One I will never forget was in SWTOR. I was the guild master of a pretty big guild.
We had a young woman in the guild who was mute and whose microphone was always on mute in Teamspeak. After a few months, I noticed that her microphone was open one day. A good friend was with us when suddenly an unknown voice sounded in the channel. It was a guy’s voice. Sighing and audibly shaken, he said he had to make a confession and get something off his chest. He said he was neither mute nor a woman and was struggling with serious mental health issues, but had decided to work on them. And setting the record straight was the first step. He knew that trust was now in tatters, apologized profusely, and left the TS server and the guild before my buddy or I could react. We were completely baffled, and it was the first time I had ever seen my buddy speechless. Unfortunately, the “ex-girl” didn’t respond to any more PMs. Otherwise, I would have invited him back into the guild.
What are your experiences?
Once upon a time I ran a clan in a popular PvE/PvP co-op FPS alien shooter (still going, but has lost its magic). We had a few kinda well-known actors in the group. Shooting aliens one day and bullshitting with one when he gets a call that his best friend and fellow actor/writer OD’ed last night. He didn’t leave, and there wasn’t anything I could say. We shot aliens in silence for quite a while.
Back in my teenage days of vanilla WoW I was the sole Australian in an American guild. There was a girl who was about the same age as me who sometimes came to our 20 player raids, and I was friendly with her but didn’t really have a lot to do with her (and even if I had, I was on the other side of the world). However, that modest, friendly interaction was enough for one of the other guys (who was also about the same age as me) to message me in the middle of a raid to say that “she’s just pretending to be a girl for attention, you know”. I think I just replied “ok” but I was baffled by that apparent jealousy because the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind (again, I was on the other side of the world from them, and I had a huge crush on a girl at my school at the time that I never acted on).
Another unrelated anecdote from that time, I had one (different) guy tell me that he had assumed I was about 25 years old with kids, and was surprised to find out that I was only 16. I guess it was the accent?
I was part of a free company in FFXIV that had a wonderful group of people. Very welcoming and incredibly fun to talk to. They were actually where I got a lot of ideas for my writing. They were an openly gay group and I’m not gay but I didn’t care, they were still fun to be around. But, when I joined the discord server, that’s when I found out how ‘open’ they really were. Channels about meeting each other, posting dick pics, wow. I read a whole comment thread about one of the guild members meeting with the leader for some fun irl.
Not quite as dramatic but certainly surprised me.
Back when Overwatch was fresh, had a couple randoms I wound up buddying and partnering up with pretty often for a few weeks. But one of them was a really annoying person on mic, who was just very clingy with the other guy. Then other guy wanted to drop clingy guy. Clingy guy freaked. They didn’t split but I eventually just stopped playing. Don’t know how their friendship ultimately turned out.
Not exactly drama but… In 2020, Verizon fucked up and kept me out of my new phone and I spent literally 20 hours on customer support (on my gf’s phone) and going to stores to try and fix it. They ended up throwing me a bone and I had a $300 Verizon store coupon. Free oculus quest #worthit?
Trying out the online community apps was intense. Upon popping into any Meta-ran space you would be flooded by children squeaking the most vile shit at each other. Occasionally there would be an older voice saying bad words to the children and laughing as they scream. What an awful place. But in other games like VRchat, there could be cool moments, too. Like an old Australian man moderating a conversation with a very international and diverse crowd around a campfire. Sure it’s cartoony and you can experience wide conversations on the web but it’s another thing to have proximity chat with stereoscopic vision. It feels like an actual “memory.” That was all terrifying and I have really touched the device in four years.
