Avoiding the Victims Of War

When Deme is not whacking big spiders and chasing down rhinos, she gets to meet some of the lovely people of Azeroth. Unfortunately, for every bundle of lovely people, there is the chance you will bump into someone not quite so pleasant. Generally speaking, in real life you can read the signs of someone who might be trouble pretty early on, the neediness, the constant phone calls, the over importance of your opinion to their self worth and so on.

Now, you'd think it would easy to spot them in the virtual world too, but that's not always the case. Take Deme's friend, the er, the er, mage, from er, from er, Dalaran. Ok ok, this happened to Deme. Talking with a guildie over TS, being friendly and having fun whilst on guild events and raiding. Friends on facebook and Twitter, everything seemed fine, no wierdo warnings so far. Then a big flame war erupts on the guild forum and aforementioned guildie /gquits. A few messages pass between guildies and comments about bringing him back because he's being daft.

Few days later Deme is doing the cooking daily in Outland (she really wants to be Chef Deme) and gets an ingame whisper from the G-quitter. Deme enters discussion thinking that her diplomacy will smooth things over, she wants to be an Ambassador too. An hour later, the messages are still coming, now via various alts (thanks to /ignore) and becoming increasingly rude, encompassing emotional blackmail, and trying to manipulate her unholy will. This is the victim behaviour, the 'you don't care about me', the 'I have the right to be insert chosen bad behaviour here because of insert traumatising event here. If you are getting this in game, this person just doesn't want to listen and nothing you can say will persuade them to change how they behave. By this point and despite Deme's scourge heritage, she does still have feelings and it's all becoming a bit much. So Deme explains the short version of events to the officers and logs out, missing her chance to bop Gluth that night because she is holed up in the Tavern drinking and forgetting about the nasty shaman she'd spent an hour talking to.

Later on a twitter message arrives too. Delete and block.

So what's the lesson here? Will Deme change her approach to people in game? Well, no, that would mean she wasn't being herself and that's a pretty rough price to pay. She will however, not befriend every single guildie on facebook. She will keep her distance in the rest of the cyber world.

There are of course the in game tools for handling this, raising a ticket with a GM is a must. Make sure you know the time of the incident too, it'll help them locate the chat log. Deme has a handy chat add on which helps as it stores the history of all her chats so when she logged out she didn't loose it all and was able to go back later and report the behaviour. Reporting this sort of behaviour, which is essentially harassment, means you could be preventing someone else from going through the same thing. In fact it came to light after this incident that the player had been behaving this way before, if that person had reported him, maybe Deme wouldn't have had to put up with it and her raid group would be one more boss on already ... oh to dream.