Boring Bragging June 30, 2009

So, I know that these numbers may not seem like a lot to many people.  I have seen people beat this time and time again, but for me it was a pretty impressive indicator of what I am capable of after all, and what I can achieve (providing things go well… like my internet not totally crapping its pants). 

I ventured into Ulduar25 with the new guild on Sunday night.  I was kinda laggy for the most part, and I have really only set foot in the raid itself once or twice, so it was a bit of an iffy experience in the first place.  However, once I settled into a rhythm and found my stride, things started to work really well.  I was generally on the cusp of being in the top 5 on a number of fights (I was 6th SO often!) but there was one minor fight where I truly impressed myself.

Usually I hover around the 4k DPS mark.  It’s not spectacular, it’s not bad, it’s just eh.  Kinda adequate, nothing more or less.  However, on one of Freya’s tree dude things (y’know, the guys who drop badges) I managed to pull off a smidge over 5k DPS.  5130DPS to be precise.  Not bad if I do say so myself!

I’m not 100% sure what changed.  Maybe I was lagging less.  Maybe it was that I have decided to ditch the Soul Fires for a while and see how that goes (they just don’t crit enough for my liking, and when they don’t crit they are kinda lame).  However, I jumped up to 3rd on that fight, top of all the Warlocks and only beaten by 2 Hunters.

So, the new rotation is something like this:

CoD, Immolate, Incin my little heart out, Conflag, Chaos Bolt, rinse and repeat.  I don’t like to Conflag early, even though I did end up glyphing for it, because it throws the bloody timer all out of whack.  However, since I no longer Soul Fire, I might give it a go… I think I might see an increase out of it once I am used to it.

I was excited, anyway

An Expected Forced Response June 27, 2009

I was beginning to write this all in a comment as a response to your comments on the last post (which were all fantastic by the way, and I thank you all from the bottom of my blackened heart that you read this… even if some of you may not anymore).  However, I was talking for WAY too long, and I thought it might just be easier to knock this over as a post while my internet is cooperating and life is good.  So, as you read, keep in mind this is basically a glorified comment on the last post, which can be found here, and which some people have interpreted to be directly related to my badge post, which can be found here.  Hell, I may as well publish it as a series, and say “Sar rants and raves about shit being too easy and badges being handed out like candy and RAAAAAAAAAAAGE!!”

The thing is, I really don’t care that people get their shinies.  I’ve said it in the past, and I’ll say it again – loot is just bloody loot.  Sure, I’ll drool over a piece here or there.  I’ll feel a little sad when someone else beats me on something I really really want.  But, eh, it’s just loot, and clothes do not make the man (to a certain extent, but we will touch on that later). Not to mention, this post was not even about badges, it was merely inspired by some comments I have seen justifying the badge change.  As a quick reminder, although it is irrelevant here, I do not like the badge changes because:

1.  It makes no logical sense to be rewarded in heroics with Conquest badges.  I have seen so many better ideas around (a logical trade up system was one good one… where is the logic in a 1:1 ratio?)  Imagine what people would say if ‘Naxx bosses now have a 10% chance to drop a piece of Ulduar quality gear’.’  I can guarantee the level of QQ would be much higher than it is here.

2.  I giggle in absolute mirth when people say this will make getting Naxx runs easier, especially for new characters/undergeared alts.  Seems we all forget the Kara farm days of "LFM for Kara.  Must be in full epics/have over 1000DPS".  Sorry, your newly levelled alt isn’t going to be getting Naxx runs unless they are guild runs.

3.  Seeing the content is fine.  The big end of BC nerf helped my guild at that time a LOT… we went from 3/5 and 4/9 to into Sunwell.  In my opinion, that was kinda a nice way to do it – I know at the time it felt a bit over nerfed, but it did help people see content.  People were happy with that too – sure, some people still might not have made it into Sunwell, but they were happy to make the next jump.  It was a fun, giggle filled time, just like going to the circus.  However, nerfs/things to make life easier/etc should happen at an appropriate time.  Many people feel that this will be too early.   Fair enough, Blizz wants all the playerbase to see content.  I am down with that.  However, does it mean we all need to keep well within range of each other at all times?

