Strange interactions with strangers online

Hey Duders agus Duderiniettes

I just had a bizarre experience in a game of League of Legends which I shall describe below.

My question to you is what are the strangest interactions you have had with people online? Be it video games or other wise.

I do not mean general or vicious abuse, I am mainly looking for weird and wonderful experiences with strangers on the internet.

Here is what just happened to me and my friends:

I was playing League of Legends with 3 of my buddies. We were doing the ARAM mode, which is 5 v 5 on a single lane map.

We are losing badly. Very badly. Somehow, towards the end we manage to wipe their team out and take down all their towers and their inhibitor in one swoop. They kill most of us, but we still get their two base turrets. This leaves their base wide open, as is ours.

The enemy team rushes down the lane towards our base. We are fucked. However, my friend Stevie has managed to hide himself in the bush near their base, by very cleverly flashing into the fog of war and then using his ability (Kassadin) to flash again into the bush. They don't notice him and run on by. When he is sure they are too far away to get him, he legs it towards their base and attacks their nexus, while the entire enemy team is about to attack ours. We win the game when our nexus is at about 10%. A beautiful win, brought about by my friend and his clever thinking.

We get to the post game screen. The member of our team who was pulled from the pool of online players proceeds to give my friend HORRENDOUS abuse. Incredible abuse. His opinion is that we should have lost, and let the other team win, rather than win with an ingenious backdoor attack. It was "Lame".

This is by far the strangest reaction I have gotten playing LOL. I have been privy to mounds of horrible abuse. Un-cooperative players. Trolls. But getting abuse for winning the game? That has NEVER happened. We could do nothing but laugh and wonder at the strange, strange person we just met on the internet.

What are your stories?

DotA 2. Someone was playing Spectre on my team (this characters voice work is all unintelligible) who would only communicate with gibberish. They would type out something like "Shsshhkavajhkldsjafkl;" and ping on the map to interact with us. I found this pretty funny, and started trying to carry a conversation with them. This person responded with the usual nonsense, and I started replying to what I assumed they were saying. It got pretty ridiculous, but I (and this other person from the looks of it considering how they played along) had a pretty good time. Best experience I've had with the community in DotA 2. Kind of wish I had sent a friend request.

I don't really have any strange interactions to speak off. I once got set up with a guy in FFXIV who got mad at a party member for using their limit break to finish off the final boss of the dungeon we were in, though. Still dunno what that was about. It was kinda funny. Maybe he wanted to do it? I dunno. That community loves to find things to get angry about.

I met a dude from Utah back in the days when I was playing Bad Company 1 obsessively who was incredibly polite and interested in the fact that I was from Wales. I found out a bunch about Mormons and American fast-food while we flew around in a helicopter attempting to ram tanks.

I also played through Portal 2's co-op with a complete stranger. We just burned through the game with a vengeance. I the process I heard one of the most disgusting toilet stories involving my co-op partner's roommate and discussed geopolitics. He was pro-intervention in the Middle-East and told about his time in Iraq, I told him what it was like to live in Singapore. It was kind of emotional when we finished it.

Not all weird online interactions are negative.

This one wasn't too crazy or anything, but has stuck in my memory so vividly from how incredulous it left me.

I was playing Monster Hunter with one of the worst players I had ever played with like, ever... He was really bad. I kindly asked him if he would refrain from using his uppercut attack (if you haven't played, the uppercut on the greatsword launches teammates into the air for about 5 seconds and is typically not used unless you know what you're doing) because he kept launching everybody. He agreed, but of course, he didn't stop. After paralyzing the enemy and getting launched for about the tenth time, he said he pressed the wrong button and also it was my fault for standing too close to him. I tried to tell him that, with his current setup, he'd probably do better with a couple of well-placed shots than trying to combo like he was currently doing, but he interrupted me mid-explanation with something along the lines of, "I know what I'm doing. I am a master of all weapons" which, to his credit, absolutely shut me down. I stopped talking and pretty much soloed the monster at that point because he kept launching everybody else and I left the room at the next opportunity I had. Like I said, not crazy, but at the time I had a really hard time believing how inept this person was.

There was also this couple who I played with regularly that, at one point, called me "the Gandalf of the group" which was probably the highest compliment one can receive.

