The release of the new Star Wars game "The Old Republic" has gamers in a blissful tizzy, well at least the ones I know personally anyway. It has restored my interest and optimism in the big MMOs where World of Warcraft had started to drag me down. Even though I love The Old Republic it has also brought back things I absolutely freaking hate about playing online and I narrowed them down to a list of five topics.
1. The Grind
If you're a gamer, especially an online gamer, than you know what I am talking about.This is a necessary evil because well...you have to level and you have to earn it. A lot of companies do their absolute darnedest to make leveling interesting and exciting with the allure of new abilities and immersing you in the story, but sometimes it's just too long winded. The new star wars game especially is guilty of having long winded cut scenes...but I digress. The grind can come off sick and twisted too by creating an addiction to leveling. Gotta get to the next level, gotta get to the next level, gotta get to the next level. It's like having a gambling problem for crying out loud. Crafting also contributes to the grind. Some people I know just wait until they reach the max level to craft, but people like me who depend on the gear to help get leveled need to craft.
2. Trolling
Ah yes, the trolls, probably the worst thing ever to come from the Internet, and sometimes the funniest. Most of the time it's just down right mean, some noob seeking honest help in general or trade chat (Barrens chat anyone?) gets lambasted with smart mouthed replies and comments from someone who has low self-esteem and taking it out on that player. Usually the noob falls into the trolls trap giving the troll more power to make fun of them. Oh! They are so brave with their keyboards! So defiant in front of their computer screens! So lonely in their mother's basements! Don't feed the Trolls kids. Luckily for us there is the ever useful ignore option and if you're my brother you just disable the whole general chat system entirely.
3. Group Questing
Unless I'm in some sort of heroic instance or an endgame raid then I really can't stand questing within a group, it's absolutely frustrating. You have to wait for the people or find the people if they run off some where and you spend half the time in the game typing instead of questing. Sometimes they want to skip quests you don't want to skip, or run into a huge mob that you have no chance of beating, it's lame. Usually I try to be polite and make some excuse why I don't want to quest together, but I guess the cat is out of the bag now!
4. Travel
In most MMOs for some lame reason they make your character start out traveling very slowly. In WoW if you need to taxi they charge you. Really? Wtf? They just can't have a character start out with faster movement or even a mount? I never saw the point of this. Sure if you want a special mount you have to get the achievement or pony up the dough, but for goodness sake at least make the running speed twice as fast in the beginning. What's it going to hurt? It is a virtual world remember, its fake economy isn't going to get hurt.
5. Guild Politics
This one is a doosy and has effected most everyone that has ever been in a guild. Usually it happens because the guild leaders don't have the mental faculties to govern a guild or make the appropriate people officers to help divvy out the raiding time. It results in favoritism and then members who haven't gotten the chance to raid and get better gear start throwing a fit and it all goes downhill from there. Other problems with guilds is that the leaders can be unholy douchebags of people who take out there real world problems on people in-game. Also sometimes certain people just don't mix well with other people. You can have instances where something is said that was meant to be taken one way but is taken the wrong way. My advice is have thick skin and don't take things personally. If you are a casual player like myself then find a casual/social guild. If you are or want to be a hardcore gamer than find a hardcore guild, a big one too that has an actual guild application to fill out online.
There yah have it.
