I’ve decided that there’s one thing I really can’t stand in an online game, more than PK Greifers, Exploiters, Trade Spammers, Ninja Looters and Random Drive-By Guild Recruiters, it’s Attention Whores, and boy did I hit the jackpot last night, in World of Warcraft.

Warcraft is quite fascinating for me right now. I’d thought that pretty much everyone else on the Interweb had comprehensively Been There and Done That with the game by now, and that turning up as unfashionably late as I have, there would be not a lot left for me – just a novel, but mostly empty world occupied only by level 60 Godlings shuttling between the main bank, and the most epic dungeon.

So what is surprising is that even today, genuinely new MMO virgins are still starting their first characters. It’s adorable, actually. In most other games up to this point, I’d always assumed that essentially, the entire population of every MMO was basically made up from the same pool of maybe 200,000 distinct players. I’ve probably passed each and every one of you outside an imaginary bank or starport at some point in the last five years.

But suddenly, WoW is bringing in actual new people, in droves, and is still doing so today; refreshing, if somewhat frustrating, new players who aren’t jaded and expecting to be disappointed, who don’t know The Critical Path, who don’t understand the inviolable relationship between the Tank, the Healer and The Mezzer, who don’t Min-Max, or spout bollocks like ‘4TW’, do that cleverly ironic ‘!!!11!oneone!11!!’ thing to indicate overexcitement while typing or shout ‘LEEEEEEEROYYYY’ every eight minutes. Remember kids, if everyone does a thing, all the time, it ceases to be ironic. Very refreshing, particularly in my case, as at the moment, I keep starting new characters to see what each class is like, so am in the various newbie zones a lot.

Of course not everyone in the newbie zone is an actual newbie. That’s when I met the attention whore. We’ll call her Roxanne, because really…she didn’t have to put on that red light - they could probably hear her eight zones away. I say ‘she’ of course, as if it meant anything, but attention rent-boys are equally common in my experience.

After only three minutes of my new character’s life I’d already been shown how to play the game by her, and was hiding on the other side of the zone to avoid further instruction. But no, Roxanne then proceeded to pipe up on general zone chat and let us all know:

  • Her opinion on Chavs
  • Her opinion on McDonalds
  • Her opinion on Everquest 2
  • Her opinion on Guild Wars
  • Her opinion on Alliance Players (We were Horde)
  • Her opinion on Horde Players
  • Her opinion on the Battlegrounds
  • Her opinion on various guilds
  • Her opinion on the profanity filter, and how to bypass it

We also got to learn her complete repertoire of swear words (Robust, but unimaginative, I thought), how many level 60 characters she already had, how much better [insert other race here]’s newbie area was, and she was even decent enough to meticulously plan out where we should go, and what mobs we should fight for the rest of our character’s lives, so we didn’t need to explore or experiment at all. There was a great deal of ‘lollerskating’ going on too, and every other line ended with ‘:P’ which I found especially irritating.

There may have been something about Asylum Seekers there too, but at that point I was busy clawing at my eyes and beating my head against the monitor. People like this do exist! Several options exist to cope with this:

  • /ignore Roxanne. This would seem ideal, but the trouble is, it only works if everyone does it. Otherwise you’re just left with the responses to her relentless torrent of verbal diarrhoea, which are half sycophantic gibberish, and half people going ‘STFU!’, and can be almost as irritating.
  • Pipe Up and Tell Her to STFU. Nonononononono…this is a lot like trying to extinguish a petrol fire with more petrol; generally counterproductive.
  • /duel. While this may indeed shut her up temporarily, I suck at PvP, and the last thing I'd want to do is give her a PvP victory to crow about, or indeed, a PvP loss to bitch about. It's a Lose-Lose situation.
  • Turn General Chat off. A bit extreme – general chat can be a useful thing too; help, advice, other game-related, well... chat, and in general, most people don’t claim unspoken ownership and then run audience participation chat shows using it.
  • Get the Hell out of Dodge. Not always practical, or even possible. I’m a newbie…I need to be in the newbie zone for a while at least, and anyway, why give in to terrorists?

Mostly you just have to weather the storm, and hope she says something really unintentionally funny. Twenty minutes in, with no sign of her slowing down, my ISP decided to put me out of my misery, by kicking me off the internet, as it has a habit of doing lately, and for once, I wasn’t annoyed…

“Rooaaaaaaaaaaaaxanne!” – Sting.