This morning I /gquit on all my characters. I feel ok about it, though – this was much less hard than leaving SS was. I’ll be leaving behind a lot of old friends, and no longer playing with Miz, but the guild is not a happy one.
I can’t help but wonder if the problem that I had in trying to get runs going was because of the core of Danish/Norwegian/Swedish players that all hang out together and have lan parties, etc. There’s a weird xenophobia on European servers – it’s quite common to see people spamming for all-Danish guilds or all-Swedish guilds or whatever, not wanting to mix with the rest of us. I’ve never had a problem with it personally, and I’ve always been in mixed guilds – everything from the northern Europeans to Croatians and people from Turkey, Israel, Iceland, you name it. It’s disappointing.
That said, one thing that is interesting, from an American point of view, is being awed by how literate people are. You can talk with people from all over the world, who speak several languages and have flawless English in guildchat. In SS they’d have times where everyone made bad puns, usually featuring fish for some reason. (“This isnt’t the plaice for that!”) I have the language that I was born with, a leftover bit of highschool Spanish, and nothing else…I can’t imagine creating wordplay and using puns in a second or third or fourth language. Quite impressive.
So now I am looking for another guild. Not easy here on Aggramar, where most of the top raid guilds have split, left the server, etc. I’m thinking about going back to Moonglade to try an RP server again – IF (big if) I can get into a guild before I transfer. It was very lonely last time.
A friend who used to spend far too much time on Anarchy Online, and who was mostly fluent in French, joined a guild of French teenagers, partly as someone to play with, and partly to practice her French.
She said the weirdest thing was seeing the slang spellings that they developed to get around how slow it could be to type accents, graves and so on. The only one I can remember now is ‘ki’ instead of ‘qui’, but Kat said that there was a wide range of them.
I’ve always found it interesting that there are new “pidgin” languages evolving that everyone in an environment, such as an MMORPG environment, understands regardless of country or language. The txtspk/l33tspk shorthand is used by everyone. You see words creeping in from languages such as Chinese, which are adopted, such as “ni hao”, which everyone knows. I think spellings such as wai for way and bai for bye also have a Chinese influence – but I could be wrong.