Let's tell our small MMO stories

[pedroteixeira]

Inspired by this post in one of the FFXIV threads, I thought it’d be fun if we shared these kinds of small, fleeting but special stories that you can only experience in a MMO.

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I’m not as deep into MMOs as I was back in high school in '08. These days there are too many games that I want to play to dedicate my game time to a single game, and due to their repetitiveness I can’t remain interested in one for more than three months at a time, unless there’s a new patch/expansion.

Even so, during my last months with FFXIV I was lucky enough to be part of one of those stories.

It was past midnight, which meant there was a small number of active players. As I was doing my tasks in Limsa Lominsa (one of the three starting cities), I saw a player using the city chat to announce a certain “Yellow Party” in Gridania (another of the starting cities). The player also asked for people to come to them first for outfitting. I was busy with my tasks at the time, and thus didn’t pay much attention to it.

Many minutes later, the player broadcasted their party again; apparently it was still going. Since I was about to quit and go to bed, I traveled to Gridania to see what was going on.
Right at the entrance I was met with sounds of cheers, laughter, and celebration (players can use emotes to trigger those sound effects). Following them, I found ~15 characters in a circle, all dressed in yellow and dancing together.

That broadcaster suddenly came to me, traded me yellow dyes, and said nothing else. Instinctively, I changed the color of all my equipment to yellow thanks to those dyes, and joined the circle to have some fun.

Every passerby would stop there, look at us puzzled and dance for a while. It was so weird because no one was talking, there was no need for words; you just knew that this was an event, and you could totally be part of it if you wanted so by getting close.

After 15 or so minutes it started to get really late, and one by one people said goodbye (the only word exchange) and left. I didn’t record their names, nor did I meet them again. And I would have missed this weird thing if I had gone to bed early that day.

(I’m the black dude with the fro)

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Whether it was in an old MMO a decade ago or a new one, if you were socially engaging you were bound to see a story like that happening in front of you. What are yours?

[videodante]

I don’t play it anymore, but there were a few months a while back I was really into EVE. One of my most memorable ‘arcs’ in the game was doing a bunch of PvE and eventually being noticed by a small nullsec corporation. They weren’t super big, but they were allied with a larger corp (honestly, it’s been so long that I don’t remember which big one).

EVE is weird because it makes you constantly feel like you’re part of this massive universe in a way that not many other games do. I vividly remember that when our corporation was establishing an outpost in nullsec (an operation that takes like a couple IRL days) I was on guard duty with this other guy, and we were chatting in ventrilo and it was just this surreal experience because he was telling me about his weird experiences in EVE, how the reason he left his last corporation is because they screwed him over in a battle and left him to die.

So in response, without telling anyone, he starts just… stealing ships? Like he will just, one by one, take ships from the Corporation hangar and fly them back to a secured station of his own. He did this for like 20 ships before he actually resigned from the corp. Then he sold them all and relocated to another sector of space, and met up with this current corp.

All of this is happening with the backdrop of some giant space battle happening one system away from us, preventing us from leaving our nascent outpost. It was like a weird, cyberpunk version of a bottle episode in a sitcom.

I don’t know if I’ll ever really get back into EVE, but damn that game is cool.

[alexok]

[P4nt0mL4nc3r]

Some friends and I one time in WoW made druid alts and got them to the level where you can get bear form and sat outside of the entrance to Undercity and just greeted people while sitting on pillars for a couple of hours. A few people threw an emoji back or something like that, nothing too spectacular happened though.

A better story probably: before they changed mind control (another WoW story) to where you couldn’t communicate to the other faction through emotes (you could do /e and type whatever you wanted), and we were trying to do a world boss, so someone mind controlled one of the Alliance players in the group that approached us and gave them our vent info so we could coordinate attempts and not just murder each other. It was a weird experience, everyone felt really uneasy/wanted to mess with the Alliance when they were doing their attempts, but we would switch off a few times, then they eventually interrupted ours and stole the kill from us

[Scy]

Small MMOs or small stories? I played in the Korean beta for Lineage 2 (don’t speak Korean) and after I got bored of it I started PKing until a bunch of Korean players chased me down and killed me. I was a higher level than them (20 something at the time) so it took a good number of them. I was a bit surprised to find that my shoes had dropped on my corpse and someone had taken them. And that’s the story of how a Korean stole my shoes in Lineage 2.

There’s also an enemy in Lineage 2 that shares the name of my old character but I’m fairly certain there’s no connection. I think it’s a pirate.

[sammneiland]

Aw shucks, I’m glad to have inspired a new thread!

As for character stories… hmm, I don’t have any at the moment, but I’ll deffo check back in the next couple days. There’s some rather big server wide events that are going on, and there will be more as we get closer to Stormblood.

[sammneiland]

Alright I got a story now (after having been in the hell that was Stormblood launching hooboy good times)

Anyway a little preface. This wasn’t an RP story but was a typical game play related story. More to the point, it happened with the final boss of the Main Story Quest line for Stormbood which… compared to previous final bosses, is REALLY intense to fight. Like there’s almost no room for error and everyone has gotta be in really good sync. Like its really satisfying to beat but… man, my first couple times at it were just soul crushing.

