Nothing ever goes according to plan. Maybe you die in a desert full of horrifying fuck demons, and you think your loot is gone for good. Maybe you find yourself lost in space. Maybe you accidentally punch the wrong person. Regardless, you need help. When have other players come to your rescue in a video game?
For me, the original EverQuest may as well have been called, “Nathan Bungles Everything, And Well-Meaning Strangers Save Him While Politely Resisting The Urge To Call Him A Stupid Child.” The first time I ever logged in, I unintentionally, uh, assaulted another player in a city area, prompting guards to swarm on me. Recognizing that I was an idiot baby, that very player found me at my spawn point, led me to my corpse, and cooly gave me instructions on how to enable/disable auto-attack so I wouldn’t do that again.
There was also the time I got lost in a desert full of sand giants and other nastiness long before I was the proper level for it, and a group took time out of their rigid “killing shit as tall as the Statue Of Liberty” schedule to guide me back to a safe trade tunnel. Speaking of situations where I’d have been lost forever if not for the kindness of strangers, Star Wars Galaxies. Just, like, that entire game.
My favorite video game rescue story, though, is one Eurogamer wrote about a while back. The game was Elite Dangerous, and one player had traveled out to what was basically the brink of the universe. Then they realized, oh crap, they’d used up a crucial resource for boosting, and they were stranded. They posted about their plight online, but they didn’t have much real hope of rescue. Enter another player who, over the course of 48 real hours, flew all the way to that person’s position and helped them obtain resources to make the jump back home.
Have you been rescued by kind strangers (or friends), maybe from a rival group of players in a game like Ark: Survival Evolved or Rust? Or perhaps from your own poor life choices in EVE Online? Share your stories below. They might even end up in a post on the site!