Today’s topic is one that is going to probably be a bit deep and dark and possibly even controversial. But, it’s something that I feel needs to be talked about. I am not going to go into huge amounts of depth, and please, if you ever feel endangered or something, take the proper course of action. These are just some of my experiences…

So. Creepy stalker types on WoW.

I’ve run into quite a few. Some of them are creepier or stalker-ier than others. Pretty much all of them have had the creepiness resolved in one way or another, and I regret to say many of those were not resolved by me. Many of these are gender-specific (people tend to pick up on my “femaleness” fairly early on; the way I type, perhaps? I dunno) but I imagine they could happen to anyone.

Here are a few examples of the ones I’ve come across in my year of playing the game, and how they turned out:

1.) The Guy Who Wants to be Friends a Little Too Quickly

I’ve met a few of these types, and to be honest, some of them really are merely people whose way of making new friends is a fast as the speed of light. But I chose to throw this into a sort of low-level Stalker Category simply because some of these people do launch into questions such as “Are you really a girl?” “Are you single?” and “How stable is your current relationship”, and come on, being asked those things five minutes after you have met someone is kinda awkward.

My Reaction: Usually I just refrain from giving out any details; if pressed, I’ll say “I’m not comfortable giving out information like that over the internet.” Now, good friends and guildies can pretty much read me like a book but for the people who seem to want to be best friends in three minutes, it’s a little different.

How It Was Resolved: Some of these people still whisper me on occasion and we will have decently friendly conversations (although none of them have ever reached “Bestest Friend Forever” status with me like they all seem to want so badly to attain), others have stopped communicating. Typically I don’t see something like this as warranting immediate action unless it’s really bad, but again, please use your judgment and what you feel comfortable with.

2.) The People who Simply Give You Bad Vibes

Now I am, in general, a very highly optimistic person who tends to see the best in people. That’s why when somebody gives me “bad vibes”, it’s a huge red flag for me, because that rarely ever happens. I have met one or two people in WoW who seem genuinely nice but for some reason give off a vibe of “I’ve got a certain reason for talking to you” or “I’m just pretending to be nice”.

My Reaction: I am never sure what to make of this “vibe” because I am always so used to seeing the best in people. And who knows, maybe I’m completely wrong and these people really are being sincere– I’d like to hope so. Still, I would say… go with your gut instincts.

How it was Resolved: Again this is one you really can’t take action against especially since at face value these people are usually being very friendly even if you sense an ulterior motive. Maybe let a good friend know, if you are feeling very uncomfortable, and get a second opinion– that is what I have done in the past, and not just on the internet.

3. The Guy Who Wants Cyber (May or May Not Have Mental Issues)

Yep, these people are out there. A lot of you have maybe, unfortunately, had to interact with them. My particular story involves a guy who for a span of a few months was incredibly notorious in trade chat for being a jerk. It also turns out he had a tendency to find out who on the server was a female, and start whispering them. His whispers to intended targets were typically very highly charismatic and appealing at first but then he’d start spewing out random sexist and/or racist tirades intermixed with nonchalant “Oh here’s my progress on soloing Sunken Temple/farming rep”, and subtle requests for cybersex. You definitely got the feeling that something was quite “off” with this guy.

My Reaction: I have a big problem that I really need to work on: I don’t like to put people on “Ignore”. It makes me feel bad somehow. So after this guy had whispered me a few times and was sort of starting to creep me out– I regret to say I really didn’t do anything. I half-listened to his rants usually without responding and then consistently turned down his advances. (Admittedly it was also sort of like watching a train wreck or something– you can’t stop looking at it).

How it was Resolved: A few weeks after he started bugging me, he disappeared completely from the server and never came back. Now I don’t know the details, but I’ve heard it said that he said something extremely offensive in Trade and got perma-banned for it. I think he’s still around, though– on other servers.

4.) The Guy Who Wants Cyber in an Unconventional Way

These are the people who ask you for weird favors that may seem almost hilarious at first but no, these people are serious. The best example I can think of is the guy who repeatedly asked me to, um… /fart on him. Cause he liked it. I regret to say that I actually obliged at first, because I thought he was joking, but… he wasn’t.

