Internet story incoming:
Dr. Mycroft or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Videogames.
It was around 2005 or so, I was a sophmore in highschool and about 16 years old. It was probably the biggest time I had ever freaked out in a video game and it was the very last. I have never since been angered or saddened by a videogame.
It was on a free-shard(privately run MMO game servers) for Ultima Online called UOGamers
ivinity. I had started playing some years earlier on IPY and then Redemption, and being quite young didn't have the easiest time fighting people who had played the game from the beginning. But I had worked and worked at it because I wanted to be good at the game.
So on Divinity I finally started to get legitimately very good at Ultima Online(which has a very high skill curve.) I started to win actual tournaments against players I had previous thought were invincible. I progressed so far that I was actually the third best duelist on the server. So proud of myself that I took a screenshot of it for posterity. http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/3288/topduelists.jpg
The point being that as I was quite young, I developed kind of a massive ego about my abilities. UO isn't a game like other MMOs(at least most free-shards aren't.) There were no safe zones outside of towns, anyone could be attacked while fighting monsters. All your items could be looted from your body as well upon death. So being good at the game gave me an unbelievable power-trip. Barring getting jumped 5v1 or so forth, I was pretty much capable of doing anything I wanted with very few consequences. And at 16 it was a feeling I wanted to hold onto.
But eventually the server started to die off as all fan made 'free-shards' had a habit of doing. The population dropped from some 850 clients connected at all times to about 350. The number of players I could fight got fewer and fewer, so there were less people to show off in front of and less people to dominate and control. But still I hung on until one last tournament on one fateful day.
A word on the PvP Gameplay in Ultima Online: It is very fast paced. Your maximum hitpoints are 100, and a single burst of spell damage can easily do 80 damage. It is based around disrupting the casting of your opponents spells so that they can't heal themselves or deal much damage to you, while you damage them. Very twitch based with perfect timing and fractions of seconds being important. Fights are often finished in a few minutes and rarely go over ten.
Most players play as strong mage warriors(called tank mages) who can deal high burst magic damage combined with heavy melee attacks. Because of this, keeping a pre-casted healing spell ready to cast at any moment is considered extremely bad form in a 1v1 fight, because it requires no skill and merely prolongs the fight making it boring. In addition to the popular tank mages there is a type of warrior(called a medwarrior) that uses magic only for defense, but can hit much faster than a tank mage and for higher damage. They tend to be damage sponges because of their quick healing.
So with the game already becoming less and less fun on account of the decreasing amount of players I joined up in an officially sanctioned server tournament. With each round more and more players were defeated and I progressed further up the ladder. On the 6th and final round however I ran into problems.
Medwarrior was not a particularly popular character template to play as, so I did not have much experience fighting them. I ended up in a tiny arena with one who I believe was named slugmosphere, though that may have just been his monicker later on. He immediately casted a healing spell and began attacking me(which was again, considered very bad form.) I had in fact never run into anyone doing it before and so my first attacks were simply met by him healing and me wasting my mana.
Having been then exhausted of my most important resource, my mana pool, I had no choice but to run. There was no where to go in that tiny arena and he could deal constant heavy damage to me, forcing me to heal and spend more mana. So I simply ran in circles avoiding his blows as best I could. But because of this I was under nearly constant threat of death and it took me nearly 20 minutes of running away to get enough mana to attack him again. And attack I did again and again. 20 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour ecked by. With him barely surviving every single attack with extreme ease because of his 'abusive' stratagem.
For two and a half hours I fought on the constant brink of death. I legitimately started sweating and getting red from the effort by the second hour. But I held on because my ego demanded it. I was a great player who had spent years perfecting a delicate combat system. How could some douchebag with no skills beat me by abusing a single poorly planned game mechanic.
The admins had actually left and returned later to find us still fighting. The whole servers events had been put on hold because this fight would not end. The scheduled capture the flag game was run though the same system the tournaments were and so they could not start it until the 1v1 was over. Half the server sat watching one of the most boring fights imaginable.
Eventually the admins created flametraps inside the already cramped arena. Spawning more and more of them as the fight went on. Which, though I'm certain was not their intention, only made the fight even more unbalanced against me, because my opponent the 'medwarrior' got a certain amount of their healing for free. Eventually because of this I ran over one of the flame traps while wounded heavily, and died.
And everything came crashing down around me. I had spent two and a half hours of my time on a server that was becoming less popular every day on the assumption that because I had spent a few years of my life learning to become good at it I would be able to win. But instead I was killed by some guy 3 years my younger who had started the game a few months ago, because he had essentially abused a game mechanic.
I basically went into a fit of complete rage. I'm not the type to throw things, yell or bawl in real life; so it would not have been as fun to watch as the great many youtube videos of raging gamers. But I probably looked pretty pissed off. And in the game I basically cursed everyone out calling the admins trash, the server trash, the guy who beat me trash. I'm a pretty fast typer so I was able to throw out a whirlwind of imaginitive curses in about a minutes time. The admins started to get mad with me and made threats of banning my account and so forth.
Such threats don't work on me though and so I continued to rave and rant, at which point I'm sure they started talking amongst themselves in staff channels as to what to do with me, because I was a pretty high profile active player and they likely did not want to ban me. At this point other players started trying to calm me down. They were promptly told to go fuck themselves. And at about two minutes into my rage, I endeavored to quit the server.
I opened my bank and threw all the items I had on the ground, my trophys, my equipment, everything. I then started spamming my account name and password and was promptly kicked offline when someone else logged into my account. And at that point something inside of me broke. After I had calmed down the next day, I realized that I basically did not give a shit about videogames any more.
Not that I was never going to play them any more. Nor that I couldn't become happy from playing that, for it will always be an enjoyable experience to me. But that getting angry about them, about some pixels even ones I had worked very hard for was such a waste of my time. And from that time on, for the past 7 years or so I have never again had a single bad experience with a video game. I simply accept them for what they are and never take my losses personally. They are forms of entertainment and even when I'm not the explicit video-game champion I want to be they are always still fun.
As a side note. I had started playing UO again about a year later after my blowout. I eventually ran into Slug(the guy who had cause me to quit in a rage) some years later. We became friends without my really knowing who he was, and he later confessed to being the person who made me quit the game and to this day feels really bad about it(though he really shouldn't.) Hes probably one of my best e-friends and we became 2v2 partners in Ultima Online for the two or three years we continued to play it.
Also, apologies for any spelling or grammatical snafus there may be as I didn't spell check any of this.
implodinggoat said:
Do you think that LotSB made up for it?
