The Daily Grind: Things that go bump in the night

EQ I... running from east to west across the continent at level 5. There was a bug in the game where mobs would load into the client about 50 feet above ground level... and if the mob was a giant spider and you were in the forest it looked like spiders were dropping from the trees.

That level 5 dwarf's grave is still there.

How much is EVE paying you for this constant coverage?

The first time I ever fought Stitches on WoW was the scariest/most fun time I've ever had in an MMO. This was way back in the first month of release. My friend was on his dwarf hunter, and I was on a priest. We bumped into the big guy on the road and ran for our lives screaming and laughing on Vent the whole way back to town, then had an epic fight while he rampaged around killing everyone. Good times.

The run from Gotar through Myrkwood forest in Dark Age of Camelot. It was my first MMO and I was scared out of my mind. I don't think a game has ever scared me more.

I wouldn't call it scary but extremely tense/stressful situation.

It was in eve online, I was moving from one system to another, roughly 21 jumps away, and I was carrying most of my important ships in my Transport ship. I had originally planned a pretty safe route, the lower one being 0.5, so I thought I would be fine... o how I was wrong.

Upon warping to the stargate that led to the 0.5 security system, I noticed a large of people standing on the gate, generally the first sign that there is a gate camp established. Deciding to wait and see if it wasn't a patrol of some sort for faction war or a corporate or alliance war, but quickly enough I was targeted and my cargo was scanned. I had 3 choices from there, dock, log out and wait some time for them to go away, take a detour, which would turn my 21 jumps trip into a 43 jumps trip (the camped gate is the choke point between Caldari space and Amarr space. The last choice, the one I made, was to take my chances.

And so I did, upon jumping on the other side, immediately aligned the next stargate and activated my Cloak. Since transport ships aren't made to use Cloak systems, it puts you down to rough 10% of your normal speed, and if anyone comes within 5000 (or 2000, forgot) meters from you, it decloaks you. Not only that, but you can't warp while cloaked. Surely they had noticed my presence, and it was confirmed soon enough when an interceptor flew roughly 7000 meters away from me, then back under me, at about 9000 meters.

I shimmied away at roughly 20 meters per second, and 15 minutes laters, I was 15 kilometers away from the gate, and 20 kilometers away from my assailant, but then something unexpected happened. Someone warped in from the stargate I was aligned to 2 kilometers above me, and my cloak system automatically shut down. Having no time to waste, I warped directly to the stargate. Within seconds, 2 minmatar battleships started locking in on me, their lock ended just as I warped in and received a volley from each of them.

I lived with 22 structure points remaining, and the minmatar battleships were obviously destroyed in the assault, thank god for armor hardeners.

After 4.5 years of continuously botting a popular MUD ~23 hours/day, I woke up in the middle of the night. This wasn't the 'amber alert' sound my PC was making, this was full on red alert. Not only was something slightly suspicious like an imm being seen in a room I happened to be moving through, but either an imm was seen in a non-town/non-travel zone, or had just messaged me, or I had been ported to jail, or something equally bad for a bot... The bot had not only turned itself off, but I likely needed to look like I was at the keyboard the whole time with an intelligent and immediate rebuttle/reaction. I jumped out of bed and slapped the monitor out of sleep, knowing I had only a few seconds before my bot script would make a default, neutral response like "moment, lag..." followed by a simulated loss of connection. Unless I aborted the bailout with a more intelligent response to the situation. (This was built to have a slight chance to thwart inquiries like "are you there?" or "are you a bot?" if I wasn't home at the time; better than 100% chance of being caught in that situation.) I groggily processed the communications pane of my MUD client and whip out an applicable response. I managed to avert suspicion but I'll never forget waking up with my heart pounding in the middle of red alert.

Go ahead and flame away. Botting/automation is a rewarding metagame to me, and your approval is irrelevant :)

You are correct, you can do whatever you want in EVE, whether its against the TOS or not and the developers will rarely do anything. Your also a shining example of what the EVE community is in both attitude and deed, that is scary.

@Tempes Magus, completely understandable, but at the same time that's what makes Eve such a memorable game.

I love WoW, and I play it, but beating a boss, even the hardest one, is still a thing of trial and error until you understand the gimmick of a fight. Yes, there might be some pressure (I am a tank after all) and lots of stress when trying to get a server first, but at the same time those feelings are so ephemeral because the game is so detached. In PVP, if you die because you failed to use a certain ability or counter a certain move set of an opponent, you'll simply learn from your mistakes and get better, but that's about it, you don't actually fear your opponent, you just fear losing.

While in Eve, you only get one shot at things, and the losses are great. If I decide to go on a piracy rampage, I have to play patiently because my death will cost me 300m. Unlike most other games, you will pick your target carefully, you'll scout every single players in a system to be sure that person does not have a corp/alliance friend somewhere in a station.

Basically, in Eve, whenever you play you have to be ready to lose a lot (implants, ships, etc...) even if it's in the highest of the sector. Just look at the Eve news from a couple weeks ago, some guy had a full faction Battleship that was destroyed in high-sec by a suicide gang.

The scariest I can remember must've been the Disc of Chaos from Eye of the North in Guild Wars. The mission leading up to it is long and really hard, and the even the Disc alone can thwart all these efforts, and he's got escorts. My fight with him was a 7-10 minute affair, with the assisting Asura robot NPCs tanking and my team damaging and healing for dear life.

Seeing that picture of the Hellfleet turf should make me scared but it only reminds me of getting a pay-back some time. Ha!

WoW is not really a scary game. Most of the time it's not even tense. However, there are some moments that can startle you.

I was riding back through the salt flats into the canyon zone (I can't remember any of the zone names) at night. It was very quiet in game, and also very quiet in my house. The lights were out and I was just cruising along back to the flight point. Seemingly out of nowhere there's a loud RAWR! It started me and I twitched with my hand on my mouse. My camera angle panned straight up into the night sky and all I could see were stars and all I could hear was RAWR! Once I reoriented myself it was no big deal, just a stealthed cat that I happened to run into, but it was probably the scariest thing I've run into in an MMO.

In Eve, moving a jump freighter through a POS in a 0.0 system that I always use. Our corporation just changed alliances (who we were still blue to), and I didn't realize that the POS didn't belong to us. I jumped in and couldn't get through the shields. While waiting for my cyno out of the system a red comes in, lights a cyno and I'm staring at a mother ship. That was a 9 billion ISK mistake that I won't forget...