Oh and there was this one time I needed to mine some stuff and decided to hop into a mining/gathering room which I saw pretty much every time Iogged in, but have only ever seen one person in it. It turned out to be this lady who occasionally mined for her boyfriend's (or husband's, I can't remember) character, and she was probably the most polite person I'd ever spoken with in an online game. Or possibly just online in general. That was cool.

During the heyday of Team Fortress 2, much shenanigans were had. That game was a hotbed of nonsensical, bullshit fun.

My weirdest experience involves two teams full of spies on CP maps (custom server, of course), everyone running the Dead Ringer. There were bodies everywhere, but no one really died at all. Everyone doing their best/worst Spy impressions on their mics while backstabbing. The match culminated at the final control point with everyone grouping up and stabbing the fuck out of one another. Player clients crashed because they couldn't handle all the bodies that were spawning.

Also, dumb, fictitious rivalries between daily trophy winners when server stat tracking was a thing. Sniper beef, best beef.

Back when Shadowrun came out on Xbox 360, there was a viral achievement that if you teabag the person with the achievement, you receive the achievement.So players would check each others achievements to see who had the achievement.

I was in a match where a guy on the opposite team had the achievement, and after he had been killed and his teammates had retreated, my entire team just surrounded his body and just started tea-bagging him.

I don't usually find tea-bagging fun, but this was hilarious.

The only other thing that gets even vaguely close to this is TTT(trouble in terrorist town), and that game is entirely strange interactions.

In one match I was the terrorist, trying to kill everyone else, and I managed to coerce the other players to kill each other until there was only one innocent left, which I proceeded to kill.

OH! I remembered one. Also from FFXIV funnily enough. Not that weird or anything, but still kinda funny.

So I was leveling my Lancer one day and decided to do a dungeon. I then proceeded to get set up with one of the worst tanks I have ever seen. I'm not exaggerating at all, this person could not tank. At all. His main problem was that he wasn't using Flash or any of his aggro building combos. We desperately tried to get him to use them, but he either couldn't understand us or he didn't have the chat log open. Or maybe he was just trolling us. The healer was soooo mad, it was hilarious. Anyway, after a while the healer just asked me, a DPS class, to start tanking instead. That worked out okay for a little while but we obviously couldn't get through the whole dungeon this way.

I had close to the same situation happen to me. My brother and I were playing Dawn of War. We were getting destroyed. My brother told me to "hold them off" while he was doing something. My army held for as long as they could but eventually were broken. They systematically started destorying out buildings (it's important to point out you win by destorying the HQ and only the HQ). They were taunting us in chat when my brother Dreadnaught dropped into their base and targeted their HQ. We won. It was glorious. We were verbally abused. But a win is a win.

People are assholes. If they were supposed to win they would have. It's a bummer that they verbally abused you. Good job on your win!

I was playing Dark Souls 2 when I decided to help some players out. I'm doing co-op mainly to return to human form not because I'm great at the game, I still haven't beaten the game yet. I put my sign down by the Smelter Demon and this guy summoned this clownish guy and I. We absolutely wrecked that boss. About two hours later I defeated the Old Iron King so I decided to help someone else The three of us demolished the Iron King. It's nothing crazy but I felt a sort of bond during that last fight.

http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/off-topic-31/

Hmm, well I just got into a several thousand word debate on gender politics, where the guy wouldn't concede that women and men have differences.... That was mostly because I like bugging people who are uncompromising.

Although gamewise, In Halo 2 back in the day a friend and I started doing a different random accent every couple minutes in a match we were losing to pass the time till our inevitable doom. French, German, Indian, Newfie, etc. By the end the other team, who themselves had very thick Texan accents were so incensed at us and I quote "Got Damn Forners" that they had lost their lead, and we beat them that round and several after that. Sacrebleu!

I'm aware this means I'm somebody else's weird online story.

@dudeglove: That would one of the few occasions where the reply "umadbro" seems appropriate.

Long story short.

Back when I first started online gaming. My friend at the time introduced me to a cool online buddy. In the beginning he was a cool guy, anyway. Over the years he would have these bizarre mood swings. He would either be happy,sad,angry or suicidal. Sometimes, he'll say racist shit for no reason, remove me from the friend list, and talk about some crazy religious beliefs. Shit that's like on a unimaginable scale, then he started telling me his personal business and doing weird shit such as...

