It's been a few weeks or so since I joined my best friend on the Bootes server of Maple Story to kill cute snails and happy green slimes. The game's pretty good; apparently it was made by the same folks who made Gunbound.
Maple Story, for those not familiar, is a free-to-play, 2D side-scrolling platform MMORPG played in real time. It's got cutesy chibi anime graphics that are quite good. The game itself came out of Malaysia, and I see evidence of this in the fact that the servers are basically dead in what I as an American would call daytime.
Unfortunately, I've found the average age of a Mapler is probably about 14. Beyond my party, I don't generally talk to people... mostly because I can't understand what they're trying to say. More on that later.
Our party is five strong now. Jolda, my best friend, came to MS first and brought me into it soon after - thanks bud ^.^ Jolda is our thief.
I, Lynceus, am one of our two bowmen. Nothing special about me really, except that I'm one of our two highest level party members.
Next came Jaron, our warrior. He's not on so much because he's also an obsessive WoW player, which is kinda annoying sometimes. Come play with US, man!
Masukari is our other bowman. He's going to be the hard-hitting bowman specializing in crossbows.
Lulu is my girlfriend (that's right folks, Lynxie has a love life now!). She's a mage, and is going to be our cleric.

We're probably going to end up creating a guild, though from what I understand we'll need one more person to do that. Add in a price tag of 1.5 million Mesos (ingame currency) and the fact that I actually have to FIND the place ingame you register guilds, and you can see this goal is actually a ways off. :P

I'm not nursing much hope of finding a person to add to our guild. As I said before, pretty much all of the players are kids, and they all speak their own dialects of netspeak which are incomprehensible to anyone with a high school diploma. New levels of lazy were invented when the internet rolled around... you all know this. Jolda once commented that the uneducated seem to have their own language... and I see that quite clearly in Maple Story.
If I do have to look for another member, it'll be pretty easy to screen out who we don't want. I've come up with some requirements:

1) Ability to speak coherent English. Y and U are letters, not words; you save about .000000000002 seconds by not typing out the other two letters, but it has an oh so profound impact on your perceived intelligence. I understand that you can't stop to write a book when the party's being chased by some creepy-crawlie whose level is higher than everyone else's combined, but in casual conversation... show some effort - or at least proof your mental facilities surpass that of a coral polyp.

2) Some level of creativity. I'm not going to be impressed by someone whose name is a misspelled adjective or two followed by a tally of the US national debt (i.e. CoolTheif23425214 or some such nonsense). You need a NAME to communicate.

3) Continuation of the previous rule: Replacing letters with numbers or symbols is dumb, and adding xXxstupid bordersxXx around your name just makes it more difficult to read. aLtErNaTiNg cApS doesn't exactly look good on your IQ resume either.

4) Relative equality, both in level and mind. Having one person who's level 100 isn't much fun when the rest of the party's still working on level 12, and if you have an inflated head about perceived or actual superiority (or just get bossy), you won't be around us very long.

Did I miss anything? The only catch I see with these rules is that they'll rule out at least 97% of the population in Maple Story, since as I said most of these players are kids. Them's the breaks.

So wish us luck. We'll be roaming around the Bootes server breaking things, and hopefully sometime we can get our guild started. Speaking of which, we need a name. Any ideas, folks? :)