MMO Drama Storytime featuring DAoC

I use to hear great stories in Second Life. My favourite was from a Furry friend. He told me there was a furry, gay, BDSM harem in SL (niche interest!). So far, so normal for SL, but what was really awesome was that the master of this harem reportedly got some of the guys to move into his house where they spent their time as his slaves in their fur suits.

And you STILL haven't gotten rid of me.

Still not sure what PR team managed to convince us that Alb were the ones who needed help on that server. I mean, Alb needed help on Bors, but not in the "needs more people" sense. Thankfully I met awesome folks out of the deal.

Did Bonnie also come from Bors with you?

No, she was native, or from somewhere else. She and Catakin did eventually come from my guild though. I forget who we stole her from.

Guardian .. Council? I think? Was the primary Bors guild eventually.

edit: you know what I really miss? Fucked up combat systems, shit PVE and everything aside: I miss Guild Cloaks in pretty much every MMO.

Yeah, it's not true drama, but just... kinda weirdly niche, and very much an SL story! I believe the household dissolved into drama but I don't recall the details. My blog article on this on tinypirate.com has led to "gay furry BDSM" being the top google draw card for my site, however!

Why the hell didn't ya link the article then? I swear, you're going to have half the forum searching for that using the search... terms... provi...

Oh, you're good.

As a fur myself, I liked it; you poked at the weirder bits of the fandom without being too judgmental. Though I will note that for the year-and-a-half or so I've been in the fandom, I've never had anyone proposition me for sex. Yet.

Sadly, I'm not much of an MMO player, so I don't have much to add to the topic proper... 'bout the only MMO story I have is during the earlier days of Wurm Online, where I had been working with a group that planned on moving from the Golden Valley starter zone (back when it was a fully-featured server) to one of the pay servers (I was not part of the move, as I didn't have any money at the time). The group members involved were just about to leave when a random bear (that I later learned was a domestic bear that had gone wild; bears weren't supposed to spawn in GV at the time that I played, but the player-owned ones supposedly stayed) attacked out of nowhere, turning a somber "we're leaving" ceremony into a desperate struggle for survival as we all huddled in the community home that was built for the newer players.

In retrospect, had that kind of thing happened more often, maybe I would have kept playing Wurm Online.

EruditeDragon, I was very confused for a minute until I realized you weren't talking about human bears...

While I appreciate the Tipper Gore line, I like this one more. madkevin is definitely more of a stoner, but we're all stoners, man.

In fairness, that would have made for a far more interesting story.

Yeah, I'm the "LET ME TELL YOU MY CURRENT REAL LIFE WOES" officer, but Ingmar is the "SJOFN PLEASE DON'T KILL THE RAID WITH YOUR RAGEY MIND BULLETS" guy. I like to think that just one angry sigh from me said all I needed to say by the end, though.

I WAS the cuter dwarf warrior, after all. <3

There was also the time where you and I were the healers, and Ingmar died because neither of us were healing ANYONE. We just put our HoTs on him and then spammed smite because we were bored. <3

There was a chunk of time during TBC where I did PUGs on my bear druid, and every single one of those PUGs had at least one person /friend me. A couple of them joined Slap in the Face. And one of those people was friends with Drachmir.

Towards the end of my raid-leading career (Wrath of the Lich King) the fiancee of a friend of mine was running some with us to play catchup so she could join his group which was doing non-baby raids, when we had a spot available, and after listening to my, uh, style of leadership, she told him "he just sounds so sad."

Oh God, I forgot about that. And you did. You really did. You were the sad, disappointed father whose kid is trying hard but can't get better than a D in English.

Man, raiding with you two would have been a hoot.

It wasn't very good for my blood pressure.

Holy fuck this thread is fascinating. And I feel bad. But hot damn.

Raid times were pretty much ~9PM PST until Ingmar or Sjofn seriously started considering making new friends.

I'm not entirely joking.

edit: Sjofn, is this the place for the BAD CITIZEN story, or is this thread more horrifying events rather than hilarious to everyone else?

