Don’t try that prank when you’re tired or drunk. If you miss that initial blank space in the chat window before typing /gquit, you’ll gquit yourself then have to explain in shame why you need a re-invite to the guild.

That’s the voice of experience talking.

Mate01: You’re such a cute gnome.

Mate02: You’re cuter! I’m so gonna stock you.

See that? I hadn’t even realized that “stalk” and “stock” are homonyms. Learn something new every day.

Hunter: Hey! How come our target macros don’t work on these totems? (The /target corrupted macro from the Halazzi fight)

Raid Leader: Ummm …

Warlock: Because these aren’t corrupted lightning totems?

Hunter: Oh.

I’ll bet he still doesn’t understand why his macro was “broken”.

1. Holidays. Duh.
2. Traveling for the holidays.
3. Finished a major project at work. Ka-ching!
4. Traveling for work. Bleh.
5. Updated the blog software and ruined the site … on New Year’s Day while VERY hung over. That was fun.
6. Told 1/3 of our World of Warcraft guild membership to GTFO of our guild. We realized it was more efficient to have them type /gquit then go down the list and /gkick. Really saved a lot of time.
7. Explained on Vent that we really did mean it.
8. No. Seriously. GTFO.

Here’s the thing. Every goddamn year around Christmas time, raiding guilds go through this period where people are traveling or spending time with their families or both, cuz THAT’S WHAT NORMAL PEOPLE DO. So, of course, the raiding (read: the loot train) slows down or grinds to a halt, only to pick up again after the holidays have passed. And every goddamn year, there’s a group of players who begin to panic when the loot train isn’t chugging down the tracks. “Are we disbanding?” “Will we raid again?” “This guild is dead!!”

Fercrissakes, it’s two weeks out of the year and these losers can’t wait for people to get back to their computers.

So our officers told the losers not to panic, and, after the holidays, they’d see, everything would be back to normal.

Apparently, losers don’t have access to calendars, and in their world, the holidays are over December 26th. Therefore, they had been more than patient by waiting until January 1st to start issuing ultimatums like … replacing our long-serving officers and giving King Loser the guildleader rank. (Riiight.)

See #5 above. I was trying to put out a fire on Ye Olde Blog while alt-tabbed at the PVP lounge and those sonuvabitches are complaining because we’re not in Serpentshrine Cavern and goddammit, turn over that guildleader tag and give them admin rights to all the web resources and the Ventrilo server so they can get to it.

The officers said, “So go raid SSC, nothing stopping you.” And indeed, they were welcome to raid SSC, there was nothing stopping them.

Not good enough. They wanted the raid leader to stop playing his alt and lead the raid; they wanted me to stop screwing around at the PVP battlemasters and heal the raid on my priest alt; and pretty much everyone to stop what they’re doing for a good old-fashioned New Year’s Day raid in Serpentshrine Cavern.

It was one of those super-rare moments when everyone’s temper blows at once. In short, every single officer online issued a “GTFO” (or some variation thereof), and me, late to the party, added my GTFO on Ventrilo … y’know, for the illiterate in the audience.

Those that GTFO are now on their third post-Foton guild.

9. Remember that one chick in my guild who plays the same class as me, and, she and her imaginary guild boyfriend always hassled me — more accurately, passively aggressively hassled me — about rolling/bidding on any loot ever that she might want? They left. Server transferred to another server where her dude had a real life friend in a Black Temple guild. He’s the one guy in all of gaming who has a worse personality online than out in the world. We were all (secretly) glad to see them leave.

Guess that didn’t work out though because they’re unguilded now. BIG surprise.

10. I PVP’d ALOT. Mostly Eye of the Storm. As you might recall, Alterac Valley is dead on my battlegroup, but I tried AV out a few times to see if it was still dead. Take a look.

This one was outrageous too:

A screenshot demonstrating the sieve-like qualities of the Stormpike graveyard:

That was actually a fun Alterac Valley. No wait. It wasn’t. Made a good screenshot tho.

11. Leveled up a couple of alts, mostly for PVP fun, and took them to Alterac Valley to see if the other brackets are as stupid as the level 70 AV. Surprisingly, no. And I’ll say here, if your battlegroup’s Horde aren’t winning every single AV except late at night when they all fall asleep at the keyboard, your Horde aren’t doing it right.
12. Chuckled at the AV changes coming in Patch 2.4. Whatever. It’s much too late. Patch 2.3 was released 11/13/2007 so that’s 3 months (and counting) of Horde 3 medals plus 500-ish+ bonus honor per versus Alliance one medal + 0-ish bonus honor per. On my battlegroup at least … and almost all the others now. No way that gear gap will have a lasting effect. No way.
13. Shelved my level 70 priest alt, probably for good, but at least until Wrath of the Lich King’s gear reset. And I mean SHELVED. Emptied the mailbox, burned the transmute timers, shipped out the gold and primo mats to my rogue, and wrote a short retirement post for the guild boards. And I’ll tell you the reasons why.

As healers burnt out, we were relying more and more on my priest to pick up the healing slack, which was the purpose of my priest alt, yes, but I figure I’ve put in my time and we were never going to stop leaning on my priest until I called a halt to it. So I did.

But also, I confirmed in my own mind what I suspected when The Burning Crusade went live: priests are not the foundation on which to build a guild’s healing strategy anymore. I’ll go so far as to say that guilds should bring ONE priest on raids for the buffs, shadow-spec preferred, and round out the raid healing with paladins primarily + druids and shaman.

You might disagree, many in my guild do.

(And NO! I do NOT want Blizzard to nerf paladins … or druids or shaman. Toss the priests a bone and stop yammering about Lightwell, you twits.)

14. Attracted another anonymous game stalker who hates me and my guild and can’t stop posting about his hate on the official World of Warcraft boards from the safety of his level-nothing posting alt.

I promise you this: I am going to find out who that motherfucker is and then I’m going to call him on his bullshit.

Meanwhile, his drama posts are becoming ever more shrill since we (the royal guild we) all refuse to take his bait.

15. Did some thinking about server transferring. My realm is low/medium population, guild recruitment is a bitch lemmetellya, and as you know, my battlegroup is awful. It’s not just the AV thing, our Alliance has some truly terrible PVPers — disheartened PVPers, always-AFK PVPers, and stupid, very very stoopid PVPers, hunters who never trap, warlocks who never fear, paladins who think they have Hammers of Glory, rogues who can’t afford poisons, the list is endless. Sad.

On the other hand, it’s a great realm for leveling alts or farming mat(erial)s.

Still thinking on that, but if you have a realm recommendation, by all means, speak up.

16. STILL haven’t received a Warhammer Online beta invite. Those bastards.
17. Holy crap, that was a lot of spam email, phishing and keyloggers!
18. Realized that procrastinating blogly administrative chores for a month isn’t such a great idea. I mean, why can’t the internet tend to itself for a few weeks? I don’t know. It just won’t.
19. Our guild paladin man-whore MADE us guild invite his latest game love interest. She promptly dumped him and took up with another paladin in the guild. How long until this blows up in our face? (Y’know, more so than it already has.) I’m going to guess two weeks, tops.

So we all have THAT to look forward to.

and 20. I discovered a place on the public World of Warcraft forums where no man, woman or child should dare tread: the battlegroup forums.

If you’ve never been, it’s worse than you can imagine, and if you have been, it’s worse than you remember.

I’ve been trying to recover ever since my gruesome discovery. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Anyways. They may pump up the honor of the 2.3 AVs, but I’m getting while the getting’s good.

So. I spent a bajillion hours in AV this weekend, making friends … no, actually, I didn’t make any friends, but I did get some laughs and I made it to at least one new /ignore list (that’s confirmed, people), and, oh ya, I met a horde warlock I hope to never cross paths with again.

One of the first interesting interactions came from this druid on my server. He wasn’t in AV, but he sent me a tell asking if my guild was recruiting boomkins. (That’s moonkin druids, for you non-WoW people. They boom boom, mostly.) Said me, I’ll ask. His name sounded familiar, I remember /who’ing him a few weeks back because some guildmates were in an awful heroic instance with him. Asked me in /gu, Isn’t *LilBoomkin* the druid who was gawdawful in heroic few weeks back?

No one knew, but before I could respond to LilBoomkin, he sent a mistell to me “I asked the guild”, and then, not realizing his mistake, “When we go?”. I was momentarily flummoxed. I /replied, “mt?” (that’s gamer-speak for mistell). He replied, “Hi. Yes? Who are you?” I “umm”-ed. He asked, “what they say recruiting?”

“Sorry, we’re full up on crazy in this guild.”

…

Later, I was in this scrappy AV where each side is fighting tooth and nail over every tower and graveyard. I’m on duty at Tower Point when the Iceblood Graveyard people ask for assistance. You might not know, but IBGY (that’s gamer-speak for Iceblood Graveyard — you’re catching on!) is just down the road from Tower Point, so I told my tower partners that I was gonna head over there and help them out, WHICH MEANS: Stay here and watch this. If I hadn’t said anything, I could see where a person could be confused if anyone was going and those graveyards sure are important.

I mounted up to ride over to IBGY, with all the other tower defenders behind me (/sigh), and when we arrived, we saw that the two IBGY defenders were fighting the Wing Commander. This was their IBGY emergency, the will-not-aggro-you-unless-you’re-really-trying bitch-to-kill horde NPC Wing Commander.

And of course, as you probably guessed already, we lost Tower Point in the meantime. GOD I LOVE ALLIANCE!

Before I returned to Tower Point to recapture, I did explain to the IBGY defenders that the Wing Commander IS NOT AN EMERGENCY. Don’t you be calling Foton over there to help you kill an optional mob. Or that beast of a warlock. No thank you!

…

It was kind of funny about the time I met that warlock beast, who I will call Beastie. Shortly before, I had just finished another AV where this one Alliance dude asked in /bg chat for some help with a warlock out in the middle of nowhere. I had told him, /bg I’m sorry, we can’t spare 15 people right now to go kill a warlock. Yuk yuk, warlocks are so OP, which I didn’t use to believe very much as I only had troubles here and there with them. But brother, now I’m a believer.

Back to Beastie. He was ten feet tall if he was an inch, shoulders as broad as a horde tower, forearms like tree trunks, and his AE fear could reach from Dun Baldur to Frostwolf Keep. A drain lock (think: EQ necro) with about a billion hit points.

How I ran into this beast: I was cheerfully guarding Iceblood Tower ( … IBT) with a feral druid guildmate, hoping for some horde customers, when up wandered Beastie, and we were ready.

I’ll spare you the play by play. I’ll just say he made short work of my guildmate and was able to focus on our PVP dance, the warlock and rogue — me determined to stay toe-to-toe, him determined to stay out of range, although I have my doubts that he even NEEDS to be out of range to survive. For my part, I did solo him down to 20 percent health, which was a far sight better than I saw anyone else do, but nevertheless, a poor showing.

Ventrilo – Guildmate: What. Was. That?
Me: I dunno, that guy’s nasty.
Guildmate: To the armory!

On my way to have another go, while my guildmate was fawning over Beastie’s armory, I spotted Beastie out in the Field of Strife dealing with five Alliance players. Five on one, not very fair, eh? OH HOW WRONG YOU ARE. He never dropped below 80 percent health and quickly sent all five on their way … to the graveyard.

Before I could stealth over (you might call it slink, I call it STEALTHING), he met up with a blood elf paladin buddy and this is my true strength in PVP: I know when I’m licked. No thank you, the Field of Strife is yours, I’ll go watch this tower over here (WAY over here) and collect my honor.

I’ve checked for him in every battleground since then, and, fortunately for my sometimes-large PVP ego, I haven’t had the pleasure again.

…

Do some players think that battleground flags and/or capture points explode on contact? I’ve noticed this behavior for many, many months, where players will tap a flag for their side and then immediately run away. So quick is their retreat that I wonder.

A related observation: If no player or one player is guarding a capture point, no one else will guard the point. If two or more players are guarding, everyone else will gather around to guard also … almost as if they think refreshments will be served. I understand there is safety in numbers but five Alliance in a horde tower is too much. Besides the misuse of limited player resources, there’s no way we’ll get any action if the Horde see five of us packed into such a small area.

…

Very often I’ll be randomly assigned as the battleground raid leader. I’m not sure how the game assigns this position: I know it varies in different battlegrounds, it seems to be related to PVP rank or honor kill totals, I don’t know, but frequently I am raid leader. I do understand that in Warsong Gulch, Arathi or Eye of the Storm, guildmates and friends want to be grouped together and I accommodate those requests. However, in Alterac Valley, with 40 team members, and several people asking to be moved around or put with this healer or that shaman … I don’t have time for that.

Honestly, some players act like AV is a field trip and they want to sit next to their buddies on the bus. Has no one heard of raid frames? There’s even some rudimentary default ones built into the UI nowadays, they can drag their buddies’ names to the WoW desktop and fondle the health bars all they like — I won’t judge.

…

I was guarding the Iceblood Graveyard flag in stealth. There were a few minutes left to go before the GY flipped to Alliance. A horde warlock arrived and began the 10-second flag capture. I slunk over and sapped him. (Non-WoWs: sap is a 10-second rogue ability that freezes a target. His head rolls around and his body wobbles — it’s quite entertaining.) I slunk away. After he recovered control, he ran in concentric circles trying to flush me out with an AE. (Boy, I didn’t see that coming.) He tried a flag capture again. I slunk in, sapped, slunk away. He let out a heavy /sigh.

A horde mage arrived and began to flag capture. Horde warlock did a /say “throm”. Hmmm, thought me, I wonder if that means “rogue” in Horde-ish. The mage interrupted his capture and AE’d. No throms that he could see. He restarted his flag capture. Horde warlock repeated, this time with more urgency, “THROM”, but alas and alack, his pal was sapped and he took a cheap shot to the spine.

Next time, that mage really ought to listen to his buddy about the stealthed throm.

…

The afk-reporting in Alterac Valley has really gotten out of control. I like the system, it needs some work for sure, I enjoy abusing it as much as the next guy — I’ll report the people who call everyone “tard fags”, or the blaming dudes, or character names that irritate me cuz they’re so damn stupid, but it seems to me that SOME OF US are spending too much time worried about possible AFK people and not enough time worried about fast offense, or minimal defense.

To wit: I arrived late in this AV and was just about finished carefully picking my way past the horde zerg near Icewing Tower (I like to be on O, donchaknow), when one of the Alliance told me to take back Icewing as long as I was nearby. Ok, sure, should have thought of that myself. So I went inside the very spacious Alliance tower known as Icewing, found it empty (FOOLS!), and restored the tower to Alliance status. Stealth, drop down, watch.

In came a blood elf paladin. He retagged the flag to Horde and ran around spamming AEs trying to flush out any potential stealthers. I like to let the flag timer drain down a ways before recapturing — gives them hope.

He grew tired of spam AEs and wandered off. I stealthed back in, retook the tower, stealthed/dropped/watched. (Possibly he thought “fucking throms”, I wouldn’t know that, but I like to think he did. I would have been.) He returned, retook for his side and spammed AEs.

Just about then, when I had plenty of time to get back in there and retake for our side, some Alliance douchebag told the battleground to report me as AFK near the Icewing Tower. Y’know wtf. I let him have it in /bg chat, cuz I’ll just sit on my ass and watch the BELF paladin take our tower and I’ll laugh and laugh — much easier than playing cat and mouse with fancy pants here.

…

Speaking of the battleground-AFK fascists, I had been assigned to the same AV as one of their more fervent believers a few times before there was any … “incident”.

This guy had a macro he would use many times in each AV. Something like, “Report the cave AFKs so they don’t get any honor! Make them work for the honor!” The macro really didn’t bother me, I had more of a problem with his blaming everyone else for everything, but there’d be plenty of opportunities to mock him openly when some graveyards and towers were secured.

In the fortuitous AV, we were having a tough time doing just that. Possibly due to the “zero or one defenders means everyone else run away!” phenomenon I cited earlier, graveyards weren’t secured, no towers taken, and only a few of the ranked horde NPCs had been killed. Naturally, Mr. AFK-Macro blamed the rest of us entirely (Cuz his play is perfect. Always.), and then he added his AFK macro for good measure. Another teammate complained about the macro and told him to knock it off already.

He protested, and further, we were tard fags who were too noob to guard graveyards and towers. I know, yayaya, it’s all us.

So, I suggested he should macro THAT. And he could name it the “blame macro”. Would save him some time typing out the blame every AV.

And that’s when I got this:

Because as luck would have it, he’s on my server.

Now. You might think I would /ignore him in retaliation. Take that, Mr. Ignore with the AFK Macro! Oh no no no no. I’m much smarter than that. Now I get to have some REAL fun with him. Y’see, I can still hear/read him, but he can’t hear/read me.

Like in the AV a few battlegrounds after that, when I told /bg to report Kal***** as AFK hiding behind the Iceblood Tower. And they did.

Boy. Was he mad.

BONUS from the World of Warcraft forums: Another WoW poster who should self-edit his posts. Maybe. “Horde ALWAYS wins EVERY BJ!”

You’d think horde characters would be more popular if that were the case.

That was an interesting story, lemmetellya.

And COMPLETELY not my fault.

That, and more, from my very WoW AV weekend … tomorrow.

EDIT: Did I say Tuesday? I meant Wednesday.

A screenshot from a recent (could be any) Alterac Valley, and like always, the Alliance General Vanndar Stormpike calls for a turtle. What a moron.

(For those who are WoW-free, a turtled PVP battleground is 100% defense — either forced or voluntary.)

Here’s some amusing guildnames I’ve collected over the past few months from our PVP battlegrounds. Thanks to these guilds for providing entertainment as we rode into the valley of death.

<Whip Cream Bikini>
<Hanging with my gnomies>
<Lambda Lambda Lambda>
<Queue Me Up Buttercup>
<Not Enough Minerals>
<Clan Redundancy Clan>
<Reagent Vendor>
<Gank You Very Much>
<OMG Who Talked to Domo>
<We Wipe on Trash>
<Nightmare Bunny Rabbits>
<Hanz Wheres My Guild Bank>
<Vicious Space Bees>
<Not Worth Inspecting>
<Diablo is better>
<My GF is letting me play>
<Do My Laundry>
<House of Pwncakes>

mmmm, pwncakes.

NOTE: If you want to add your own nominations in the comments, either use no enclosures on the guildname, or, use the hex codes for less than and greater than symbols. You probably think, “why don’t you just tell us those codes, Foton?” Believe me, I would, but I can’t figure out how to do it without resorting to & l t ; and & g t ; except no spaces, and by the time you’re done with all that nonsense, you’ll wish you hadn’t bothered.

Thought me: please don’t ask .. please don’t ask .. please don’t ask. But of course someone did.

Although I detected the strong odor of bullshit (as you do), I congratulated him on the best guildchat story I’d heard in more than a year. No small feat that.

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.

!!!

She really kept that a secret. Not that married people aren’t bawdy, but usually they mention their spouse at least ONCE.

Their game relationship was somewhat unusual, too — they never played together, hardly spoke to each other, and his presence didn’t curtail the bawdiness one bit. I appreciated that, because I love bawdy. I’ll bet you do too.

Another thing his presence didn’t curtail, her private Ventrilo sessions with whomever was her favored guildmember of the month. Interesting.

Fast forward a month, and she announced to the guild that she was getting a divorce. (I believe that was our 2nd or 3rd real life divorce.) Also interesting.

Shortly after her announcement, the mutineers and I jumped ship and started our own guild. We offered to take her aboard, but she’s one of those guild teases — ya I’ll join, I can’t join just yet, no I won’t join, ask me tomorrow, for sure I’ll join next week, seriously I’ll join tomorrow night after raids, etc. etc. until we just don’t give a shit anymore. Last I heard, she couldn’t join because her guild boyfriend (real life boyfriend now) hated us. Another interesting. That guy wasn’t even in our old guild two months ago! Girl moves fast.

Back to our man-whore paladin. He was done with HunterSister because she was crazy. She was different, I’d grant him that. A divorced woman in her mid-30s who digs horses, and fairies (the fantasy kind, not … well, you know.), and glitter, and sometimes her Myspace had tears raining down the page with motivational messages like “believe in your woman-ness” and “everywhere is LOVE, LOVE, LOOOOOOOOOOOVE!!!” or something, and she hearts puppies and kittens and babies and lip gloss too! You don’t find that every day … in someone over the age of 13.

Until she deleted her Myspace after ANOTHER bad breakup, it was a good source of regular entertainment. She had this predictable cycle where she’d be single and looking for the perfect man who she just knows is out there (her words) and she’d have a photo with some skin — not too much (as if), just some. Then, she’d be IN A RELATIONSHIP and the photo would go to less skin, like a turtleneck and jeans, and she’s so lucky to have this guy. Then oh noes, the tears would rain down her page and she’d post some blog about not trusting men because they’re all liars and the cycle would start all over again.

My theory, then and now, is that all these guys would get frightened away by the doll and model horse collections she must have all over her apartment. I walk into some house with dolls and model horses all over and I walk right back out. My line in the sand, no doll or model horse collections.

Anyways, our man-whore paladin ran away, probably trampling several other guys also fleeing.

Now I used to think our man-whore was a stable individual, but then he started doing this routine: he’d log on a few hours before raids, he’d run around doing daily quests or whatever, then he’d get in a snit over some offhand remark in /guildchat and log off — sometimes he’d be gone for days, sulking, I assumed. He’d come back (maybe after intense therapy or multiple listens to a My Chemical Romance CD, who knows), he’d raid normally and joke around, and then one day, back to snits and sulking offline. A grown man sulking, that can’t be attractive.

In between the sulking, he told one of the guildmates that he and bawdy paladin were boyfriend girlfriend or dating or really close (in real life, tyvm) and he might join her guild or she his guild (i.e. my guild — and suuuure she will) and ISN’T LIFE GRAND!!

How lucky was that guild going to be to have the two of them? DAMN lucky.

Sooo. You know how these things work out with the … undiagnosed. Not well. And soon after them being really close (and you know “really close” is just code for screwing but no time to add guassian blur to sappy photos), there was trouble in paradise and she went back to her prior game/real life boyfriend and he went back to his true loves, My Chemical Romance and sulking.

Now this is what we wonder: who exactly is the whack job in these scenarios? I’m not so sure anymore.

But here’s a scarier thought: maybe he’s the one with the doll and model horse collections. Think about it.

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.