Category Archives: Real Online Life Stories

O The Things I’ve Seen!

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I was chatting with some gaming buds (ya, we were supposed to be working, SO?), and the noobus amongus was aghast about some SWG hosebag that had passed around some of her personal porn (and by personal, I mean of the aforementioned hosebag) a few months back.

O please. That is so five years ago and has been done to death.

Not that I blame him for being shocked; the first time I heard of such a thing, I was shocked as well. SWG is his first MMOG so it’s understandable that the seamy underbelly of MMOG society is repulsive and nauseating to him. To experienced gaming hags like me, it’s just business as usual.

It’s been my observation that in any online gaming society, there are at most five, maybe six normal people. I AM NOT BEING CONSERVATIVE HERE. We work, we interact with real, live people every day (with a certain amount of enjoyment), we have other interests besides catassing our way to gaming riches, we think cheating other players, even if it’s JUST A GAME, is wrong, etc.

Everyone else, all 1,995 of them on each gaming shard, server, et al, is the solid waste at the bottom of the septic tank. I know this to be true, and you would too if you’d stop hanging onto the delusion that human beings are inherently virtuous.

Still don’t believe me? Want examples? Hell, I could give you AT LEAST a month’s worth of examples, but since I’m inherently lazy (and virtuous), I’ll give you four days’ worth of examples. Tuesday through Friday … it’s story time.

And I’ve got some doozies.

Way Back When

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Back when I was AOL user #24, hoping user #25 would come along some day, I ran into AOL’s gaming area and tried out a little PVP shooter named Rolemaster:  Magestorm (MS).  By today’s standards, this ancient shooter was as primitive as using chopsticks to eat soup.  In it’s day though, it was the shit.

The Setup:  Three teams, Chaos (red), Balance (green) and Order (blue) each of which has a home area that must be conquered/defended within one of three different maps available — The Cathedral (our overwhelming favorite), Catacombs, or the dreaded Thunderkeep (notoriously difficult to defend).
 
Wanna hear scary?  I remembered all of that and it’s been over five years since I’ve played.
 
O those were the days!  PVP was new, graphical gaming was new, hacking game code just for the hell of it was new.  We invented cyber, baby!  The scams, griefs and backstabbing that you are so familiar with in online society today — that was us.
 
I remember several times when this one guy would take over control of the game and change everyone’s player name.  (Mike the hacker we called him.  He was the god of turning an MS night into a night of chaos and anarchy.)

One weekend, they patched in what became known as “The Hacker Patch”.  Basically, the patch compared a player’s set of trained spells with their earned experience points and deleted any players whose training was mathematically impossible.  (Why in the world they didn’t have this in the original code, I dunno.  Devs were new too in those days.)
 
The next week, many of the players we used to play with were gone.  I was vindicated, however, as a couple of asshats had been accusing me (!!!) of cheating.  Maybe I had just been clever enough to restore my original spell set before the patch.
 
The world will never know.  That one goes to the grave with me.