- Him getting rape by a black guy in a mental hospital (If its true he should have kept that to himself, I didn't want to hear that)

-Him getting on camera crying because his girlfriend left him. (I got on video chat to calm him down,keep him from hurting himself, and I regret it)

-Him trying to flirt with a suppose Asian girl on his friends list. (He was trying to get her to come over his place, but she never did. She showed a pic of herself before, but I don't believe it. He even wanted me to put in a nice word for him to her, I'm like the fuck?)

-He told me a story that he was getting his dick sucked one time, when we was playing tekken 6.( Again, that's his personal business. I remeber he showed me a pic of his ex and she looks old enough to be his mom. I had a weird image in my head once he told me that.)

Out of all the weird people I met when online gaming. I haven't came across nobody to top this guy. He helped me become an atheist. All that talk about the rapture,and me going to hell, being left behind because I didn't believe hard enough. Well now I don't believe at all, fuck him.

I would go out of my way to force strange interactions upon strangers in WoW. I'd only do it when they were out in the world alone, it's much more effective that way. I made a few long-term WoW friends by doing it. I'd just go up to them and talk to them like an overly friendly next-door neighbor. Throw in a dance and some gestures and there's a good chance you've got yourself a friend for life. Except now I can't remember a single one of them, so not really.

I actually got pretty close with a gold farmer by doing this as well. She'd give me stacks and stacks of health potions and talk to me about her shifts, which were ridiculous because she'd play and then sleep there in that building and wake up to play some more for days and days. Sometimes it was a different farmer using that character and they couldn't speak English so I'd say the name of the girl I got friendly with and they'd let her switch with them to use that account. Even when we were talking for sometimes hours she'd only ever stop farming to trade the potions to me; they were just taking up bag slots to her, whereas I used them for raiding all the time. She never gave me gold or anything, but did at one point ask me for some so she could reach her quota for that day and go to get something to eat sooner than she could otherwise. I obliged as it wasn't all that much.

The term "duder" does not denote or connote any specific gender, or lack or transience thereof.

PSO for the Dreamcast, everything about the online interaction was just odd from people jumping into games and stealing your loot or script kids deleting / corruption your characters. People were hooking up then breaking up and that was just in the public lobby’s.

The icon emotes from kittens to intercourse were great too, miss that whole kinda of craziness.

@cale: That's a great story.

I think that I am responsible for the strangest interaction I was ever involved in. In my first ever MMO, called the Realm, I was in character creation. I could see that there were four slots so I figured it was a game like FF1 or Eye of the Beholder where you make a full party, so I make my first character a chick warrior to be my tank. Then I find out that I only get to be the one character, but I stick with what I've done. Being only 12 at the time, I had no idea how I was supposed to interact with people. Was I supposed to substantiate their belief that I was a girl, and if not, how do I disillusion them properly? As it was, I deceived (mostly through inaction) my guild for several months before coming clean in a wave of guilt and it was incredibly awkward for everyone involved.

The real question is...

...did you ever have wierd sex with a online acquaintance?

Do tell.

I pretended to be a chick while playing vanilla WoW, to a certain guy, not overtly, just kinda hinting by omission. It just happened because he assumed since it was a female avatar and i kinda just rolled with it for shits and giggles. Milked the hell out of him for a while. He tried to get me on vent/TS several times that I dodged with mic/shyness excuses. It was pretty fun :D Sadly I totally forgot how I let him down, either told him i was a guy or just not interested, completely forgot. Felt a bit bad afterwards, but eh, the hilarity made up for it. Kinda makes me a bit of a dick doesn't it?

That sounded fan-fucking-tastic. Oh man. So dumb, I love it.

I honestly can't remember any weird interactions. Probably because I don't play very many multiplayer games anymore and GW2 has seemed pretty tame except for the dumb Queensdale boss train arguments that used to happen (and probably still do occasionally).

I used to play Ghost Recon on Xbox with a few people who were 60+ years old, but they were all cool.

