Please allow me this moment of introspection and self-pity, because they come all too infrequently. Perhaps it’ll offer a little insight, for those curious, into my deeply neurotic mind.

50 gold coins wasted and some bruised egos all around. It should have been an easy run — perhaps that kind of confidence had made us complacent; arrogant, even. It should have been easy, but everything went to hell for reasons that nobody could agree on. It’s easy to point fingers, of course, and everyone points away from themselves, but sometimes things just aren’t meant to be.

This is the point where I realized — or perhaps I should say, it was the last straw, the last thread on an ever-so-long rope — something which spans further than mere raid groups in World of Warcraft, but also extends to my out-of-game personality. By habit I tend to play a support role in online RPGs, most notably the archetypal healer whose job it is to keep the group alive — stemming, I think, from earlier excursions where the ‘group’ tended to just be a core body of 3-4 friends who’d play online games together, a team I was comfortable and happy enough with to easily support my compatriots.

Sadly, herein lies the problem, an issue which has been troubling me with increasing intensity for weeks, and finally culminated with the realization that no matter how hard I try, no matter what angle I look at the problem from, nothing can change the simple and undeniable fact that I’m simply not built for this — or, more specifically, not willing to put the responsibility and safety of others in my hands, even if only in the context of online games, tenfold when applied to reality. The expectations of others — and, indeed, myself — combined with what eventually becomes crushing stress and self-doubt, thoroughly abandons the realm of what should be considered ‘fun’ and enters into much less favourable places.

To clarify, while I wish I was and certainly try hard to be, I’m just not a ‘team player’; I don’t easily handle the responsibility of being the lynchpin of failure or success upon which others rely, and except when given fairly menial, low-risk tasks, the combined stress and self-doubt accumulate into what eventually becomes an aversion so great that I’m unable to react with anything but an overwhelming sense of avoidance. Indeed, I’m not much of a team anything, being a person who tends to flourish in very small groups, but when at large social gatherings or parties (and I would consider a ‘large’ gathering being that which has more than 5-6 people present), the urge is almost overwhelming to quietly occupy a corner and interact with others as little — and avoid drawing attention to myself as much — as is possible. Indeed, I’m even known to abandon a group entirely, when the combined weight of numbers becomes too much to bear.

The lesson learned, I think, is merely that the greater the concentration of people — whether be it a real-life social gathering or an online game — the less I want to play a prominent part. It’s less a case of apathy, laziness or unwillingness to contribute, and more that I’m just not comfortable leading the charge, having people rely upon me, or being the centre of attention during a group discussion. I mostly just want to do my own thing — the archetypal ‘lone wolf’, as it were — and when I do have to rely on others, do my part in the most subtle, unassuming, and unnoticable way possible. I don’t want praise for being a good team player — I just want to do my part in such a way that, failure or success, neither the blame nor thanks land on my shoulders.

Things I admire: Mechanical engineers, astronauts, Stephen Hawking, monocles, leaf-cutter ants, medieval alchemists, and cats for their aloofness.

And sometimes I feel like just dropping the faux-eloquence, poring over a thesaurus in order to seem like some kind of intellectual and just being all like,

hey,

it’s not really like this,

I’m just this guy who smokes too much and wishes he wasn’t so shy at parties.

Sometimes, I wonder just how the majority of humanity survives without choking on their own tongues. Today’s supreme redefinition of “fail” is in a class of its own, enough to make me despair for the species. Yes, it’s a fail-group in World of Warcraft.

Now, let me step back for a moment and say that I’ve generally had superb experiences when it comes to level 80, “endgame” dungeon-running, even despite the occasional player who displays, shall we say, less-than-stellar performance. People generally know the game, they know their role, and with very few exceptions, things tend to go pretty smoothly. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for misbegotten attempts at low-level dungeoneering, a tendency I’d blame simply on players being new to the game, but that pretty heirloom gear (adorned with Crusader, no less), tells a different story.

I wish I could make this shit up.