4.  For me, the best part of seeing new content is a) the work it takes to get there, and b) the challenge of getting there.  Handing out badges likes this removes challenge.  I remember it making life a lot simpler when I saved up my many hundreds of badges (easily obtained through a daily heroic and a weekly Kara run) and got myself significant upgrades from the new vendor as soon as it was unlocked.  As the rest of my guild did the exact same thing, we suddenly downed a couple of previously tough bosses like rolls of squishy toilet paper.  I felt robbed of a big chunk of progression.  We didn’t win because we could play any better.  We won solely based on gear.  Where’s the fun in that?

5.  Elleiras (although she disagrees with me in the end) raises an interesting point.  Many people are claiming the gear one can equip off badges will not be comparable to the current BiS.  Elleiras, being much more logical minded than I am, does a direct comparison.  Her post in its entirety is well worth a read.

6.  Another thing which makes me giggle is the hypocrisy between valuing gear as a hardcore player and valuing it as a casual.  It is the ultimate in heinous evilness to value gear for the sake of gear as a hardcore player.  Admit it, most of us think this is true… hell, this is what people are firing back at me for thinking the badge changes are whack! You just don’t want anyone to have your gear!  Your gear makes you think you are special!  etc etc.  Well, we can say that’s unacceptable… but we can’t then go and say this is fine for the casuals. (Quoted, again, from Elleiras) “My mom has no desire whatsoever to raid, but she still gushes over each new epic because obtaining it was an achievement in and of itself".  Now, I’m not saying that’s a bad thing that Elleiras’ Mum feels that way… but how can we simultaneously applaud it in the ‘casual’ player base and decry it in the ‘hardcore’?

OK, so there’s my 2c on badges right there.  I don’t think ANY of those reasons relates to ‘OMG Noobs getting shinies!!’  Hell, it’s not like I am the best geared Warlock out there and have nothing better to do than bitch that ‘everyone else is getting what I got, but they are getting it more easily!’  I just think this is way too much, too soon.

Now, on to responding to my last, actual post.

OK, so I may have slightly understated the difficulty of Ulduar.  Natch, 1 point to you guys in the stands right there.  However, Ulduar being difficult does not mean that the game itself is not easy.  However, the rest of the game was horrifically undertuned, and that was a HUGE mistake which in effect makes the game, wait for it, too bloody easy!

Not everyone wants to raid.  The game is way too easy for those of us who do not raid.  Who would be happy doing the occasional 10man, but mainly hanging around in heroics and doing other odds and ends.  My old guild here is a case in point.  These are the people Blizz is (in my opinion) aiming the game at and changing the game for: the small guild that generally only has a handful of people on.  The guild who may have the numbers online for a raid, but not the right classes.  The casual players who still want to play a lot but just aren’t that in to progression raiding… hell, who treat raiding as casually as the rest of the game.  These were the guilds that were hit HARDEST by this sort of thing.  First they hit 80, after a fun whirlwind ride of levelling.  Huzzah!  Then, they venture into Heroics… and are sorely dismayed.  This is where I saw a lot of my old guildies saying ‘I’m taking a break, the game is too easy now, it’s not fun anymore, and I miss my trapping!’

How is making loot more accessible going to help this part of the player base?  Not to mention, according to statistics and what people say, it is actually a HUGE part!  They are saying the game is too straight forward for them.  They are saying ‘Blizz, we don’t want to raid, but we would LOVE something challenging’.  So, we give them better gear?  Is this meant to make them get into raiding?  If you are the ‘supremo casual’ who doesn’t want to raid, well… you’ll get a little pleasure out of getting something nice and shiny.  Hell, we all do.  Then you’ll do more DPS, down things even more quickly… and be bored again.  Making things EASIER is not a good response to undertuning the game in the first place.

