The social side of an MMORPG

Do you ever play an MMORPG where you're in a clan or guild and apart from helping each other out with the game, questing and what not, do you ever feel like doing something social just for the fun of it?

What kind of things would you, could you do?

Have a party with lots of cake and dancing?
Have a raze from one zone to another?
Maybe have PvP contests?

Runescape, World of Warcraft, Runes of Magic, Warhammer, Starcraft and however many other mmorpg's are out there, what do you do as social events and activities?

Roll Nelf.
Strip.
Jump on nearest mailbox.
/dance
Profit!

There's a Starcraft MMORPG now?

When I first started playing UO (10+ years ago), my first in-game friends and I would sometimes meet up in a bar after a hunt just to chat and drink in-game booze. Later, my guild would have casual sparring matches, which I (as a tamer/mage) did not take particularly seriously. I would just polymorph into a chicken and run around hitting people. Speaking of polymorph, I also amused myself sometimes by going to a common newbie hunting ground and polymorphing into a daemon to scare the newbies.

When I played EQ, some of my guildmates and I would get our characters drunk and then try to navigate the wood elf tree village (which had many long, narrow bridges). This commonly resulted in deaths.

This also reminds me of in-game weddings, which was not uncommon back when I was playing UO for whatever reason. I never did anything like that.

Early on in FFXI my guild would do interesting contests and stuff. They would do things like naked, level 1 Jeuno runs. members could pick whichever home city they thought would give them the advantage and the first one to make it would win a prize. Usually it was sizable amount of gil.

They would also hold raffles where everyone in the guild would show up and put in a certain amount toward the guild bank for an unknown set of prizes. Several /rolls would be done and people would win items. As more people participated (and put more money in the pot to participate) the prizes grew larger.

Something kinda social (it benefited us in no way) that some of my guilds would do is to get together and actively look for Jeuno shouts for certain very difficult quests that people needed help on. Then we'd swoop in as a pack and nearly an alliance of level 75s would go plow some AF mob or do some rank mission for a lucky person. Back then getting help from a single 75, much less a legion of them was enough to leave stars in a lowbies eyes, so it was certainly its own reward.

My rl friends in WoW would drop from high altitudes and watch my friend's sister try to pull them to safety with a spell (it rarely worked LOL) or we would duel...and the guy that is losing or will lose needs to do something extra silly after dying (or in the case of my friend as he is dying...he stunned me, ran away, mounted up and flew into the moat of Stormwind in a swiggly air flight path...loool).

I played UO for about a month donkey's years ago on some free server, and the admin (a guy pretending to be a girl) randomly gave me a bunch of cool (at least I assume it was cool) :bou::bou::bou::bou:, including a pink horse or something because I had a cool username. I confidently strode outside town about three yards, all haters-gonna-hate, then got pwned by a grue who teleported in from smurfing nowhere, made me wear his sword like a shish-kebab, then shat on my corpse. I've never played a mumorpuguh with any degree of seriousness or decorum since.

I don't think I would do anything social in an MMO that wasn't a gameplay thing. Like I might take part in a tournament or something but I wouldn't sit around in a bar chatting. There are better ways to chat.

I just play with real life friends usually, and in EQ2 we'd get drunk and get each other killed for fun. Hell, a lot of my friends live in various far away places now, so MMOs are our way of staying in touch and having fun. MySpace and Facebook are terribly dull in comparison. But yeah, we use to pull mobs on one another and let someone take hate and then take off running or step back and watch them die. Or just sit around the guild hall chatting awhile, or maybe PVP raid some. In EQ1 death had bigger penalties, so training a bunch of noobs to their death usually made for a better source of entertainment. Or racing one another across a very very long dangerous zone, and see who could get to the other side and not die.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Roto13

I don't think I would do anything social in an MMO that wasn't a gameplay thing. Like I might take part in a tournament or something but I wouldn't sit around in a bar chatting. There are better ways to chat.

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Yes, I agree. Time is valuable. I will usually decline to participate in social events unless I am actively interested in getting to know someone or I think I could get an item from it somehow.