I’ve crushed on some girls in MMOs a few times. They’ve always been members of my guild though, so I’ve known who they were. Met one of my ex’s that way, matter of fact.
Ugh, no joke.
In my DDO guild we had a girl who was around 16, maybe 17. She constantly sexualized herself in guild chat, to an embarassing extent. Fortunately I was too old and unresponsive to be one of her flirt targets. The younger guys seemed to like it, as they were about as clueless as she was. Ah, youth. But it really put a damper on guild chat for me. Thankfully she’s gone now.
Back when I was a teenager I would have found this kind of thing to be the biggest turn-on. As a 40-something, all I got were douche-chills.
I haven’t spent too much time on MMOs, but I spent way too much time playing MUDs in high school and college and I can tell you that this was an enormous problem for female characters. Since those games tended to have much smaller communities, you’d often end up with certain characters/players who were infamous as lechers.
The lechers don’t really bother me. I can happily set them in their place and move on. It’s the crushes that bother me. Not as an insult or anything, but because I have to deal with calling it off. I guess I feel a bit sorry for anyone that gets that caught up in a crush.
This is also another reason why I don’t develop emotional attachments in online games. I only know people’s real names if they use them in Vent or if they’re my RealID friend, and I only have one of those. My old guild has been close to imploding this past month over drama, and I’m clueless on half the reasons why because I don’t get emotionally involved. Kinda like work friends - you’re friends while playing the game/at work, but as soon as I logoff/go home, you’re not in my circle anymore.
No kidding.
I finally uncloaked to one game friend who I’ve been playing games with for going on 11 or 12 years, and used my REAL EMAIL address to send him an email, instead of my game-only address. I figured after this long, if he was going to be a stalker, I’d’ve figured it out.
So far, he hasn’t shown up on my doorstep, or turned into a weird (well, any more of a weirdo than I already knew he was). <whew>
Yeah, I’m pretty much this way too. In all the time I’ve been playing MMOs, I’ve only gotten two “real” friends out of it (“real” defined as people I’ve actually made an effort to see in person, we’ve gotten together to go to cons and whatnot, and we interact about non-game-related stuff–and the two are a married couple). I have several other friends that I keep up with, but only casually.
Same here. I’ve got 3 people that I keep in contact with in RL.
I don’t give out personal info in game. That’s why the crushes so baffle me. You don’t know anything about me, not even my name. How can you love me?
I had that “problem” in WoW while leveling a female night elf in the NE starting zone. Male characters following me all over the place, “helping” me kill mobs. Except I neither wanted nor needed the “help”.
OTOH, the other day I was playing my well-geared male night elf hunter, and a female blood elf started using emotes to flirt with me while I was standing at the flight point in Dalaran. Then I got a whisper from another character, this time a female night elf, and she identified herself as the same person who had been the blood elf, and continued to flirt. Fortunately, it was just playful, joking stuff (and I didn’t reciprocate), especially since she turned out to be 16, while I’m 46 (her dad’s age, she said). But she was fun to talk to.
Unless you deliberately change how you act, personality still comes through. I don’t necessarily have to know your identity to know you’re someone I want to spend time around. (Hypothetical you, of course.)
Granted, I think for a lot of the lonelier gamers, it tends to be more on the lines of “You present yourself as female and you’re not instantly rejecting my presence. WANT.”
(While I speak from the position of a guy who has developed online crushes, I learned a long time ago not to be creepy or awkward about them.)
I’m male, but I’ve been playing MMOs for years and been in positions of guild leadership for a significant portion of it, including currently. I see a lot of this sort of thing seem to happen more often in the more casual settings and less often in progression settings. That is, if I’m doing a casual PUG run I’ll notice random people hitting on eachother, but I’ve only ever noticed two people in my guild hook up but they also lived like 20 minutes away from eachother, so it’s not nearly as odd as if they’d hooked up across country.
As a GM, I make a point of always refering to people in game by their character name to help me keep that mental separation of the character and the player and I generally make a point not to give out my own name and limit how much personal info I share. I do the best I can to treat the men and women in the guild as close to even and fair as I reasonably can.