@dudeglove: Ha, I recall you posting those 2 while back. ^.^

The first story that came to mind was back when Halo 3 was still popular/when I still played Halo 3. I was very good at the game. So good that I'd get bored on my high-level account and I would make smurf accounts using the free 1st month of live that came with your first 3 accounts on a system or whatever (got accounts from friend's houses using the same technique. Yes, I was one of those assholes). Anyway, one of the accounts I made was something like 'doabarrelroll69' and eventually I got matched up with a group of talkative people. They weren't very good (or at least close to my level of skill), but they were nice and were awe struck by how many kills/deaths and all that, so they sent me an invite to join them. I typically don't join random people, but they seemed nice enough and weren't taking the game too seriously, so I played with them.

Over the course of the next month, I played with the group regularly (honestly do not remember their gamertags or much else about them), but I remember I got a few guys' levels up so high that they couldn't compete with the competition and I was doing most of the heavy lifting. I enjoyed it though.

PS I really hope I don't come across as a self-centered douche, but I was really good at H3.

I think the weirdest interaction I ever had was during a Deathmatch in Delta Force 2 way back in the day. There was this one guy who had a sniper rifle and kept trying to get to a mountain to perch on to shoot everyone and when I or anyone killed him when he was on his way to the mountain he would tell us to stop it, that it wasn't fair and he just wanted to get to the mountain and to just stop killing him even though his obvious intent was to kill us. So that was kind of odd. I felt a bit bad for him at times to be honest, he didn't come off as a dick or anything, almost like he didn't grasp the game he was playing, I don't really know.
Other then that not much that sticks with me, sort of the usual someone just being a dick.

I had a severe rage session with this guy on Gears of War once, writing hate messages and tea-bagging each other over a 3 hour session, with extremely hateful things being said, nationalities were brought into it and all. But the funny thing is we eventually became really good friends somehow and ended up playing together regularly.

@adam1808 I played through Portal 2 with this French stranger who had very little English and I had studied French in high/secondary school but I had been out of school 4 years and had never been very good at it. So we communicated very poorly through Steam chat in a mix of French and English. it got frustrating at times but we did pretty well. Used Google translate a little bit too but it wasn't very convenient.

Edit:

Oh yeah and this little gem in reply to a comment on IGN, I said something about Rockstar fucking up the GTA Online launch and got this in response:

"Character flow a monetary cry enlightenment staycation no birds compute totally indifferent maximum."

I have no fucking idea what it means but I think its bloody brilliant.

Years ago when i was still playing World of Warcraft, a friend of mine introduced me to a guild. So i joined them but as a joke i always spoke in a bad fake irish accent on the ventrilo. It was supposed to be a little goof thing, but quickly got out of hand when they all actually thought i was irish. It went on for months because i didnt know how to suddenly NOT be irish to them, that'd be weird. It actually made it very stressful having to maintain the fake accent the entire time.

Eventually i forgot one day and they were all like "woah what happened to your accent" and i was like "oh im not really irish, it was just a joke that snowballed out of control". They thought it was funny i guess. Super weird.

I used to run a Counter-Strike:Source server many years ago, and we had a guy who would sing instead of talk. He would be the last person on the map and be singing ♪♫ "I'm so scared, what do I doooo" ♪♫. It was absolutely hilarious and amazing. We would play the bells on de_inferno together until we both got shot. Wherever he is, I hope he's doing well.

for the first few weeks of Age Of Booty, I was ranked 4th in the world, in a team with 1st and 5th in the world. I don't think we ever lost. I couldn't even understand the guy who was 1st, because he was French, but some of the acts of heroism we pulled out to save one another still sticks in my mind :D

dafuq?

For a couple of days I tried to get in to Puzzle Pirates. It was fun doing puzzles and junk. And then this guy comes out of nowhere asks me if I want any items. I humored him and said sure. The guy gives me everything he owns starts talking about how he's done playing the game and wanted to give his legacy to someone who would use. I didn't even know what half the stuff did. Then the guy logs-off, like he was just searching for someone to take his stuff. Anyway, I haven't played that game since.

Mine centers around World of Warcraft. I was reading a book on Warcraft (I think it was Arthas) while waiting for an interview with my wife to get her green card at USCIS. The lady sitting next to me asked if I played WoW and what server. I was horde on Illidan and she played Alliance but I forgot what server. She was Australian and she met her husband while playing WoW.

