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style="font-style: italic;">Perhaps the only GM Event that
is remembered fondly - more because it went very wrong.  Here's Lord British showing us how
to really hold an event during Beta...and forgetting to set his
invincibility flag.

When faced with the juggernauts of the current MMO world,
once again nostalgia rears its ugly head when the old people get
bored.  They’ll speak of a time when players and GMs alike
would create something new and unusual.  They’ll speak of a
time when lore was coming from a GM’s mouth unrehearsed, as if they had
an actual interest in the world and were not just underpaid slaves of a
corporation that makes money just as fast as investment
firms.  And of course, things like that simply don’t happen in
our AAA MMORPGs these days.




Because they’re laggy, buggy, frustrating garbage.


Events of
the Past

When events happened in older games, it was a big deal. 
People would communicate in guild chat, zone chat, and OOC and
immediately high-tail it to the zone.  This is back before we
had flying mounts that cruise at 88 miles per hour, so navigating to
these was a bit of a time investment in itself.  And what did
we spend all this time commuting to?



Chances are it was just a bored GM spawning monsters that didn’t
belong.  Possibly he or she would even assume control of one
and have it start speaking in its native tongue, which would freak out
all of the roleplayers in the area and cause them to go into
shock.  But the end result was always the same.



Nothing.



In the end, your reward for this event was nothing.  I’m not
saying the event has to be quantifiable in its reward, but the GM
events of the past were largely worthless.  We all have one or
two good stories to tell, but how many events have us veterans
experienced that were just a complete waste of time?  How many
events have we witnessed that we’ve completely forgotten because they
weren’t interesting in the slightest?



Hell, sometimes they’re just downright inconvenient.  I was in
a party in Everquest once that was leveling in the Lake of Ill
Omen.  A couple of bored GMs grabbed some Sarnaks we were
pulling, buffed the hell out of their stats, and wiped the floor with
us and the general leveling area until some higher levels noticed it
and dealt with it accordingly.  What the hell was the point of
that?  They weren’t chatting, or patrolling, or acting
territorial... it was just fun at our expense. style="font-style: italic;">

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The best GM events are events gone wrong.  Here is the great plague of Zul'Gurub,
spreading throughout capital cities and killing millions.
 Needless to say it was a rough night for petitions.


Events of
the Present

In games today, GM events are a bit of an oddity.  They’re
like a rare shiny Pokemon that you have to catch before they’re gone
forever.  In WoW, for instance, GMs are seen on
accident more often than not.   I had a conversation
with one who was following me around on my farming route that amounted
to, “Why are you following me?” “Whoops, thought I was
invisible!”  Really?



The real WoW events are the ones that evolve the world
somehow, and those are so heavily scripted that they might as well not
be called GM events.  If anything, the GMs are there to
referee the event and nothing more.  Since rare and unique
items tend to show up every time the world collapses or evolves,
competition is fierce and no holds are barred.  If anything,
the rabid player base turns a scripted event into something much
crazier.



So what remains in a world where the GMs are delegated to handling the
petitions of peons?  The game itself obviously, but where are
the GM events that we longed for and remember from our past? 
They’re gone.  Know what constitutes a real GM event these
days?  Getting your account hacked.  



You get a free set of strange gear, riveting conversation, panic, rage,
and the feeling you just wasted your time.  All of these are
what you experience during a typical GM event anyway!

Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

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