Sam "azerian" Maxted is showing his age with his most recent editorial about the diminishing courtesy in MMOs that once existed but is now seemingly all but gone.

You know the elderly think things were better when they were young; that ice cream was sweeter, summers were hotter and you were grateful for what you had? Given what I've been seeing in MMOs of late, I could be on my way to joining them. I've been shaking my head over the past few months at the way some people behave online. I don't know if it's just the servers I've been playing on, but increasing numbers of players seem to want something for nothing, and aren't afraid to step all over you in order to get it. I'd like to start by addressing something that most of us will have seen in MMOs, and which some may even have participated in when we were newbies. This topic, ladies and gentlemen, is begging.

Personally, I have no time for beggars. It's not difficult to earn money in most subscription-based MMOs, so beggars tend to get a mix of two reactions. The first would be "get lost and earn your money like everyone else", with the second being something like "if you'd gone out and levelled, you'd have earned twice that by now". Why people beg in MMOs really confuses me, when it seems such a pointless exercise. At best you waste some time and miss out on a load of EXP, while at worst you ruin your character's reputation and set yourself up for pranks. I have to admit that I've done the old trick of leaving cash in a trade window before going AFK, just to see how long the beggar would wait for me to hit "Trade". This may be a bit of a dick move in itself, but it's generally reserved for the more obnoxious beggars out there.

While people have been begging for money in MMOs since day one, the number of those asking for - or even demanding - "boosts" and power levelling seems to have rocketed in the last few years. It used to be that I could play during peak times without being asked for this, but these days I get someone begging for this kind of help a few times a week. Now, I'm not a heartless person, so I don't mind helping with something that's nearby and won't take too long. However, I don't see why I should spend an hour or more babysitting someone I don't know through a low level instance, so they don't have to worry about competing for loot. If I knew the person who was asking for help and I wasn't busy, then things would be different. However, I'm usually only asked by people wanting a free ride.

Something else that bothers me is the language people can use when they don't get their own way. For example, I was playing WoW recently and waiting for the instance server to behave so my group could enter Azjol-Nerub. A few of us were flagged for PvP (having come straight from a Battleground) and we were ambushed and killed by a group of Horde. Rather than wait to be de-flagged from PvP, one of my group kept respawning and attacking the Horde by himself. This prompted him to hurl abuse through the public chat channels about how we - and others nearby - should have helped him in his doomed crusade. Fortunately, he logged out in a huff and was replaced just in time for us to start the instance. It did, however, prompt some members of the group into saying it wasn't the first time they'd seen this sort of thing recently. I can understand a bit of swearing going on in front of the PC when your character's killed in an ambush, or making some comments in-game if the situation was unavoidable. On the other hand, targeted abuse is completely unnecessary. Why risk your account being suspended by swearing at people, especially when those people haven't done anything wrong? It's easier to be forgiving of new players - particularly if they're new to the genre - but max-level players doing it confuses the hell out of me.

Still on the subject of instances in WoW, it really bugs me when everyone in the group assumes they'll be teleported there. For the uninitiated, when two members of a group reach an instance's Meeting Stone, they can use it to summon everyone else. However, I've often seen group members refuse to head over to the Meeting Stone, even when they're closest ones to it. This usually means someone has to travel half way across the world to help with the summoning, when Mr Lazy could've made things ten times quicker. Before you say it, this isn't due to the offending group member(s) being afk - some people simply can't be bothered to travel to Meeting Stones themselves.

While the Meeting Stone thing gets on my nerves, it pales in comparison to group members who go AFK for half an hour - or even log out - because they need to eat dinner half way through a dungeon. I can say that I've never done this and, barring a stroke or an attack of near-terminal stupidity, never will. It has to take some kind of sociopath to join an instance group with no intention of actually finishing the dungeon, or making four other people wait while you eat. Wasting an entire group's time like this makes me angry - I'm starting to feel it just writing this. Is it that some people simply don't think before joining a group, or do they join on the off-chance that they'll finish before they need to leave? An apology or the character saying in advance that they didn't have long would go a long way towards smoothing things over. However, at least in my experience, this hardly ever happens. The offending character simply disappears with a message saying "AFK - dinner", then gets annoyed when the group either splits up or has kicked him by the time he comes back. If anyone here has done this (or knows someone who has), please let us know what caused this behaviour. There may be something I'm missing here, but on face value it seems like one of the most inconsiderate things someone can do in an MMO.

This brings me onto my final point, which can be summed up in three letters: plz. Maybe it's the writer in me, but I don't like the word "plz" at all. When people use it towards me, they may as well not bother: it simply doesn't sound like a "please". To me, it sounds like the person saying it knows a "please" is expected, but they can't be bothered to type it out and don't really mean it. I might be getting the wrong end of the stick here (at least in some cases), but that's how it comes across. Is it really so hard to add the extra three letters? It's not as if they're spread across the keyboard. And how did a "z" wind up replacing an "s", anyway?

So, with all this staring me in the face, can I say that courtesy in MMOs is dead? No, I don't think so. While everything I've listed here is annoying and seems to happen more than it used to, the majority of players don't behave this way. In reality it's only a small minority who do any of the above, with the exception of using "plz". What happened when I was waiting outside Azjol-Nerub actually gives me hope; one player may have been out of line, but others nearby reacted to him in the same way I did. In other words, while one person in the group had some serious anger management issues, the others - and everyone else nearby - were just fine. As long as the majority of gamers can't be accurately described by Penny Arcade's theory, we should be ok for a while yet.

SAM "azerian" Maxted
Editor
ZAM.com