On MMOs...

Yesterday I was playing this new MMO game Aion Online, which was pretty decent. In the game, one of my friends asked me if I wanted to join this aussie guild which was recruiting, in which I replied I was not interested. He asked "why not?" and I simply replied "why yes?". Following that he described several so-called "benefits" of being in a guild such as easier to find groups for quests, raids and stuff. I replied to him "Its ok. If need be, I will just solo myself all the way. If you want to, you can go ahead." After which, he gave up trying to persuade me into joining the guild which I did not have the slightest idea on what it was about or even the name of it.

I consider myself a veteran game player, having played games for almost 20 years in my life. I spent the most recent years getting involved in MMO games. However, even more recently, the concept of MMO games are problematic for me.

The definition of a MMO is "A massively multiplayer online game (also called MMOG or simply MMO) is a video game which is capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously. By necessity, they are played on the Internet, and feature at least one persistent world."

MMOs are considered by many to be a social game. I have had my share of guilds in various games and have played in various roles such as guild leader, guild officer, raider and casual. Most noticeably, I have been the guild leader on and off in WoW for 2 years at least (on and off). Once in a while I may keep in touch with the players from the various games whom I have had played with and for the players who are still playing the game, I often get the question. "When are you going to re-form the guild?"

A guild leader is by-far, no mean feat. You have to manage the guild's inventory and players, lead and plan the raids, handle recruitment, do up the guild's website and DKP, come up with strategies for bosses and the most hated part of it, handling guild drama. To me, at the prime of my days as a guild leader, it had almost become a job to me. It felt to me like I was handling a small-medium company. (My guild had over 100+ unique players.) Every moment of my free time was spent trying to make everything go smoothly. Yes, playing the game was enjoyable. But outside the game, it was not.

Spending all the time, effort and money often ends up for naught when players would just leave the guild in a whim for simple reasons such as "unhappy with the loot system, unhappy with the officers, unhappy with the leaders". (Nobody was unhappy with me as far as I knew.) Honestly, till now, I have a low tolerance for noobs. And yes, all the epic gear that you have means nothing when you have poor attitude and skills, and being carried by other players. I don't mean to sound arrogant but if I could clone copies of myself to play the game, I am certain that I would make clearing raid content look like a joke.

At the present moment, the hardcore raider in me is no more. I consider myself a casual player. Joining pug raids whenever and however I like, even though sometimes it may mean playing with noobs. But its just a on-off thing, so it doesn't matter to me a lot. At least I do not have to face them every other day. I want to play whenever and however I like, where nobody can tell me what I can do and what I can't do. (Yet I do have a code of conduct which I follow through.)

Here's the problem. Nobody really likes such people in real life, and neither do people like such players in the game. (Unless you have some level of skill that make you useful.) Some narrow-minded people have asked, "If you want to play the game solo, then why play a MMO in the first place?". Yet it puzzles me how many of this people would actually say that Social Interaction is their prime motivation for playing MMOs. Whatever happened to playing games for fun?

I don't really intend to stay like this forever. But neither can I say I would even play a game or MMOs forever as they are time-intensive and my current socio-economic status allow me to spend more time in them. Once the status changes, gaming would have to take a back seat to other things.

Influence

Perhaps its these recent few weeks that I've been spending more of my time alone, I realized that I've become...what should I say...more "distant" towards people and perhaps "colder" or "nonchalant" in a way. Yet it may not be a bad thing, as I find myself more and more in control of my emotions. I think too much of human interaction cloud my cognitive and emotional behavior. Somehow, I don't think it may be a bad thing to be this way.