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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Set" data-source="post: 4601356" data-attributes="member: 41584">I wasn't a fan of it, but there is absolutely no shortage of personal interaction, role-playing, etc. in online games.  Indeed, for a 'power-gamer' who is more interested in the 'crunch,' there can be *far too much* annoying role-playing garbage in online games! I'm fond of role-playing, at times, and fond of powergaming at others, and I've found that RPers in online games are prone to sit around and socialize for hours, and not actually *do anything* in the game, other than chat with their friends, run roleplaying 'storylines,' host contests and competitions (best costume, riddle contests, naked gnome races, etc.) and on and on.  Various online games even have specific zones set aside for pure RPers (which has the side-effect of reducing system lag for players who are trying to adventure in that zone, since a good sized 'event' can have a couple hundred people show up).  City of Heroes / Villains has gone to the step of having a 'club' (and a ski lodge, and one or two other areas) where villains and heroes can socialize on strictly enforced 'neutral ground', making it one of the few online games with Player vs. Player that has an RP area set aside for members of different factions. Many guilds these days communicate through Ventrilo (or Teamspeak or whatever) and are friends in real-life, and a number of them have get-togethers in real-life, either at established fanfaires or conventions, or more informal 'geekends' where they gather from all over the country (or world, my EQ guild has a large UK contingent, as well as the odd duck from such exotic and distant lands as China, Russia and Canada) to sit around and drink and share stories and play guitar hero and sleep with each others spouses.  (Well, that's not one of the scheduled activities, but it's always a spectacular way to see a guild fall apart...) Pretty much every stereotype you'll hear about online gaming from people trashing 4E by comparing it to WoW is an exaggeration or comes from someone who spent three days trying to play the game alone and didn't make any friends (and then complained for the rest of their life about how antisocial all of the other people, who were off having fun with their friends, were!). I'm not playing any online games at the moment (barring PBP D&D games, that is), and I prefer tabletop games, but dissing Warcraft for being insanely popular and having critical and financial success of the sort that Hasbro execs would orally exsanguinate kittens for is kinda silly. After 25+ years of tabletop gamers being considered basement-dwelling socially-maladjusted troglodytes by the jocks and whatever, it's amusing to me to hear tabletop gamers talking smack about Warcraft players. Then we can divide into even more pointless sub-factions, and the LARPers can try to out-smug the d20 players who are regarded as drones by the GURPS-o-philes and all of whom are regarded with benign contempt by the wargamers.  Meanwhile, the online MMORG gamers can team up on the first-person-shooters and the God-gamers, while the Sims crowd giggles at all of them, and the console gamers shrug and get back to admiring Lara Crofts backside as she dodges another exploding barrel.</blockquote>

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