Oh Jesus, that guy. I think this thread is totally appropriate for that. And you can tell the story, because I am about to go afk. :P


(Also, 9 pm EST until we wanted to kill ourselves, I don't recall making any of you losers start raiding at midnight your time. :P)

OH OH I KNOW THIS ONE

*gleefully sits with popcorn* I mean. If this is the right...one thinking of.

Aww. So for a while, we raided with a Sister Guild (that later pretty much merged with us, but for now they are OUTSIDERS). A little hazy on it, but we were slow pullers and would often sit around waiting for AFKs. And for some reason voting came up and how everyone should vote. Other Guild's .. shaman? did not vote, and starts heavily implying to Sjofn that he's a BAD CITIZEN and should be punished. For some reason this resonates in our guild (probably because he was often inappropriate, and we like to make fun of each other) and this became a running gag for quite a while.

Sadly, it's long enough ago that I don't entirely recall why it was quite so hilarious. I think it was Sjofn's reaction basically being a digital spit-take. These Kara raids were always a source of humor though; I think at one point we had the other guild accidentally convinced that Sick and I were going through a messy breakup because of our banter. But if anyone wants emotional triggers for Sjofn, just randomly yell HEROISM at her at completely inappropriate times.

So I lied, I'm too lazy to post the chat log. Besides, the excerpts I have don't really make sense to anyone who wasn't there at the time.

Basically, I was in a casual guild in WoW that became very carebeary over time. It had started off as a more laid-back group with intelligent adult members that were good players with great senses of humor, but several iterations later it was a more politically correct, help-everyone-and-let's-all-be-happy-together kind of guild that sings Kum-bai-Ya around the campfire. Which tends to attract a certain kind of member. Still lots of good people, including some of my old friends, but more players who were really new, really inexperienced, really insecure, or just unable to take responsibility for their own progress.

I'd been an officer for a year or so by this point, and worked on planning, setting up and leading our early raids. This was post-vanilla, so Karazhan was the intro 10-man raid instance. I was helping some guildies getting their Kara keys when this woman (call her Olive) sent me some tells in which it eventually became clear she was angry with me for being left out of the group. (I'd had no idea she wanted to be in it, and that set of quests took maybe an hour so I wasn't sure why it was a big deal.) In general, Olive was demanding, imperious, and had a sense of entitlement despite being really uninformed about the game and harboring bizarre ideas about the roles of officers. (She would tell us things like "Make sure I'm included in the group if you run X dungeon, I need some quests there" or "I need you to get me a group to do Y because I've been waiting a week and nobody has offered to help" and the like.) So I wasn't entirely surprised at it but I was reaching the end of my rope.

The blowup came a few days later, in response to some raid roster posts on our forum. I hadn't included her because we had a surplus of her class and we needed stronger players in that role, but of course I can't say that because (gasp!) somebody might have to cope with the fact that even raids like Karazhan did take some modicum of awareness. So she gets pissy at me in tells again, and at that point I didn't have any more fucks to give as far as she was concerned. I was honest without being mean - I told her that she needed to take more initiative on her own to get quests and dungeons done, that I couldn't personally form groups for everyone in the guild on demand, and that my being an officer meant I was willing to help where needed, but that I wasn't her personal concierge service. She flipped shit for some reason, fires off a few indignant lines and ends with "FINE. I won't ask you for help or bother you any more. Happy?" I went to respond and say no, not exactly, but was greeted by the red text saying "Olive is ignoring you."

In retrospect it's still hilarious to me, but at the time I think I was actually surprised - we just didn't put each other on /ignore in that guild, certainly not officers. But I screenshotted it and resigned myself to having to bring this to the GL and the other officers to figure out how we were going to handle the problem. Ironically I don't even remember what we did, if anything. Probably had lots of talks with her. I do recall that she left the guild a while later, but not directly following this event or anything.

