How To Be a Complete Idiot

by

Pig 

I am, at any given point in time, playing a number of online games. Recently I had an experience that I thought I?d share with all of my fellow game-geeks out there. We?ll file this one under the “what not to do” category. (One day, I?m going to write a guide chock full of things not to do while gaming, but that?s not important right now. Gotta stay focused. So quit trying to distract me.)
 

Questing

Questing is an important part of any massive online game (MOG). The general approach is that you assemble a group of buddies (or total strangers, for that matter), and you collectively get the job done. As a group, you talk to a computer-generated non-player character (NPC), and he/she gives your group the quest. Then you attempt to obtain the required quest components (the tooth of a dragon is typical), slay the appropriate beasties (often pretty nasty ones, too), go to the necessary locations (which are, of course, scattered all over the stinkin? globe), and talk to other NPCs (most of whom have the most cryptic conversational skills imaginable). You then bring all the stuff that you?ve collected back to the beginning of the quest, give those items to the NPC that started the whole thing, and get your reward.

All of you online gaming geeks out there know this drill all too well. It?s pretty much a sequential thing — do step 1, then step 2, then step 3, etc. At the end of step 5 (or whatever), you get a chunk of experience and an item. Rewards vary, but overall questing is worth the effort.

(Oh, wait. For all you Everquest players out there, the experience is a little different. It starts the same — talking to the quest-giving NPC — and requires that you travel around, kill incredible boss monsters, and obtain various items. The difference is that you?ll sometimes have to quest for, oh I don?t know, 20 hours or so, with all of your friends, before you can complete the quest. And even if you had to kill Lucifer himself to complete the quest, you get 11 experience points and an earring that you could have bought in the Freeport tunnel for 55 platinum pieces. That?s the way EQ “rewards” it?s players. Since I said that “overall, questing is worth the effort” in the above paragraph, EQers might have become confused. Thought that needed a bit of explanation.)
 

Finding the Right Team

Now a weird thing happened the other day. I went to the correct location, and spoke to the quest-giving NPC, grouped with some other like-minded individuals, and off we went to accomplish our first goal.

To accomplish the first half of our little mission, we needed to get to the bottom of a pretty nasty dungeon and slay the chief beastie down there. No small task. We began quite professionally, traveling ever deeper, fighting increasingly tough uglies, and in general kicking some monster-butt. It?s the kind of excitement game-geeks like me live for.

The early parts of the dungeon are quite generic. You fight a bunch of low-level undead beasties, all of which are badly organized. The undead do NOT understand tactics, let me tell you. They just come at you one or two at a time, and get themselves chopped, shot, and burned up. Easy.

As you approach the bottom of the dungeon, there are three main obstacles. The first and hardest obstacle (which I?ll call the “undead room”) is a big rectangular space containing a number of doors, out of which flow 10 or so undead baddies that wanted to eat our brains (or whatever the undead do to people). The second obstacle is a constricted little area (which I?ll call the “crowded hallway” for discussion purposes) that contains 6 miscellaneous monsters. The third obstacle is killing the boss himself.

When we got to the undead room, we had ourselves an old fashioned donnybrook. It was a long, drawn out fight, lots of heroism was shown, and there were a few scary moments. But we killed everything (how, exactly, do you kill something that?s already dead? Oh, never mind). We were ready to head into the next room.

I?d done this quest before. The hardest part of the quest is getting through the room full of 10 undead baddies, and we just did that. And yet this is where things got weird.
 

When a Good Plan Goes Bad

Our next obvious step was to kill the monsters in the crowded hallway. It?s a tight space, but it?s not very hard to do. In fact, these are actually much easier to kill than the monsters in the undead room. However, someone in the group started talking about how we need to run past them, as there are too many of them, and they are too tough to fight. I guess the plan was to outrun them, get into the boss? room, and kill him. I say “I guess” because I never actually saw this plan work. It never even got close to working.

Everyone in the group except for me seemed to agree with the “run past them” strategy, however. I was the lone voice that advocated the more deliberate approach of killing them. The truth is that I didn?t get to say much at all. As soon as we killed everything in the undead room, there was a bit of scattered chatter (most of which consisted of “ok, everyone run past these and get into the boss? room! Go go go!”) and we all ran, strung out and scattered, past the 6 monsters in the hallway. Confused, trying to type out my protest against this “plan”, I was last. Don?t be last in a dungeon. It?s bad.

