit of back and forth on guildchat and, I'm told, much more on the officer channel, he ended up quitting the guild to start up his own one. He found a bunch of gullible saps willing to help him start it, and through a combination of bullying and blatant lies persuaded some of the more impressionable, younger members of PW to split off and join him instead.

One of our members had a chat with one of the new members of the ex-GM's new guild, and the depths of the guy's divorce from reality started to come clear. Firstly, he claimed to be "fluent in Latin"(which I found doubtful, given that he seemed less than fluent in his own Swedish, never mind English), and used that to name their guild... something that he thought meant, well, "Purple Warriors" in Latin, but on closer inspection and guildwide leafing through Latin dictionaries turned out to mean something closer to "royal pink". He then convinced his players that they were the REAL Purple Warriors, because Purple Warriors was him and him alone, because he had started the original guild all on his lonesome because that was one of the powers he had as a GM. No, not guildmaster. Game master. As in, official representative of GOA/Mythic. He'd somehow convinced his players - without showing any of his supposed powers, of course, because that would be abuse of his position - that he'd been given GM powers because he was supposedly one of the original testers of the game before launch. Yes, really.

Several of us submitted reports of "impersonation of GM".

Also, Bahimiron, did you ever hear about that WoD MUSH player who tried to sue a small forum devoted to mocking people's horrible descriptions, backgrounds and RP, for intellectual property theft because they put her terrible, terrible description up on their boards and proceeded to soundly poke fun at it? Yes, she really went to a lawyer and told them she wanted to sue and got them to go along with it. Nothing actually came of it, of course, but the letters from the lawyers investigating the matter apparently had kind of an incredulous tone.

RE: Neopythia's post above - in my experience, MMOs tend to attract a lot of people, both male and female, whose insecurities, loneliness, unhappiness and other RL problems make them epicenters for drama and associated crazytimes. Some of the drama is hilariously lulzy, but a lot of what I saw in EQ2 in WoW was just really sad and regrettable. After I'd quit WoW, for example, I heard from a friend about a married couple in our guild that split up and eventually divorced when the husband found out that his wife had been cybering with another guy in the guild for quite a while. She and the new guy both quit the guild and transferred servers, and then they moved in together after her marriage fell apart. Just a horrible situation all around.

Playing WoW was like living in a soap opera half the time. I'll stick with my console games and strategy titles where I don't have to deal with the explosive reactions resulting from the intermingling of dozens of peoples' emotional and psychological instabilities.

I don't know about my other Fake Internet Friends, but when moving from DAOC to WoW, I basically ignored the server as a whole beyond a few PUG friends and only talked to my guild due to how much drama I'd experienced in DAOC. And I was one of the more social players as far as "talking to non guildies" went to start. Eventually someone became social, because NEW PEOPLE started showing up and becoming guild friends! NEW PEOPLE!

I will say in the drama thread that I'm deeply happy to have met gaming friends who pretty much top out their drama at "no seriously, stop being polite and someone roll on the fucking loot, Christ", or "Oh look, a jumping puzzle. AFK for an hour while the guild fails at this"

Nymeria. She's a fucking loon. One that did end up being good friends with George R. R. Martin and runs his website or something.

Yes. That's Nymeria/Linda Antonsson. She runs Westeros.org, the A Song of Ice and Fire website. She's become good friends with George R R Martin through the site and is writing a book with him that's meant to be sort of a final word dictionary/encyclopedia of ASoIaF lore.

If MUSHing has taught me anything, it's that being a vile, narcissistic lunatic is by no means a barrier to success in life.

So wait, you were on Hib/Bors as Kildorn? If so The Cult just keeps popping up in my life.

Also you left Bors before all the interesting stuff happened :P

I always wondered with the avatar if you were my old Guido. Fucking Cultists everywhere.

Is this the story where you basically made a small child into your unwitting accomplice to break up your roommate and his girlfriend? Because if so, that is the best story ever.

The only real MMO drama I can recall was in the raiding guild I was a part of back in vanilla WOW, back in the days when clearing Molten Core took two nights of raiding with an Onyxia warm-up. Tons of fun in the early days, starting out as the #5 warrior in the rotation and eventually becoming the guild's #2 tank, but part of the reason I loved the guild was the use of the Suicide Kings loot system as opposed to DKP or other ridiculous systems. One of the unspoken rules of the guild was that if even when your turn was up to get loot, and it could benefit the raid as a whole by letting someone else take it (i.e. you're a Fury warrior and an awesome shield drops that would be a huge upgrade for the tank, you should let the tank get it) then you do the honorable thing and pass.

We had this kid in the guild who was 16 at the time, and coincidentally the guild leader's nephew. And a big enough stoner to make Demon G Sides look like Tipper Gore. The kid was CONSTANTLY baked for runs, but wasn't a bad off-tank as a paladin. So we're running through MC and the Obsidian-Edged Blade drops. At the time, I was an Arms warrior and the OEB was at the top of my wish-list for Friggin' Sweet Gear. This kid's up in the SK rotation and instead of passing on the two-handed weapon, he decides to take it and re-spec to a Retribution paladin. This not only left the raid without our off-tank, he didn't have any of the other gear to support a Retribution build. There was a lot of internal griping in the warrior channel, but we agreed not to make an issue out of it.

The Paladin group leader, however, was LIVID when he returned the next week. He called the kid out during pre-raid prep on Vent and demanded that he explain his reasoning for not passing on the OEB.

His incredibly-baked response: "I recline to explain my actions."

"...what? Just give us something, why would you do that?"

"I recline, man."

It was the funniest thing ever. Weeks later he'd personally apologize to me and swear that the next time he came up in the loot queue he'd defer to me if I wanted. Which was cool of him, I suppose. But "I recline!" became our new guild shorthand for "I fucked up and refuse to explain why!"