I have heard, however, from the people I know who regularly play both male and female toons that they generally get treated better when they’re playing a female toon, like being treated nicer or getting freebies or whatever. For that reason alone, I know some guys who play almost exclusively female toons. Of course, the other claimed reason is that if they have to look at someone’s ass while they’re playing, it might as well be a woman’s.
Either way, being aware of how the community can be, especially in the more casual ontext, I don’t blame women at all for choosing to keep their gender a bit more secretive.
I met my last two GFs on WoW so not all women must mind.
I haven’t had it happen randomly (may help that most of my in-game friends are girls - on the other hand, most of us are queer, so…), but one of my characters has a boyfriend, and his player admitted developing a RL crush on her (the context was ‘ach, this is messed up’) that, I’m beginning to suspect, has transferred to me. He’s not been too obnoxious about it, though, so I just avoid encouraging it.
Most of the women I know don’t mind if you:
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Make an effort to get to know them (and gauge whether they’re interested in you) before revealing your interest to them.
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(This is the big one) Know how to take ‘no’ for an answer–and to recognize a nice ‘no’ when you hear it, so it doesn’t have to escalate to “leave me alone, you creep!” and end up upsetting everybody concerned.
You have tits and girl plumbing. That’s enough to ‘love you’. I think it’s the combo of socially awkward inexperienced guys being taught by society that women want more than just sex, so they figure that if they show some ‘love’ it’ll help their cause.
Dealt with both crushes and creeps myself, going back to EQ. It helps now that I have a husband who plays the same MMOs that I do, and typically if one of us is in a guild, the other is too.
I have a few RL friends from EQ, more from WoW. In WoW we used voice chat, but my husband was a guild officer (or guild leader for a while), so that tended to be intimidating I think. Still, we had one guy who would send obnoxious tells that were probably trying to be cute/funny/‘innocently’ flirty - like saying “hi sexy”/“hi beautiful” - and I kept telling him back to stop it, knock it off, and telling him that I didn’t like it when he’d ask why. He didn’t stop, so I snapped and began ranting out loud (with my husband in the room), and my husband went and called the guy on the carpet over it, and he stopped and apologized.
It didn’t make me feel any better, but at least he stopped. I mean, if I tell someone who’s being “friendly” to stop something because I don’t like it, he should stop if his intentions are really good.
My husband and I are in our early 40s, so you can usually shut down crushes by telling them that. 
Yes, and the biggest one was a woman who had some unusual psychological mechanisms. When she felt an emotion she considered “unacceptable”, it wasn’t her who was feeling it, it was one of her alternate personalities (multiple personalities may or may not exist, but she was convinced that she had them, ok? Don’t ask me what the official label for her mechanism is). So, it wasn’t her who got angry with her husband, it was “Karen”; it wasn’t her who was shy, it was “the little one”; it wasn’t her who got a crush on another woman, it was the 17 yo male, “Johnny”…
Creeps? Those by the ton. Same as the anonymity of being in a car at night in a street with bad lightning when a woman walks by, the anonymity of the internet manages to bring the pig out of some so-called people. I avoid talking on VoiP because of the reactions I get; too many guys go either “oh my God, what a sexy accent” or “oh my God I love your voice”. Well, I’d love having you right here and being able to use a 2H mace to bash your brain in: focus on the bloody fight and not in sexing me, you moron!
I don’t develop crushes on other players, I experience True Love. It is something you and your lesser hearts will probably not understand. I have used each and every one of my 15 years of life to explore the emotional and sexual depths of the female species. For you see, when that sexy female elf cleric starts healing me, at first it is like a business transaction - I get help vanquishing our foes, and she gets a share of the loot. But over time, we develop a special bond, one that is forged in the heat of battle and tempered by endless struggle. I know that she starts to feel something when she comes back night after night, dressed in attire more outlandish and skimpy than the last, in an effort to bare herself to me. It is obvious when her healing spells become more powerful, and her healing clicks respond faster and faster - the female nurturing and loving spirit is in full action here, infused with raw eroticism. Soon the line between us blurs and eventually fades, until we are nothing but one symbiotic being. It is love.
At this point, she has no choice but to want to come over to my room (sneaking past my parents) and make sweet sweet elf love to me.
And how shocked are you when you discover that “she” is actually a 35-year-old, 400-pound man in an anime T-shirt? 
This is brilliant. Bravo, young man, bravo! Huzzah!