June 02, 2005

• Leroy is my hero.
• It's a scripted movie, but funny all the same. Apparently Leroy is something of a god for many players now, his name being invoked before many a battle. :) We had a guy on Star Wars Galaxies in my guild way back who sounded and acted exactly like him. Wasn't fun after he left :| Teamspeak is great.
• Leroy Jenkins?
• Yeah, that's the guy. I swear.
• So, so true.
• Um...can someone explain what that was all about? I'm so confused. There was some yelling, and some flying things, and sparkly things...
• The joke--which is really just a story about a stereotypical behavior--is that people go to all the trouble to organize in a group to accomplish a difficult task and some careless bozo ruins the whole thing. The way these games work, beyond a certain level you have to have an organized group and just random mayhem guarantees death. Which is what happened because Leeroy went charging into the room unexpectedly, not following the carefully made plans. This happens all the damn time and it's frustrating as hell. Partly because a good number of the other players are teens or younger; and partly because it's also just human nature for there to be someone who doesn't take it very seriously and, furthermore, doesn't mind ruining the experience for those who do.
• Imagining for a moment that the whole thing wasn't staged- an alternate perspective: Leroy at least sounds like he's having fun- something many people quite reasonably like to do while playing games. Apart from Leroy, the thing about the video that I find funniest is the contrast between the visuals- a group of exotically robed and armed warriors in an utterly fantastic setting- and the voices of the players, who sound like tight-assed, hapless middle management on parade. I think Leroy was more than patient.
• I played EQ from the beginning and quit because more and more of the high level encounters were being "Jenkinsed".
• At least I have chicken. And I can't believe this thing is circulating around non-video game related sites. The first time I saw this, I was laughing so hard, my girlfriend came in the room to see what the hullaballoo was all about. I showed her, she stood there, staring blankly at the screen while this clip played. Eventually, she turned that blank stare on me and said "You do realize I'm going to leave you one day, right?" I guess the humor isn't universal. Hence my surprise at seeing this clip on Le MoFi.
• Heh. I do play Warcraft, and I have the type of guild that does those kind of raids. But I haven't been in that dungeon yet (was it Molten Core?). In fact, one of the raid leaders sounds almost exactly like that. I've played EQ, EQ2, Camelot, even Anarchy Online (and I'm female! My guild leader nearly keeled over when he found out a girl had been healing his ass and doing it well. I thought we knew that girls played now?), and this is the first time I've been in a guild that does these high level raids. It's a lot more fun than I thought, seeing things designed for the truly dedicated player. Even when the entire event is scripted by the raid leader and my role is narrowly defined, it's a lot of fun to work as a team and survive high-risk pretend battles. That said, sometimes I really just want to run into a room and get my butt kicked by a thousand dragons. But I would probably leave my group first.
• "something many people quite reasonably like to do while playing games" Sure, and I think most designers and thoughtful players would say that playstyle is completely valid. What's a problem (well, this is a central problem of MMOGs) is when playstyles come into conflict. That was a big group of people there (whether or not it was staged--it was represenative of such a raid) and it's terribly uneven that merely one person can greatly diminish the experience of all (or most of) the others. I was really excited about Neverwiner Nights because of the online DM'd capability. To have something planned out and run dynamically by a person could supply something that's missing in these types of games. But I tried it exactly once. It was via a website matchmaking service, the session was planned more than a week in advance. The DM had made a bunch of content and was doing a lot of interesting stuff realtime. But we had one kid that simply wouldn't act in a coordinated manner and the result was that we'd all be killed every ten minutes or so as he just ran ahead carelessly. The whole thing was very disapointing.
• My Wow-obsessed friends tell me that there are a few points of subtler humor in the video, too. First of all, Leroy isn't even listening during the spiel at the beginning. His character is AFK (away from the keyboard). He returns to his computer and immediately charges into the room without even looking around first. Also, the strategy the guild leader lays out is completely broken. The room they are attacking is full of dragon eggs that spawn dragonkin when someone walks on them. Your goal is to avoid the eggs because a room full of dragonkin is impossible to survive. So when the party casts a fear spell on the enemy monsters, the monsters run willy nilly around the room and all the eggs hatch, filling the room with unnecessary dragonkin. Also, the party thinks the "Divine Intervention" spell will allow their mages to cast spells while invulnerable. DI does confer invulnerability on the character it's cast on - but it prevents that character from doing anything at all and it kills the paladin who cast it. If you listen carefully, you can hear the mages say "uhhh... I can't cast anything! and the paladins complain about being dead.
• My understanding is that part of the joke is that the instructions are largely nonsensical for those reasons.. but I haven't played WoW, so I'm just going by what I have heard. It does remind me very much of SWG raids, that is a game that requires, nay forces teamwork. Particularly the goddam corvette missions which I hated.
• Yeah, Divine Intervention seems largely useless unless you're facing a group wipe-out and it's a last ditch effort to give you the time to get aggo off your healer. Do you sacrifice your paladin and hope the warrior can pull agro? Hmm. But I play a Horde Shaman, so I don't know a thing about Paladins.
• Ah, thanks for the clarification. I've only played a priest to level 38, so I didn't catch those subtleties.
• Thanks, pianistic. I thought I was the only one thinking of Revolutionary Ensemble's Leroy Jenkins. As far as the gaming, I have just never been able to engage my brain in anything more plot driven than Dig Dug.
• You might've been, deconstructo! Just randomly googled that... but he does seem like a nice fellow to listen to.
• Welcome to the internet, where everything has its own t-shirt.
• Leeroy Live - Elevator Camera