Worried that you’re just wasting time gaming? Phil Hartup investigates the experiences required for a life online well lived.
Article taken from August 2008′s Custom PC Magazine
People often say to hardcore gamers that they’re missing out on the joys of life, and the world is full of wonders and pleasures that they may never experience. Flowers, mountains, love, et cetera, et cetera. This is patently the truth, but that said, there are some moments unique to MMO gaming that you’ll never encounter in real life. These are the experiences that will live with the gamer forever, for good or for ill. We present the top eight things to do in MMO gaming before you die or are dragged back to reality…
8. Meet A Chinese Gold Seller
It took around an hour of playing Pirates of the Burning Sea before the first ‘/tell’ arrived from captain Jsgjsg Hefgasfgv, informing me that if I was ‘Annoy for the cost of beeter ship’, I should visit his ‘wedsite’. It wasn’t the first game in which I’d encountered such offers and it probably won’t be the last. From the original Ultima Online to EVE, these gold sellers are there, earning in-game currency that, thanks to the cost of living in their home countries, can be sold for a price that can sustain a relatively comfortable lifestyle in a largely poverty-stricken Communist dictatorship.
Buying currency from China for use in a game is one of these things that divides gaming populations around the world (apart from China, obviously). On the one hand, many gamers will tell you that it’s sad to spend your hard earned actual money on virtual currency. However, these gamers will then spend the next six hours grinding away at dispiriting tasks such as killing endlessly respawning weevils in order to appropriate the few gold pieces they invariably and rather bizarrely always carry. Of course it’s unfair and damages games, but if MMOs weren’t such timesinks in the first place, would it be necessary?
7. Survive the First Three Months
Charles Dickens didn’t write ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ specifically about the first three months following an MMORPG launch, but there’s no more accurate a description. The heady mix of the sublime and the ridiculous that only occurs when tens of thouseands of eager gamers all hit login for the first time is unique in gaming.
The pioneering days of an MMORPG are a special time. Servers are crash-happy and crowded with newbs, and the forums are aflame as fanboys and the disenchanted argue the toss about the inevitable inbalances. The game is always, now matter how rigorously BETA-tested, buggy, laggy, unfinished and broken in many ways compared with how it will be a couple of patches down the line. Guilds will rise, implode or explode or just mysteriously vanish like planes flying over the Bermuda Triangle. The economy will appear to have been designed by people who make kleptomanic rulers who spend all their country’s money on fighter jets look like models of fiscal finesse. Red Bull-fuelled power gamers with reach the level cap in approximately a week and then bemoan the lack of decent end-game content; there will be tantrums, backbiting and exploitation. Yet this is the era that players will remember as the Golden Age: when the mobs are new, the tactics untested and the character build unformed. Legends will be born and everyone can be a contender at the beginning.
6. Run a Guild
It’s one thing to plod through the world of online gaming as a Ronin, moving from pick-up group to pick-up group, running the occasional raid and falling prey to the occasional bands on ninja looters, but it’s something else to be a part of a guild. It’s a joy to be a member of a well-run guild; you don’t have to worry about finding a group, money is plentiful and there are always people to talk to, which helps to keep the gankers at bay. The guild is the cornerstone of an MMO.
At the heart of any well-run guild is the unfortunate leader who carries out the admin. A good guild leader needs to possess a combination of skills unique to his role and no job in the world can prepare you for the challenge of running a guild. A guild leader must have the patience of a primary school teacher, the charisma of a revolutionary leader and more free time than a philososphy undergraduate. With all these qualities and more, a person can run a successful guild.
However the saddest fact of gaming life, which any guild leader sooner or later has to acknowledge, is that the second he or she turns their back on the guild, its members will grind to a halt and disintegrate into squabbling factions in around a week. Ironically, the speed with which a guild can fall apart seems to be inversely proportional to the quality of the guild leader and the effort he puts into the role; in some cases a lazy and inept guild leader can spur his guild on to great achievements simply by disappearing. Meanwhile, the smartest and most conscientious guild leader can expect his beloved minions to turn on each other or scatter to the four winds in almost no time, unless he’s there to oversee them like a cross between Mary Poppins and a Marine Corps Drill sergeant.
5. Go Nocturnal
Owls, hedgehogs and teenage binge drinkers – some of Britain’s most endearing wildlife is nocturnal; irritable, sleep-deprived MMO junkies can now be added to this list. It isn’t usually a conscious effort – you start the game, become hooked and gradually, as late night follows late night, you find that you’ve switched to a new schedule. Only serious commitment to real life can generally halt this process. In any guild comprising experienced players and a suitable contingent of slackers, students and survivialists, it’s inevitable that you’ll find some of them ploughing on, night after night, turning in with the morning chorus and waking again to the sound of ‘Deal or No Deal’ theme music. The reason for this approach – rather than players playing all day, going to bed at reasonable time, then playing all day the next day – is most probably an issue of time zone, as late night players often find themselves running with players on the East Coast of the USA. If you play on GMT then you have to make do with the company of cheerful yet utterly ruthless Russians, and the occasional confused Australian with a ping so high he’s practically playing by email.
No gaming career is complete without a stint pulling the graveyard shift. It’s good for the soul, builds characters and you can participate in the all the good spawns without some nine-year old called Leg0laz jumping your claim and scooping all the loot.