If you REALLY want to give out Emblems of Conquest in 5mans, well, that’s cool I guess.  But, if you are doing that, un-nerf (is there such a thing?) the content.  Tune it to be just a little more difficult.  Sure, people will whine at first, because we get scared when we can’t do things like we used to be able to.  But you might lure back some of those “I miss CC, so I am taking a break’ people.

Now, unless someone comments and inspires me otherwise… I think this might actually be my final say on the matter.  Yay!  Now I can get back to benting my rage at my incompetent phone company/ISP/whoever keeps breaking my internet!

Where in MMORPG does it say ‘Easy’? June 26, 2009

There has been a LOT of discussion around the place about the badge changes.  There’s some ranty stuff like what I wrote, there’s some less ranty stuff, and there’s people who have ranted in the complete opposite direction to myself.  What can I say, giving away loot in a simpler manner causes lots of emotional babbling!

One comment which I have seen coming up here and there is the argument that the changes allow people who are in, shall we say… less able guilds… to see the content.  For guilds who are carrying people doing sub-par DPS, or underperforming in some other role, they now have the opportunity to see new content because they can carry guildies through it.

For some reason people get up in arms when this idea gets thrown around, so I am just going to get this out in the open right here, nice and early:

Some people just suck at WoW.

It’s true.  It might not be politically correct, or even NICE to say this, but some people just don’t know how to play the game.  Some of them improve with research and practice, others just suck and nothing will fix it.  They might be lovely people, great to talk to, but they can’t play the game.

So, some people are saying ‘we have people like this in our guild.  They might even be RL friends.  Now, I can’t just tell them they suck and not take them on raids, but they hold the rest of us back and we can’t see the content.  This new badge gear will help us overcome that.’

That’s just bullshit.

Take a single player game…. I don’t know, Duke Nukem or something.  Now, I used to play Duke Nukem a lot as a kid.  I was also bloody horrific at it.  I couldn’t get past things, I died all the god damn time, I was hopeless.  Never been good at shooters, what can I say.  However, there was nothing to get me ‘through’ the game.  I just had to practice a lot to get past it, or suck it up and admit that I was not ever going to be good at it.  No one was going to drop an awesome gun into my hands or anything and say ‘Here you go, now you’ll be fine!"  So why do MMORPG’s do this?

Simple: Money.

Any ‘regular’ game, all the money is made at the purchase point.  If the person then sucks at it, well, too bad for them.  The developer already has their cash and they are happy.  If someone buys WoW and sucks at it and can’t progress, well… they’ll quit.  That’s a lot of money lost right there.  Blizzard want to keep their subscribers, so they want to make the game accessible to everyone.  Unfortunately, it’s slowly killing the fun for those of us who can play.

Euripides claims that WoW is not any easier than it has ever been, it is just that the playerbase is getting more skilled.  I have to disagree.  The largest indicator of this to me?  Hands up who uses crowd control.  Come on, there must be someone out there who uses crowd control.  In a heroic?  In a raid?  *looks around* OK, I think there’s a little hand up there in the back corner.  That’s it though.  CC went the way of the dodo when Wrath came out, along with most situational awareness (seriously?  How hard is it to dodge a big black pancake?)  Not to mention the fact that I find the game easier, despite having a much more complicated rotation than my ‘lolSBspam’ BC rotation.  I have to actually THINK about my rotation and the game is still easier for me!

I have not seen crowd control used in Wrath at all.  Oh, sorry…. once or twice in Ulduar.  Instances?  Nup.  Heroics?  Hell no!  Who needs to crowd control that puppy when the tank can AoE tank, the healer can heal em right through it and the DPS can just mow them down?!  I remember pulls that went horribly awry in BC heroics, where someone’s CC failed and you would almost always wipe.  Anyone remember chain seducing those mobs in Shadow Labs?  Banishing, enslaving AND tanking demons in Mechanar?  Having Mages designated solely as chain sheepers on some fights (Lurker, anyone?)… the ability to crowd control effectively in BC was hugely important.  Bosses were less forgiving of errors, and you died if you screwed up even marginally.  In Wrath, thus far all the content I have seen has been roflstomped fairly comprehensively up to Ulduar, and even partially into Ulduar. 