Anyway, on my… I think third attempt to beat it, we had a White Mage in our party named Yuyukitty Saigyouji (which is a Touhou reference apparently?) who right out of the gate was spamming Cure 3 and running their selves out of MP. Someone brings it up asking them to stop at which point they say

“It’s okay guys, I heal with TP! :)” (TP being used for mostly melee related skills)

So at this point everyone is thinking “We’re gonna die” and “This is gonna suck” which I’m sort of leaning that way. But then I look above their name and they have the title of “Good Samaritan”. Titles are a thing you have to earn, and in this case, that title is earned by Resurrecting 200 players you just randomly come across. So it doesn’t count for people you party up with or are part of an alliance.

Because of this, and because I’m kinda just in a dgaf mode already, I just say “No, I have faith in Yuyukitty.”

And holy balls, it was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.

We had party members dropping like flies either from high damage attacks or being knocked off the edge, or just having our HP drained pretty damn close to 0 but like every time we’d either get healed to max near instantly or revived just in time. Even when we got well into the second phase of the boss.

Midway through that though things started to get a bit hairy, we were at a situation where there were only 4 of our part members left alive including myself, and even though Summoner is a DPS class, I have access to a Resurrection spell and was using it where I could. One of the party asked the Yuyukitty to use the Limit Break which was at level 3, which would revive everyone who died in the party as well as fully restore the health of everyone, to which they say.

“Nah, I got this :)”

And for a while things were looking up and we had 6 party members alive as we got to the end.

Then it just lays out a big asshole damage blasting move which kills everyone EXCEPT for Yuyukitty, who at that point, unleashes the Limit Break, revives EVERYONE, which basically allows everybody to just unleash RPG nerd fury and finish things off.

Considering all the frustration I’d been having trying to clear it, this was probably the best thing to happen to me since jumping into the new content. Afterward when everyone left, it was just me, Yuyukitty, and our second healer just kinda hanging out, which Yuyukitty says they had people kicking them from the party before they even started just for goofing about. Which… I dunno, the whole thing was just such a weird thing to experience.

Like I (and I’m sure anyone else here) have dealt with trolls many a time, but it’s… kinda just this weird second level thing where the behavior being displayed was of such a different kind of… enjoyment for a lack of better terms. Like I assume they did it for the joy of being able to show off and act with confidence, rather than a troll who gets joy from seeing the frustration and suffering of others. Even in the way they talked it was so much more them being the central focus rather than just being against everyone else.

I dunno, just rambling on here cause MMOs are always this fascinating way to study people. Given it emulates certain real life kind of social cues but does so in a space that is separated from reality, folk take advantage of that to explore what it is they can and can’t do.

[swords]

not much of a story, but i’ve been leveling fishing in FFXIV this past week and i really like brief shared silent moments with someone else fishing in the same area.

this morning i was doing some semi-absent minded fishing in Yanxia and noticed that someone came out to sit in the same boat as me to fish. the river i was fishing in is huge, and you can fish on any part of its coast, so it felt nice to have someone come out to hang out specifically next to me.

[sammneiland]

So hello I have another XIV storied because I did an event the other night. Basically a “Friendship Festival” which was meant to celebrate the in game unity between the various nations and cultures. Like it was really fun and cute stuff, and my Bard character was of course doing music performance.

Normally it’s kinda an awkward thing to do but since I to a lot of my own recordings, I was trying to figure out a way to be able to make it all feel like real time and cool. So I thought this time “hey I’ll upload my recordings to YouTube and put them on a sync player thing that I can link people to” and it was great I had all these timed macros and timed pyrotechnic stuff like it was gonna be the fucking most awesome thing ever.

That is until I realized half of my songs got completely fucked up when being transcoded into video. I don’t know if it was my trying to transcode them or YouTube or whatever (like you think a 50 bajillion dollar website like YouTube could just do it for you especially when it says you have audio but whatever) so like… basically the worst technical failure ever and I thought it was ruined and just linked people to the audio on my character’s tumblr so it wasn’t perfectly in sync.

But to my delight everyone was really chill about it, especially since they were all just impressed by the recordings I made, especially since some of them I had to arrange and orchestrate entirely (which I’m a musician and I do it anyway and it was for fun) so like… I dunno, it’s just really nice to have a community that is completely willing to overlook technical snafus and appreciate the effort you put into performing art for a game that’s about roleplaying.

Even better was when I saw a little review I got in a “In Character” magazine (like they say they’re a newspaper but they’re more like a tabloid ANYWAY semantics) and it was like…

:’)

It’s just really nice. Like I love to make music and love I can do it in the ways that I do, but it’s also just… really fucking cool how I can make audio recording and say “yeah this person uses magic to make music” and it’s COMPLETELY accepted and something people treat as canon. That shit is so awesome to me <3