Stupid MMORG Tricks

The Game Room
1

Inspired by this recently raised zombie thread, please post your funny/dumb MMORG miscues. Any online multiplayer game is eligible.

To start things off, I’ll tell one on myself.

In WoW, I was raiding Kara with my guild. We cleared the place, and after the last loot roll and general cheering, there was a call for a portal to get everyone back to civilization. As the only mage present, this duty fell to me. “Of course”, I proudly proclaimed. “Anything for my guildies who helped me get my shiny new (whatever loot thingy I’d won during the raid)”. But it was late, and I was tired. I hit what I honestly believed to be my portal to a major city–usable by all in the raid. Unfortunately, I hit the wrong button, and teleported myself to safety, stranding my poor guildies deep inside Kara…
:o

2

Tab targeting pull of stupidity. That’s me. I don’t group much.

3

In Everquest, bards have a song called “Song of Highsun” that teleports a mob back to its spawn point. I’ve used it before as crowd control since, assuming you’re not fighting right at the spot, the mob has to hike back to you or may even be out of aggro range now. But you can easily imagine the consequences of accidentally hitting a mob with it, especially when you teleport a mob back to its home and it runs back through crowded twisty dungeon passages, collecting piles of respawned mobs to come help it…

Jophiel starts to sing
A Sebilite Golem gates!
Jophiel says, “Erm… that’s going to cause a train.”

4

Accidently pulled aggro on a group of linking mobs 10 seconds before a 21-24 hour mob popped, wiping out the entire alliance and wasting the 3 hours we camped that day…

5

Two dumb falling tricks from my EQ days.

There were some points high enough that you could stand at the tip with a mage, jump off and he could cast Call of the Hero and summon you back up before you hit the ground. The giant Dreadland spires at the ruined Combine “city” were one of these. Helps to have a good deal of faith in your mage :smiley:

Bards could “cast” while moving, so I would sometimes amuse myself by starting to sing my levitation song and wait until it was half-way started, jump down the giant elevator shaft in the Plane of Knowledge library and start floating just before I splatted on the ground. I once told a wizard friend that the fall was high enough to cast levitate on your way down (wizards can’t cast while “moving” so he’d have to be falling before he could start) and “demonstrated”. I did this with our other friend being a cleric with a 96% rez so it was all in good fun.

6

I am the notorious master of, when late into raids, accidentally popping Heroism (the buff spell with a 10-minute timer) BEFORE a major boss fight.

The best stupid trick, though, was actually a MUD story rather than a MMO story. I only witnessed it, I didn’t do it.
I used to run a MUD with open, in-character PvP. There was an in-character Law Patrol, even, to enforce some standards of behavior. Anyway, we had this one guy who was a max-level (lv50) mage, whose personal joy in life was killing lowbies for his jollies and then killing the patrolmen who’d hunt him down. Racked up literally millions in gold coins worth of bounty on his head, but no one could nail him.

So finally, one night (I was on IC as the God of Law) I’d had enough–he was chain-killing people level 10 and under, and taunting about it on shout. I wasn’t going to break my own rules by smiting the guy unless absolutely necessary (for various politics reasons with the other admins, I didn’t want to open that can of worms), but I wanted him to lose at least once. So I announced across the MUD, with a booming voice in the sky, “I desire that the blight of <badguy> be removed from my world. If you but pray for the opportunity, I shall transport him to your location for you to make the attempt.”

And I get one response. From a level 31 cleric who was not particularly associated with Good/Law. “Transport him to me, I can do it.” We went back and forth a few times, with me reminding him how little chance he had, but he was so insistent that I did it.

And the message immediately pops up in the log, within a second or two, “<badguy> has been playerkilled by <cleric>!”

I’m literally openmouthed in astonishment so I teleport to the cleric myself to see what’s what.
I arrive, take 1hp damage from the Cleric’s fire aura, and instantly plummet 15 rooms straight down a mineshaft. That the cleric was hovering over with a levitate spell. Landed right next to the broken corpse of the PvPer, who had died of falling damage and one tick of fire damage. And who never, to my knowledge, logged in again.

7

Back when I first started playing Anarchy Online, there wasn’t really a friend-or-foe choice for targeting. Many, many, MANY times after buffing myself at the start of an instance, my first ranged blast attack was targeted at myself. facepalm

8

I hope the guy got the bounty! That’s friggin’ genius!

9

Along these lines, back in the MC raiding days, me and my fellow mages took it upon ourselves to get as many people as possible to unwittingly teleport themselves to Darnassus. We’d post false notes to the guild as to where we were porting to, stack portals, stack a portal on something to click, etc.
I always loved the “Portal Up” only moments later to be followed by ten lines in guild chat along these lines :

“Oh crap, Why am I in Darnassus?”

10

Zeriel, how much prep did this guy have for that? That’s a clever enough plan to begin with, but all the more so if he came up with and implemented it between your booming voice in the sky and his prayer in response. Was baddies teleporting to one’s location something folks had to be prepared for in normal play without divine intervention?

11

Totally agree. That Cleric is awesome.

