Warning! Today's rambling contains feelings, hissy-fits, drhama, sub-optimal gameplay, and scenes of an Emo Nature! If you are easily offended by painful examinations of self, here is a link to a video of a man making an iPod Smoothie with an Industrial Blender, and I'll see you all next time!

I guess it started off okay, the usual sort of thing - a bit of minor tidy up questing on Istan while we waited for all three of us to log on, and then it was back on to the Primary Questing - the storyline of Nightfall. By now, myself (The Mesmer/Paragon), the Dervish/Ranger and the Necromancer/Elementalist are all near-as-damnit Level 20, and have just gotten to the Kournan mainland. The plot has Gone South, but that's not a bad thing, because the natural foodsource of Adventurers is Other People's Problems, and we've now got a surfeit of these, ranging from the Minor Domestic ("My cat got stuck up a tree, please help!"), through the postal ("This package needs to go to the next village, only I can't be arsed to go myself, please help!"), right up to the International Incident ("Take back what you said about us being a nation of demon-rutting psychopaths, or we'll declare war on you!") and Apocalyptic ("I AM demon-rutting psychopath, and am declaring war on EVERYONE! MUAHAHA!"). Life is good. Well, certainly from a game perspective anyway.

No, the trouble now looming has little to do with apocalyptic story-based exposition, and more to do with plain old Other Players, and in particular, The Guild. I don't mention my Guild Wars Guild much, largely because for me, it doesn't really exist. The only reason I'm in one at all, is that the Necromancer, a long time online friend from many games, likes to use the Guild Window's 'Last Logged On' feature to keep track of how interested I am in Guild Wars - something you don't get from the normal Friends List.

I sometimes feel like I ought to get involved more, or indeed, actually turn Guild Chat on sometimes, but I don't really care, and on the whole, (and based somewhat in past GW Pick-Up Group experience), I'm quite happy to ignore pretty much everyone else in the game. Terribly arrogant, I know, but in no other game have I found it necessary to turn off local chat before. And anyway, for me Guild Wars is about exploration, sightseeing, and PvE Story-based missioning. With the exception of a few long-time friends I've known from other games (my regular Tuesday gang), I'm not particularly interested in the thousands of other incompetent smack-talking muppets standing around in Droknar's Forge wasting my bandwidth. My contempt for most Guild Wars players is matched only by their own contempt for the game and the people in it, as evidenced by the kinds of player and team names you tend to see running about the towns, and broadcast after PvP team battle victories - stupid, abusive, nasty, and often quite vile in mispelled sentiment. If you're lucky, it'll just be a Chuck Norris/In Soviet Russia... type of meme-muppetry. I'm quite mild-mannered and it's very rare I feel a need to actually petition these names, but one particularly hateful one I saw on a Dervish in an outpost last session actually made me hunt for a /petition command, only to find it didn't exist. "Surely he can't get away with being called that!? He hasn't even swapped any letters around!" Seems he could, to at least level 16. I'm not sure Guild Wars actually has GMs, in the conventional sense.

It's all good though - an almost totally instanced world sets me free, although this is why I'm not looking forward to GW2's plans for more conventional non-instanced zones. I've become very picky about who I share my world with these days, and having a small band of people I know and trust to behave with some degree of professionalism, and most importantly, civility, has made Tuesdays something to look forward to. So away we went, picking up the story, which had us on the run from a failed invasion attempt. Some minor missioning later, we'd managed to secure for ourselves a hidden base of operations, Sunspear Sanctuary, and are now in the process of building up the base, and rallying the troops for some kind of counter-attack, all the while conducting guerilla raids on the evil Kournans. And then the fun began.

Seems that our Necromancer, a far more personable and social type than myself, had been cheerfully been reporting back our thrills and spills in the n00b club, and apparently generating some interest in the project. I guess if your normal session consists of end-game farming, repeated pointless Pick-Up PvP Matches, and silently grinding your eighth character through the three campaigns again, then hearing about a regular group of people having lots of happy-fun every week must be quite alluring, and sure enough; 'Can my friend join us?' Turns out that the Sanctuary was where one of the other Guild people had parked their latest alt, and they wanted in, which put me and the Dervish in a very awkward situation indeed. The obvious answer should have been a simple 'No, they can't. Moving on!', but I'm too polite (and/or cowardly) for my own good some times, and blurted out a 'Sure! :)', and now we're saddled with another team-mate who has done this all before, lots.

Add to that the rather unfortunate attempt at irony in the whole 'noob' thing. We're not actually noobs you see, but I'm sure the Guild thinks that the Dervish and I, are, in the 'Have never played Guild Wars before' sense, rather than the 'We've made new characters for this particular group night' sense we meant. Cue twinking, over-explanations, and minor low-grade patronisation, which in turn adds extra pressure to seem to know what I'm doing, to min-max, and to not waste other people's time by just standing around and looking at the Pretty Things, which in-turn makes me rash, sloppy and careless, often causing too much agro, and getting us all killed through over-compensation. If I were soloing, there's no way I'd have made half the mistakes I made last night, but the pressure gets to me. All this ends up making me behave like the noob I purport not to be, and all in all, is a lot more stress than I want out of it all.

We pushed on, but the sudden Stranger in our midst had a debilitating effect on both myself and the Dervish, and the pair of us found ourselves spontaneously, and independently, pretending to be happy with the state of affairs, neither of us wanting to upset our Necromancer friend by committing the cardinal sin of Not Liking Their Other Friends, and I found myself just clamming up and getting on with it, now seized of the impression that Guild Wars is SERIOUS BUSINESS, not wanting to look like an idiot or a flake in front of The Stranger. Felt very much like my previous PUG experiences, to be honest, although to be fair, The Stranger didn't have Tourettes.

We made it to the next Mission lobby, and I, with an ear now on Guild Chat, saw with mounting horror, yet another Guild Stranger log on, go through the usual 'hi all!' bit, ask what everyone was doing, and when hearing about what crazy fun was being had with the 'noobs', responded to the effect of 'cool, I'll get my noob...she's near there!' Ak! Another one! Before my very eyes, I saw our happy little regular night out sliding away and becoming a large-scale Guild Wheeze, and demonstrating yet more lack of backbone, and rather than say something unpleasant to a friend I've known and liked for a very long time, made some vague excuse about it being late, and logged off, spending the next four hours in Anarchy Online instead, alone.

Perhaps I am over-reacting, and being petulant about it all. I know I don't play well with others, and indeed, have no solid answer to the obvious question; 'why r u play online gamez then? lol'. I'm not sure how to tell someone to go away, without making it sound harsh , rude or nasty, but last night was a lot less enjoyable than the previous session, and it's not even The Stranger's fault, who came along in good faith and meant well. I guess that's the point of an irrational dislike - it defies reason. I'm a lot less Vulcan than my passport photo would suggest. Perhaps I just need to swallow my pride and get used to these extra new recruits, or just 'grow some balls', be firm and explain why the extras aren't welcome.

Anyway, a week to think about how to resolve the situation, one way or another, and both my regular team mates know about, and sometimes even read, this blog, so perhaps by posting this, I've already solved the very problem I've described...