So, cue the contestants: Mentat, my freshly-minted (and already level 21) paladin, the obligatory hunter, and three druids. While normally not a major issue, I knew there’d be a problem with our furry brethren when the ‘tank’ (feral spec, natch) started casting Wrath, the healer used nothing but Healing Touch, the hunter’s pet growled, and Muggins here had to sort the whole mess out by flailing into action as a stand-in tank, despite the sheer ineptitude present. Just as I thought I was in some grotesque parody, things turned from bad to worse — the two druids decided to have a tank-off by both assuming bear form and attempting a most painful display of fighting over aggro — I say this, because the healer and hunter were taking more hits than anyone.

The loot rolling was a similar farce — a situation so laughably awful that it could only have been a cosmic joke, with each player a mere puppet playing a caricature. The hunter rolled need on a dagger with arcane damage, the flea-ridden druid rolled need on a shield, the other bear-druid rolled need one a one-handed DPS mace, and all the time I’m praising the god of random numbers for the fortune to bless me with the winning rolls on both Stinging Viper and Worn Turtle Shell Shield (I wanted Kresh’s Back, but that only ever drops when I’m playing a cloth-wearer). After an almost predictable moment of uncertainty, the group ‘leader’ unsure which direction to go for the seventh time, all proverbial hell broke loose and the fail-druids fell down the gap during an easy jump, and between the two of them managed to aggro half a dozen elites. I bravely jumped down to lend a hand, but of course the healer was nowhere to be seen, and I’m sure you can imagine the outcome of this most ill-fated excursion.

Much as I wanted to stay and collect my booty, I simply couldn’t handle it any longer, and bailed — perhaps some other poor fool would take my place, and learn the unfortunate truth of it all; that at the bottom of a barrel is another barrel, and at the bottom of that one is a trio of druids.

But I didn't mind being killed by Dr Blight, because he had a cool name.

A trend I’ve noticed in online gaming lately — well, I say “lately” though it’s been vexing me for a number of years now — is the apparent obsession of people in team-based games to either jump into a game with a host of strangers and expect a quick, painless, easy victory, or jump ship and frenziedly search for another — supposedly superior — team to integrate with, hoping for a quicker victory. This is evident both in MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft, where dungeons such as the Oculus were so reviled for the effort involved and the potential failure that many people would leave immediately upon entering, and many would refuse entrance to a raid group for those who could not prove that they’ve completed it prior, in fear of “noobs” bringing their team down. It’s also an unfortunate inevitability in other online team-based games, such as the one I’ve picked up again recently after a few years of inactivity, Halo 3.

Now, let me step back a moment and express my general distaste for being thrust into a team consisting of mouth-breathers who probably don’t even know which way up to hold the controller; lament as I may at games where I scored the highest in the entire round and yet my team still lost, if there’s one principle I’ll stick to — largely due to the experience point penalty accrued as a result, which would hinder my progress through the game’s military-style ranks — it’s that I stay to the bitter end, even when left in a short-handed team because three of them ran for the hills when the tables turned, and the last aside from myself resorted to that most heinous act of team-killing, presumably in the name of ill-gotten “fun”. In a fairly childish and unsportsmanlike way, I shot him in the back twice as retribution before spending the rest of the round hiding, and watching my “teammate” repeatedly hunted and slaughtered by the dominant group.

Nonetheless, my ire still holds relative validity in my mind: By simply fleeing the game, these people are not only throwing away a potential victory — I’ve seen plenty of “turnabout” games where the tables turn at the last minute, to provide a satisfying and crushing victory to the underdog — but they’re forsaking the rest of their team, forcing the remaining members to either lope on like a three-legged dog, or attempt to justify the “two wrongs make a right” philosophy and follow their lead, further augmenting the problem. I remember lamenting a similar issue a while ago with online game servers which provide numerous versions of the same world to balance the player-base; rather than accepting the natural balance and helping to keep things steady, players have a disturbing tendency to force their way into the most over-populated and over-crowded worlds, even going so far as to abandon the emptier, dying servers in lieu of something more populace, thus exacerbating the reason they left in the first place!

Is it simply human nature to constantly try to impel ourselves into “easy win” situations and the “best” groups, no expense too great in the quest to be with the “best” — even if they themselves could not adequately be judged as such under this banner — or is this yet another case of online gaming, with all the anonymity it entails, bringing out the literal worst in everyone, turning normally-reasonable people into a pack of drooling, rabid animals?