The first stage is denial. In this stage, individuals believe the precipitating event is somehow mistaken, and cling to a false, preferable reality. Some may also isolate themselves, avoiding others who may have accepted what is happening. This stage is usually a temporary defense, so long as the person has adequate time to move amongst the stages. Most often this reaction does not involve refusing to accept what has been shared, but rather assuming a mistake has been made and will be corrected.
The second stage is the S-II, which consists of five Rocketdyne J-2 engines while using four outer engines for control. After the first stage has dropped away, the S-II stage begins a controlled burn for six minutes propelling the craft to 175km above the Earth’s surface at a speed of 25,181 km/h, very close to orbital velocity.
The third stage is Early Childhood, when the child begin exploring their purpose and what actions are permitted in different situations. Although rudimentary, the child begins to understand how to interact with the world around them and gain an instinctive grasp of basic laws of physics such as gravity.
The fourth stage is Dust Man, which opens with fairly standard pit navigation before a section where Mega Man must negotiate a section of spikes with blocks slowly forming over them. Afterwards, you pass through a crushing ceiling section, followed by a few more enemies before the boss chamber. Dust Man’s weakness is the Ring Boomerang, and his primary attack is the Dust Crusher, which fires a chunk of garbage that then splits into four diagonal projectiles.
The fifth stage is What Are You Playing, and I really don’t know how to help you with that one. It just doesn’t make sense.
Bonus question: What’s the weirdest online drama you can remember being a part of? (Avoid any names, please, we don’t want to shame people.)
​Andrew Ross (@dengarsw): Weekend Shadow Mewtwo raids in Pokemon Go are the name of the game for me and a friend, though I also hope to finally finish the Splatoon 3 DLC for more bragging rights in multiplayer, hah.
I’m going to keep this to online-only for myself as the Niantic games stuff I’ve seen/been involved with is kind of extreme. My guild practically dissolved overnight when I first arrived in Japan. Me, the World of Warcraft guild leader, and the Star Wars: The Old Republic guild leader all had extenuating circumstances that made us unable to log into games or even (in the military guys’ experience) use the internet for several days. During that time, the WoW raid leaders claimed the guild leader jumped ship and got the raiders to leave and form a new guild. That wasn’t it, though, as we were a multi-gaming guild. The guild we had been allowing into our voice chat server for Guild Wars 2 tried to claim it as their own and flooded it to capacity from what I’d been hearing, and that caused the SWTOR people to think combined with the leaders’ absence that the guild was gone.
Even “better,” one of the main instigators of this quickly realized that our WoW allies wouldn’t let that stuff slide, as some of their co-instigators apparently got called out in public. Within hours, not only did they leave the new raiding guild, but also server transferred. And not to their old server either, just somewhere else entirely. When the leads came back, we tried to rebuild, but two of us were in the middle of massive life changes, so we never recovered. The only thing that went “well” was that the new raiding guild struggled to not only gain members but gain raid progress equal to what they had under us, as we focused on community first. I’d heard that the server transfer instigator was just the start of their drama. Please excuse my schadenfreude.
Andy McAdams: I’m still enjoying GW2; I finished Secrets of the Obscure and I’m now just putzing around doing random things and really enjoying it. I started playing WvW a bit again, which I haven’t done since the launch. Its been a lot of fun, which is surprising considering how much people complain about it. Well, this is MMO-dom, maybe it’s not that surprising that people complain about things that are actually fun.
Bonus Question: When I was playing Anarchy Online, I accidentally stepped into not one but two weird relationship things. The first was a literal online thruple that wasn’t going well and I made the mistake of asking what was wrong, becoming an accidental counselor for way too long. The other was two friends in game who were “dating” and there was a whole thing with the woman’s family when they found out and were convinced the guy was a predator (despite the fact these two had never met in person and lived on opposite coasts) and… yeah. Good times.
Brianna Royce (@nbrianna, blog): I’m playing “Bree needs to sew a bunch of crap so she can go to a wedding in a few weeks” this weekend, and also… well I had earmarked this weekend for Palia, and now I don’t know what to do because that thing is a mess and a half.
You can’t make it this long in MMORPGs without being involved in drama, and most of it is weird if not outright dumb. So let me tell you the first: Early on in my first MMO, I helped expose the fact that the top leadership of the very first MMO guild I ever joined was actually running a secret ganker guild on the side that took advantage of intel to routinely rob/murder its own members in the non-ganker guild. It took me a few months to recover after that as I was not a popular figure with the asshats whose guild I helped explode (it was a top-five all-time toxicity experience for me; I’ve been harassed online like that only a few times since, and that’s saying something because you know what I do for a living). But the guild the decent people eventually made after that has ensured to this day, so I made the right call.
