On World of Warcraft and helpful players
World of Warcraft is like any other online game in some respects -- especially the ones involving any sort of social interaction with other players. Most of the time, the chats that go on are typical of online games -- they primarily comprise the sort of juvenile, scatalogical and obscene banter that you see from adolescent males or adult males who are victims of delayed emotional development. Ask a question and expect either a wiseass answer or someone to be openly hostile to you. It's one reason why I don't play a lot of online games -- because gamers are, for the most part, a bunch of fucking retards.
Anyway, I've been involved with the closed beta of World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade for the last several weeks, and since I didn't have any high-level characters to transfer over from the "regular" game, I just created a couple of new ones. It also gave me an opportunity to test out the new races that Blizzard is introducing in this version -- the Draenei and the Blood Elves.
My first character was a Blood Elf paladin -- a typical knightish-sort of character who specializes in melee combat and a few spells and magic that you use mainly to buff the character temporarily in combat. It's fun enough, and the art and architecture that Blizzard has developed for the Blood Elves is quite beautiful.
Then I started playing as a Draenei priest. Now, priests are definitely a ranging class. They have low strength and lower armor ratings -- they can't wear mail or leather, so you really don't want them going hand-to-hand with anything of average or greater strength.
I struggled through about 10 levels when frustration finally got the better of me and I remarked in general chat that priests sucked for soloing and that I was giving up.
Rather than call me a newbie or a pussy or any of the usual things you expect in chat, this one player actually took pity on me and offered me helpful suggestions for what spells to specialize in and how to set up my character to make the best use of offensive and defensive spells. What's more, he (or she) also crafted for me a higher-level wand than I already had, that dished out about five times as much damage as the one I'd managed to equip myself with.
So, lesson learned. Most online gamers suck. But every so often you'll find one who restores your faith in humanity.