MMO Drama Storytime featuring DAoC

Heh, I did run my own BBS for a while, but if people accused me of cheating I helpfully pointed out that the CPU was in my dad's house, and I lived at my mom's house.

(This proved to be a disadvantage when the system crashed.)

There was one time when I was staying with my dad for a weekend that I created an alien ship that was filled with whatever that stuff was that blew you up if you blew up the ship. Then I gave it 1 fighter and spawned it in the world. Not being patient enough to wait for someone to run into it randomly, I waited for the next player to log in and teleported that player to the ship. Yeah. I was a jerk, in my defense I was 13.

jeffd left out the awesome early stages of that drama: The Naxx period.

When our two guilds linked up to run Naxx, there were too many raiders for one 10 man, not enough for 25, hell, not even enough for two 10 mans. We started a little recruiting to grab the couple we were short and decided to make 2 10 man groups.

Now, the mighty Thunder Bluff Royal Navy was fairly prepped to join whatever, and we were a group who knew what we were doing, at least to the point of doing reading on rotations, knowing the fights, etc. The Other Guild only had a couple of folks like this, and the rest were casual folks looking for a new experience or had heard about raiding and wanted to try it out. Then there was their GM: this guy had a short temper and blamed everyone else for things that went wrong. Turned out he also had exorbitantly high expectations as far as learning curves on fights, but we'll get to that.

That GM ended up being the one dividing the two groups up. Raid A, which contained him and all the other highly geared toons from his guild, and Raid B, which was all of us from the Navy and... well, basically castoffs from his guild. As Jeff said, we had friends who ended up in Raid A that we wanted to play with, plus it was a bit of a snub to put all of us in what appeared to be the "scrub raid," so I was a bit offended. After he and I talked it over, we decided that we would be different from them in another way: we'd give constructive feedback, make sure we learned, give out information on classes and gearing, etc., so that we'd be just like the plucky underdogs in the movies!

So, Jeff's DK and my resto Druid (chosen in part because the Other Guild's GM played one, and I wanted to show that schmuck How It Was Done) took our rag-tag group into Naxx. We got blown out of the water. Raid A managed to get a boss or two down in the coming weeks, but not us. The difference was, we were learning. Every fight our guys got a little bit better, a little more geared, while Raid A mostly appeared to be coasting off their gear. Jeff and I had one goal for each fight: get a little better each time.

Then it happened: Grobbulus. A tubby bastard of a fight where positioning and situational awareness are the keys to winning. Both Raid A and B were working on him, A had been mashing against him for a bit longer. We went in, spent one night (iirc) learning the fight and just getting killed on him. Then the next night, it just clicked and we got him. We went on to slowly but surely clear the rest of Naxx over the next several weeks. Raid A, though? The night that the "scrub raid" got further than they did, after the GM spent a long while screaming at them in Vent over how bad their positioning was, and how they were terrible and he couldn't believe how bad they were as players... well, they basically fell apart. No one wanted to play with him any more, no one was having any fun. They pressed on, eventually getting rid of that GM, but that was the end of the idea of Raid A being the all-star group.

We weren't the best; as Jeff pointed out above we had some really... interesting players in our raid. We bounced off a lot of fights that would've gone the other way if that shadow priest and her husband weren't in them. But today, one of the recruits we grabbed, who started off being about 1k DPS lower than she should've been (about 1/3 low, for modern perspective) now runs that Other Guild and does a decent job on progression raiding. I like to think that we had a lot to do with that.

And Plucky Underdogs from Disney movies really do exist!

TEASE

I was involved in MUD drama occasionally, mostly against my guild's absentee GM. See, guilds on the MUD weren't things people formed on their own with likeminded individuals. There were only a handful (I don't remember their proper full names, but when I was playing they were the Knights, the Monks, the Scythe, Chaos, the Eldar, the Bears, and the Ravens, with those last two being the "new comers."), they were created by WIZARDS (the volunteer coder people or whatever), had whatever restrictions they felt like (my guild, the Eldar, only allowed elves, half-elves and humans, for example. The Knights had class restrictions if I remember right. And so on.). They weren't even standardized on what shit they got. Like Chaos and the Knights had a guild storage system, where you could toss stuff into a vault for other people (Chaos used karma points for "buying" gear, Knights were free for all if I remember right), but the Eldar had a personal bank (you dropped ALL your stuff to the ground except your money when you logged out, see). Even the guild lines were different, some of them having an ignore function, some of them not. The only way for a guild to get new improvements was for the GM to code some.

