We all love online games, or else we wouldn’t be here in the first place, would we? Every day you come home from work or school, tired, bored, stressed, and what a better way to relax than a few hours spent in the world of your favorite MMORPG? You like your mighty paladin/mage/rogue/etc., doing some quests, hunting, maybe an instance or two. Everything is great until you suddenly crash into those annoying things that exist in very game: bugs, annoying people you know, that stuff that makes you throw the PC out the window.

But you don't. You just live with it because there's no other choice. There are irritating thing that all games have, and there's little that can be done about it. Further on I’ll try to make a list of the 10 most common annoying things in MMOs. So, in no specific order, here we go:

1) N00bs

Imagine you're spending time with your favorite character, hunting, questing, you know, doing the stuff you usually do, and then all of a sudden someone you've never met before starts asking all sorts of questions (mostly dumb ones). Answering one or two is not so bad. But this triggers achain reaction... that makes you want to kill the guy (female characters don't count!). One question brings another, followed by items requests, power-leveling and so on. And there isn't only one, no, there's a lot of them. The more popular the MMO, the more they are. The main problem with n00bs is that they are so immersed into the game world that they forget that maybe people don't have time or don't want to help them. Fortunately a quick attack or a curse brings their feet back to earth.

2) Being a N00b

Most high level players forget that they were once the same, when encountering n00bs. Maybe because our brain usually blocks traumatizing memories. But all of us, with no exception, have experienced this. You know, the old days, when everything was new, full of life and promises of untold adventures. Until suddenly you encountered a problem and didn't know what to do. So, naturally, you would ask someone near you who appeared to be more experienced. Usually though, experienced players are already sick of n00bs and not that friendly and tend to mock, swear or kill (where possible) the unsuspecting wet behind the ears hero-to-be. Thankfully, there are exceptions, especially in games with a small tight community, where any new player is more than welcome and everyone is happy to help. Unfortunately, situations like this are rare, so being a n00b is mostly an unpleasant side of MMOs.

3) Gold Sellers

This is a big one! Gold sellers are annoying for everyone, new and experienced players alike. Especially in cities but not only, you are constantly assaulted by chat massages that sound like "buy gold at www.something.etc". Sometimes the situation is so dire that the chat is rendered useless in a place where communication is very common. Even though GMs try to fight them, they're quite difficult to stop. Once an account is banned another can be easily created, be it pay to play or free. You might think that pay to play games are safer from this type of "advertising" but it's not quite so. Considering the amount of money that is earned from gold-selling, paying for a new account each time is just an investment, plus that trial accounts are a free alternative. Apart from their annoying presence, gold sellers offer an unfair advantage to people who are willing to (afford) to pay for it. Furthermore, a high injection of gold in-game can literally ruin a game’s economy by inflation.

4) Lag

Lag has two main possible causes. The first is… you and your lousy Internet connection. The other is the game's servers over-population. Balancing the game population with the server size in order to keep costs as low as possible is not an easy task. The company has many variables to take into account: population evolution in time, the time intervals when the server is most crowded, the zones in the game world where players tend to flock and so on. This is why even in high quality games lag appears in areas with high masses of players. There are also the physical limitations of the network combined with more and more bandwidth requirements of the games themselves. So this issue is here to stay at least until high speed Internet connection become more common or network management of games with high populations and requirements improve. Unless you are lucky enough to have an optic-fiber cable stuck in your computer's behind, it's very possible to suffer from lag and you just have to bear for now.

5) "Kill x number of... stuff" quests

Well, who hasn't encountered a NPC that wants him to kill a fixed number of stuff, or bring some stuff that only some stuff has, so you still have to kill a fixed number of stuff? Mainly in the beginning of a game this type of situations are extremely common. Actually, I don't recall playing a MMORPG that hadn't (with a few exceptions that weren't so "questy", so they don't count). This type of game design is immediately associated with grinding, being considered only a way to mask it. Or it’s just the designer's lack of imagination. On the other hand, being common, this type of quests are great for beginners as most of them will know what to do, so will only have to focus on game mechanics and thus can learn them a bit easier.

The downside is that newcomers tend to be bored by this kind of stuff (along with everyone else) and may underestimate maybe great games in other aspects, so they might just leave. Although these stereotypical quests might be somewhat forgiven in the beginning of a game, its presence in high level areas has no excuse. Surprisingly though, some games go as far as asking you to kill not 1, not 10, not even hundreds, but thousands of mobs. This type of situation makes you hate not only the quest but the entire game... It's just bad business.