While slicing and dicing my way to Warcraft victory this weekend, I ran into a couple of volunteer Hall Monitors. You know the type. They cheerfully point out behaviorial violations, usually by using the public chat channels so that all may know of the violation … maybe so we can be on the alert for future violations.

I hadn’t realized how important a function this is OR how prevalent the volunteer monitors are until this weekend. If not for their selfless activity, it would be chaos, I tells ya. CHAOS!!

Monitor #1 was in a noob zone that I was passing through and he pointed out no less than three naming violations. Paraphrasing:

General chat: “Iamapali, you are in violation of Blizzard’s naming policy, just so you know.”
General chat: “Fastsword, you are in violation of Blizzard’s naming policy, just so you know.”
General chat: “Exoticgurl, you are in violation of Blizzard’s naming policy, just so you know.”

Monitor #1, you are a moron, just so you know. Questing must be raw ass boring for him if he has time to note the naming violations and notify the transgressors, just so they know.

Monitor #2 was in a mid-teen zone and was kind enough to chastize others for hitting her mobs, because that steals her (100 points per mob) experience. Paraphrasing:

General chat: “OMG, don’t hit other people’s mobs, that steals their experience. Just trying to be informative.”

Seems to me, a private conversation with the 100 point per mob experience stealer would have been more productive, and certainly less annoying for the rest of us, especially since she continued this whine for the next 15 minutes.

For the love of Christ, there’s only about 23, 904 mobs packed into each zone, all roaming into each other, I’m sure she could have found other mobs to kill in the time she wasted being “informative”.

Then today, I noticed on the Warcraft forums that volunteer monitors are everywhere! Today’s crusade: stamping out in-game cursing in our time! Bad language filters be damned, players shouldn’t be using fuck as a noun, verb or modifier.

Moral barometers are nothing new in online gaming or the related forums, but this being “informative” shit isn’t fooling anyone.

I’ve been /reported several times in other worlds, mostly for using cleverly-disguised foul language. I’ve been /reported for other things too, but foul language is the only violation for which I was definitely guilty.

I’ve lost count of the number of account warnings I’ve collected over the years; I’d guess a dozen or so. The lamest warning was for using “nutsack” in a /shout to a rival guild. Fuck, if that’s the worst they had on me, they weren’t trying very hard.

In my own defense, I didn’t say their guildleader could lick my sweaty nutsack; just that their guildleader WAS a nutsack … like where a squirrel might store his acorns.

Ya, that explanation didn’t fool the responding GM either.