pet-peeve
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The Perfect Ten: My gaming pet peeves
In general, I try to be an optimistic fellow. When it comes to gaming -- you know, that hobby we apparently love and enjoy -- I'd rather look on the bright side than the angry, cynical, disgruntled dark side most days of the week. There needs to be balance between such outlooks to be sure, but if I'm to err, I'd rather err as a happy gamer than a bitter one. So today's list will be a departure for me, as I'm going to complain at great length about stupid little things that annoy me in MMOs. I look at it like lancing a boil: painful, gross, and generally relieving. If you want to join in with me, just remember that the area can get infected if you keep picking at it for too long. What ticks me off? Open Pandora's Box below and ye shall never know peace...
Breakfast Topic: Patch 3.1 after the dust has settled
Patch days are often disastrous, and in their aftermath, there is a lot to tweak, hotfix, and repair. Realms have been unstable, Authentication servers unreliable, and bugs abound. Earlier this week, we asked you what your impressions are of live Patch 3.1, and now that you've had a few days to adjust to the changes, we want to know, how are you feeling about it now? My pick for the most annoying aspect would have to be the new quest tracker that shows the icon of the quest item, if there is one, next to the information. Or, rather, on top of it. Somehow, knowing that I've killed 1... doesn't really help me. Is that 1 of 12? 11 of 12? 13/17? Who knows.Despite this easily-fixable problem, I'm loving it. Thursday night raiding was smooth as silk, and not only are dual-specs extremely handy and fun, it also makes it easier to answer questions about your off-spec. How many hit points does my Tankadin have unbuffed, you ask? Give me under one minute, and I can tell you! I can't wait until the Equipment Manager is live.How are you liking the changes and new features, now that you've had a few days to play around with them? Have your opinions changed from how you felt in the first day or two after it landed? Why?
The Daily Grind: Your biggest MMO pet peeves
A recent thread on the Ten Ton Hammer forums about "biggest WoW pet peeves" caught our eye the other day. After reading some of the responses there, we got to thinking about some of the things in general that annoy us in different MMOs. One of the truly universal ones was gold-spam. It seems no matter what format they have to take, up to and including piles of dead gnome bodies arranged to spell out their domain, they'll do everything they can to annoy us. (After all, 300 dead gnomes, while great as a Horde member, still cause lag.) Another thing we agreed on was "1337 5p33k" (or "elite speak" for those who speak actual English) which just makes us want to hang people's characters by the toes and use them as in-game pinatas. While those are two that many of us agreed on, there were far and away many other things that really annoyed us in various games. How about you? Are there any things that really make your skin crawl? For that matter is it the people or the game that trips your pet peeve off? Did they design in a pet peeve on you? Or maybe your pet peeve is how your computer behaves when running certain MMOs?
LOL gay!
Everyone's got their chat-related pet peeve in WoW. Amanda hates the term "wife aggro." There's a lot of antipathy to the term "noob." A shaman in my guild harbors a vicious hatred towards anyone who uses an "abbreviation" that is longer than the actual word in question. There are even people who hate LFG and WTB, although I'm unsure how they ever made it to 70 without their heads exploding. I have my own major pet peeve. Arguing about it nearly got me gkicked a few months back, and even today a particular officer will rag on my "oversensitivity." I speak, of course, of the recent trend towards calling everything you don't like "gay." I HATE THIS TREND. My respect for people who say "That's a gay item", "That quest is so gay" and "XXX is gay, don't group with him" is so low as to be nonexistent. No matter how old you are, calling stuff gay makes you sound immature and ignorant. To me, you will forever be 15 years old and snickering about "buttsecks" at your lunch table. Yes, you may claim that the word doesn't mean "homosexual" in that context, but if I started calling everything I didn't like "black" and said that it had absolutely nothing to do with race, how much support do you think I'd get outside of the robe-and-white-hood community? It's the same with people who talk in trade chat about getting "jewed down." I'm Jewish, and although I've never stolen mats in my life, if you hand me the mats for a Primal Might and then start throwing around "Jew" when dealing with the price, you're not getting those mats back without an apology in the trade channel and a /dance of forgiveness. I tried to argue this issue with my guild, but got shot down fairly quickly. When the second-in-command of the guild asks "So are you calling me ignorant?", "Yes, or overcompensating for something" does not seem to be the correct answer. What do you think about these words? How do you handle these issues in your guild? EDITED TO ADD: This discussion has taken off in all sorts of ways. I've chosen not to delete any comments, but I ask that everyone please remember to be at least kind of respectful to others.
Breakfast Topic: Pet Peeves
This thread in the general forums brings up a good discussion topic about everyone's in-game pet peeves. And note the definition - a minor annoyance that causes extreme frustration. I have a number of them, myself, including people who refer to me only as "priest," players who start yelling "HAEL ME!!!" the second they take damage, and the players who see me shadowforming in PvP and feel they need to lecture me on the worthlessness of a priest that doesn't heal. (The latter especially irritates me, as anyone who's played with me for a while should realize that, even with a shadow spec, I know how to shift out of shadowform, and if I wind up in a good group will spend entire AV matches healing. Argh! I get frustrated just thinking about it!) But what are your personal pet peeves in this game?
