Mind boggling, isn’t it? I like going there when I’m feeling down because it makes me feel better just to realize I’m not them.

Yeah, totally familiar with the Goldshire phenom, but truthfully, after a while playing you just kind of tune this sort of activity out. I stopped even clicking the “refuse” button on duel invites years ago, instead just going on about my business. I barely even really register the alert text anymore.

It’s kinda funny seeing you write about these things, because I think, “Oh yeah, I remember when I used to notice that.”

I don’t know when it first occurred, but I DO remember a time before Goldshire became Asshattia.

The key there is your initial description: “It’s just a two minute walk from both a major city (Stormwind) and the spawning area for new Human characters,” thus making it a natural nexus of two types of both inanity and insanity: bored high-level characters, bored low-level alts of bored high-level characters, and genuine new people who are caught in the middle of all of this, and tend to get sucked into the insanity by virtue of the fact that, at their level, there aren’t too many other places they can go safely. While it may be “bad,” you have to admit, it’s nothing if not interesting. Just remember to laugh *at* them, not with them.

The Barrens is both better and worse.

There’s no one central location, and horde is full of Uglies. So there’s no cybersex between an undead and an orc. There’s no RP drama, or naked dancing (much – Crossroads has some).

But The Barrens is basically the prime levelling spot for Horde from about level 8 (if you’re crazy) until well in to your 30′s, if you’d like. So you have a *huge* range of people that have access to one giant global chat.

There’s a reason you can buy this shirt.

Go to the Barrens, and say “Chuck Norris” or “Where is Mankirk’s wife?” or “Where is the silver?” or “Why do Pallys always try to tank? They can’t!”

It’s an experience.

As far as I’ve seen, what you describe only happens in Goldshire. I’ve yet to find anywhere on Horde side that even comes close. Yes, the Barrens general chat can be strange and somewhat annoying, but that’s more an effect of player boredom (the Barrens is a very large zone with quests spread far apart and where three races tend to spend levels 10 to 25ish… many people spend a lot of time in the Barrens) than anything else. It certainly comes nowhere close to the rampant idiocy you see in Goldshire.

You missed one thing about Goldshire — the walking. You can always tell when someone is a Serious Roleplayer, because they’ve set their character to always walk instead of running. It’s more immersive that way, you know.

“Is this effect present in other MMOs?”

Oh yes, yes it is. It is as old as MMOs and the MUDs and MUSHes they grew out of, probably.

I think it first exhibited its Goldshire-like state first in Everquest, though. There were certain areas (zones) in EQ that functioned similarly on virtually every server. Namely, Greater Faydark (GFay, high elf and wood elf newbie zone – also the only outdoor zone that included a city zone) and East Commons (there was a tunnel in the zone that functioned as the unofficial trading area on many servers, as did GFay). All the same forms on inanity and foolishness you describe were found there as well.

I think I can explain the Goldshire Effect in one word…

TEENAGERS!

I was equally flummoxed by the craziness in Goldshire when I first started playing the game. Out of curiosity I attempted to have private conversations with a few of the more outrageous characters. After taking a few minutes to establish some level of trust and making them realize that at 41 I’m probably older than their mother, most of them will divulge their real age to me.

Usually the answer is 14. Or 16. Or 12.

Through the hazy lens of time it’s hard to remember that at that age we were probably just as big a dorks as they are. We just didn’t have the internet as our playground.

CoH players have this. It’s called Atlas Park, and luckily you don’t have to go back there very often once you’re past level 6 or so. (Rigged) costume contests are the most concentrated form of nuisance you’ll find in the game. Oddly enough, the same phenomenon seems not have taken off on the Villains side. (I’d worry about jinxing this, but after so many years after game launch I think that the threshold has long since passed.)

With that said, if you turn off Broadcast chat and avoid the area underneath the Atlas statue… you can pretty much avoid the worst of it. This isn’t to say that the CoX environment lacks its fair share of idiots, but they’re remarkably easy to get away from after you’ve spent a couple of hours leveling past the starter zones.