My Reaction: After several pestering whispers of his asking me to perform, followed by him trying to come find me in the game world, I told him “Look, I was just joking at first, I’m not into this kind of stuff and I’m not going to do it.” He proceeded to spend the next twenty minutes going into detail about how horrible and evil I was and then he never talked to me again. All’s well that end’s well.

How it was Resolved: See above.

5.) The Anti-Roleplayers

This is kind of a phenomenon that you will really only see on RP servers, and some might say it’s not really considered “stalkery”, but it can certainly get to that point. Most Anti-Roleplayers are the people who will stand in the middle of your RP event, /dancing, /nosepicking, and typing random keys into their /say box to try and provoke a reaction; and most of these people can be safely ignored.

Sometimes it can get bad though.

Silver Hand is in Battlegroup Nine, “Bloodlust”, a battlegroup which apparently has quite a reputation for housing the most “hardcore” PvPers in WoW, consistently churning out world-best arena teams and the like. Because of that reputation, serious PvPers flock to that battlegroup which further fuels its “hardcoreness”. Oh, and did I mention that Silver Hand is the ONLY roleplaying server in that battlegroup?

One time it was Arathi Basin weekend so I queued up and wound up in a game with what was otherwise a premade– fourteen people all from the same server and me as the fifteenth person. Those fourteen people were all from a particular server that is seen as being the “hardest of the hardcore” in terms of PvP, whether or not that is really true, I don’t know, but the sheer reputation does make them rather daunting when you see that server name floating above their head.

So here comes this little girl from the RP server to fill out their team and all heck breaks loose.

The entire time I was mercilessly teased and taunted and battleground chat was filled with sarcastic “DARESAYS” and “FORSOOTHS” (a joke which is not funny by the way; things are only funny to me if they have some semblance of truth to them), and again at some point they deduce

d that I was a real girl and then the chat turned decidedly sexist and I got whispers from people telling me it was my lucky day for being able to get into a winning premade because apparently that’s the only way a female from an RP server can win an AB.

My Reaction: Now, believe me when I say I can take a joke, but if something lasts the entire duration of a battleground and segues into sexist comments, that’s a little excessive in my book. I would have put the entire team on ignore but I felt that as I was in a BG, it was my duty to be able to know what was going on and warn others for “incs” and the like. So I just focused on the battleground and eventually topped the chart at the end (which I hope that whole premade team took a nice long hard look at).

And then ya know what? It happened again, in an EotS a few days later. I showed up as the fifteenth member of what was otherwise a premade from that sever, and I was teased into oblivion. /headwall

How it was Resolved: After that second game I was seriously angry and sent a ticket into Blizzard, asking what sort of action I should take. They replied promptly and told me “Any sort of excessive teasing for any reason, including server type, is reportable, just send us their names.” Now I didn’t remember anybody’s names from the two incidents, but rest assured if it happens again I’ll be prepared. I’m not gonna take that kind of crap. I am here to be judged on my merits as a player, not on server type or gender. /rant

Well, that does it on my rundown on run-ins with various unsavory types of people. I suppose the point of this post is not to tell you what you should do in these situations (seriously, don’t use me as an example, I’m bad at that), but to remind you that these types of things are out there and you will probably have to deal with them at some point, if you haven’t already. Sure, the majority of my WoW experience has been a positive one… but, as with anything, you will always have the weirdos who you can’t always avoid.

Stay safe.

Matticus had an interesting post where he references an excellent writeup at the site “Girls Don’t Game” called “Confessions from a Former Hardcore Raider”. The story presented is a very powerful and touching one and can hopefully be seen by some people as a wake-up call of sorts– not even necessarily a 180-degree one, but one where you sort of sit back for a few minutes and see her point and where she is coming from.

See, here is the thing. WoW is a hobby, not life. /gasp I know right?