4. Make Some Actual Friends
The internet, as far as socialising is concerned, is considered to by polite society to be something of a joke and the punchline is the life of a MMO player. This isn’t how it has to be. Players in a gaming clan, especially one that’s well established and has dedicated member, will often find themselves spending more time with each other than with their work colleagues, flatmates and family. Players spend many hours on Teamspeak or Ventrilo, shooting the breeze and stabbing Alliance lamers. Not considering the guys you’re playing alongside for hours a day as your friends is a pretty depressing thought. Get voice comms, don’t be afraid of the Guild Chat channel and, if the opportunity arises, get the gang together for a beer (unless they’re Scandanavians, because you could lose a kidney). There are few things sadder in life than players who spend a considerable proportion of their waking hours playing a game with people they don’t like.
In gaming, as in life, a gamer should hang onto the people with whom he gets, from game to game, and forum war to forum war – life is too short and there’s plenty of time for solitude when you’re dead. No man is an island, even if he has self-healing abilities and a killer DPS.
3. Go Cold Turkey
The worst-case scenarios for a hardcore gamer are as follows: acquiring a job, getting a girlfriend or having to take a bout of vitally important exams. There’s only one thing for it – you have to give up your favourite game, perhaps forever. Walking away from an MMO that still has you firmly in its grip comes naturally to some gamers, but to others, it can be a true test of mettle.
Trying to escape is never easy. Aside for the game itself, there are forums to distract you, guildmates on MSN telling you how great it is and a shortcut on your desktop that puts you two clicks away from the action. The temptation can be too much and since the rise of the MMO, the world have become littered with broken relationships, failed degrees and even lost jobs due to the curse of the compulsive gaming. Just remember the three-step plan: cancel the account, uninstall the game, but don’t burn all your bridges. After all, if you’re lucky, you might get sacked or divorced and then you can get back into the raiding schedule.
2. PvP
Playing against computer-controlled enemies that scale in power, but not in technique, is a perfectly legitimate way to spend time gaming, just as jackets with patches on the elbows are perfectly legitimate items of clothing and the kazoo is a perfectly legitimate musical instrument.
Ultimately, however, there’s nothing like the thrill of fighting against a human opponent in a MMO game. The reason that MMO PvP is more intense than, for example, a quickie game Team Fortress 2 or Call of Duty 4, is that your character is a something on which you’ve lavished hours of game time. Your character is a reflection of yourself, unless you’ve just thrown together the usual IWIN/Best of archetype, in which case, shame on you (unless you invented it).
The second aspect of MMO PvP that sets it on a pedestal is consequences. Sometimes these can be severe – in EVE or Pirates of the Burning Sea, you can lose your ship in combat; replacing it in your preferred specification requires time, money and effort. In Ultima Online, it could mean that your killer will rob you blind, kill your trusty steed and make stew from your body parts. In World of Warcraft, it means that you’ll frequently have to run all the way back from a spawn point and this can sometimes take several minutes.
Consequences in terms of losss to your character are one thing, but the losses and gains in terms of the spirit are of more importance. Beating another human rather than a pile of AI animated statistics is a great feeling, whether it’s the first time you fight, with your nerves on edge and your mouse hand shaking, or the calm feeling as you go through the motions of your millionth fight with the precise, calculated approach of a killing machine.
While the coolness of fighting another player can’t be overstated, even that pales before the majesty of massed PvP combat. Take, for example, EVE’s fleet battles, in which you can watch hundreds of man-hours of player-crafted warships go up in smoke, and the missions of the glory days of Planetside, in which groups battle, step by tortured step, through relentless enemy fire towards their objectives as giant robots stomp past. There are also the sieges of Lineage 2, in which hundreds of players battle for control of a castle and the honour of claiming that they have the pointiest hair. Plus there’s the end game of Lord of the Rings Online, in which you suddenly find yourself slapping down player-controlled orcs and goblins rather than the usual AI controlled suspects. Until you’ve fought against other players, you haven’t really fought at all.
1. Camp and Grind
In you play online games for several hours a day, most days of the week, for a couple of years or more, the you probably don’t want to think about how much time you’ve spent grinding and camping. These are the aspects of online gaming that, when we reach our autumn years, will cause so many of us to wonder, “Why the hell did I waste my youth doing that?” this is where you pay the piper and sink the time.
Camping in an MMO isn’t like camping in a first-person shooter. The five minutes you might spend at the underpass in Counter-Strike with an AWP are nothing compared to the hours of mind-numbing, spirit-crushing tedium that comes from sitting in one spot for hours, waiting for a specific enemy who might drop a vital item. There’s nothing like camping to provide a wake-up call to a player about how deeply addicted to a game they are. There are legends about the longest times that people have spent camping a target – different players have different tolerances – but 24 hour camping sessions aren’t uncommon in some games, with some guilds working in shifts to cover a key point for longer periods.
While the camping element of online gaming is vast and disturbing, it perhaps isn’t quite as stultifying as the grind. Grinding is the noble art of performing a very simple task repeatedly in order to gain money, experience points or items. this is the scariest area of gaming, where a game becomes workl it isn’t work, like steaking rare sports cars or overclocking graphics gards, but proper, souless drudgery that’s like working in an online version of a Victorian mill.
Every game has its own variations on a theme, from mining ore in EVE to killing the same old mobs in WoW and harvesting at resource nodes in EverQuest II. Every game finds a new way to take your character, a hero of spectacular power and skill, and turn him or her into worker bee for a sizable chunk of time – all because it wants to reach the maximum level, own the most epic items or fly the shiniest spaceship. You can get far in online gaming with skill, smarts and a flair for comedy forum put-downs, but you can achieve twice as much if you have time on your hands and a stomach for the grind.