Things I had to learn through online gaming

My gaming skills are average

Do you remember what gaming with friends and family was like before the internet? People would ask me to play for them. Help a friend through a particularly difficult level, beat a boss for my little brother, destroy the whole neighbourhood in Street Fighter II. I was the best damn gamer around. I was a god!
Today I get facerolled by 12 year olds on Call of Duty. How? Why? Are they breeding a creepy new generation of virtual killers?

You wouldn't believe some of the shit he's done to my mother.

A much more likely explanation is that I may have overestimated my skills.
If you owned a console in the 8/16bit era, there's a pretty good chance you were really good at playing those games. There was no DLC back then, your favourite franchise didn't get 3 sequels a month and you've played the shit out of every game to get the most value for your money. I know I did. I mastered that shit, because if I had to spend all my hard-earned cash on video games, I also wanted to see the damn ending credits. And back in my day, you couldn't just look them up on youtube or look up all the cheats and exploits on gamefaqs.
So it's not really surprising that I was better at this stuff than my friends and family. Besides, I owned the damn games! I could play as much as I wanted to, whenever I felt like it. Most friends who challenged me in Mortal Kombat either didn't have a console or weren't allowed to buy the damn game. And some friends simply sucked at playing video games. Being a noob wasn't such a big deal when the term noob didn't actually exist and people couldn't see how shit you are at Angry Birds on Facebook.

When you play against other people online, chances are that most of them are just as competitive as you are. They don't play for fun like your little sister did when you beat the tree monster for her in Castle of Illusion. They play to fucking destroy you. They spend just as much time playing the game as you do, they have proper gaming hardware and they're pretty fucking good at what they do. Because that's what happens when you spend 18 hours a day doing only one thing. Practice.
Oh well. Most emulators have internet multiplayer capabilities now, so I can still challenge all my friends at Street Fighter II and destroy them when I want to feel good about myself.

The internet is a lot like Thailand

Final Fantasy XI, roughly eight years ago: A friend pays me several million gil to see nude pictures of me. Well, actually he's looking at nude pictures of my ex, because my sexy catgirl avatar has lead him to believe I'm female. But I'm rich, he's gonna be happy until he finishes in 28 seconds and realizes what a complete idiot he is, so it's a win-win. The internet today: Everyone is a female night elf.

Even on Star Trek Online.

I can log on to Neverwinter right now, join any random group and there's a 90% chance that every character in the group will be female. Which is a bit weird, but tolerable and usually followed by the same old explanation. "I don't wanna stare at a male character's ass all the time." And there's a bunch of weirdos out there, who aren't just hard for female polygons. They live out some strange, fetishy fantasies online. So if one of your group members can't stop talking about what a raging, hardcore lesbian she is, then you're most likely dealing with a male teenager. It gets particularly hilarious when two of those guys start virtually making out with each other. Ahh, cyber love!

Some are more obvious than others.

People pay any amount of money in exchange for power

Games like Neverwinter are 'Free2Play' and it is perfectly possible to create a character, play all the quests to the maximum level and see all the stuff there is to do without ever paying a penny. Lots of people play it like that and they're happy that way.
There is also the "Hero of the North" pack for nearly 200 Bucks. It lets you play one of the ingame races a little earlier than free players and you get a relatively useless battle pet, an epic mount, a bit of item shop currency and a whole lot of useless tat in the box.

"Buy now! Offer must end soon!" So they keep advertising, but 'soon' never comes.

Surely, nobody in their right mind would pay such a ludicrous amount of money for some pretend goods in a free game, right? WRONG! Apparently, there are tens of thousands of people who have already bought the package and the number is going up all the time. The whole thing was so successful in fact, they've expanded their overpriced package system to Fury of the Feywild and Star Trek Online:

And this time they're only 59.99 and 159.99! What a bargain!

The madness doesn't end here. Star Trek Online has long introduced special lockboxes, which, according to the forums, have a ~.5% Chance (HALF a fucking per cent!) to contain ultra rare ships, which you cannot obtain any other way, unless some other player is willing to sell them for ungodly amounts of ingame cash. Opening a lockbox costs roughly 1 Dollar each. It's perfectly possible to spend 500 Bucks or more in order to obtain one of these ships. And you see the damn things everywhere!
People are so desperate to be special, to stand out, to have something cool that nobody else has got, they lose all reason and responsibility and pay virtually any and every amount of money for some cool new ingame item, only to realise that every other fucking idiot around them has already done the same thing and their special new toy isn't as OP as it was cracked up to be. But they don't learn. There's a reason why every online game in existence is plagued by bots advertising gold-selling and power-leveling services.

