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Drama Mamas: Friends behaving badly
Dodge the drama and become that player everyone wants in their group with the Drama Mamas. Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are real-life mamas and experienced WoW players -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your server. We're taking your questions at dramamamas@wow.com. We often explain bad behavior in game (and on the internet in general) with anonymity (NSFW link). This just does not apply to the letters we answer this week. The friends behaving badly know the letter writers in "real life," and it is that phrase that seems to be the problem. If WoW were just a game and not real people interacting in real situations, it wouldn't cause real drama for us to tackle each week. This disconnect between proper behavior in the physical world and Azeroth just doesn't make sense when you know your guildies in both places. But sense or not, it happens -- and these letters are just two examples of a common problem.
The Daily Grind: Who do you MMO with most, real-life or online friends?
In a past Daily Grind, we asked you how important your friends are to your MMO gaming, and how much influence friends have over which virtual world you reside in. What we didn't ask was whether those friends were people you knew in the flesh, or people you had met online, quite possibly in a game. Some of you did specify in your responses whether the friends that influenced you were RL or online, and it would seem that the answers differ quite a lot from person to person.There are gamers out there with no real-life gamer friends, and one would assume that some of the strongest online friendships are between people from this category, as they finally find folks to share their hobby with. Others might be too hardcore, or not hardcore enough, to play with their real-life friends for a lot of the time. On the other hand, we know plenty of people that only ever play an MMO if they have at least one of their RL pals joining them. If you were to look at one month of your play-time in any particular MMO, would you have spent more time with real-life friends or with people you met online?
