Sometimes yeh just get oot o’ the wrong side o’ bed in the mornin’ or it seems like everyone else does…

It’s one of those days. You’ve come in from School/Work/Rolled out of bed feeling not-so-good, you see you’re not on tonights raid list (bah!, you really wanted a chance at that uber-mace) and decide to farm. You clear to a node to see it’s being mined by some pink-tabarded Orc warrior and, if you’re on a pvp server, get ganked by one of those bloody lollermace rogues/huntards/warlols, etc. Then someone decides to ‘have a go’ at you in guild chat. You know, like “Haha if Frank were here he’d totally have messed this up!” or “Oh, lol, your mace of impending amazingness dropped and we sharded it Lololol!”.

BOOOOM!

*insert interesting expletives here*

It happens. Sometimes it might be one of these things, all of them or something completely different but at some point in your wow career you’re likely to feel a bit tetchy or upset about the game or its player’s behaviour.

Now I, personally, have a fuse shorter than most goblin rockets have. I get really irked sometimes at the most inconsequential of comments and this mutiplies tenfold when I’m tired, feeling ill or have had a bad day. However, my guildies and most people I meet on WoW don’t see this very often. Why? Because I’ve learned ways to deal with the stupidity that is people on WoW and their often irritating, anti-social behavior.

1. Oldest mechanism for reducing frustration - share. Who you share it to will depend on what the problem is. If someone is stealing my nodes I just usually /sigh and ‘argh’ in gchat; if someone is irritating me in the guild (thankfully very, very few people do) I can chat to the others who I now have the same feelings. If wow in general is irking me or there’s too much drama / business in guild I turn to my other half who kindly sits and nods / agrees at the appropriate pauses (of which there are few when I rant).

2. Step back from it. This is a hard one for me - I’m always tempted to go straight to step three if I can think of something appropriate. If it’s something serious (guild drama, bitching, etc.) I often just go do something mindless and ignore it for a bit. This works wonders for relieving stress by simply not creating it in the first place. Feeling like you’ve got an external perspective to an argument (i.e. not taking sides) also helps you to deal with it more effectively if it becomes a bigger issue later on.
If the situation is really bad then just step further back - Your PuG just wiped for the third time on the first boss? Leave the group. Major guild drama means you don’t want to log in? Think of looking for a new guild. WoW is causing you to feel stressed whilst not even playing it? Maybe stop playing for a few weeks.

3. Revenge. Ok, so, this is not the best method to deal with the slavering hungry anger inside but it does help alleviate the more common forms of aggravation. Example: One day I was grinding the trees in Skettis on my shaman to herb them. He’s resto and not really very well geared so I wasn’t killing them quickly but it was kinda fun to be killing big trees with flame shock and searing totem. A warlock landed beside me whilst I was drinking. “I’m grinding these and I can do it better than you, might as well leave.” Now, this was true but the arrogance of this simple statement really tipped me over into frothing-rabid-anger. I really, truly dislike arseholish-ness of this kind - intended to make another person feel incapable and make them want to go away so the commenter can do better for themselves. That it was doing this very thing made it feel even worse.

It came time to do my Skettis dailies on my rogue. Warlock was still there, grinding trees. Was near one, seen said warlock casting fear or something warlocky, sprint-stealth-cheapshot-kill. My rogue can’t herb the bloody things… but neither can anyone if I don’t loot the corpse. I left it there feeling rather a lot better at having deprived an asshole of his herbs for 10/15 mins even if it made me just as bad as he was.
Making another player feel bad is not a good idea in general as misery only begets misery!

4. You are behind a computer, so are they. Remember this. Just because you’re only seeing their character doesn’t mean that is all they are. Realise that other players are human beings. Sometimes they don’t act like it but that is often as a consequence of not being treated like one. Given a chance the most idiotic or inept seeming players will sometimes smarten their act up if you explain yourself or ask them to explain theirselves more clearly. This will make some pugs far more bearable and, thus, calm your soaring blood pressure.

5. Be positive! One of the most common frustrations for many players is PvP and it’s one of the most useful places to use this method. Some people become slavering idiots the second they walk into a battlegroup and before you even walk onto the field of battle will be spewing such wondrous phrases as “We’ve already lost!”, “Alliance/Horde on this server suck!, “You all need to L2Play” and so on. Even if saying something like “Ahh come on at least lets kick their arses as best we can!” will not make you win the often positive responses can make your PvP experiences much more enjoyable.This, in turn, leads to you not walking out of battlegrounds frustrated at WoW and human beings in general.

Just being upbeat, if not taken to extremes, can help alleviate others’ stress and thus your own. This, along with number one is the more common way for me to deal with stuff. I have an optimistic viewpoint most of the time and try to engage it when people are being morbidly fatalistic. Joking, too, can often alleviate tension but it’s one of those things which needs a good sense for when it will be appropriate.

Of course these are all methods I use and, much like dealing with people in real life, everyone has their own way to cope with tense or irritating situations. I’d love to hear how others deal with their own in-game frustrations as learning new ways to cope is always a good thing - even if only to be able to recognise when someone is having to use them to deal with you being annoying!

I’ll be following this rather ’sad’ post with something a little more upbeat - not all of wow, after all, is dealing with idiots and being frustrated!

Edit:
Other posts -

Mauling Your Computer: Not a Good Rage Dump by SuraBear