A few weeks ago, my husband found himself in a bit of a reorienting Overwatch match. There was a young kid on chat sounding super depressed, when several of the players piped up and tried to talk him out of his funk. My husband is kinda used to being teamed with kids, given the weird hours he plays, but this time there were several much older men in there (one of them was talking about his new grandbaby!), and he was surprised and heartened to the fact that instead of facing typical toxicity, he was witnessing mentoring and encouragement. I don’t know whether those dudes made a difference in that kid’s life, but they sure tried, which is a lot more than I can say about way too many gamers.
This year we made it a point on MOP to feature “warm fuzzy” stories like this specifically to balance out the stories that make us feel miserable; in fact, we’ve been binning them together so we can find them later. We’d love to hear more. When was the last time you saw something truly heartwarming in an MMORPG, and how did it turn out in the end?