Ran Kailie: (I was typing mine up while you posted yours, so this is an edit.) On Protector, Pocket D is a ghost town. Almost every time I go through, I’m the only person in the entire place. I often run a /search for amusement’s sake just to see if I’m alone again. As for Atlas, I should add that this is the leading cause of my picking Back Alley Brawler in GC as my starting contact/location…

Yeah, I was amused by your earlier comment about going Alliance to avoid the idiot children playing Horde – on our server there is nothing like this anywhere I’ve seen Horde-side, but the Alliance towns seem full of it.

Mind you, our entire guild made up blonde blood elf paladins, leveled them to level 6 (so we could bubble), ran a conga line through town and then held a race through a level 60+ zone to an Alliance town, dodging guards and dying repeatedly to the finish line at the bar. But we only did it the once, and I like to think thats a little less annoying than role-playing rape in public. Still, I’m sure there were people shaking their heads at us too.

In Role-play, the characters usually refer to Goldshire the same way you might refer to Vegas…or a strip club.

There’s actually an ongoing mythology that Gnomes are born from eggs placed in mailboxes, but that they’ll only hatch when a night-elf dances naked on the mailbox.

…because “the stork brings them” is too boring I suppose.

Anecdotally, Goldshire isn’t always that bad. On US-Turalyon (non-RP PvE) I’ve leveled a number of characters through it, and there’s occasionally some people dueling, and maybe once I saw some unclothed characters, but not the circus of insanity described here.

Through the hazy lens of time it’s hard to remember that at that age we were probably just as big a dorks as they are. We just didn’t have the internet as our playground.

Speak for yourself. At that age, I had one good friend my own age, and the rest were in university. I have NEVER understood most of that behaviour.

This is not to say that I never do silly things, only that I (apparently) achieved a level of maturity early, such that the silly things I enjoyed then are (mostly) still the silly things I enjoy now (such as telling people about Monty Python movies in such ways that, when they see them later, they come back to me and tell me that I was actually funnier… which is rather disturbing, really).

As to such behaviour on MMos – I MUDded for a long time (back before Al Gore invented the internet, no less), and such behaviour was rampant on some games (which I avoided like the plague, once I realized), so it’s nothing new, merely a larger scale of on old problem.

A similar thing happened in Ultima Online, but it was initially influenced by the game’s design and map layouts, and it stuck around a long time.

In the early game there was only three banks, one in Britain, Trinsic, and Vesper. Banks were the only secure storage in the game; thieves could take stuff right out of your backpack or you could have your house key stolen and all your stuff taken by player killers. So banks were the hang-out place in the game. There were also guards in the area, so thieves could usually be disposed of with a single shout.

So, Britain is the capital city, so naturally, most starting players chose to start there rather than elsewhere. The result was a total lag-fest around the one bank in Britain that would create a latency black hole in that portion of the map.

EA/Origin dealt with the issue by first adding a second bank in some locations, and eventually added banks to all major cities and towns, so players didn’t congregate in one area. Eventually 100% secure housing also reduced the threat of theft as well.

But on most UO servers, the trade hub has always been the first bank in Britain. So all the clowns, morons, and weirdos hung out there too for attention. The result was it was still laggy (although not crash-laggy like the old days), but a good place to get stuff, since no auction system exists in the game.

Interestingly, on my old server, Pacific, one of the quest creators actually spawned a mass monster attack in Britain. It lasted a few weeks, and when it was over, the bank was deserted and remained that way; everyone moved to a different city in one of the expansion areas that was better suited for trade, and never went back. So it was pure inertia that kept players in that one place.

Hmm… never had that on the server I was on. Sure, Goldshire was interesting, but the real nutter place was Xroads in the Barrens – always about 30+ lvl 60/70 (Depending on pre- or post-BC) Allies attacking, killing all the guards, questgivers, etc.

Damned annoying.

Is it bad that, after reading this, I want to roll up a Alliance character?

There’s some interesting things about MMORPGs (and WoW in specific) at The Daedalus Project.

Humans and night elves are, by far, the most prevalent races in WoW. Followed closely by Undead. I guess most people simply want to play something close to humanoid.

Secondly, players who pick the human race are, on average, younger than most races. Trolls and taurens are certainly much younger on average, but then again, there are so few of them.

My theory: there is some kind of critical density at work in Goldshire. A great mass of relatively young, male players who just spontaneously gravitated towards a digital Sodom and Gomorrah.