Now I’ll be the first to tell you that I love this game, and I love hunters, and I am very proud of what I have been able to accomplish not necessarily in terms of endgame progression, but in terms of feeling like I am knowledgeable about my class– at least enough to be called a teacher and a class leader, and enough to have a blog on it that seems to be popular and helpful if many of your kind comments and e-mails are any consideration. Many of my friends and family, even those that do not play WoW, have even told me they are proud of me in this regard. I am proud of my WoW accomplishments just as I am proud of my Neopets accomplishments or the way I knew games such as Starcraft or Final Fantasy Tactics Advance inside and out.

But I think that we are all guilty of sometimes turning the game into a job. Maybe some of us do it more than others.

I myself am certainly guilty of the no-work days where I say “I’m only going to play WoW for a few hours in the morning and then get other non-WoW stuff done” only to get distracted by heroics, then alts, and have the entire day turn into a pure unadulterated WoWfest.

I am guilty of saying “I’m going to take a break from instancing and raiding” and then showing up at Karazhan the next day because I feel the group needs me.

I am guilty of spending three hours doing dailies, yawning and bored out of my mind (instead of, you know, having fun in a game, heaven forbid), because “I need the gold”.

One of the scarier nightmares I had in recent memory was a never-ending Karazhan pull. No joke; that was my nightmare. Mobs kept coming and coming and I was out of mana and I was desperately fighting to stay alive and yet we never wiped, but never got past the pull either… I woke up countless times that night in a cold sweat, wishing for it to simply end, but then I’d fall asleep again and the mobs kept coming. Yep, other people have nightmares about dying or being chased; I have nightmares about World of Warcraft. I look back on it now and I can’t decide whether it was hilarious or pathetic. (Probably a little of both, really. I giggle at the memory, either way, even though it was a seriously scary dream at the time.)

When you realize that you are maybe playing too much and starting to be guilty of some of the things I mentioned, that’s when you’ve got to take a step back and remember that the game is a hobby, and there are tons of other hobbies out there to cover and only a limited lifetime in which to do them. Playing one video game to the exclusion of others isn’t bad in and of itself, but you’re missing out on a ton of other great stuff, you know?

Barring a brief ten minutes to /wave to the guild and test my new install, I haven’t logged in since last Tuesday. Almost a week now. Instead of playing WoW, I have been able to reacquaint myself with an old and faithful friend: my hobby of tinkering with computers and Linux. It’s been both a frustrating and thrilling five or six days; pounding away at the keyboard and racking my brains for solutions to various problems. This culminated in three days of trying to figure out why my new WoW on Linux install was crashing on me at the login screen; three days of hard work and trial and error followed by the inevitable sheepish “Eureka” moment when I discovered the solution and realized how embarrassingly simple it was.

Trading in a week of WoW to rekindle an old hobby was well worth it in my opinion, and actually gave me a deeper appreciation for why I play the game in the first place: to relax and have fun. I think when I return to active playing tomorrow I’ll have a lot more fun than I was having a week ago.

Well, that’s all from me for today. In closing, my new computer desktop is made of equal parts win and awesome:

And yes, that is the Gnome desktop manager. Yes, I know, I am normally a hardcore KDE fan. I felt like trying something different though. (Besides, “sometimes you feel like a gnome, sometimes you don’t”.)

P.S. I am fully blaming the Spell Shades for that nightmare I mentioned. /shudder

It seems accurate…

Because I am bit of a tinker, I decided to start messing around with my computer the other day, and to make a long story short I basically blew everything up, in true goblin fashion. So these past few days have been spent hacking away at my keyboard trying to fix things, and reinstalling more than one operating system. As such I currently do not have access to World of Warcraft and I imagine I won’t for another couple days (I actually am in the process of installing it right now, which is taking longer than usual because the “Copy the Old Folder Over” method does not want to cooperate– but I won’t have time to really touch it very much for a bit, even when it is installed.)

Honestly I probably could have had this all fixed and taken care of in just a day or two, but it’s hard inbetween long work shifts!

I am still going to be on the Twisted Nether podcast tonight (note to self: install Skype) so that will be fun.

In closing, lemme tell ya… it’s surreal when you Google “WoW on Wine with Kubuntu” to make sure you’re doing it right and you are the top result.

Mania’s Arcania had an interesting post the other day about a hunter who refuses to use guns because he doesn’t like them. The comments were also full of people agreeing about how much they disliked guns.