12

Honestly? I crafted him a custom item with +wis scaled to level, named <cleric’s> Hat of Tactical Mastery. :smiley:

And yes, he got the bounties. Since he was the only PC who’d damaged the target he was considered by the engine to have kill credit.

It was practically unprecedented. The only use of teleportation was when the Gods needed to move players around for whatever purpose.

As the cleric told it to me, he happened to be near the mineshaft zone at the time, and thought “Hey, I’ve already died twice today trying to level up–including falling down the mineshaft once–what’s the worst that can happen?”

13

City of Heroes was the first (and to date only) MMO I have ever played. I mostly soloed in my early days because I picked the game up more for the fact that it was a Superhero game than an MMO.

Early on I took a mission to fight a villain named Frostfire. At that level, his fight is probably the hardest one you will have experienced up to that point (especially as a Blaster as I was) and I had cleared the entire mission except for his room but I kept dying over and over. Finally I had to stop for the night with a plan to pick the game up the next day.

When I did and went back into the mission, I was shocked I had to refight the entire thing. “What do you mean it doesn’t save my progress?!?!”

Seems totally dumb now.

14

EverQuest, back when people actually played together. I was the Cleric, a very, very important group role at the time. I was always on edge because I didn’t want to fuck up and have everyone call me a “noob.” If anyone died, for whatever reason, it was always the Cleric’s fault. I had a Complete Heal spell which, at the time, completely healed my target (duh).* Great spell of course but it takes 10 seconds to cast (longer if it “fizzles”), a very, long time in a tough fight. I usually start casting it when the tank is at 20% health, and usually that’s enough, though the tank does occasionally panic. So here I am; I just reached the level required for Complete Heal and with a new group, so nervous, trying not to fuck up. First fight. Tank gets down to 20%. I start casting Complete Heal. 10…9…8…7…6…5…(gah, hurry up already!)…4…3…2…(almost there, man is the tank gonna love this)…1…cast! Finally! Man, they’re gonna be in awe of me. Wait, what!? Tank is at 2%!? Ahhh, cast a quick heal, quickly! Tank is dead. Rest of party wipes. WTF!? What the heck happened? It wasn’t my fault. Wait, what’s that? My target was the NPC the tank was fighting, not the tank? Oh my fucking God!

Man that was humiliating. I admitted the mistake and even though they all said it was ok, I wondered if they actually it actually was. But I redeemed myself by performing flawlessly thereinafter.
*Complete Heal heals a fixed amount (7500 HPs). At the time, no one approached that level. Now, base HPs have far out-distanced the spell so it only heals a small fraction.

15

In City of Heroes, your “R” key is bound by default to the command to make your character autorun. One of my personal habits is to bind the “T” key to a command that targets the nearest enemy. Another habit is playing squishy ranged characters.

This combination is not especially compatible, as I realized while staring at a horde of cyberzombies standing on my first Defender’s head.

16

Slow clap.

17

We were raiding in EQ once and our main healer, Bumpbump, started freaking out as I used Call of the Hero to summon her deep inside Vex Thal, a high end raiding zone.

“stuck can’t move” she said. I turned around to take a look at her and quickly discovered the problem.

[spoiler]“lol stand up” I told her.

She had accidently hit the key to kneel down and meditate and hadn’t realized it because (like me) she always played in first person view. It caused much laughter on our raid. Sometimes we’d do a “standing check” before a pull after that.[/spoiler]cite

18

Every WoW hunter has been in a dungeon and jumped across while their pet takes the long way around, aggroing the whole dungeon on the way. Every single hunter has done this.

19

Dark Age of Camelot, when first released, had hard crowd control spells for PvP, including a mesmerize spell area effect that could lock down huge numbers of enemies for lengthy periods of time - long enough so that a good mezz could allow an outnumbered group to win fights. The only way a mezz would break was damaging the target or time expiration.

Anyway, I played a thane, a tank with ranged ligtning bolts spells. Our group’s mezzer got off a great mezz, freezing three groups of enemies and we moved down to attack. Except for some stupid thane who cast his aoe lightning bolt spell. Did I mention that thanes were really sucky, and not many people played them? And that the only thane that night was me? And thanes were notorious for over-eagerness mezz breaking lightning bolts?

Mezzer: %^*&%#$^%^&!

Me: Oops.

20

Ah complete heal. I had a similar situation. I was in Lower Guk (this was a decade ago, at leats) and I use complete heal on my tank. Same thing with you. Watching the cast timer and health bar going, hmm this could be a problem, then uh oh, and then “oh shit” when my tank goes unconscious. Unconscious means (I don’t remember the exact number) that 99.99% of his life is gone, and the weakest creature in the world could kill him with one hit. Luckily, my heal spell went through in the nick of time, and I played it off with a casual “I like to be efficient with my mana”.

Then there was the time I accidentally casted an aggressive spell instead of a buff on a fellow player while raiding the Plane of Sky. It didn’t do anything to the player, but pissed off the god we were hanging around waiting to kill. Said god goes apeshit and takes out a swath of the party, but oddly enough, not me.