One I will never forget was in SWTOR. I was the guild master of a pretty big guild.
We had a young woman in the guild who was mute and whose microphone was always on mute in Teamspeak. After a few months, I noticed that her microphone was open one day. A good friend was with us when suddenly an unknown voice sounded in the channel. It was a guy’s voice. Sighing and audibly shaken, he said he had to make a confession and get something off his chest. He said he was neither mute nor a woman and was struggling with serious mental health issues, but had decided to work on them. And setting the record straight was the first step. He knew that trust was now in tatters, apologized profusely, and left the TS server and the guild before my buddy or I could react. We were completely baffled, and it was the first time I had ever seen my buddy speechless. Unfortunately, the “ex-girl” didn’t respond to any more PMs. Otherwise, I would have invited him back into the guild.
What are your experiences?
Not exactly drama but… In 2020, Verizon fucked up and kept me out of my new phone and I spent literally 20 hours on customer support (on my gf’s phone) and going to stores to try and fix it. They ended up throwing me a bone and I had a $300 Verizon store coupon. Free oculus quest #worthit?
Trying out the online community apps was intense. Upon popping into any Meta-ran space you would be flooded by children squeaking the most vile shit at each other. Occasionally there would be an older voice saying bad words to the children and laughing as they scream. What an awful place. But in other games like VRchat, there could be cool moments, too. Like an old Australian man moderating a conversation with a very international and diverse crowd around a campfire. Sure it’s cartoony and you can experience wide conversations on the web but it’s another thing to have proximity chat with stereoscopic vision. It feels like an actual “memory.” That was all terrifying and I have really touched the device in four years.
I was part of a free company in FFXIV that had a wonderful group of people. Very welcoming and incredibly fun to talk to. They were actually where I got a lot of ideas for my writing. They were an openly gay group and I’m not gay but I didn’t care, they were still fun to be around. But, when I joined the discord server, that’s when I found out how ‘open’ they really were. Channels about meeting each other, posting dick pics, wow. I read a whole comment thread about one of the guild members meeting with the leader for some fun irl.
Not quite as dramatic but certainly surprised me.
I play EVE Online soooooo this happens daily? multiple times a day?
The political dramas in that game could put actual real world political drama to shame. I mean take what’s currently happening in game right now. A massive alliance named Pandemic Horde decided to evacuate the space they held. fair enough, the issue? Leadership made the announcement they were leaving said space and then…leadership quit. in the same message. Thus all the regular members, literally hundreds of them if not well over 1000, were left on their own in hostile space with all their assets stuck in stations that were now actively being shot at and destroyed by opposing alliances. The players are essentially stuck because all the upper leadership of Pandemic Horde have the massive capital ships that they could have used to save their members by getting them out of system or aiding in destroying the attackers but they said nope, we’re not going to do that. It’s a cluster fuck.
Holy shit that’s big. I haven’t followed up on the Eve shenanigans since I left reddit
oh yeah it’s huge. As of right now Pandemic Horde have lost over 16,000 characters that have quit the alliance. they’re pretty much done. End of an era.
As a wormholer, watching it unfold from afar has been kinda hilarious
Once upon a time I ran a clan in a popular PvE/PvP co-op FPS alien shooter (still going, but has lost its magic). We had a few kinda well-known actors in the group. Shooting aliens one day and bullshitting with one when he gets a call that his best friend and fellow actor/writer OD’ed last night. He didn’t leave, and there wasn’t anything I could say. We shot aliens in silence for quite a while.
Back in my teenage days of vanilla WoW I was the sole Australian in an American guild. There was a girl who was about the same age as me who sometimes came to our 20 player raids, and I was friendly with her but didn’t really have a lot to do with her (and even if I had, I was on the other side of the world). However, that modest, friendly interaction was enough for one of the other guys (who was also about the same age as me) to message me in the middle of a raid to say that “she’s just pretending to be a girl for attention, you know”. I think I just replied “ok” but I was baffled by that apparent jealousy because the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind (again, I was on the other side of the world from them, and I had a huge crush on a girl at my school at the time that I never acted on).
Another unrelated anecdote from that time, I had one (different) guy tell me that he had assumed I was about 25 years old with kids, and was surprised to find out that I was only 16. I guess it was the accent?
Friend of mine in high school was super into Star Wars Galaxy. Was pretty much all he did after school at the time. One day he got into an argument with his guild leader or some other member with thw power to remove him, and they kicked him from the guild. This pissed him off enough that he recruited another friend of ours to infiltrate the guild and then spent the next month or so getting to a position of power within it so they could re-add the original friend and kick everyone else out while also draining the guild coffers. Effectively destroying the entire guild.
Back when Overwatch was fresh, had a couple randoms I wound up buddying and partnering up with pretty often for a few weeks. But one of them was a really annoying person on mic, who was just very clingy with the other guy. Then other guy wanted to drop clingy guy. Clingy guy freaked. They didn’t split but I eventually just stopped playing. Don’t know how their friendship ultimately turned out.
I used to play growtopia as a kid (don’t play it now, it went downhill lol), and I’ve seen a ton of scams/griefs among my friend circle, people would work for ages to gain someone’s trust and then either steal via picking up dropped items, not returning borrowed items, ooor… if you gave them access to your world they’d log in when you’re offline and literally tear the whole thing down to bedrock, even valueless blocks
At school there were a bunch of Xbox cod players that were friends and I was in their class and they gave me so much shit every day. It was like 5v1 and 3 were way bigger than me and 1 my size and 1 smaller. We would always argue about which friend group was better but could not resolve it because my friends and i were on ps3. We ended up getting to rank 1 on this team ladder and they were so mad they pushed me around and pushed me over. So I when i saw their small friend alone in the hallway I attacked him. Didnt do any damage because was to young to cause proper damage. Just called him racial slurs and punched him in the face and pushed him over. It was the style at time.
The next day I thought i was dead as soon as I got to class. But actually it turns out they pretended it never happened and ignored me and we didnt really argue after that. The only conversions we had after were small talk asking thoughts on the new game or guns perks etc.
I got beat up for fucking up someone’s trickshot in search and destroy. We took mw2 a little to seriously that game was our life.
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Another one. About 2005 my friend had a birthday we a went to his house and did stuff but then played runescape and he had no items so he logged into his older brothers account and drop traded us his rune set. I got a rune platebody that I could NOT wear. His brother pm ingame asking for it back the next day and I said I had no idea what he was talking about. Then on Monday he beat him up at school until I said I would give it back and then he hunted down all of my friends who got his given his items.