The Night Elves are almost as popular, but they have more females playing, who, on average, tend to be less… well, you know. They are also generally older players.

What Eric said: take the tram from Stormwind to Ironforge. Run out the front door of Ironforge and you’re right in the middle of Dun Morogh, the dwarf newbie area. It’s not as nice as Goldshire, but it’s a lot quieter. You’ll probably want to run to Loch Modan from there and get that flight point too. Then you’ll have your choice of two sets of 1-20 levelling areas and can switch back and forth if you get bored of the same old scenery.

I recall similar behavior on MUDs, fifteen or twenty years ago.
Oddly enough, I don’t recall much of that on Lineage (1; haven’t played 2). Maybe I just missed it.

Derek K has it right. The Barrens also tends to attract the attention seekers, but not in the same way that Goldshire does. Its Barrens general chat that is really bad, you can turn it off and ignore it. Goldshire… even if you can turn off the emotes, you still see the characters wandering around and grinding against each other. And at the same time, its not just horde characters that it attracts. Yes, Alliance come to the Barrens all the time. Its almost literally a 24/7 gank fest against Crossroads. I’d recommend leveling your horde characters anywhere else just so you can avoid having to wait for the current campers to leave so you can turn in your quests. But the sad fact is, you almost cannot avoid going through Crossroads at some point in your Horde career. At the very least you have to get the flight master to properly be able to navigate Kalimdore. Unfortunately theirs a lot of story that passes through Crossroads as well. Its really hard to avoid, theirs always some reason to go there.

Goldshire sounds like the digital equivalent of Austin. Weird and likely to stay that way.

We had this in Graal Online back when it was a free game. It was called “Level 13″, the town square of Graal City. It really didn’t help matters that players could build their own content and submit it to be included in the game, because all they ever made were gathering spots similar to Level 13 and eventually it turned into an urban sprawl that became the entire world. Incidentally it was right about then that Graal started getting popular enough to spin off extra servers featuring unique worlds, just to get around this problem.
Then they screwed that up by adding a price tag to the game and forgetting to throw in some quality control, so players were basically paying $20 a month (yes, $20) for something that was previously offered free of charge. As a result, many of the good players left, and only the dorks and riff-raff from Level 13 remained. The whole game got very much inbred after that and is lucky to enjoy more than 200 players at once these days, down from 1000 at its peak.

When I started on Nordrassil (PVE), Goldshire was empty–there were maybe five other PCs at any given time. I don’t think I even spoke to another player until I was in my teens.

When I go back, which is very seldom, it’s usually during the Darkmoon Faire, and I will admit to having dueled a lvl 20 using only my fists (I’m a 70 Warlock, but this is still a sure-fire way to lose a duel with anything 50 or above), but at the lvl 20 player’s request. It was mildly amusing, but it was asshattery too.

On my server, the biggest issue is people screwing around on Alliance trade channel (and maybe horde too, but I’m almost never horde-side). For a long time, the running gag was to put “murlock” (the semi-intelligent fish-monsters you fight for most of the game) into titles, song lyrics, item names, and everything else. For example: “Murlock under water and they tell me to breathe easy for a while…”
Lame, eh?

@RobertB: Thanks – largely thanks to Shamus, I’ve recently started trying the demo of WoW myself, and the madness of Goldshire was a thing of wonder to me. Probably because I’m used to CoH, which is a lot quieter.

I’m almost disappointed to find out that the rest of the game isn’t like this – while the rather unique charms of Goldshire might grow stale eventually, I’m actually loving them at the moment.

BUt overall, yeah, there’s no real comparison in CoX to this. Atlas Park, maybe, but only at certain times of the day – at peak, it can be as busy as Goldshire is in the quiet times. And Pocket D is only really like this on my server (Union) when there’s an event going on. At least with Goldshire it’s explicable, though – I don’t understand why Atlas Park is like this when there’s a free choice between it and Galaxy City. Wouldn’t Back Alley Brawler be a more interesting contact to would-be tough guys?

In EVE online, the major trade hub is a system called Jita. It is best known for the ammount of lag that happens in system. (If i remember correctly the lag is from people moving items from one container to another. I believe on weekends the system can easily hit 400+ people all trying to trade. I’ve only passed through there once, and that was on a weekday).