Euripides says that the game being ‘not easy’ is proven by Ensidia taking 204 tries to kill the hardest boss in the game.  Let me just think this through…

1.  Hardest boss in the game currently.  That immediately implies that this is content people SHOULD be butting their heads against.  The hardest boss in the game should take a hell of a long time to get down.  How long did it take people to down Kil’jaeden?

2.  204 tries.  That’s chicken feed, quite frankly.  If you raid, think about the number of times you wipe on progression content.  If I think back to BC (and I hate to harp on it, but if we are going to say the game is easy, then we need to compare it to something) I remember wiping for weeks on end on Vashj.  At about the time I started this blog, my guild was beating our collective heads against the wall on that stupid Medusa looking creature.  So, minimum of 8 hours of wipes a week.  Weeks on end.  I would say that added up to well over 100 wipes.  I was easily going through a stack of food at LEAST on a ‘wipe on Vashj’ night.

Now, I don’t blame Blizzard for making the game ‘easy’ and accessible to everyone.  At the end of the day, they want to make money, and it’s the best way to do it.  However, the minute something more challenging and interesting appears on the horizon, I for one might just jump ship.  WoW isn’t a challenge anymore… it’s just far too easy for anyone with a pinch of skill.  I for one am tired of wipes feeling more like “Who noobed it up this time?” than “Wow, this is a HARD fight!”

Summary

Heroics – Wrath is FAR easier than BC overall

Entry level raid – Naxx is definitely simpler than Kara was.  Kara was a nightmare of an entry level raid… Naxx is not much more difficult than a Heroic.

Single Boss raids – I would say Gruul’s Lair is about on par with Malygos, but OS is much easier than Mag’s was.  Except for maybe 3 drakes, which is slightly harder, but then, that IS ‘hard mode’.

Next level raiding – Ulduar is a weird mishmash of difficulty levels: I would say that the bosses on average are harder than the easy bosses of TK/SSC (let’s face it, TK was fairly easy overall), but the more difficult bosses of SSC/TK were more difficult than those of Ulduar.

Irrelevant post script: This is my 300th post!  Yay!

A Girl’s Allowed to Brag Occasionally, Right? June 23, 2009

… and the best part of all was, I won her with a 16!  Suh-weet!

Badge Changes Can Bite My Butt June 19, 2009

So, after a week or two of what was essentially Radio Silence from Sar-land (issues with Telstra, surprise surprise, they managed to bork my internet without even being my ISP!), I come back with a totally Warlock-irrelevant, emotionally charged angry rant.  But, hey, you guys should totally expect that now, right?

Blizzard have announced that in 3.2-orwhateverthedamnpatchnameis Conquest badges will be dropping like a hooker’s panties.  Do Naxx?  Get Conquest badges!  Do heroics?  Get Conquest badges!  Of course, these will be tradable for the other various forms of badge, but essentially you can get the best form of badge for the least amount of work.

There has been discussion of this here there and everywhere.  Some people like it, some people don’t.  I put myself firmly in the ‘For heaven’s sake Blizzard, what WERE you thinking?!?!’ camp.  How bloody ridiculous.  And no, this isn’t a ‘they are making the game too easy for the casuals!’ rant.  This is a ‘lets devalue the value of badges and gear’ rant.

I thought that it was a fricking fantastic idea that Wrath saw the introduction of different levels of badges.   5 mans, entry level raiding, and end game raiding are not equal to each other.  Each level is progressively more difficult, and should be recognised as such.  Having different types of badges should allow for this, but by basically wiping the other two types out of existence, the whole system and idea of this is gone.

Now, I am not one to bitch (well, I am…) without offering some suggestion as to what would be a better way of doing things.  So, well…. here goes nothing!