I eventually left as well, and joined a raiding guild because I was kinda done with casuals for a while. Even though I still considered myself more casual than raider, my first guild had formed such a needy, codependent culture that it was just a constant drag being online. Everyone was very cheery and cute with each other, but there were constant tensions due to these differences in priorities, skill, and readiness for content. Some folks just couldn't hack it in basic five-man dungeons (let alone raids) but they felt like they were owed runs through those instances. Any expectations or benchmarks for raid groups were seen as elitist and exclusive rather than a way of acknowledging the realities of the encounters. This obviously bred resentments going both ways - the veteran players who could raid were frustrated by lots of wiping, and the novices were frustrated by being blamed for the wipes, even though it really was all their fault, the damn noobs.

Wallow in the dramz, my precioussss

It was actually election day and I had proudly proclaimed that I was a Good Citizen that voted, and that man I love voting, everyone should vote. And so the shaman (who was named Chwompy, if I remember right) said he was a bad citizen and maybe I should punish him, in an alarmingly suggestive voice. This was funny to other people because a) wtf, b) Sjofn was already not Chwompy's biggest fan, as he was also a Mansplainer, and c) Sjofn did, indeed, simply sputter in response, because boy howdy was she not expecting that, and rendering her speechless is a rare thing.

And SuperJay, our guild was soooort of like yours, only much more insular. But we had a wide variety of skill levels and commitment (and naturally, the people who were terrible at their class were also the ones most dedicated to attendance and gearing up, SIGH), no one wanted to be the bad guy, etc. So I was the closest we had to one, although I think only the officers knew the true degree of rage I had in my black heart. People usually took my angry old woman-ness as well as possible (I think I always managed to stop just shy of making people feel actually bad) (I hope), at least.

Heroism and random earth elementals, though. Banes of my fucking existence. See, we had this shaman. He was one of the sweetest people I've ever met online, would give you the shirt off his back, always helpful, always cheerful, always on. Always on, because the man had a terrible work injury years prior, which left him essentially bedridden and hooked up to morphine 24/7. Again, I must stress: sweetest, nicest man. But constantly high on morphine. And man, did he love to raid. But he was not very good. Not very good, because he was always high on morphine. And just when we'd be getting good at adjusting for his ... style of play, his doctors would mess with his meds and he'd be even goofier for a week or two.

So he had macros out the ass, as you might imagine. And he was constantly fat fingering them. So we'd be jogging down the hall towards a boss, and heroism would go off. Or he'd accidently drop an earth elemental, which would taunt the boss we were fighting and make things all wtf (one time he did it and it screwed up our tank swapping, so I may have threatened to take his earth totem and shove it up his ass if he didn't put that keybind someplace harder to hit THIS INSTANT). Or sometimes in the middle of a fight, his shaman would calmly, serenely, start spinning in a circle. If there was fire to stand in, he would stand in it. We used to say it wasn't a Slap boss fight unless we heard him die twice (as he would ALWAYS reincarnate right into another death).

Really, really nice guy, though. And he would do everything in his power to try and mitigate it somewhat (he researched the shit out of his class, he would do 25-man raid PUGs (we only did 10 mans) to overgear whatever tier we were doing, because he just liked hanging out with us, etc).

OH GOD ITS LIKE YOU WERE THERE

No really, that could be chapter-and-verse out of one of our raids. We always made accommodations for people. Because we were nice. God, it was nauseating. I am a pretty damn nice person but goddamn I lost my cool more than once at well-meaning people who were genuinely trying, but who didn't/couldn't recognize or accept their problems. Like the guy who couldn't Misdirect his way out of a paper bag, who would constantly screw up the tanks assignments - but you couldn't tell him that or his feelings might be hurt. So we had to quietly ask his wife (who was an awesome healer) to gently teach him how to be a hunter ASAP.

We had training programs, gearing runs, class leads, a raid group for learning and a raid group for progressing, etc. And to be fair, it wasn't constant drama or anything, but my lord was it tiring after a while.

Actually, I lied about managing not to make anyone feel bad. There was this one rogue that I had a ... clash of personalities with. So he rage quit the guild. Well, OK, sorry about that, but then his internet girlfriend (who was like 12 years older than him or something, he was still in college) sent pages and pages and pages and pages of in-game mail to Ingmar about it. I only got about six pages, but Ingmar got a gazillion (because Ingmar was the GM, and also my husband, so duh, of course he was the go-to guy for Sjofn Related Issues).