We're all greedy, selfish scumbags

Modern MMOs like Guild Wars 2 have abandoned dubious features like mob-tagging, meaning everyone can attack any monster and receive experience points and quest updates for it, regardless whether the monster is already fighting another player or not. They're doing it that way, because online gamers, you, me, everyone, are complete douchebags.
What did you do in World of Warcraft, when some other player attacked a boss or some monster, which was relevant to one of your quests and you could see they were about to get their ass handed? Did you jump in and help? You've probably watched them die, waited for the monster to reset and claimed it for your own quest progress. We all did this. You've probably need-rolled on items now and then, which you put on the auction house, because you never really needed them in the first place. You may have felt the need to /spit on a member of the opposing faction. Corpse camping? Hell yeah! If you're a veteran, you may have lured a whole train of baddies onto an unsuspecting player and got them killed. Some people are more selfish than others, some have elevated asshattery to an art form, but we're all guilty. We're all dicks, because we know we can get away with it and we don't have to face the consequences of our actions. Not in the shape of a fist to the face, anyway.

And some of us simply enjoy being full-time assholes.

The problem is that we tend to forget our own greedy behaviour. Or we may even justify it, because "everyone else does it", so it's only fair if we ninja a few things here and there, right? That is, until somebody else cheats us out of a monster, an item or some other virtual thing that we feel is rightfully ours. Then we bring on the nerd rage. And that leads me to my next point.

Discussion is a waste of time

So that guy in your pick up group has screwed you over, grabbed an item, which is rightfully yours or maybe he's your healer and went AFK without warning and got you killed on the first pull. And you feel the need to chew him out, to tell him what a complete asshole he is and how and why he screwed up. And damn are you gonna destroy him, because you have empiric evidence that his behaviour is antisocial and wrong, Wikipedia is on your side, you've done your research and there's no way in hell he could possibly counter any of the points you're about to raise.

"OMFG! You put my fucking mage set on your HORSE?"

Except, he's probably too stupid to understand any of your excellent points, he may choose to ignore them by insulting your mother and no amount of arguing and discussing will make him see your point of view. What's worse, your other group members probably don't give a shit about the whole thing, they're here to run a dungeon and they didn't ask to see you going mental on some ninjalooting troll. And even if by divine intervention or some some supernatural event you actually make the other guy see your point and have him apologize and admit he was wrong (which, according to my studies, happens 0% of the time), you may have won an argument, but you've probably lost your dungeon group, who got tired of your shit and left. And for what? To convince some random stranger on the internet that you're right. Some kid you'll never see again in the game, let along meet in person anytime in this life. Well done!

People are stupid and hate responsibility

What's the one thing that makes waiting for a dungeon group boring, tedious and time-consuming? Lack of tanks and healers. The tank calls the shots, sets the pace, keeps the group alive. If he fucks up, the group dies. The healer makes sure the tank can do his job without getting hacked to bits too much and spends all excess mana on overzealous damage dealers, who don't understand the concept of tanking and frequently pull their own mob groups. These jobs don't usually show up anywhere near the top of the DPS meters and playing them requires more effort and talent than simply dishing out.
"But wait", you might say, "finding the perfect spec, gear and rotation for maximum DPS requires just as much work as being a good tank!" You nimrod! And tanks and healers don't have to work on their gear, spec and rotation to be efficient or what? They have to do the exact same shit you do, but they carry the whole group. If the team dies, it's always their fault. Or when was the last time somebody blamed crappy damage dealers for not killing a boss fast enough?

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Is that a toilet under that curtain?

And what do particularly stupid damage dealers call their class? "Rouge". "Assasin". Seriously. The word Rogue is on the character creation screen, it's the first thing you see when you log on as your rogue character, it's in your character menu and printed on to every single one of your class-specific items. It's the one word that's constantly on your god damn screen, you look at it for 12 hours every fucking day, yet you're too fucking stupid to spell it properly! And it doesn't end there. You've probably named your character "Raeper" or some shit, because you're also too fucking stupid to spell your own damn name. And dyslexia is not an excuse - they've invented Google so dipshits like you can look things up before typing them out.

-Cat