1.  Eliminate the difference between 10 and 25 man raiding badge wise

While it is impossible in reality to make 10 man and 25 man raiding equally difficult across the board, both levels of raiding are as hard as each other over all (in my humble opinion).  Why should you get a lesser form of badge for 10 man Naxx than 25?  It’s ludicrous!  10 man and 25 man raids should receive equivalent badges.

2.  Attach the badge types to the appropriate raid/instance level

Badges should drop as follows

Heroic Instances:  Emblem of Heroism

Naxx/OS/Malygos/VoA: Emblem of Valor

Ulduar: Emblem of Conquest.

I think that doing this would mean people are able to get content appropriate badges, which would be tradable for content level gear (see below).  You do NOT need gear that is vastly better than what drops where you are currently running.

3.  Make the bloody gear commensurate with the content level it drops from! (that includes improving the quality of badge gear where appropriate)

If people want to only do 5 mans, that’s fine.  They will NEVER need the sort of gear that is obtainable with Conquest badges.  The people who do only do these may cry ‘But why can’t we get shiny loots too?’  My answer: because you don’t ever fricking need it!  If you want to stick at that content level, that is just fine.  Peachy even!  Do what the hell you want, but for heavens sakes, make the damn gear you get out of it appropriate!  You don’t need to massively overpower the content.  Same thing goes for Naxx etc.

One thing I remember happening in BC was the massive Kara farms.  Let’s go spend a couple hours in Kara, grind out 21 badges, do that for a few weeks, and get ourselves some T6 quality loot!  Then we will barely need to even set foot in the T5 content… we can just skip over most of it!  When they announced the new gear that was obtainable with badges, I (along with masses of other people) spent weeks before hand grinding away at heroics and Kara to be able to kit myself out as soon as the gear was available.  Sure, that won’t be able to be done now, but the principle is still the same.  I can foresee a lot of ‘lolKara Farm Nights’ in the future.  Frustrating for people who are tired of the content, and equally frustrating for guilds who are still running it and have to hear people bitching about ’EZ mode lolKara that we clear in 2 hours just for badges’.

If you decide you want to raid a higher level of content than what you do now, that’s fine as well.  But you have to do it the honest way, the way it was intended to be done, and work your way through the content to progress to that level.  Why should you be rewarded with gear which is far greater than anything available from the content level you are currently doing?  That just devalues the gear and frustrates a great deal of the player base.  Sure, it ‘might not hurt the raiders’ to have other people have the same phat loots.  It isn’t fair though to have some people work hard on difficult content, just to have others get equal gear. All it does is make people raid content they don’t particularly want to raid, and cause even more tension between the ‘casual’ and the ‘hardcore’ players.

/end rant

P.S. – perhaps make Emblems of Heroism/Valor Bind on Account?  That might keep everyone happy, AND be practical!  You are essentially making the damn things worthless anyway!

edit P.P.S – So, I managed to miss that there is a new type of badge coming out.  However, I don’t think this makes my original point invalid.   All forms of content should be rewarded appropriately, not just ‘OK, we have decided this is obsolete, so new badges!!’  THAT makes no sense.

Short n Sweet… Somewhat Like A Gnome Rolling In Honey June 15, 2009

Well, I decided to go with the transfer after all.  Now Nagrand is stuck with my noobish butt!  Muahahaha!  Jokes aside, I am hoping that this works out for the best… I got accepted into the guild I applied to, which is just fantastic (although it’s going to look REALLY bad that I can’t make the first weekend of raiding, since my Mum is coming out to visit), and it seems like a fairly nice server to be on.  One thing which is going to take some adjustment is being on at the same time as all the kids when they get home from school – I am really not used to that.  I’m still spending quite a bit of time on Cenarius though (with a certain someone keeping me logging in there… and everyone else I know on server as well), and my wee Druid is 79.6 as I type this.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll get her out and level her up some. 

Blog updates have been slim pickings as I have been working frantically on writing school reports, programs, and all sorts of other school related stuffs.  I tell you, it’s a bloody good thing I like writing!  However, I am getting more in game time again, and I will be able to update you all with the latest of my noobish adventures.