That's all well and good, until you have a GM that never logs in to even see what suggestions people have made. Which the Eldar happened to have. Really, it didn't matter, because the thing that people wanted most (aside from an ASSISTANT GM :P) was an ignore function for our guildline, and he was dead set against having one. For some reason it really, really pissed me off that we had this absentee landlord of a GM who would log in once every six months, IF that, then get angry at us for not being 100% happy with the guild as it was AND having the audacity for not being the sort of guild he seemed to have envisioned (we were very goofy and spammy and clique-ish, I have no idea what he had wanted ... possibly just a guild that included his hardly-ever-there ass in the clique.).

I was mean to him. Really, really, really mean to him. Meaner than I probably should've been, but I was young (I like to think I mellowed as I got older, but when I was 19? Forget it, I was queen internet bitch.). And he was an asshat. A complete and utter asshat. The peak of our semi-annual flamefests, I asserted for the billionth time that he didn't give a fuck about the guild itself, just that he had the "guildmaster" title and he was a power tripping, short dicked, pathetic fuck of a man who needed to admit he had no interest in running the guild any more and hand it over to someone who did. This so enraged him, he ported to my character (wizards could do all sorts of shit, being coders n' all, and I was a MERE MORTAL) and attempted to destroy my guild object (you needed one in your inventory to be part of a guild, the Eldar one was a SILVER HEADBAND) to kick me out (as there was no gkick function <3). I guess he was utterly furious and/or forgot the proper syntax, because what he actually did was appear before me, then destroyed his OWN headband, causing the guild NPC to announce he had left the guild across the guildline, which we all found hilarious. And the dude did not like being laughed at. AT ALL. Much angry rage followed, coupled with him coding a /gkick command for the guild. He finally picked an assistant GM, though. Victory! :P

After this, his creepy wife (who played much more than he did, but I never talked to her, as she was in some other guild ... Scythe, maybe?) started semi-stalking me about how I was such a bitch to her husband and I should stop. I finally admitted that maybe I was a little TOO mean to get her to shut up, and this somehow triggered an evolution to her hitting on me. The GM himself also suddenly got much nicer in my direction after that, and I hope to God it was just because his wife exaggerated my apology or something.

I somehow never even got warned for being such a raging bitch to him from the LAWWWWW. I dunno why. Maybe they all secretly hated him.

Oh, wow, MUD stories.

I and a few of my friends staged a coup and stole a MUD from the admin (amicably -- he sort of knew something was about to happen, and agreed that the code had gone stagnant). Here's a newsgroup posting of someone complaining about an outage right before we junked the code and took over -- 20 freaking years ago. Over Christmas break, we took it down, recoded it from LPMud standard, and debuted it after 2 weeks. It was hosted on a NeXT machine in the UW-Madison department of technology.

And then the unthinkable happened: One of the admins literally got religion, got angry when a fellow admin (the guy who actually ran the hardware) innocently teased him about it, gutted the code ("his code") from the core libraries, and got in his car and drove off. We had to reinstall from practically original libraries, and start all over. The MUD ran for about 10 years, but I dropped off of it after I moved out east.

I reconnected with this admin about 2 years ago when we'd formed a Facebook group dedicated to alumni of that MUD. He showed up in a conversation we were having about that time in our lives. He didn't really go into what happened back then.

Incidentally, every one of us, independent of our majors, went on to get jobs in IT and programming, with our only experience on our resume for that first job in the market as being a "MUD Programmer".

My pet project was the Demons guild. In order to gain power and rank, you had to kill mobs, as normal, but once dead, you had to chop off their heads and sacrifice their bodies. I learned, early on, that describing this to people who didn't understand what a MUD was, had its own set of difficulties.

My guild was particularly popular on the MUD, until a rival Wiz coded up an "Eep" machine. Basically, it produced a monster-object named "Eep" every time you pressed a button. You could kill it, behead it, and advance through the guild without penalty.

Ah, Wizard wars....those were the best kind.

I was once handed the keys, as it were, to a small but thriving MUCK by the headwiz, who then proceeded to fuck off and never be seen again.
I'd never once expressed an interest in staffing there and in fact said on several occasions I wouldn't want to. And then one day the headwiz asked me for my email address and sent me everything. Backup files, passwords for the admin accounts on the server that ran it, #0 and headwiz character bit password, news files, bits of code they'd been working on. Everything.
I ended up contacting the person who hosted the server, explained the situation to them, and they were fine with letting the MUCK continue to run free of charge. In the end I adminned the damn thing for several years after, until it died a slow but natural death of lack of players.

We never did find out what drove the headwiz to do such a thing.