My first thought was that this was silly, because guns are awesome. They make big “Pew-Pew” noises that accentuate the damage you’re doing! They look really epic in silhouette! And from a roleplaying perspective, they throw a unique spin on your character; that you are a bit of an eccentric mechanic or tinkerer on the side, perhaps, at least enough to know how a newfangled gun works. I’ve always been drawn to that sort of character; one with a curious enough mind to be willing to wonder how a gun works. My crossbow is the weapon I’m sure I’ll be keeping until WotLK, but I do miss my Wolfslayer.

(And have you seen a male blood elf hunter with a gun? /drool)

Truthfully, perhaps this all simply my lifelong crush on Han Solo coming to fruition (curse you Princess Leia), but the fact remains that it’s hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that many people don’t share my Thing for Guns.

…but then I started thinking about it and realized that I have my own silly little quirks too. Other people may refuse to use guns; but Pike refuses to use…

Saber mounts.

They drive me insane. I don’t know why. I think it’s because many times it seems like every Alliance toon and their dog has one.

Tawyn was exalted with Stormwind at level 37 and has ridden horses her entire career. My druid is in her 30s now and is slowly grinding Ironforge rep so she can ride rams. Fortunately both of these characters have appropriate backstories for why they ride the “wrong” mount (I actually seem to have an affinity for that kind of thing, hence why my blood elf is going to ride a kodo even though I actually do like the chickens).

The really illogical thing is that I love cat pets on my hunters, even though they look exactly the same as the saber mounts and they are just as popular. So I really can’t tell ya why the mounts bother me. This probably makes me much sillier than the people who dislike guns because at least they usually have a valid reason (i.e., they’re loud).

What about you guys? Do some of you guys have silly opinions about various aspects of the game or is it just me who is completely illogical?

Close your eyes for a moment, forget the world around you, forget your day job or your classes at school and feel that you are a hunter. What does that mean to you?

Does it mean you see you and your pet as being so much a part of each other that you draw energy from one another as you call on the aspects of the wild to give you speed and grace and a precise rhythm to your attacks?

Does it mean you see yourself as being the calculating sniper from afar, masterfully weaving your full pantheon of tricks and abilities into your weapon as only you can do?

Does it mean you see yourself as a wielder of defense and survival, knowledgable about the land and the terrain, impossible to kill, always ready when the enemy isn’t, and quick to use all your resources to your advantage?

Well?

That’s how you should spec.

I don’t tell people how to spec. If somebody is clearly unsure about what they are doing I will offer suggestions, just as I do if people ask for advice. I am also not afraid to come right out and say that in most cases it’s Beast Mastery topping the damage when it comes to our class.

But if you prefer to be a Marksman or a Survivalist I will not look down on you in the slightest and you will have earned a lot of respect from me for being a hunter. Pike does not discriminate against any well-thought-out spec.

You don’t choose the spec. The spec chooses you.

In other news, I have been slowly picking through my blogroll and rearranging it a little and moving inactive blogs to a separate section. If you happen to be the author of an inactive blog, I still love you, and will restore you to the “active blogs” list upon a new update.

And if you link to me and I haven’t noticed yet, feel free to poke me about it. I try to link to everyone who links to me back and who has some decent content. ^^ (Yes, this means my blogroll is huge. Wall of Text crits you for 47k. You die.)

For the uninitiated, that’s BRK’s blogroll.

If you need me, I’ll be fainted dead away on the floor somewhere.

One year ago today I wrote the following in my LiveJournal:

I’m playing the World of Warcraft free trial.

My night elf hunter has awesome teal hair.

Fin.

“Darn straight I have awesome teal hair.”

Huge apologies for the lack of meaningful posts recently, and my lack of presence in the WoW blogging community in general. Basically I’ve had a lot of stuff going on lately both in-game and in-real-life, and on top of that, I’ve hit a bad case of… maybe not writer’s block so much as “Editor’s Block”. I have probably five or six posts I’ve written on various subjects in the past couple of weeks that are “in queue” but have not been published because I’m unsatisfied with them, and I’m having troubles trying to fix them so that I am satisfied with them. So they don’t get published. I’d like to get them all out there someday, though.

