I lost my friends to WAR.

Yeah, WAR. WAR is hell. What is it good for etc. All those cliches. Insert them all here! Well WAR is good for losing five friends. That's what it is good for.

A bunch of my staple geek friends all got themselves playing Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, through a combination of relationships ending, boredom and geographical distance. Now they play it. A lot.

(Un)fortunately, I am copied into all their emails so daily I get 145 emails which roughly broken down are: When we gonna meet up tonight, tomorrow, weekend (45%), what we did last night for those who couldn't make it (35%), hey guys I just read the wiki and we should.... (10%), microphone, PC, problems (10%). And dps jokes and all other acronyms which I couldn't care to google are the new order of the day. Just today I got sent this:

LOLLERCAUST you will all no doubt agree. But do I despair? Nah. It's how MMORPGs work and the mix of my friends who now play WAR is testament to the tried and tested formula of sucking people into the game and getting them to keep the sub fees flowing. Three are longtime on/off WoW players, one would have punched Wow in the balls and spat down his neck and the other one was always afraid he would get sucked into WoW so avoided it. Then BINGO! a new slightly different game comes along and the ex-wowers are back in, the wow hater claims it's very different and therefore okay and the scared ones' transition was made all the easier by personal circumstances and the peer pressure all coming together at once.

Since then it has been by the book cliche MMORPG experience. One of them "accidentally" forgot to have "eaten or anything yet today" at 6pm, a number of them are running alts and one shamelessly traversed London with a PC and a monitor just to play it because his new house didn't have a connection.

Am I upset? Nah! They sound like they are having a blast. As long as they remember to eat (you know who you are?). It's nice that a game can provide for a social experience and bypass that horrible feeling at the end of a good real world geekend whereby you have to pack up your junk and start to think about work the next day on the train home. Of course, the whole social aspect of MMORPGs is highly questionable as most conversations (microphone problems aside) in game tend to be about the game but it's better they are MMORPGing than on the streets. That shit is dangerous.

Am I jealous? Well, who is to say where I would be if I was single, had some frickin time, had a decent PC and internet connection. I'll not be so high and mighty to suggest I would be any different.

Nooch and good ganking guys.