The Whatever that Happened to that One Girl

When last we left HunterSister, she and that one man-whore paladin in my guild were dating. (Here’s when last we left HunterSister) Well, they were dating — and you know when I say “dating” that’s just a code word for screwing and posting sappy, gaussian-blurred photos on our guild site — and then ALLEGEDLY she was whacked and game-stalking him and we laughed because goddamn, everyone saw that coming.

So I guess that didn’t work out (shocking), and our man-whore paladin moved on to other female gamers, eventually landing on (pun!) a female paladin in our guild.

Now, this gal was an interesting character. Friendly, outgoing, and a reasonably skilled player (that’s code for “kinda sucked, but not enough to get kicked”). After about a week of guild membership, she’s comfortable enough with us to reveal more of her personality, which is somewhat clever sexual innuendos and occasional bawdiness. Who doesn’t love bawdy? I love bawdy, I’ll bet you do too.

Un-for-tun-ate-ly, one of the consequences of a female gamer working bawdy humor is unwanted attention. I saw a few things in /guildchat that gave me pause, and I wondered if it bothered her, but she would carry on like there was no harm. Cool, because I hate policing the guild.

Then, late winter 2007, we had this huge guild meeting in Ventrilo. Planned agenda: the future, namely raiding, recruiting, downsizing (that was my agenda item because goddamn, we were just TOO BIG for a max 25-man raid scheme), and restructuring of guild leadership. Actual agenda: airing of grievances.

One of those grievances, which took up AN HOUR OF DISCUSSION TIME, was that bawdy paladin girl didn’t appreciate the similarly bawdy (my opinion) comments made in return. Summarized: she didn’t like the inappropriate comments made to her and the guild dudes often stepped over the (invisible) line when talking to her. And of course, the gentlemen officership expressed GREAT ALARM and rushed to comfort her while scolding the rest of us. Truly, most of us knew exactly who she was probably talking about — the suspects had tried to initiate outrageous conversations with other guild women in the past, however, when rebuffed, the suspects had ceased and never bothered those women again.

Isn’t that ok? It is in my opinion. Someone says something that someone else doesn’t want to talk about, the someone else says stop, and the offensive someone stops. Another crisis averted!

So, I asked her, who are we talking about, and did you ask them to stop? And, of course, as is the way of modern times, she doesn’t want to say who it is, and yes she did ask him/them to stop and he/they didn’t. Christ. I really hate that. Some dude(s) is sexually harassing her or borderline harassing and she won’t say who. How are we supposed to deal with that? Here’s how we did deal with that: Hey guys, don’t sexually harass anyone. Kthx!

Talk about an edict with no teeth. (I mean, duh?)

She seemed satisfied and the meeting crawled forward.

Few weeks after that, there’s this new level 65-ish druid in the guild and I asked the officers why in the hell were we recruiting new people when we’re already obese with members, and further, why in the hell were we inviting low levels?? Oh, that’s the bawdy paladin’s real life husband.

!!!

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Hey, Whatever Happened to that One Dude?

Why don’t I just tell you?

Remember that one dude who was guildleader of (yet another) guild that hates my guild and he claimed he got hacked and/or keylogged and, what a world! what a world!, their phat guildbank is gone and they might have to start whoring themselves for a living to survive in Le World of Warcraft? Well … whoring more, if that were at all possible. (Link if you need a refresher.)

So, he had tried for a few weeks to prop up his “I’ve been HACKED! and/or KEYLOGGED!” story for a week or two on my realm forums, and of course all of us were doing the “uh huh, sure”, and his guildmates were licking ass and telling us haters to stfu. And then, suddenly, he dropped off the face of the Earth.

A month went by without a word from him to his guildmates. We know this because we’d politely inquire of his guildmates and they said they hadn’t heard from him in weeks.

(That’s not suspicious at all. No way.)

And so, after weeks of no communication, his guildmates scattered to the winds and transferred to different servers or joined other raiding guilds, like mine, and that one dude became just a story we told our younger members who, often times, take every game character at face value.

