As some of you may know, I used to be a game magazine editor until just a little over a month ago.

I also like to play MMORPGs - you know, those online games where you pay like RM50 a month and get hopelessly addicted to? I still do, and the game I’m currently playing, is World of Warcraft.

I belong to a mostly-Asian guild called Mamak Alliance, of which I was one of the ‘pioneers’ (help come up with the name and sign the charter). Yea, I’m a total geek when it comes to computer games.

But the one thing I’m not, is a hardcore gamer. This might sound strange to a lot of people who know me professionally, but no, I don’t really pound away at my character 20 hours a day. I am a parent, after all. As much as I like to level all day and night and be an uber-druid, I can’t.

Thing is, I’ve never been very hard core for as long as I’ve played these games, and that was since Diablo and then Asheron’s Call, my very first MMORPG back when broadband was just a figment of our government’s imagination. I will play very hard until I get my character to the top, and then, that’s it. I lose interest quite quickly when there is nothing to work towards, and worst of all (to an avid MMORPGer), I am not an item whore. All I’m looking for is that group roleplaying experience and some PvPing. Which is why I move relatively easily from one MMORPG to another.

In the last few months, boredom with the game, compounded by our big move and the behaviour of some of my guild mates, I’ve played very little (compared to the hours we used to spend on the game). But it’s the latter that’s made me a little annoyed at how seriously some people take the game - and how much THEY expect you to contribute before they will give you the respect one gives to another human being.

Because you don’t know as much, or play as much, your respect ratio decays much more rapidly than the honour points one accumulates in PVP in the game. Don’t log on after a certain amount of time even if it’s because you have commitments “IRL” (in real life), and you may even see your ‘membership’ in the guild revoked (what more your elite ‘guild officer’ status). Pretty soon, nobody even wants to have a conversation with you because what do you know? You got play meh?

Not that any of these has happened to me yet. Perhaps after this entyr, I may find myself guildless very quickly.

It is a very tricky world to be in, these online game universes. Just recently, PC Gamer US reported an online game (EVE Online) guild that pulled off the biggest heist in the history of the genre, where the guild master’s right-hand man actually penetrated the ranks and moved through the ranks in months, to finally assassinate the leader and take over the property and guild (give and take some details).

But is this cause to be paranoid?

Or worse, elitist?