In the meantime, rest assured knowing that all is well in Pike’s WarcraftLand. I’ve been logged into Tawyn a lot, doing Kara and various heroics and rep/gold farming. A lot of my alts are sadly being neglected, though, in favor of a… Top Secret Project which will reveal itself later. Whether or not the Top Secret Project goes as far as I want it to, I can’t say, but this particular one has gone farther than most of my others, so… we shall see.

I’m writing to you instead of driving to work right now because it’s about -10 degrees Fahrenheit where I am, which really wouldn’t be too bad except my car is refusing to start. So here I am writing up a post inbetween trying-to-get-my-car-to-work.

Basically, yesterday, apparently a few pretty sizable raid groups of level 60+ Alliance on Silver Hand got together and successfully raided Orgrimmar and downed Thrall.

Sadly, I wasn’t here for that, I only heard about it.

I was there, however, for the resulting Horde counter-raid on Stormwind. It was chaotic and very, very laggy. Now the sort of semi-lag that results from some of the more epic battles in Alterac Valley, I can handle. But about 50 Horde clashing with 75+ Alliance at the entrance of Stormwind was ridiculous. I was trying my best to get in on the action but it was like… I’d fire my bow and nothing would happen for several seconds… and then I’d send in my pet on something and again, nothing would happen… and then everybody would just be running in place for a long time… yeah. Apparently everybody was having the same lag issues though; I just don’t think the server was prepared for it.

Somehow… no idea how… but somehow I managed to get 4 honor kills out of it, despite the lag. And because the Horde were just too hopelessly outnumbered despite their own numbers, the majority of their counterraid was defeated right at the entrance. There were some who managed to get back to Stormwind Keep, but there were more Alliance waiting for them.

Then we heard that apparently a lot of them had managed to get to the Deeprun Tram and were headed to Ironforge. So away we went– probably 60 or 70 Alliance all dancing on the Deeprun Tram and then making a mad dash for King Bronzebeard’s throne room, where we apparently had just missed all the action because a bunch of dead Horde were there alongside the still-intact-Bronzebeard.

Now it was at this point that the Alliance decided to launch a counter-counter-raid and try to take Undercity. Visions of screenshots of downing Sylvanas danced in my head and me and quite a few of my guildies decided to go. So off we went!

Unfortunately, this Undercity raid was not nearly as coordinated as the Orgrimmar one had apparently been… I really only saw about 6 or 7 fellow Allies there (despite the fact that a /who Undercity revealed over 50 of us) and I was killed a few minutes into the thing because I jumped off a high ledge bringing me down to about 100 HP, at which point a mage came up behind me and one-shotted me. Most of my Undercity-raid-time was spent bouncing around my corpse in wisp form, waiting for the orc hunter with jealousy-inducing gear to go away. Finally he did and I managed to rez, run around frantically for a few minutes while being chased by guards, feign death, and then hearthstone out to Shatt and safety.

And so our counter-counter-raid had apparently failed (or maybe they’d succeeded without me? I’m not sure) but it was still fun to be able to participate in my first real “worldwide PvP” event and I hope I can participate in more of it in the future.

Other things of note that happened yesterday included our guild’s first ever attempt at a Heroic instance, namely Heroic Mech (we couldn’t get past the first mini-boss, which we were kind of expecting anyway, so we just did it on Normal mode instead); and some fantastically intense roleplay between our guild and a Scarlet-Crusade-esque guild. The downside to roleplaying in Stormwind on a Sunday afternoon is that you will always attract the mockers; honestly I have no idea why they decide to roll on an RP server if they have a problem with roleplaying. It will forever be a mystery.

Hmm. My car still won’t start and the soonest I can hitch a ride off of somebody isn’t for another hour or so. At least I’ve called work and updated them of the situation. In the meantime, there is always WoW to be played or my story to write (have I mentioned I’m working on a story? I’ll be posting it here for you guys!)

Oh and apparently I now have an authority of 50 on Technorati which really just blows my mind. Thank you all so much.