Silence is... Boring.

I signed on one day last week and started chatting with my friends when I realized no dialogue was appearing on my screen. Unless there's a clan event in our home world, I generally try to stick to the least populated worlds. More than one occasion, in doing so, I've unwittingly logged into a Quick Chat world and I thought this ahd been the case again. I hop worlds, still no dialogue. I look a little closer and doh! I've been muted.

Now, I've been playing this game for a long time and I've never been muted or had any sort of marks against me. I never understood those with lifetime mutes, bans or who are in constant trouble. It never seemed that hard for me to not get in trouble. In fact, its kind of easy. At the same time, I've also never reported anyone. I can see where it can come in handy, especially if you're a parent, but for me, there's not really anything some random person on the internet can say that would offend me. Granted they can say some things that are offensive, but I never really cared enough to take to heart what some random person I'll never meet and probably never even have another conversation with, thinks about me.

The situation was this, someone was standing around on the docks complaining about how badly he would much rather be playing WOW and how much better it is. I responded something along the lines of "Why don't you stop complaining about it, and just go play it." Which seems fair enough. Why so many play RS only to claim that they hate playing it is beyond me. To which I was met with a hail of threats, swears, not-so-cleverly spelled words to articulate his point using curses, but that the censor wouldn't pick up. I fell for the bait, I made one quip about his intelligence and then the next 10 mins of moderately-amusing anger. After which I logged and didn't really think about it.

That's all it took, one quick line rebuttal to a hail of insults and I get a 24 mute. I would love to know what happened to him, if anything at all. In this though, I found out how frustrating a muting actually is.

The Quick Chat system is completely awkward to use if you've never really done it before. There also don't seem to be a number of options for fairly simple things. I ran into several of my friends who would run up, say hello, and about 30 seconds later after fumbling through the greetings I would come up with "Good Day!" - Something that I would never actually say, and they would guess right away that I was muted.


They would ask me how long and I was frustrated once again there was no responce to this particular question. I was asked "Is it 24 hours? Nod if it is." Oh darn, emotes. Flip over to the emote screen. Which one is nod, where is it? "Nod if it is, or even shake if its no." Looking...Looking.. Jig? No. Dance? No. My finger slipped on the skillcape emote which was met with the equivalence of a blank stare. "Just nod if yes." Muted frustration: I'm trying! I'm trying! At this point about 2 minutes has gone by, and the next words I see are "well, gotta go!" Dah! I failed. I wouldn't really want to wait around for an answer if it seemingly wasn't happening either. There are levels to be gotten!

Luckily, about 2 hours later the mute wore off (must have started while I was alseep or at work). I can't imagine how to work out common things like what you feel like doing, interesting trades or pretty much whatever. I can't imagine playing if I ever got a lifetime muting. The silence is deafening. I would have to start all the way over from scratch, and I think that would be too depressing. In the end, no matter how stupid or insulting someone is being, or how incredibly rude they are, realize your words are very important in this game. Save them for those who deserve them, your friends.