Go on. Admit your gaming mistakes.

The Game Room
1

I play WoW. I’m not an expert, I’ve been playing for years and have yet to reach 60 with any of my toons (this has to do more with what I consider fun. Once I reach a certain level, the game becomes work and not fun-- so I move on to another toon). Right now I’m still having fun with my lvl 42 Hunter, except. . …

I keep breaking my own trap. I’m always on auto shoot, I set a freezing trap— and then shoot the stupid mob immediately. I cannot break myself of this dumb mistake. I also always, always, ALWAYS forget to turn off Aspect of Cheetah. I have to get knocked silly two or three times before I remember to switch aspects.
We won’t go into how many times I got lost in the stupid trees playing the original Myst because I was not on the level I thought I was.

2

Buying a Wii.

3

Also in a WoW vein - forgetting to stick stealth on my rogue and casually wandering up to mobs during raids. I still do it occasionally. :smack:

4

Another WoW one–attacking the nearest mob after my target dies. I’ve broken a few sheep and traps that way. I’ve finally learned to tab target, check, THEN hit mangle. (At least I’m a tank, so ‘you break it you tank it’ doesn’t get me killed. Woohoo for 30k armour!)

5

Back when I played WoW, I could manage all the regular pitfalls - not DOTting mobs, damage high while not pulling aggro, managing different curses on multiple targets - but I could not, for the life of me, avoid falling off a cliff half the time.

Blackfathom Deeps, where you have to jump over a pit - I would miss it on the first try every time. Running back after a wipe? Miss it again.

The funny thing is I could always manage to get in and out of the water just fine in SSC on Lurker Below. Any other thing requiring jumps pretty much guaranteed hilarity. Don’t get me started on the stupid wall walking exploit during the Onyxia attunement quest - my friend mastered it after three tries, it took me an hour of trying. An hour!

6

Going all the way back to EverQuest for mine. I was once shown how to get across the main continent on foot. It was a trip that went all the way from Qeynos to Freeport on our first in game ‘guild event’. I the highest of us was level 9.

Long story short, we had to cut some weird paths through the zones and run along the walls to avoid the higher level monsters. That’s how I learned to navigate the zones and even at level 50 and beyond when I could have killed most of the stuff with a hit or two, I’d still hug the zone lines.

Then there was that time on a raid where I had a set of hotkeys active that included my ‘Gate’ spell instead of my buffing spell. I absent-mindedly hit it and teleported out of the dungeon halfway across the world. Did I mention that the raid was to get a quest item… for me? and that we were over halfway down when I teleported out?

I had to run back to the dungeon and make a suicide run so that someone could drag my corpse back to the raid.

7

Back in the eighties, me and a buddy were working through an Apple adventure game called Crypt of Media. We’d picked up along the way a barrel full of gunpowder, a length of fuse and a candle. We had to blast our way through the final barricade and it seemed simple enough:

>>Build bomb

You have a bomb.

>>Light bomb with candle

The bomb is lit!

>>E

You go East.

>>E

You go East.

>>E

You go East.
You are killed by a huge explosion.
“Well, shoot,” we thought. Maybe we weren’t running away fast enough, so we tried again a few more times with the same result. Finally the missing step occured to us:

>>Build bomb

You have a bomb.

>>Light bomb with candle

The bomb is lit!

>>Put down bomb

You put the bomb down.
-sigh-

8

[QUOTE=Bryan Ekers]

>>Build bomb

You have a bomb.

>>Light bomb with candle

The bomb is lit!

>>E

You go East.

>>E

You go East.

>>E

You go East.
You are killed by a huge explosion.
“Well, shoot,” we thought. Maybe we weren’t running away fast enough, so we tried again a few more times with the same result. Finally the missing step occured to us:

>>Build bomb

You have a bomb.

>>Light bomb with candle

The bomb is lit!

>>Put down bomb

You put the bomb down.
-sigh-
[/QUOTE]

This made me laugh out loud. I may have even LOL’d. I have a picture of Inspector Clouseau running away from a giant wall with his round "buemb’ with a lit fuse sticking out of his pocket.

9

Ultima Online in the old days was a fairly brutal game. Outside of the towns you were fair game to other players.

I was working on my mining skill in a cave on the outskirts of a small town when another player approaches me. “I have a load of ore you can have if you want it”. Sure, what could possible go wrong? Smacks forehead. He took me to his house, which was outside the town, and proceeded to trap and kill me, but not before I smelted all his nice pretty ore into ingots for him. Ore he no doubt ‘acquired’ off a similarly foolish miner.

