Reposted from
Atomic
Idiots usually spoil things. They're all about bringing the experience down and ruining it for those around them whether intentionally or by accident. Idiots working at nuclear power plant for example, tend to put a dampener on the atmosphere for other workers by forgetting to shut down the core reactor prior to the installation of auxiliary instrumentation. This leads to a reactor meltdown and a whopping explosion that kills thousands of people and leaves the surrounding earth unusable for growing anything other than killer tomatoes for the next 3 million years.
But sometimes - just on rare occasions - idiots actually enhance and lift our experiences of life, propelling us to new and entertaining heights of pleasure through their inability to grasp anything properly.
Those are the special idiots, and those are the special times. You see, when the planets align to form the outline of the Psygnosis owl, and complex numerological calculations performed on the current calender date reveal the code
idchoppers , a special breed of gamer is born.
The kind of gamer, who just fucking sucks at everything.
Sucks beyond the realm of 'you'll get better with time or experience', sucks beyond 'you just need a better PC to fight the evil lag'.
Nope, this guy or girl couldn't fight their way out of a pixellated, bump mapped, godamn wet paper bag with the entire cast of Worms: Armageddon helping them.
They are just innately bad. But this doesn't need to spell disaster. It can actually spell mirth and merriment for those around them, particularly in a multiplayer setting. To support this odd notion, I point you towards my experiences with Everquest 2 and a bloke named Andrew Smith. He just wasn't any good at games, and signing up his warrior Sir Andrew to EverQuest 2 was no different.
First up, his command of switching in and out of chat mode was less than uber. In order to use the chat window, you'd simply hit ENTER, and hit ENTER again when you'd finished typing your message thus returning the keys on the keyboard to being used for actual in game running, fighting and whatnot.
Sir Andrew never quite got up to speed with this. Rather, he'd hit ENTER randomly, leaving him unable to determine if he was in chat or normal mode. The result, was a chat window something like...
<Sir Andrew> adssserfff's'ss's'ssaaaaaa
<Sir Andrew> aadfd
<Sir Andrew> faa
<Sir Andrew> sorry
This would go on for ages until someone managed to key him into the notion of exiting chat before trying to fight or run.
That's just the tip of this little adventure iceberg. In EverQuest 2 - at the point in time Sir Andrew and I were playing - there was a game mechanic in place that meant when you were killed by monsters, you'd leave a spirit shard - a glowing ghostlike version of your corpse - behind on the ground. When you revived somewhere, you needed to go back to collect this spirit shard from wherever it fell or else suffer penalties to your statistics. Sir Andrew had a
farm of spirit shards.
I'm serious, we'd help this poor bugger go to collect one from somewhere he'd died - and sure enough, he'd run straight over and draw the attention of every large fanged creature he could, and die - again.
By the end of any given day, there were more spirit shards of Sir Andrew's than there were actual players on the server. Just a big old rugby scrum of spirit shards. Classy.
Then there was the temple incident. Coming up to a bridge, myself, another friend and Sir Andrew came across a ruined temple in the lands of Antonica. Now anyone that knows their fantasy games, knows that ruined temples are always infested with skeletons, ghouls and other undead. It's just one of those basic facts.
Sir Andrew however - was on frontal lobotomy auto-pilot and ran straight into the temple solo.
1 second....
2 seconds....
3 seconds....
Sir Andrew comes flailing out of the temple, with roughly 20 skeletons in tow - chasing him and launching all manner of disease spells at his mangy arse, while all we got in the chat window was,
<Sir Andrew> asasadfaa'asdfas'a
<Sir Andrew> saas!!!'sassia'
To his credit, he managed to run around in circles for a good two minutes or so - neither myself or my mate willing to jump in to help him, knowing to do so would mean certain death - until he finally made the ultra smart move of leaping off a nearby cliff into the ocean.
The skeletons followed. We're still not sure if the lack of oxygen, or the multitudes of angry and newly seafaring undead killed him, but the same end result came about.
Another spirit shard.
This sort of stuff continued for many months, and we had all manner of other players private message us to ask if Sir Andrew was in any way retarded or some kind of idiot savant where the savant part hadn't revealed itself yet.
The thing is though - rather than destroying our experience of Sonys MMORPG, it actually enhanced it. We looked forward to Sir Andrew coming online for the pure comedy of it all. We'd be left gasping for air as we all lept from a carefully chosen point on a cliff side so that we'd land on the ground below with some health left, while Sir Andrew would just do a spectacular run-and-jump only to splat with an undignified death animation below.
He was fun. The scene was fun. Following him around and becoming woven into the rich tapestry of an idiot flailing at every turn was actually an entertaining and awesome experience. This just goes to show that sometimes idiot gamers don't have to leave you feeling sour, they can actually be bucket loads of fun and laughs.
Just
don't let them start working at your local nuclear power plant.
Amiga4eva
Sir Andrew
FEEL the WUMP
