My last couple of posts have been pretty City of Heroes centric and I'm afraid that this one isn't going to be any different. I'm going to pick on some poor schmuck this time, though, so at least I'm trying to give you some variety.

The group I usually play with are all semi-casual players. We do have a Ventrilo voice chat server and we all have microphones, so we're well setup relatively speaking. We typically have a full team (8 people) on Tuesday nights (our regular night), but we also have a minor team going on other nights of the week as well. The interesting thing is that most nights, I get a request from some random person asking if they can join our team.

i iz 1li73rat

These requests vary in quality, but here's a tip for anyone looking for a good team to join: try, please try, to give the impression that you're someone a rational person would want to team up with. Here's the schmuck I heard from last night:

This tell practically screams post-literate kid sneaking onto mom and dad's computer after they've gone to bed. Seriously. Has someone removed the shift keys? How about punctuation—did they stop teaching that in schools? And is it really that much harder to tap out the "yo" in "your"?

You Can Call Me "l337 ki11ah"

And I don't know what these people are thinking when they select names. Actually, I question the act of thinking when they select names. Here's something to think on: the one piece of information that accompanies every action you take in the game is your character's name. I don't care how hard it is for you to find the shift key, take the trouble for your freaking name. Also, I happen to know for a fact that City of Heroes allows apostrophes in names. If you don't know the rules for possessives, take a moment and ask mom, m'kay?

I don't mind misspellings in a character name. There are a lot of people on any given server and names have to be unique. I've made something of a practice of naming my characters with a slight misspelling myself. But names are always case-insensitive so if you can get a lease on "earths core" then you can get one on "Earths Core" and it's even more likely that "Earth's Core" is available. Try it, you'll like it. Plus, 100% less dorky!

Reloading

Part of the unique nature of MMOGs is that there are no redoes. Add that, as in life, you don't get a second chance at a first impression and you have people setting themselves up for a bad experience from the start. For all I know, Mr. core is a bright, cheerful person with wisdom, humor and insight. Based on this first impression, though, it's 10 to 1 I'm not going to even bother responding.