Cross Faction Relations

I have a horde friend. There I said it. Damn me and curse me for being a traitor to the Alliance. Actually I have two. In fact, if I properly thought about it would probably be more. But I have one particular horde friend who I chat with regularly via Skype and trash talk during world PvP.

Yep World PvP. It still happens on my server. And it's bloody good fun because there seem to be a few regulars that turn up and kill each other on a consistent basis. I can sit on Skype and listen to him cursing me and my friends and swearing when things go wrong. When you hear your friend getting very cranky because you just killed him, it's extremely funny. I can also log onto my hordie and trash talk him whilst he logs onto his ally and returns the favour. I have Ally friends who just LOVE to rip him a new one and frequently do, /2 channel tends to get a little blue to say the least. But I've never known someone brush it off and secretly enjoy it quite so much.

All in all it makes for a good evening when you need a break from raiding and frankly, when your horde mate is an infamous and argumentative as mine is, well you want to whack him as often as possible. Here's to horde bashing. /cheer

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.