I was furious with myself and logged off right there, as a ghost in his house.

I learnt my lesson though. I still miss that game…

In WoW:

On my first character I found a blue item my level, a Sentry Cloak I think it was. I put it on…

I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve died just because I thought I could finish the fight without using a potion (which I always carry).

10

Two mishaps with NES hardware:

Ultima 4 Quest of the Avatar - I had been playing through this crazy game during most of the summer of 1991 and was finally up to the last dungeon…i was inches from the end of the game when POOF…there were renovations being done to my home’s basement, and the power was shut off. When it came back, my saved game was gone!

Final Fantasy - my first time through this game, and I was up to the Sea Shrine…after getting pummeled by the Ghosts for the 20th time, I threw my controller at the console…remember how sensitive the toaster NES was? Well the impact was enough to reset the game…and erase my saved game.

11

But I presume the roadrunner still got away?

12

[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]
Also in a WoW vein - forgetting to stick stealth on my rogue and casually wandering up to mobs during raids. I still do it occasionally. :smack:
[/QUOTE]

I managed to get to 70 without doing this. Then I did a Slabs run a few weeks ago. As usual, I stealthed up to groups of mobs, sapping one, pulling the rest. We got to the upper level, to the second boss, with the big room of mobs in the middle. We had just cleared two thirds of the room when for some reason, I forgot to stealth. I casually wandered over and suddenly found myself with 6 brand new friends. Really angry friends.

It would have been ok if my party had just let me Vanish or die, but as soon as they saw me getting trashed, they ran in. We all died. I was quite embarrassed. Hopefully, that’ll be the first and last time that happens.

13

The use of Fear spells during a raid. A couple of times (in WoW as well as DaoC and a few other games) I forget that if you fear a mob it runs off…and brings back a freight train of friends. When I solo outside I liked to kite mobs by dotting them and then fearing them away, letting the dots work on them and then using DD spells as they come back. Try to do this in a raid dungeon though and it’s not so good. And sometimes I forget.

In WoW I broke a lot of frozen/sheeped mobs with my hunter when I used auto shot/multi-shot or with an explosive trap. Again, when I solo I use certain shots…but try and use them the same way on a raid and everyone will be saying ‘Kill that stupid hunter first!’.
The other big mistake I made was buying a copy of Tabula Rasa. It’s an ok game but it was a waste of my money since I don’t have any time for it. And I keep forgetting to cancel my subscription (note to self…do that tonight!)

-XT

14

I can’t remember one of my own, but awhile back someone provided a link to an AD&D site in which a GM told about one of his gamers seeing a gazebo in a garden. The gamer cast a Detect Alignment spell, tried to read its mind, and eventually attacked it… clearly not knowing what the word “gazebo” meant.

15

First time with a new gaming group, old PnP style…

I roll up a nice thief/mage, my favorite combo. Pure dungeon-crawl type adventure. The players, who had been together for about a half-dozen sessions before I joined, go into a ritual before opening every door. It is long, it is tedious, it is boring. And, for the first 4-5 doors, it was wholly unnecessary, as they led to empty rooms. So, being bored with the antics, I decide as they set-up to go up to the door and open it, and saying “C’mon guys, it’s just another empty room”

It wasn’t (and yes, the rooms were pre-populated).

I barely survived, but spent the night as a piece of furniture. Turns out that ghouls hold person ability did not have a duration assigned to it in the old Monster Manual. My arguments that it should last as long as a cleric spell fell upon deaf ears.

It did lighten the mood, and get me quickly accepted into the group (as I was a fairly good sport about the whole thing).

16

[QUOTE=Elendil’s Heir]
I can’t remember one of my own, but awhile back someone provided a link to an AD&D site in which a GM told about one of his gamers seeing a gazebo in a garden. The gamer cast a Detect Alignment spell, tried to read its mind, and eventually attacked it… clearly not knowing what the word “gazebo” meant.
[/QUOTE]

ERIC & THE GAZEBO
Copyright 1986 by Richard Aronson (Original Story)

… Eric was playing a neutral paladin (Why should only lawful good religions get to have holy warriors? was the rationale) in Ed’s game. He had a holy sword, which fought well and did all those things holy swords are supposed to do, including detect good or evil (by random die roll). He was exploring some lord’s lands when the following exchange occurr.

Ed: You see a well-groomed garden. In the middle, on a small hill, you see a gazebo.

Eric: A gazebo? What color is it?

Ed: (Pause) It’s white, Eric.

Eric: How far away is it?

Ed: About 50 yards.

Eric: How big is it?

