Examining the Nerd Rage
March 27th, 2011
On Sunday, I decided that I was going to spend the day leveling my Defiant rogue in Rift. She was level 29 to start and I didn’t get her too far into 30 before I decided to shut the client down. Why? Because I was nerd raging.
To start with, I’m leveling in a zone called Scarlet Gorge and whoever designed this zone is a masochistic bastard (sorry, but it’s true). The zone is an absolute nightmare as most of the quests I have done so far involve killing mobs that are jam packed on top of each other.
In recent zones, like Stonefield, you may have had to kill a couple at a time, but in Scarlet Gorge, you are stuck with 3 most of the time and then will most likely get a patrol that you weren’t accounting for. As a rogue, I do have a crowd control mechanism (sap) to take care of one mob, but that still leaves two which can sometimes be tricky unless I use a cool-down or a potion. If I get an extra mob into the equation, I’m screwed, and will have to run or I’ll die; in fact, even if I run, I still may die.
On top of dealing with that for about 2 hours, a major invasion occurred and the boss Gnar King (I think that was it – don’t hold me to it) showed up. I ran half way across the map for the chance to participate and after missing the big fight I ran in to help clear up the trash. I used an AOE and next thing I know I’m flagged and I see what seemed to magically appear out of nowhere: a ton of Guardians all flagged.
They chased me down all the while I was just hoping to get far enough away to stealth out. What crap!! I had to nerd rage to Twitter and then had to log out. I was just too pissed off.
It made me think, “Why do things like that get me so upset? Why do people have to nerd rage?”
I think a lot of it is because we like to think that we are all awesome in our game world and that we can’t die. Dying by a mob is annoying, but dying from another character outside of a Warfront (Instanced PVP game) is just unacceptable. Why?
Perhaps because we feel that we’ve been out-witted. That someone by default of killing us is better than us. When the reality of it is that these people are usually using sneaky methods to get us in the first place. A huge group going to a major rift invasion flagged is of course looking for trouble. It’s almost as bad as those people that would flag themselves and sit on top of your mobs just hoping that you would accidentally hit them and get flagged so they could kill you?
That is also a part of why it’s so irritating to be tricked. A player figures that they know all the tricks and when they get out-smarted it’s enough to set them off into nerd rage city.
Another thing that always gets me is that I don’t like to deal with jerks in a game that is supposed to be some kind of happy go lucky virtual world. When I first started playing MMORPGs, there were never any negative people around. Maybe 1 out of 100 would be a jerk and everyone would talk about how awful they were and why they would do such a thing.
Now it’s just a fact of MMORPG life and it’s something I still haven’t come to fully accept. It annoys me that people really do think that they aren’t dealing with real people on the other end of the line. Worst yet is that most of the time griefing is done out of boredom; I say find these people something to do!
The main reason that I have never enjoyed a PVP server is because I have two separate mindsets when I play a MMORPG: PVE AND PVP. When I’m trying to level, I don’t think about the possibility of a player ganking me and I don’t even want to. I have played multiple games on a PVP server and in the end, it just gets old! Sure you can kill people whenever you want to, but you also have to worry about them killing you – whether you feel like fighting or not.
When I go into a battleground or warfront, I’m expecting to fight! I’m ready to go and I know that it’s kill or be killed, so I don’t hesitate. That also means that obviously if I’m there, I’m in the mood to fight and am perfectly fine with dying. But, I can’t stand getting caught off guard when I’m not actually wanting to PVP.
Ultimately, the nerd rage is not cool. I’m sitting there all upset like my street credits have been ruined as a decent PVPer, when in reality, it just doesn’t matter. It’s still just a game and it can be shut off at any time. I won’t deny that it’s very hard to avoid spazzing out when frustration gets heavy. I have no problem admitting that I nerd rage. It might even be because I drink too much coffee. Still, it’s best to just try to stay calm because those little jack asses just love it when you get mad.
WHY U MAD, BRO?
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