And I was curious if someone else used "Kildorn" :p

For my first story it'll be the time Kildorn tried to get me kicked out of the guild I would later GM for breaking up duels in Emain! Actually that's not that interesting :p Also also that was someone else completely, so nevermind that story at all.

So for the story I was summoned to the thread for - I ended up being one of the core players in a semi-casual gank group that lasted from before SI until sometime after the release of Lab of the minotaur. We were semi-casual in that we were serious about winning, and winning was the goal, but we didn't radar, we didn't play 18 hours a day, and were mostly adults with jobs. We also didn't have a set group - we'd play with just about anybody that was good, and we'd invite people we knew were good players as needed.

Anyway, the group changed a lot over the years as we played, and we kept picking up different bards (the most important part of any Hib group). We finally ended up with a guy I'll call Achilles that borrowed a level 50 bard account from one of our original guild members who no longer played. Achilles lived in Virginia, and had somehow developed relationships with the Mythic employees. He'd drop pizza off for the CS guys on weekend nights, and was generally buddy buddy with a lot of people there. He eventually let a female dev move in with him (Charlene) as she'd just broken up with her fiancé. She ended up playing with us sometimes as well, but was fairly annoying so that stopped. Achilles would regale us with his relationship status, how they were dating and other sordid details. Eventually he tells us that they're engaged.

This all happens over about a year or year and a half - eventually Achilles starts playing with another group that he apparently likes more, and leaves us high and dry without a bard. This pisses off my group something fierce - not only can we not RvR anymore, but he's basically stolen our guildies level 50 bard. It's at this point, one of the other long time members of the group (a guy named Barroom) tells me that Achilles had been logging in and using Charlene's Dev tools to create gold for Barroom and Achilles use, as well as creating super characters on Pendragon (level 50 all paths) to screw around with.

He'd never told me before that as he knew I would report them to Mythic - I'd been the Hero TL and on the internal pendragon boards for many years and had reported other exploits in the past (even stuff that hurt our group). I did report Achilles, which caused a huge fracas at Mythic, getting Charlene in trouble. While the investigation was ongoing, one of the other Devs I was pretty friendly with at Mythic called my cell phone and started asking for more details on Charlene and Achilles relationship. I eventually get out of my dev friend that he'd been dating Charlene the entire time, Achilles and Charlene weren't engaged. Given the details I'd gotten via Ventrilo from Achilles (unsolicited mind you, I don't care about his sex life) it was likely they were just fuck buddies and he was having delusions of grandeur (which he was prone to).

Mythic investigated and found no logs that anything had happened on production servers - even though Barroom swears up and down that the the CSR crystal had appeared in front of him and handed him plat. Charlene apparently got in some trouble for having CSR tools on her home system, but wasn't fired. Achilles kept the bard account after reaching some agreement with our no longer playing guildie. And being very disillusioned with the game I quit :)

Nothing really compared to Bahim's story, but that was the most interesting drama for DAoC for me. Tons of other little server drama related stuff (call someones wife a stupid motherfucker after a ML3 raid and he'll hate you for life, having the alliance vote on whether to kick your guild out - then after voting to keep us leaving anyway just to spite them, various "you stole my cloudsong" like incidents, etc)

I vaguely remember something like that. I don't remember the details but I do recall that there were a bunch of CS tickets from various people asking/begging/demanding to be instated as the GM of PW or for the current round of officers to be banned or whatever. As I said I was good friends with Svartmetall so I pinged him on MSN and got him to explain what was going on, satisfied myself that no-one needed to be de-GMed and told the other guy to move on with his life IIRC.

That is drama I don't remember! Especially because as an Alb I liked to fuck with people I found dueling. I was an odd Hib (seriously, barely remember Hib/Bors. As you're probably aware I was going through a mess of RL drama at the time)

Though in hindsight: you probably deserved it :P

Actually that wasn't you. I apologize! It's so long ago some of the details are hazy :P

Oh man, I just remembered one other lulzy WoW drama situation that involved me being a raid officer and a woman in my guild who was old enough to be my grandma, co-starring her insane expectations of guild officers with a cameo appearance by her inability to get anything done by herself. I think I even have screenshots of the chat logs at home, I'll post them later along with the full story.

You misspelled "madkevin".

And a big enough stoner to make Demon G Sides look like madkevin.

I think we all know ElGuapo was the biggest stoner, guys. He started threads about it.

Yeah, but so did madkevin.

It's possible that I am being sarcastic.

I think you mean the recently departed Repoman, who smoked pot so much he started a thread saying "his friend" was addicted to it.

Was that when Los Ortiz was the paladin TL? That guy was an utter, utter failure - source of the 'quickness increases run speed!' meme. I want to say they didn't add Gaheris until after that clown was replaced, but I'm not sure. I was a Pendragon tester/forum guy for a couple years and his contributions were always worth a few laughs.

No tape backups? D:

Fucking Bors. You people were responsible for completely trashing our server for a couple months, with the whole Project Bors thing. I know, let's all reroll on an unbalanced server, and pick the most populated side! Luckily most of em went back home, but we got stuck with Kild and a couple others.

One of the last round of TL reports I read made me giggle, with each of the class TLs told to restrict their comments to a few key issues some of them still submitted multi-paragraph reports. The Sorceror TL report read as follows:

There was that time I was working for a game dev on an MMO where the producer thought you could run ALL the server code on a single box and the game was designed that way from the ground up. Three years later the test server would struggle at more than 20 people logged in, oops!

It took another year and some consultants to convince the studio that all the server code would need to be re-written. Oh well, we didn't really need that four million pounds.

It's possible I know that.