Well, you do get kind of uppity, after all.

One time our paladins were utterly failing at healing. I had been a paladin healer through TBC, then WotLK broke my will to heal as one of those (because it was still a two-button wonder) and I took up tanking full-time (I had tanked in TBC, but only during alt-runs). And I kept thinking to myself "It can't be that hard. It CAN'T be." But finally, one of them ran out of mana one too many times (YES THAT PALADIN RAN OUT OF MANA CONSTANTLY) and it broke my brain, so I spent the next week leveling and slightly-gearing my abandoned paladin and healed the raid the next week, just to be sure it was them and not the class.

It was them.

I think I finally managed to get them both to accept crit into their lives by the end ICC, at least.

I had personal drama in wow, but not much elsewhere. I seem to have a bad habit of attracting friends that absolutely cannot get along on some level, later having to decide where I am going to go and what story I want to persue.

Odd thing about my home Wow server is like ten people got hired into the MMO world from it. Mostly based on stories they wrote. One ended up at Mythic for a bit (post even Warhammer). The rest were all working on Fallen Earth as quest/art.
Though supposedly there are entire bits of tribute to alliance side wrapped into Swtor. Forgot the gnome player that works there.
Yeah woo not much drama, sorry. I still am wary of airing things too far because inevitably someone finds me and starts deleting my crap again.

AUGGGHHH we had this one priest healer who was constantly running out of mana for heals and had no idea why. When I finally asked her what she was casting to heal the MT, she said "Circle of Healing" and I was all

Oh wait maybe I can give you guys sideways drama. Loon (Fauntasy) my significant other destroyed no less than five guilds by raiding with them. One of them was one of the oldest guilds on the server, and did it before he joined. He was in "process" at the time.

It always came down to him doing something in raid that everyone swore could not be done but because he played a shaman he could do. Things like swapping on a shield and tanking that dragon in Nax til the druid got the tank back up, dying and ankhing back up into dps mode. He was the master of the planned death, where to die when to come back and how to maelstrom heal. Some of this is not doable anymore due to how they have further reduced enhancement's skill set. There was nothing quite like watching him put the shaman heal weapon buff on both weapons , drop four totems, stand in the middle of the room for the four horsemen and heal the hell out of the raid.

Still his humor and puns took their toll, after any significant time with him most people plead for their lives. I handle it by going into a different room, but I can see how trying to raid with him would be those who value his skills vs those who cannot stand him to open his mouth anymore.

What? That's reasonable. The ability has "healing" right in its name, fer chrissake! You wanted him to heal, right?

Yeah, it totes does the healing. And how.

Man, all of this reminds me so much of Short Bus Raiders. Wonderful group of people, had the most awesomely wonderful Mage who was one of the Guild's leadership and sort of the Guild mom, but boy howdy were the players a little bit slow sometime. Shadow Priests really should not have topped DPS meters in T5 content, nor been competitive on them in T6.

thankfully back in the days when i played WoW, the Drop Bears was a pretty tame guild. good memories of playing there, but not a lot of stories to remember, ya know?

Yeah DB was pretty drama-free. One partial guild split over raid philosophy during my membership, which was awkward. But really, just a bump. Mr W and I led raids in the Firelands expansion -- it's handy being in the same room for coordination -- which was occasionally hilarious (DBers, read that in Axebeard's voice) but mostly fun. Tiring though, and we're both on long-term hiatus. Sadly, I'm one of those players that takes a while to learn encounters, so I always felt like I was holding the raid back. Since I played a tank/healy paladin, though, there was generally a spot that needed me.

Yeah, being in the same room as Ingmar was pretty great, especially when we had to tank swap or whatever.

omgomgomgomgomg THIS THREAD

This one time I banged a fellow guildie. Then I moved in with her. Then I married her. Everyone was happy for us.


I guess that wasn't very dramatic.

Rereading this reminds me of my roleplaying adventure(s).

Spoilering for length, because this wound up being a fucking book: