I had some leftover quests to finish up before I could leave this Warcrack zone that I’ve grown to hate. I’ve been here so long, I’m on a first-name basis with the graveyard spirit.

Anyhow, I meet up with a couple of e-friends to finish these and we trot over to the target hunting grounds and begin whacking on some elite ogres. These were kill quests — the elite mobs were just under our own levels — so shouldn’t take long and we can finally, blissfully, kick the dust of that town off our boots.

While we’re a-whacking, along comes a lower-level paladin to do his own whacking. He asks in /say which quests we’re working on, and as we were engaged in group conversation at the time, we didn’t respond immediately.

(Time out for a truth break: many times, I personally don’t respond to /says because I’m an asshole and because I simply don’t watch the text box all the time. TeamSpeak has kind of trivialized chat typing.)

Back to the paladin. Our lack of response must have ticked him off because he repeated himself, this time in ALL CAPS. JUST IN CASE THE LARGER LETTERS WOULD BE MORE NOTICEABLE, I GUESS.

Preemptively, my buddy tells the group: we’re not inviting him. And we all understood that sentiment — we didn’t need help, we wanted to be done, we didn’t want to babysit, and, mostly, we didn’t want to share any phatty lewt. The bud continued: And you better answer him *Foton*, because if I keep talking to people, the whole server will hate us.

And we all understood that as well. The bud, he’s not too good with the people skills. Real low on tolerance, donchaknow.

So I /said that we were working on quest A and B and left it at that.

We pressed further into the hunting grounds, ka-chinging all the way and whittling down that target kill count. ALLCAPSPALADIN follows behind a ways and then /says: sorry to interrupt your professional chinese PL.

Now seriously, what the fuck.

Firstly, we were all approximately the same level, so unless we were really stupid about how to properly conduct a power level or we were almost done with the alleged professional PL, that makes no sense at all. Secondly, how the fuck did he peg us as Chinese from anything that had transpired?

(If you haven’t kept up with the current state of professional game farming, and in particular by our friendly neighbors to the east, this is a competent write-up on same.)

So now my bud steps in by /saying, “we fucking answered you” and tells the group, “he’s on the list” … which means, ALLCAPSPALADIN is on The List. You know about The List, right? The List of players who, if you run across them with their hearts on fire, you wouldn’t even piss on them? Ya, that list. No groups, no heals, no rezzes, no sales, no purchases, no answers, no lockpicking, no corpse assistance, no assistance of any kind for The List.

No group of people on Earth has a longer memory than MMOG players. Trust me on this.

After chuckling about how large The List was getting in Warcrack, and so quickly too!, we moved on and continued our assault on Castle Ogre. As we moved out of one room, passing Mr. ALLCAPS, one of the other guys did a /say something like “mani lew ajsi raiwo pehlk”, which was his impersonation of a Chinese farmer. heh.

About fifteen minutes pass, and we’re heading into the much tougher area to finish the final segment of the quest, Mr. ALLCAPS shows up behind us, his helm in hand, to apologize and ask to group so he can finish also.

I suggested that we just fucking invite him so he’d stop whining … not as if we’d have to talk to him. But, the bud called me on that by asking if I understood what The List means. He had his doubts about whether I was clear on the function of … THE LIST.

Hell, I know all about The List — got my own List, in fact. And it’s growing larger every day, almost by the hour. I just didn’t want to get tells from Mr. ALLCAPS all night about what assholes we are and how his powerful guild (that wasn’t there to help him) would smote us the next chance they got.

But, a list is a list. It’s not to be triffled with. So I /said, “sorry man, you’re on the list.” heh.

Of course noobs don’t know about The List, which makes having a list all the more enjoyable.