Let me explain to situations of what's happened to me on EFU lately. Both are, to me, the height of lameness.

Situation One: A group of halflings go with my fighter, who is much higher level, and do a quest. During the quest, the halflings continually slight my fighter - who is evil, and thinks he's pulling all the weight. For these slights, the Fighter subdue the halflings during a fight.

The halflings begin to whine. They whine that it was unfair - despite them being three to one, and having acted like bastards should still not have been PVPd. So I do not full-damage them and loot their bodies as I should have done, and instead let them go. They continue their whining, whining, and whining at me for doing it for a full half hour until I tell them I want nothing to do with them IC or OOC for this. They agree.

Confident they will honor this agreement, I cease and leave them alone - until, a while later, they return with a full-damage ganksquad with the intent on killing me. I am not killed since I have no DM - an advantage which they earlier, on a related note, also abused, which is why I do not feel it bad form to turn this advantage on them. After they keep harassing me IC and OOC, I log off. Situation two: This is the more recent and more lame situation. The lameness is on part of the first two people:

I go on a quest with two unnamed people. I do not know their UserIDs or anything. We do the goblins, and it goes okay, but they keep slighting my character for being slow, short, and smelly. Okay, fine. When we leave in two different parties - having split after a disagreement - one of them is killed by phase spiders. I save his ass, and drag him back to town after using several potions costing a lot of gold to fight off the spiders and invis up and drag him.

Back at town, he respawns and IMMEDIATELY begins to whine on me in OOC tells and IC that I have stolen all his things. In fact, his very first comments were: "Where are my things?!" Not a thank you or nothing. I give him back some of what I thought I had taken, and he keeps whining. He then gives me an OOC lecture on how EEEEVIL it is to loot the corpse of a random guy you do not like, who have slighter your character, and who you then have to spend a lot of gold on saving. His OOC tone, let's say, was less than polite and he demanded OOC to have his things back just as much as he did IC. After a lot of bartering, I manage to get what exactly it is the guy wants.

Now, one of his main problems was that it was "unfair" to loot a guy when he was beaten down. Okay, fine. The next move of this team is to demand a duel on Montezzi grounds.

Their next move - after explaining to me OOC how bad form it is to be "unfair" to someone - is to get the Montezzis to loot my poor dwarf dry, by demanding we "fight" on Montezzi soil, only to go grab the Montezzis, fully buffed, to gank my dwarf and then jeer on as I get clobbered.

I hope someone has understood that my anger is not at the Montezzi who were just proxies to the lamers' vengeance.

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What's MOST lame in all this, is that in each instance, I have been close to or have actually lost pretty much ALL things my character had, or have characters permadeaded (in other similar instances), because I was OOC nice to people who whined after I did something which was, in all honesty, completely legal. All, so far, shows of OOC courtesy I have made - either given back things I have stolen because the player whinged OOC, or spared the lives of people who also whinged OOC, or other things like that - have always come back to bit me in the ass.

To the Montezzis: You guys are swell though. This is in no way directed at you - of all things, you guys should have Kudos for always taking OOC fun into consideration.

That is not how this happened. Calm down.

Perhaps not in your view. In my view, that's exactly what happened. If you're on of the persons I mention in the text, then buzz off and leave me alone. I want nothing to do with you.

I think you might be exaggerating things, Berosion! If this a serious problem for you, in my opinion I think it would be best to calmly tell the players* what your problem is, and why it is a problem. If that doesn't work, contacting DMs privately is always a good way to come to a solution!

1) Calm down. Bad things happen to most of us, remember that there's a person behind the screen and I really don't think anyone meant to annoy you or anything like that!

1.1) This might include taking a break to chill. There's little reason to get stressed over a game and no obligation to keep playing if you're feeling bitter! If you're really feeling stressed over this, more the reason to take a break. Sometimes it's just more stress than it's worth.

You are of course entitled to your opinion, but in my mind, this is a repeated problem. As I am sure most people who try to be curteous in this place find, there are a lot of you out there who structurally abuse courtesies given - and it is a big problem!

The most common part of this is people OOC demanding they be given courtesies, and threatening with DM action unless you do as they say. It's happened to me on numerous occassions, but my screenshot finger is never so good or fast that I can nab one.

If another poster tells me to "calm down", I might actually become emotionally upset - right now, it is merely my sense of what's right and wrong which is somewhat vexed.

Our BBQ man gives some solid advice here! I do believe that a DM once said you should take a day or two break to cool down, I'm sure many of us have suffered some less than desirable situations that we should have taken a little more lightly.

You don't get it. The situations are quite accurately described, with lapses only where my skill at english and litterature in general is failing.

The broad traits are: 1) I do something IC. 2) Person A whines OOC. 3) I fold to Person A's whines. 4) Person A then goes to do in turn against me the very thing he whined about, or something even worse.

If you have an issue with PvP, this has been made clear many times, send your issues in to the email at escapefromunderdark@gmail.com.