Last week, some of our members got tells from “That One Dude” and he explained that he did get his account back from Blizzard after an EXHAUSTIVE investigation and he had server transferred and changed his character name. (As you do.) Despite several direct inquiries, he refused to disclose his new name or server … because “he didn’t want all that drama to follow him”, and he wished everyone well or something ridiculous like that.

Are these the actions of an innocent character? Several of his former guildmates think thought so.

So. Being the fucking guerilla master that I am, I resolve to get to the bottom of this cuz I’m tired of being labeled a hater cuz I won’t swallow bullshit.

Fortunately for me, some of his friends ratted out the thieving bastard and named the new server, and again fortunately for me, he’s as stupid as he is dishonest and he renamed his character similarly, although not quite searchable without more info, thereby saving me several hours (days) of fruitless hunting. Ba da bing, I have the server, I have the name, and now, thanks armory!, I have the guild.

And with the guild, which has forums, and a searchable member list with join dates, I now have the date he first expressed an interest in this other guild on a server far, far away from his own guild — a date one week prior to the day he claimed that he was HACKED! and/or KEYLOGGED! Why … it’s almost as if he planned the whole thing.

Ya’know, it’s almost not fair how smart I am compared to the average gamer. It’s like I’m that Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and I can frighten the superstitious populace with my superior knowledge of a solar eclipse. It’s magic, be afraid!

It’s interesting to me how otherwise (mostly) honest people assume a fake name in a game, and sometimes a fake personality, and their dishonest, thieving nature comes to light. It’s doubly interesting that there’s always apologists and hive minds to defend them. His original story didn’t even make sense and yet, there they were, buzzing around his level one posting alt calling the rest of us jealous haters.

The things some players will do, the things they will believe, all for loot — future loot, the hope of loot, the fond memory of past loot — that’s the magic.

Tomorrow: Meh, I ran out of time to tell you about the continuing woes of hunter sister and our man-whore paladin. I’ll save that one for tomorrow, plus … BabbleOn is back!! She’s still not speaking to us. Yet.

The Karazhan Mistake

(CAUTION: Before I link this interview with WoWarcraft’s Mr. Didier and Tigole (aka Mrs. Kaplan’s son) from the Games Convention in Leipzig, I’ll warn you that this site set off bells and whistles in my Firefox NoScript. So don’t click if you’re an extra cautious type. I’ve uploaded a screenshot of the page to Flickr and you can read the entire interview there.)

From an interview at the Leipzig Games Convention with WoWarcraft’s senior art director Sam Didier and lead designer Jeffrey Kaplan (Tigole) by ComputerandVideoGames.com’s Stuart Bishop — Tigole said:

The big lesson we learned from The Burning Crusade was that our ten-person instances are extremely popular. So for Wrath of the Lich King we wanted progression in the ten-person raid game for the players… who want to stick to that ten-person cap.

Well dammit boys, you learned the wrong lesson. You completely missed the most important lesson of The Burning Crusade, that is “The Karazhan Mistake”. And really, how could you miss it? I don’t know — I guess because you’re listening to the neo-uber guilds STILL, instead of the meat of the raiding bell curve.

Nevertheless. Since you all failed that portion of the final exam, let’s go over the material again (with some added explanations for the non-WoW people):

Karazhan is a 10-man instance with a reset timer of one week. It is firmly placed in the line of gear progression. Technically, you could skip Kara gear and step right into the first 25-man instances, I suppose, if you had a guild composed entirely of messiahs, prophets and gods. (Hint: none of us do.)

Therefore, since we all had to do Karazhan at some point, every guild either had to run multiple simultaneous weekly Karazhan raids with guildmembers tied to a single raid ID (no swapping of guildmates to the other guild Kara raids), OR, they ran a single Karazhan over and over and over and over many weeks to gear everyone up for the 25-man raids.

Was this fun? (Imagine I drew a huge question mark on the whiteboard at this point.) NO IT WAS NOT. I’ll pause while you take some notes. No pen or paper? Crimony. Never go into class or into the boss’s office without pens (plural) and paper. Write that down too.

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