Needless to say, I died, respawned, and headed back to the dungeon to try again.

Once I got inside, I found half of my group mates at the dungeon entrance. They had died, respawned, and were starting over as well. Well, needless to say, some people left our group, and others joined, and our semi-new group started into the dungeon again.

Remember, there are three main obstacles in this dungeon: the undead room, the crowded hallway, and the boss himself. Pretty straightforward stuff.
 

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Again, everything went as planned — up to a point. We fought our way ever deeper, and had a massive brawl in the undead room. As we were approaching the crowded hallway, someone started the whole “Ok, everyone, just run past them. There are too many to fight!” thing again. And that?s what we did. We got strung out, we tried to run past monsters that we could have overcome with relative ease, and half our group got wiped out doing it.

I made it into the boss? room this time. Immediately upon entering, however, I noticed three things. First, I was badly wounded, as I?d taken a bunch of hits from the monsters in the crowded hallway. Second, our group was now half a group, since we pointlessly killed off half our members 45 seconds ago. Third, I learned pretty quickly that you cannot kill off the boss monster with half a group of badly wounded players. Needless to say, the undead boss got to eat my brain. And he also ate everyone else?s brain too.

Death, respawn, run back to entrance.

Now at this point in the story, you may be thinking to yourself “Dude, that is a dysfunctional group you have there. Get them to change their minds, or group with someone else. No sense dying like an idiot.” You?re right. There?s no doubt about it. So I quit that group (I had to log off for a while anyway), and when I got back on I started looking for another one doing the same quest. After a few minutes, I was freshly grouped with another eight hearty individuals, and we started into the dungeon.

Things were looking good. Everyone in the group knew what they were doing. We fought our way deeper, killing off the foul undead as we went. We got to the big undead room, and overcame the nasty brain-eating zombies and skeletons in there. Then, just when we I thought we were ready to kill the monsters in the crowded hallway, it happened. Someone started yelling, “Ok, everyone run past those things! There?s too many!” I tried to lodge my protest. I really did. But because I was typing, and not running, I was last.

Not a good thing.

Death, respawn, run back to dungeon.

…And Repeat And Repeat And Repeat

So we tried again: fight deeper into the dungeon, slay the undead in the undead room, approach the crowded hallway.

Yep. I couldn?t believe it either. I swear, we?d agreed that this plan was doomed to failure. Yet somehow, none of that seemed to sink in, and here we were, trying to run past them again.

Death. Respawn. Run back to dungeon entrance.

Well, tomorrow finally arrived, and I found myself a group. We fought our way ever deeper, and killed everything in the undead room. And just as we were about to kill the crowded hallway monsters, it happened yet again. “Just run past them! There are too many!”

There had to be a commonality here, but I didn?t know what it was. Multiple groups, all REPEATEDLY trying the same failed strategy? Everyone and his brother apparently thought that this plan was a good one; everyone and his brother was dying trying to implement this plan, too. The idiocy had spread like a disease.

I?d spent hours trying to finish this quest, and I?d had enough. Before we started down into the dungeon to try again, I had a heart-to-heart talk with my group about the undead room and the crowded hallway. I shared the fact that I?d died 6 times trying the “run past them” plan. I told them that killing the monsters in the crowded hallway wasn?t very hard; I?d done it before. And I typed in ALL CAPS SO THEY COULD HEAR ME REALLY WELL.

It worked.  We cleared the big room, we rested a moment, and then — much to my surprise — we systematically cleared the crowded hallway.  It was easy.

Then we healed and buffed ourselves, talked strategy for a moment, and headed into the boss room. Since we had a full group of 8 players, all of whom were in good health, we had a good chance of success. And since we all jumped on the boss at the same time (instead of being all strung out, sprinting into the room one by one), the boss was pretty easy to overcome. The quest requirements were met, and we went off to claim our reward.
Needless to say, I learned a few lessons from all of this.  First, find the right group members.  Guild mates and other in-game buddies are a golden resource for quality players.  Second, if a strategy doesn?t work, don?t keep doing it. And if your group won?t listen to you, TYPE IN ALL CAPS.

Copyright 2003 by a totally idiotic pig named Pig. All rights reserved. Any attempt to use the material contained herein for your own nefarious purposes without express written permission is strictly forbidden. And if you tried it, it would mean that you didn?t learn anything from this column, and you either ARE a total freakin? idiot, or the undead really did eat your brain. Um, have a nice day.