Carlo Lacsina (@UltraMudkipEX, YouTube, Twitch): Wife and I are beating Persona 3 Reloaded this weekend. It’s been 100 hours!
Bonus Question: Gosh I’ve been in so much online drama its hard to just keep it at one. This one time in Guild Wars, I hung out with an elementalist and a warrior often. The warrior was a girl in real life, but from what I understood she was married and was like 40 (so she’s probably in her 60s now). Anyway she had to be one of the richest players I knew in the game, had all the FoW armors for every class and everything. The elementalist was also quite rich. I hung out with them, but they hung out even more. Anyway, I guess something kinda sparked between these two, and the warrior got really clingy to the elementalist. The elementalist knew it was wrong and tried to back away but the warrior was just, lets just say, really invested in their relationship. Things kinda got out of hand, the husband got involved, and after that the warrior moved on to play Flyff of all games!
I wasn’t directly involved, but they were kind of the core of our online friend group and things just started getting really awkward hanging out with them. Just hearing about the tension was problematic for a lot of our friends.
Chris Neal (@wolfyseyes, blog): I’m probably going to focus on a bit of preparation in Nightingale as I ready to open up a new realm for me to explore/loot goblin around later. There were also some tasty new weapons added to Helldivers 2 that I’ll want to play with some more, and perhaps a bit of Final Fantasy XIV, though I’m not really sure what it is I’m going to do there.
Bonus: I think the biggest drama I’ve been a part of is when the leader of a guild I was a member of in FFXIV decided completely out of nowhere that they were going to demolish the guild house and just disappear into the ether. It upended several dozen folks and left a lot of us confused and a bit angry. Obviously I found a new (and much better) group, but that was certainly something.
Eliot Lefebvre (@Eliot_Lefebvre, blog): Just a couple days until the Final Fantasy XVI crossover in FFXIV, which I am very much looking forward to; for now, probably a bit of City of Heroes and some single-player titles.
Y’all have all your drama stories in MMOs like that’s all you ever did online. Have you ever managed to wildly derail an entire roleplaying community by befriending the friends of a site owner who’s a few years older than you and just listening when two of them were telling you about drama you didn’t even know was secretly about the other people? Seriously, Person A had a crush on Person B and told me about it without telling me it was Person B, while Person B was telling me about her crush on Person C and how Person A was getting really creepy. And then they were both using me as a go-between and trying to bribe me for influence with all of the nothing they had. I was freakin’ 15!
Justin Olivetti (@Sypster, blog): I am pretty psyched to play a new Sith Warrior in SWTOR — a class story I’ve never experienced but heard pretty great things about. I’d also like to finish up the main storyline in Lord of the Rings Online‘s Corsairs of Umbar if all goes well.
Mia DeSanzo (@neschria): I am on a liquid diet in preparation for a surgery on Monday, so I am going to be playing Avoid The Kitchen. It’s a solo game. Otherwise, I am dipping back into games I haven’t played in a while, mainly the EverQuests and Black Desert. Next week should be a lot of post-surgical downtime, so I am planning to do more of the same then, (As a side note, I have got to spend some time on customizing that EverQuest UI because… dang.)
Sam Kash (@thesamkash): I’m still rocking and rolling Harry Potter Magic Awakened. I managed to smash through the story but they’re already promoting the next one. It’s like… Give me a break, too much content. I’m also playing some Predecessor. I was obligated after all. So we’ll see what happens there.
Bonus: I met up with a bunch of players from PvPing in original flavor Guild Wars. They had invited me to join and we had some good matches. For like a week. Then it all imploded. I had stepped into some power struggle over who was a real leader bringing in good players and who was just wasting the guild away. It was messy. They broke into like three guilds and I don’t think any of them stayed together long after.
Tyler Edwards (blog): More World of Warcraft. After a couple weeks of speed-running, I’ve finished most of Dragonflight’s content, and I can now confidently say that this is one of the expansions of all time.
Bonus question: I can think of some weird drama I’ve seen, but a lot of it’s pretty dark or upsetting and not something I’d really want to share in this venue. I remember one time when I was involved in the campaign to try to save Star Trek: Enterprise, some other campaigner whom I’d considered a friend (or at least an amiable acquaintance) went off the deep end and started attacking me over some tinfoil hat conspiracy he’d made up on all his own. Can’t even remember what he was accusing me of anymore, but the whole thing was just bizarre.
Every Saturday, join the Massively OP community and staff for What Are You Playing, our roundup of what MMORPGs and other games we’re hoping to play this weekend (with a bonus question or two for our amusement). Tell us what you’re up to! Go off-topic! And don’t forget to have fun!
