Things to know BEFORE you start ANY online MMO

I was recently confronted with a situation where a young teen-age girl recently started gaming and landed in our guild. I know it’s quite common for younger teen-agers to play MMOs but this MMO I’m currently playing is defiantly more on the adult end of the spectrum. She was confronted with the usual MMO chatter and was completely unprepared for ANY of it. So, here’s a run down of some basics to be prepared for:

  1. You will get asked where you are from! Have an answer ready. It’s not about stalking, it is just natural human nature to be curious and in heavy PVP and upper level PVE your ping rate to the server matters. (Ping is amount of time it takes for info from your computer to travel to the game’s computer.) It is perfectly FINE to answer with a region and anyone that pushes too hard for specifics is just being a CREEP and tell them to “back off”. So lets say you are from Baton Rouge, LA; an answer of The Gulf Coast, Louisiana, The South, Southern Louisiana, and even Baton Rouge (If you are that comfortable) are all ACCEPTABLE answers. If you are uncomfortable being vague PRACTICE IN FRONT OF A MIRROR TILL YOU ARE COMFORTABLE giving your answer so it rolls off the tongue easier.
  2. You will get asked how old you are. Very few can tell from someone’s voice how old they are and this again falls into the above of it’s just human nature to ask. First you need to be honest! If you are 14 playing with a bunch of 30 year old’s you are going to get exposed to behavior YOU AREN’T READY FOR, so they NEED TO KNOW so they can tone it down and vice versa to some extent. Most MMOs have a minimum age limit of 18 with exceptions, so most will assume your that old or older, you have been fair warned.
  3. Google is your friend! don’t be that guy/gal that refuses to use the wiki to answer your question. you tube is also a great source for hard to complete mission. Type the name of your game and the name of your item/mission and hit enter. This is where Alt+TAB is your friend and having your windows bar locked in place on your screen can be a big help to quickly swap to your web browser to find answers. I try to use Google and the Wiki’s to answer easily asked questions and keep the more complex question that are more vague for my guild.
  4. It’s ok to use your first name if it’s pretty common. How many Joe’s in Baton Rouge? LOTS! JUST DON’T GIVE OUT YOUR FULL NAME TO ANYONE. Be aware if you give out your real name as Charmaine of some small town, you’ve just given away your entire identity! I personally think Facebook is extremely dangerous and your INSANE to put your real name and location on that web page  for everyone in the world to see, we’ve proved time and time again that SECURITY BREACHES HAPPEN.
  5. Discord, Team Speak, Mumble, and most voice com systems need administrative privileges to work correctly in the back ground of most games. DO NOT SET THESE TO START WITH YOUR COMPUTER! Right click the com system’s icon in the window start menu and choose run as Administrator, now this way you will have to do this EACH and EVERY time. OR: set up an icon on your desktop, right click, properties, compatibility, check mark run this program as an administrator. These are 2 of the many ways to make a program run as admin and allow the push to talk feature to work while it’s not the active/selected window.
  6. learn to use push to talk. JUST GET OVER IT AND DO IT!
  7. ABOVE ALL ELSE LISTEN TO YOUR GUT.  If you get that feeling that this is just not a good person or situation, JUST LEAVE. You can always say your internet cut out and you had to restart your router.