Ed: (Pause) It’s about 30 feet across, 15 feet high, with a pointed top.

Eric: (rolls dice) I use my sword to detect whether it’s good.

Ed: It’s not good, Eric. It’s a gazebo!

Eric: (Unusually long pause, even for Eric) I call out to it.

Ed: It won’t answer. It’s a gazebo!

Eric: (Pause) I sheathe my sword and draw my bow and arrows. Does it respond in any way?

Ed: No, Eric. It’s a gazebo!

Eric: I shoot it with my bow (rolls to hit). What happened?

Ed: There is now a gazebo with an arrow sticking out of it.

Eric: (Pause) Wasn’t it wounded?

Ed: Of course not, Eric! It’s a gazebo!

Eric: (Whimper) But that was a plus-three arrow!

Ed: It’s a gazebo, Eric, a gazebo! If you really want to try to destroy it, you could try to chop it with an axe, I suppose, or you could try to burn it, but I don’t know why anybody would even try. It’s a @#%!$*& gazebo!

(author’s note: Ed was in the army, and no, he did not say @#%!$&. The letter count has not been changed for the linguistically curious. Clue: it was a gerund.)*

Eric: (Long pause - he has no axe or fire spells) I run away.

Ed: (Thoroughly frustrated) It’s too late. You’ve awakened the gazebo, and it catches you and eats you.

Eric: (Reaching for his dice) Maybe I’ll roll up a fire-using mage so I can avenge my paladin…


One time while playing GURPS, I pulled out a pistol (or was it a glock?) and shot at a brownie - damn things are always goin in & out of faerie doors. Well, the weapon wasnt powerful enough and only projected the damn thing back a few hundred feet instead of killing him. He brought back some friends & a big bad cannon. They shot back at me, severly injured me since I was in the lead & a few of the guys behind me got hurt.

All I could say is "oops, my bad" before passing out.
17

A recent one. In Bioshock, I made the mistake of killing Sander Cohen on sight. I didn’t realize you needed him alive for additional achievements later in the game.
So now I’m playing through again on Hard difficulty to pick up what achievements I missed the first time, due to my itchy trigger finger.

18

Long ago, I used to play on a MUD. MUDs were text-based forerunners to MMORPGs. I was XP’ing my cleric in a PK area. In this particular PK area, being PK’ed meant losing all of the gold you had on your person, half of your XP towards your next level and your killer could loot your equipment from your corpse. Due to the danger, mobs in these types of PK zones gave much higher XP than in safe zones. This zone in particular seemed to be completely unknown to pretty much everybody: occasionally a trader would pass by the town or stop in at the trade post, but that was it. So I felt pretty safe XP’ing there: there wasn’t any risk if nobody was around to PK me. The game had a sophisticated auction system that could be used from anywhere: you could place items in your inventory on auction, and players anywhere in the game could bid on them. I liked auctioning off anything I looted from mobs as I XP’ed to make a bit of extra money if I could. It never occurred to me how dangerous this was until the day that a level 124 hero nailed me while I was resting to get my mana back to full. I’d never seen my HP drop from 600 to under 50 so quickly(from a single spell, no less). Two defensive spells saved my life that day: a general one that halved any damage that I took, and another one that further halved any damage I took from evil-aligned players and mobs. Oh, the speed at which I had learned to cast a recall spell that took me out of the PK area immediately helped, too. After I escaped, the hero helpfully told me that perhaps advertising to the game at large that I was XP’ing in a PK area through the auction system was ill-advised.

19

[QUOTE=Pithy Moniker]
Long story short, we had to cut some weird paths through the zones and run along the walls to avoid the higher level monsters.
[/QUOTE]
Likewise in CoH for getting from The Hollows’ main entrance to the other end of the zone. Eventually I discovered it’s easier do go through Skyway City (a higher level zone but less populated) and access the alternate entrance.

The start of debt (i.e.: death penalty) has since been raised from level 5 to 10 so new players don’t have to worry as much.

20

NCAA Football 2005

My woefully over matched option running scrub of a football team heads into Neyland Stadium to take on the #1 ranked Tennessee Volunteers. My only chance is a huge ball control offense eating up the clock.

Sure enough I’m only down 20-21 and driving, sitting at their 40 yard line with 1:45 to go. I get down to the 23 yard line with no timeouts left so my kicker jogs out for the game winner…

…and I hit the wrong button and select “Fake FG Pass.” Out of time outs there’s nothing I can do. I drop off the couch and to my knees. My kicker doesn’t get the ball in the same area code as my TE. I lose 20-21. I just sat there staring at the final score for a good 3 minutes.