There was an interesting (to me at least) post recently on this Terranova thread (which started a couple weeks ago) from someone named Heather Sinclair. She’s either a player or a developer on Dungeons and Dragons Online. Can’t tell which. In her post, she talks about the apparent rampant superstitions that run through the playerbase of DDO. She writes:

“From beta all the way through months into launch players were CONVINCED that if you used the diplomacy skill on a chest it would improve the loot you got.. this was SO widespread that you literally could not get in a pick up group without them querying about the diplomacy skills of the party and someone forcing everyone to wait while the highest diplomacy skill player cringed before the chest sufficiently. No matter how many times we posted on the forums that this was a myth and it doesn’t do anything, they kept doing it. It got so bad our community relations manager even put it in his sig. Finally we made chests an invalid target for the diplomacy skill, then players whined that all the points they put into diplomacy were worthless because we “nerfed” the skill! Even now I’ve seen endless variations on the theme, from people being CONVINCED it’s based on a certain stat, or a certain class, or amount of times you’ve repeated the quest, or level of your character, to the point that there is always some voodoo you must do to satisfy someone in the party, if that voodoo does not produce sufficiently acceptable results, they’ll switch to another superstition.”

“We’ve had similar problems with some of our boss encounters, for example, on my first dragon raid, I was regaled with a long list of things I MUST NOT DO or else the raid would be wiped. Not one of them was valid, but they were incredibly detailed and equally silly. (Things like you can’t switch weapons, press hotkeys, cast spells, attack anything but a single leg of the dragon, that sort of thing). It was pointless to argue about, they wouldn’t accept the fact that their rules were really all superstitions.”

This kind of thing is both highly amusing and frustrating to me as a developer. Amusing because it’s kind of fun to watch these kinds of unsubstantiated rumors sweep through a playerbase, but frustrating because some players will simply refuse to believe you when you point out the lack of truthiness in the superstition, and will, in fact, get angry because they believe you must be lying to them.

I must confess, I’ve been guilty of encouraging this kind of thing at least a couple times purely for my own selfish entertainment. For instance, I once appeared in my guise as Sarapis, the Logos (the creator God of Achaea) to a newbie named Mick (I liked his plain name), and informed him that he, Mick, had been chosen by Me, the Lord, to be the savior of mortalkind in the face of a terrible threat about to encroach on Sapience (the main continent in Achaea). Mick was a trusting soul and took my warning very seriously (as he should…typically when a God lets you in on something like this, you’re pretty damn psyched. It usually means you’ve been chosen for whatever reason to be involved at an early stage in an upcoming admin-assisted storyline). He loudly proclaimed that he had received a visit from Sarapis and had been named the chosen one, destined to lead the defense. I feel a bit bad about it as I write this (sorry Mick!), but….it was really really funny to watch a newbie spend a couple weeks trying to convince everyone else that he was, in fact, the chosen of the Creator, believing it himself all along.

So how about it? What other superstitions have players of our text MUDs/MMOs noticed? I’m particularly interested in superstitions surrounding gameplay mechanics such as described in DDO above.