miko2: Ranma disguised as a schoolgirl to fool Ryoga (Default)
[personal profile] miko2


I made some friends in City of Heroes over the last few months while I was leveling up my character Mouse Police. They were good players who all played late at night when I did, and as we all approached level 50 we decided to form a channel so that we could stay in touch. Most of these people I didn't even have as a global friend, and we were all in different super groups, but none of that really mattered, because once we formed our global chat channel we always knew when each other was on and could hook up and work together no matter which characters we were playing.

There was a guy named Ultra who was one of the latecomers to our group, but he was the most excited and enthusiastic about it. He'd gush about what a great thing the channel was, how we were all great players and how wonderful it was that we could work together, and he suggested many times that we should just form our own super group, ignoring the fact that we didn't need to -- having the channel made it so we could act as a super group together while still remaining in our own separate groups.

He was also a person I dubbed "Mr. Non-Intuitive" for his remarkable inability to pick up on subtle or even obvious clues and statements. I spent 15 or 20 minutes one day trying to explain to him how to add our channel to another character so that he could see what was being typed. This is not major brain surgery -- you right-click on the tab in one of your chat windows to edit it, and the edit window that comes up lists active channels on the left and inactive channels on the right, and has large buttons that you use to move a highlighted channel from one side to the other -- adding it so that text from that channel appears in that chat window, or removing it so it no longer appears. I had to take him through it step-by-step-by-step, explaining everything in minute detail, before he understood.

In general, he didn't pick up on clues in chat. He'd log on and wonder if we were getting together to do something. We'd say what we were doing or thinking of doing, but he'd keep asking, as if he didn't understand or notice what had already been said. He could be very insistent, and even whine-y, when this happened, and I always wanted to tell him to calm down and pay attention to what people were typing.

There was also one night when he was playing his character "Ultrawife". He had several "Ultra" characters; his main character was "Ultra7" or something, and then there was the wife and the son -- "Ultrason". Anyway "Ultrawife" was, perhaps inevitably, an overdeveloped female character in a bikini. We had joined this team and one of the other female characters had said that she wasn't "Ultrawife" unless she did all cooking, cleaning, and could still give her husband great sex afterwards -- some sort of comment like that -- and Ultra started sending me tells about how this person was "obviously a guy" because he "hated women so much". And he went on about it for many, many minutes. It got annoying, but I mostly didn't say anything back. Not that he was probably wrong -- a lot of guys in online games play female characters, so guessing that a female toon is played by a guy is often a safe bet -- but that he took a clumsy joke as proof that the person "hated women" and would constantly harp on it for over thirty minutes to me was annoying.

Ultra had also decided early on that I was a guy -- which was true of course, although he'd never bothered to ask directly -- and he'd call me "one of his guys" and his "good buddy" which was also a little annoying. And I suppose his insistence on treating me like a guy no matter what character I was playing should have been a clue that he had trouble separating the game from real life.

So basically he struck me as a somewhat annoying and non-intuitive guy who was also a good player and very enthusiastic about things. I didn't mind playing with him, although at times he got on my nerves.

So last week Issue 9 goes live, and one of the new things in this update is the "Statesman Task Force", specifically designed for top-level characters. And Ultra's all excited to do it as a team with our friends from the Channel. This is another case where he gets insistent and a bit whine-y, because he keeps harping on us to pick a date and time when we can do it. He can't wait. Several of us agree that we're usually on between 10pm and 2am and that Friday sounds like as good a time as any.

So I log in last night and Ultra starts saying things in the channel that make no sense at first, because when he's Ultra-excited he doesn't use any punctuation or caps and you have to parse what's typed through a punctuation editor to make any sense of it. But it turns out he's in the middle of forming the Statesman Task Force that we "promised" we would do. Nobody else is on, and he's greatly disappointed that the others in our channel haven't lived up to their "promise", but he's also super-excited because he's on a team with his friend E Princess who is "the greatest team leader ever" and everything is going to be absolutely perfect, and now I'm here and I need to log in Mouse immediately and join the team.

I hadn't really planned to do a Task Force, and his confusing multi-sentence, no-punctuation statements and assumptions that I was there for a reason and already knew what was going on are already getting on my nerves, but since I also didn't have any particular plans of any other sort I log in Mouse and join. While we wait for E Princess's tank friend to log on and join, our friend Fire logs on, so he gets added too. Ultra is ecstatic, this is why we have such a great channel, this is going to be the best team ever, etc. etc. He's like a kid on his first trip to Disneyland and he can't wait to get started.

Finally the tank arrives and we start. Several of us haven't done this TF before, and while we're told to follow the tank, it isn't very clear where we're going or what we're trying to do. The tank runs around destroying big cables on the dock area where we first appear, so I try to follow him and help. Then he disappears. It takes me a minute to figure out that he's gone underground, and to find the entrance, but I do so and follow him down. Other people are having the same problem... Ultra, in particular, never finds the entrance (Mr. Non-intuitive) and whines in the team channel that he can't find us, doesn't know where we are, doesn't know what's going on, can someone please teleport him, etc. etc.

Meanwhile the tank issues an order that he's "going to herd" meaning he's going to round up a lot of villians first, and to "wait for him to call out for FS" meaning fulcrum-shift, one of Fire's powers that is more powerful the more bad guys it hits. So basically he's telling us to stay back and wait for him to say when. Herding is a common tactic in City of Heroes, but of course every tank does it differently, and until you get used to each other it can be tricky knowing exactly what the tank is up to.