I thought that was pretty neat.

I have had a few interactions with people online that were really interesting, but that one that really stands out was in GTA V Online.

My best friend and I both bought the game and basically only played online together. We got to the point where we realized the flaws of the online system and didn't want to play anymore because we just weren't having fun. That night when we were online we were in a group chat, just bullshiting and trying to decide what to do. We got out dirtbikes (he made his character look like Ryan Gosling's character Heartthrob Luke from "The Place Beyond The Pines" and I had my guy looking like Walter White with Heisenberg variant) and started riding around doing flips. We were about to stop playing when two other players rolled up on us on dirtbikes as well. My buddy and I gave them the message that we were cool by doing rad donuts with our bikes, which these two other players responded two by doing donuts themselves! It was so surprising that they didn't just shoot us that we tried to drive around and see if they would follow. A few hours later the four of us had driven across buildings, flew planes together, defended each other from other online players, and a myriad of other things all without saying one word to the other pairing of guys. It was such a weird experience in that online mode.

Oh and the best part? Their gamertags were "CooClucksClam" and "Mudpuppy."

i bought defiance in hope of having some encounters like this. too bad there's too many people who wish to actually play that game

Ya, LoL has some weird ass players. I don't get the way people drop out of the game constantly if you aren't playing their way and the massive amount of forfeiting. I've never been raised to ever give up on anything so it boggles my mind.

When I was deep into BF3 I made the great decision to have a few beers while playing on a friday night (no, it was actually a pretty stupid decision). Apparently I befriended a german squad mate during this session. He seemed to be a pretty cool guy, and he wanted to continue to play with me.

But then he told me he and his girlfriend was visiting a friend in sweden and wanted to swing by my place... which was miles away from the town he was going to. So it got a bit awkward for me.

Don't get me wrong. Asking to visit people you've played a few games with is pretty... brazen. In hindsight, I regret not meeting up with him. He was probably planning to roadtrip around, so it was probably not about me at all. But I'm a socially awkward person, and it felt pretty strange.

I was an officer in a WoW guild for about 2 years when the leaders, who were husband and wife, stopped playing for a week. When they returned to the game they both sent me PMs telling me they were getting a divorce because the husband had an affair with another one of the officers (in real life, obviously), and wanted me to decide which one of them should 'get' the guild in the divorce.

While I had interacted with these people A LOT over those 2 years this still felt super personal and weird and led to me quietly leaving the game and I've never really had the desire to go back.

On the plus side?, according to facebook, the husband and officer are now happily married with twins. so good for them I guess?

League has some weird fucking people playing it. Carrying a team of 4 other people who all hate eachother and actively want to screw eachother over is the shittiest feeling. It almost makes me wish I wasn't winning the game because some or most of the people don't deserve to win

@deadpancakes: I've had alot of fun and infuriating experiences in MH throughout the series lifespan. In the original through my friend and Is crazy antics like running around naked in the volcano and calling ourselves the Kut Ku army and only using his gun and chanting battle cries, we made a lifelong friend. My buddy even dated a girl he met through our shenanigans online. Actually, I realize my friend and I are the type of people that this topic is about.

I suck at SFIV and I know it but I had a pretty great encounter with one dude where we kept getting randomly matched up every few minutes. First he destroyed me with Sagat, then he recognized my name and beat me spamming the butt stomp with Honda, finally, understanding just how much of a scrub I was, he chose Dan trying to troll me. I ended up beating him actually but only by the skin of my teeth.

As someone who has little to no exposure (a fair amount of Titanfall and a couple hours of MMO play in LOTRO and Star Trek Online) to the odd world of internet gaming, I find myself simultaneously befuddled, appalled and intrigued by some of these stories. They are so foreign to me. I don't understand why people act the way they do. What the hell is going on in the world?

Nothing as crazy as some of these stories, but fairly recently when I was playing Ravaged I was teamed up with a guy who just flew the helicopters to do loops with them. That was pretty rad.

Chivalry medieval warfare has hilarious voicecommands and warcrys. Practically every game you can see people roleplaying in the middle of a battle in different, ridiculous ways. I love that game.