Doing Something Dumb? I’m In!
October 3, 2008
Someone in our guild read this post this morning and put out the call — it’s time for Chicken Wars!
My natural inclination for these events is, “Sorry, guys, but I’m in the middle of pushing hard to hit T4 by November so I can… oh, who am I kidding? CHICKEN WARSSSSSSSSS!”
I love stupid player-run events in MMOs. I just love them. Listen, I’m all for dev-created content that’s involving and fun and whatnot, but often we forget that these games are a giant playground that we’re not, y’know, playing in. We end up hammering away at four-square to become the champion so much that we lose sight of the dozens of other options out there, like hide ‘n go seek, tetherball or (my favorite) run up to the girl, flick the back of her head in a 3rd grader’s attempt at flirting, and run away crying when she punches me in the mouth. Adults often have to be retaught how to really play, which involves a hearty dose of imagination, irreverence for rules (Calvinball, anyone?), and a willingness to look and act silly. As you may assume, this doesn’t often go over well with the hardcore PvPers/raiders/min-maxers. But it goes great with Syp!
MMO scavenger hunts? I’m there. Naked whatever races across high level zones full of nightmare creatures like Razor Wire Tapeworms? Yup, I’m already nude a day before the race even begins. Parades through enemy-controlled areas just to get a pocket full of ooze? Why not!
I admire guilds that make it part of their mission to organize games and activities for their guildies that aren’t standard MMO protocol. If the call goes out for people to reenact Hamlet in the middle of a RvR lake, I’m all down for being Ophelia. If someone wants to organize all the dwarfs into a giant smokathon on Earth Day, I’ve got my trigger finger on /special already.
Really, why can’t we color outside the lines in MMOs once in a while? I’d love to hear what wacky events your guild has done!
Waaagh! A Warhammer Online Blog 
Reminds me of my brother’s Operation Stupid Plan(tm) in SWG, in which he pitched a camp in the middle of Kraytt canyon and ran around taunting the dragons… naked.
How I use to love going into Deadmines helping low level guildies while I was Naked in World of Warcraft.
NAKED DEADMINES RUN!!!!!
Gotta have fun sometimes its a game for crying out loud.
Now if only developers would make it easier for us to blend playing the MMOG, and creating our own methods for playing in it.
City of Heroes is a great MMOG for playing Hide and Seek. Three-dimensional travel, for the win!
One thing I want to do for my guild is run an event called “Night of a billion zillion squig herders!”. Everyone in the guild makes a squig herder on some poor innocent server and in mass we all run wild and do as much damage as we can, in a rvr zone. That’s gotta be good for a laugh or two.
Yay! Calvinball! Yay!
-JRW
We’re having a chicken run on monday I think, um.. I should know, because I organised it…
That’s hilarious.
I think it depends upon the idea, right? The ideas you mentioned are good ones, and I think usually the more, the merrier, but it seems like most events, at least in the (maybe lame) guilds I’ve been in, have been nothing more than running an instance naked or something. Who cares?
The best events are done in public and cause a ruckus and hopefully cause some “wtf?” in chat.
I had more random, weird fun in Everquest 1 (with my small guild as well as with others) like you’re describing than in any other MMO since.
There were of course a ton of weddings. These were always fun because of the crazy stuff that would happen in the zones that were picked. I remember one in particular, that was held in Steamfont (the gnome newbie zone). It was held by the big gears with tiny gnome skeletons all around them. I was an enchantress, with the ability to apply Illusion: Skeleton to myself, and charm the little skeletons. I had so much fun wandering around amongst the wedding guests dancing with my Mini-Me 🙂
Our guild leader was a truly gifted guy who could make up rhyming poems on the fly. He played a half-elf bard in game, too. I first met him when he came to town and gave a concert. He used to travel between all the cities and perform his poems about things and battles in the game, and it was always so awesome with the old, original graphics for the bard – his little half-elf would play a pipe and dance around, and little musical notes would swirl around, so great. At the end of every concert he would ask everyone to participate in a light-show – everyone would perform whatever abilities they had to produce sparklies. That was always a crowd-pleaser 🙂
Once our guild performed a Circus event at the stage in Freeport. Each member got up and did a stage-act that used their class’s abilities/spells in some way. I had my enchantress perform her patented Troll Dance of Seduction – apply Illusion: Troll, strip naked, and /dance and /point for the crowd. Wild fun. We had some hecklers, so our wizard performed bouncer duties: he sent a tell to the rude person, invited them into a group, then teleported to Odus, disbanded, and gated back. Was pretty funny since the recipient was a melee with no personal means to return from that hideous zone.
Sometimes when we got bored we would go to a newbie zone, equip beer steins in our hands (they were weapons, they did about 2 damage), and “mug” griffons and things that insta-killed newbies (or those hideous dark elf mobs that seemed to be all over the place that always killed people).
We held Smashed M*A*S*H Bashes, where we would travel to the entrance of a newbie dungeon (like Crushbone or Blackburrow) and heal and buff the low levels in exchange for them drinking our home-made alcoholic beverages. Was great, chaotic fun after the whole zone had enjoyed a couple rounds 🙂
We had a guy in our guild who had a half-elf ranger named Zedh Wispcatcher who was the guild’s self-styled master of all things pimp and quite the ladies’ man. He was always joking with us about how hard it was for him to leave the nubile wood-elf nymphs in his harem and come out adventuring. Once for his birthday, we got everyone in the guild and a bunch of other friends to make level 1 newbie wood elf females that had “wisp” in their names. Then we drew him to the wood elf city zone on false pretenses, and surrounded him with our Wisp-ettes and fawned all over him. You should have seen the zone-wide chatter in Greater Faydark that day 🙂 It was hilarious. Some low level guy sent him a tell asking “how did you do that?”, to which he replied “it’s all in the attitude, my young friend!”
Then there was the ever popular dives off the “diving board” thing in Lake Rathe… man so many memories of more stuff than I could possibly relate here. Did we just fool around so much because the leveling was hard and painful? Have we streamlined MMOs so much now that there’s no reason not to just be grinding/questing straight to the level cap? Is that a good or a bad thing? I think it makes the actual gameplay better, but reduces the random socialization factor we all enjoyed in EQ1.