In any case, more than one person on the team doesn't even follow his orders. As he tries to herd, they charge forward into battle. I follow because I'm one of the major damage-dealers and I don't want my teammates to die while I'm standing around, but the tank is upset that people can't follow orders and he and the team leader agree that we've already wasted far too much time, that the mission shouldn't take this long, and that the team just isn't working well.

Meanwhile Ultra is still begging for a teleport because he can't find us.

Then the tank orders us to head back up top -- NOW. I follow his orders. He's done this before, he knows what he's doing, and the tank is always the last to leave because he can stand there and take a pounding and keep the bad guys busy. But several others fail to follow this order, and suddenly some of the others on the team -- mostly, I think, people who are supergroup-mates of E Princess and the tank -- decide that it's not working, our team is hopeless, we'll never make it through the task force if we can't follow orders, and people begin to drop from the team. In seconds the whole task force has fallen apart.

This sets off Ultra to no end, and he blames the tank. He literally goes on a tirade about the tank, calling him names, saying that he was off doing his own thing, how he's ruined everything and is a lousy team player, on and on and on. I admit that there could have been a little more explanation of what we were doing, but basically the tank knew what to do and the few orders he did issue were mostly ignored. But what it boils down to for Ultra, I think, is that he's been waiting all week to do this Task Force, he's been ultra-excited about it, he kept saying how wonderful our team was and how smoothly everything was going to go, and now he's ultra-disappointed that after all that waiting and standing around until the team was formed, it fell apart so quickly. And again, he blames the tank, and he's also exceptionally mad at his friend E Princess for "sticking by her stupid tank friend".

It's childhood playground politics. You're friends with that idiot! How can you be friends with someone I don't like? Now I don't like you either!

Fire gets invited back to the reforming team. Actually, Ultra had been given an invite but had turned it down because he refused to team with the "stupid tank". They didn't invite me. I didn't really take this as a slight, since they seemed to favor certain types of players over others. Fire, with his fire and kinetic controller abilities, is more valuable than my scrapper. I understand this.

But Ultra is upset that we are no longer on a team together -- never mind that we stood around for several minutes discussing this and Fire and I agreed that we didn't want to lead a Task Force until we knew more about how it worked and what to do. Also Fire had suggested that Ultra start inviting people if he was so gung-ho about us being on a task force together, but he'd declined, waiting for someone else to lead. Which Fire and I weren't going to do.

So Fire joins the team we'd just left because, as he'd pointed out, once he's done the task force once he'll know how it goes and then we can run our own teams and not be in the dark. This seems sensible to me, and I honestly wasn't that excited to be doing the task force that evening anyway. But Ultra works himself up into a frenzy, claiming that Fire is a "traitor" for teaming with the tank he hates, and for teaming with people who refused to invite me as well, or whatever. He rants and raves in our chat channel about it for nearly an hour, calling the tank names, laughing that they haven't started their new task force yet because they're so obviously incompetent, that sort of thing.

Fire explains (for the tenth time at least) that he's doing the task force with other people because he wants to do it with an experience group so that he knows how it goes, and then we can run them for our own group. But Ultra doesn't understand. He sends me a tell saying that he will NEVER do the Statesman Task Force with Fire, that no-good traitor. So I tell him that I guess he won't be doing it with me either. He says that I'm siding with "traitors" instead of my friends, and I tell him that he's being stupid, nobody's a traitor, and his constant whining is really getting annoying.

So. There. See that? I clearly back-stabbed my friend by saying he was whining, and by refusing to side with him no matter how irrational he was being.

This set him off even further. First, he wanted to remove me as a global friend. (As I said earlier, most of the people in the channel I don't even have as global friends, I didn't need to, but it's more personal for Ultra I guess). Of course, being Mr. Non-intuitive, he can't figure out how. Part of his confusion is that I'm now playing on my second account. My first account has the global chat handle "Shinobu" and my second account has the global chat channel "Shinobu Valentine", just to keep it simple. But despite the fact that my two chat handles are that similar, despite the fact that I talk to him every day on our chat channel, despite the fact that I was teamed with him earlier on my main account and if he just scrolls back he can see my chat handle in his chat window -- despite all of that, my so-called "good buddy" can't even figure out who I am to remove me as a global friend. I have to tell him.

This isn't enough for him of course, because he's still in our chat channel with all of us traitors who don't stand by their friends (a mistake he says he'll never make again, being friends with traitors like us). There's absolutely no question he doesn't know how to quit the channel -- even I don't know off the top of my head, although I'm sure I could figure it out if I wanted to -- so he starts spewing profanity and calling Fire (who happens to be the channel moderator) names. Fire is very patient, telling him that he needs to calm down and take a break, but eventually enough is enough, and Fire is force to kick Ultra from the channel.

I'd like to think that Ultra woke up today and realized what an idiot he was being, but I suspect he's too obtuse to ever come to that conclusion. The rest of us know that this is a game, and frankly both Fire and I were partly amused at his strange meltdown. I'm not upset that he's no longer my global friend. I'd be happy to team with him again, but I doubt he'll want to team with me. Considering how excited he was about our channel earlier in the evening -- and how excited he was about teaming with his other friend E Princess, who also "turned against him", I did wonder what he's going to think in the morning. He'll probably be very depressed that all of his good friends have turned against him for no reason, but I doubt he'll realize that the focal point of all of this is him, and not us.
This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
No Subject Icon Selected
More info about formatting

Profile

miko2: Ranma disguised as a schoolgirl to fool Ryoga (Default)
miko2

December 2012

S M T W T F S
      1
2 345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031     

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Aug. 10th, 2025 01:48 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios