A brief digression...

Sorry for the lengthy delay between installments, here - I swear, part 2 is coming: a detailed discussion of genre definitions, conventions, and game mechanics in videogames (or, why Diablo is really an RPG, and not an "Action" game, despite its labelling). The epic wall of text is imminent... just as soon as my IRL job quiets down a bit, allowing me some free time again to finish writing the damn thing.

In the meantime, though, I wanted to throw a light on this article by Nathan Grayson at Kotaku, which perfectly illustrates why I don't play Massively Multiplayer Online games, or any online game which involves teaming up with anonymous rando's for potentially hours at a stretch:

An MMO guild is like a giant family, a tangled yarn ball of love and dysfunction. Generally speaking, people don’t DDOS their families. It is, for obvious reasons, Not Cool. And yet, that’s exactly what top US World of Warcraft guild Limit claims one of its members did.

[...]

According to Limit officer Jeathebelle, a healer in the guild named Adois was stuck on the bench, but really wanted in. Jeathebelle claims Adois schemed to scrape fellow healers’ IP addresses, DDOS them, and take their spots when they suddenly and mysteriously fell off the internet.

“We only found out because Adois was begging a healer to click his shorted URL link, so we checked out the link and it redirected to an IP scraper,” Jeathebelle wrote on Twitter (via PCGamesN). “Earlier that night, the only healer who had clicked the link had disconnected on mumble, discord, and game.” Jeathebelle said they became suspicious when Adois showed up at the exact right moment to claim the newly-open raid spot.

Jeathebelle said that the guild then found evidence that Adois had been doing this for a while, going back to at least Tomb Of Sargeras, an earlier Legion raid. He’s since been kicked from the guild, with Limit members publicly advising other top guilds to steer clear of him.

Jeebus. Truly, hell is other people.


Don't get me wrong; if you love WoW, or any other MMO game, then love it; lots of people do, so you'll have lots of company. But there are also lots of people who don't, and this kind of crap is why we don't. With so much human shittiness on display in these "communities," I can only assume that those who still love them have developed a high tolerance for toxicity, which is something I simply don't care to do.

Also... is it just me, or does this look like Blizzard ripped off an old Jack Kirby design?

Seriously, that's not a "Protoss-looking motherfucker," that's Kirby's Fourth World/New Gods with glowy F/X.