All a game

I’m definitely developing a love-hate relationship with WoW, that online game also known as World of Warcraft. Being a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG; I’ve written about this type of game before if you’ve never come across this acronym and want to find out what I’m talking about), a big part of the game involves playing with other people, from all over the world. This can be good, in that you can sometimes meet interesting people and you can team up with them to achieve goals that might be difficult or impossible to achieve on your own, but the people factor can also be very annoying.

I’ve been playing the game again during this break, after not playing for a while, and am really starting to get annoyed with all the idiots in the game.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, given that a huge number of players are teenaged boys, but man they are irritating. The character I have created is ‘female’, in that she has a female shape and I have given her a female name, but geez she is just a bunch of pixels moving around on screen – so why are you breathing heavily all over her??

I have had complete strangers come up to my character and send her messages like “Lick me” a few times. Another charmer followed me around a few times saying “Nice hoo hoos”. I presume he was referring to her breasts; unfortunately he didn’t get it when I enquired if he was still traumatised from having been weaned too early.

Kids, the character is a Tauren, a cow (so I am bovine phobic), she has a tail, and in any case, I could be a 60 year old guy running her around!!? (See the picture – hardly centrefold material, is she? Okay maybe the tail gives her character…)

The other form of annoying childish behaviour is begging. People whining on and on about how they just started playing, and could NE1 spare 50s plz? And they have the nerve to get irate when you tell them to stop begging and run away and work at it like everyone else. I’m glad there is an /ignore command that allows you to just completely ignore anything a particular player tries to say to you (this would be good in Real Life too, sometimes).

And I suppose this goes with the teenaged boy territory, but I am so sick of the homophobic taunts. I keep telling myself not to get offended by people saying that so-and-so is a fagg (they can’t spell either, oh so wrong on so many levels!) but it really pisses me off and I’ve actually left guilds because I couldn’t stand the name calling. (Only to have fools from the guild then tell me I was a fagg to [sic]. *sigh*) And then we have sexism and racism. In the interests of my blood pressure, I’m not going to list the sorts of stupid statements, you get the picture, I’m sure.

The way WoW is set up, there are two opposing sides – the character(s) you make is either on the Alliance side or the Horde side. While you can talk to other players on your side, you can’t actually say anything to those on the opposing side – beyond making rude gestures, or, if you are on a PvP (Player versus Player) server, you can attack them on sight and try to kill them. It amuses me to hear players on my side (Horde) say that all Alliance are fags or cheap or useless or that Horde players are somehow better than Alliance. Amusing because I have played on both sides, and both sides say the same thing about each other and seem to forget that it is completely arbitrary and meaningless and whichever side you are on depends on which side your friends are on, which type of class you want to play, which sort of toon you want to look like, what you want to roleplay. That is, you pick and CHOOSE the side you want to be on. Sheesh.

There are nice people in game with whom you can actual have decent chats and achieve things, the nice people usually get on with what they are trying to do and don’t try to get in others’ way, or be offensive, which is why the idiots seem to be the loudest, I guess.

I’ll get over it once I’m back at work and won’t have the time or energy to play all that much.

Categories: WoW, MMORPGs, games, annoyance, people