Signing off, no longer as Sar of Cenarius, but as Sar of Nagrand!  It’s trippy I tell ya… trippy indeed.

Dilemmas Dilemmas June 8, 2009

I finally got a chance to talk WoW to a real life friend of mine.  Now, I don’t usually talk WoW in real life at all, as most of you probably know.  I don’t have many friends who play the game, and it’s just one of those things non-WoWers just don’t understand.  However, I have been waiting to talk to this friend for a while, because I have been considering a server transfer for quite a while now, and his guild sounded like it might be interesting.

Now, I am totally putting the cart before the horse here and getting all caught up in things before I know for sure what is happening.  He still has to talk to the GM, I still have to make up my mind, not to mention the small fact that I need to be able to spare the money at the time and I need to talk to the GM and all that fun stuff.  However, it really is something that I am tossing over in my mind, and it’s a difficult choice.

I absolutely adore 99% of my current guildies.  Really, I do.  They are all such fantastic people, and I have made some exceptionally great friends on Cenarius over the years.  My RL friend pooh poohs this, of course, but I am the sort of person who can get along just as well with someone over the internet as I can in real life, if not better.  I have no doubts that I will meet people who are just as wonderful, but it will still really hurt to leave all my Cenarius friends.  Of course, Hermia is staying on Cenarius, at least in the short term, but as much as I could promise I will log on all the time… I know that I won’t.  It will be just like when I left my old guild, and my log ins on my other characters just slowly dwindled away.  Doesn’t mean I won’t resolve to log in there and say hi fairly often, I guess!

The other issue is the same one I come across every time I change guilds or run with someone new.  It’s the real reason why I avoid PuGs, why I preface everything I do with ‘please be patient, I am a total noob’, and probably why I haven’t looked for a raiding guild sooner – I just don’t have any confidence in my ability to play.  I know deep down inside that I am not a bad player.  Certainly not what I would term a good one either, but definitely not a bad one.  However, this doesn’t stop me from feeling scared that I won’t be good enough, that I will be forced to change and do things I don’t like doing to be better, and all those sorts of things.

And, of course, there’s the whole ‘playing with RL friends’ thing.  It’s been a long time since I have played with people I know IRL, and it’s kinda scary.  I don’t want my real life friends knowing what a noob I am!

I really just have no idea what to do.  I swear, I have spent less time wracking my brain over much more consequential things than this!

Deconstructing, Reconstructing, Whatconstructing? June 4, 2009

Deconstructing is a word that, frankly, I hear a hell of a lot of.  As an English teacher, I am forever harping at the kidlets (“You call THAT deconstructing??”) about deconstructing all manner of things.  However, this week the ever delightful Spinks has suggested that we deconstruct our own favourite quest.

Now, we all know I don’t really quest.  As in… I pick up a quest.  I look at it.  I abandon it in utter frustration because it is too hard, too boring, too far away, or I just don’t like the sound of it.  However, there are a couple of awesome quests which stick in my mind.  The Wrathgate chain clearly is a standout, as is the Dreadsteed chain, and that other awesome Warlock chain. 

However.

The best quest.

The quest of ALL quests.

You know the one.

Mmmm…. Amberseeds!

This quest raises so many questions.  Why do they keep the Amberseeds there?  HOW many people have eaten those Amberseeds?  Does the Health Department know about these seeds?

Most importantly….

Who has to clean the bloody toilet?  THAT would be a nasty job!

On privacy, Fibbing, and other Bloggy Things June 1, 2009

So, after browsing around a little, I have noticed that the Ferarro thing has caused massive amounts of controversy.  Personally… well, I am always dubious about everything that I see on the internet, so it didn’t really have a huge impact on me (at first).

See, now, I mainly blog about a game here.  Well, I supposedly blog about a game, when I am not blogging about other random crap, just like this.  At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter who I am, so there is no point going into an elaborately crafted lie or deception.  It doesn’t matter what I look like, sound like or do for a living if I want to talk about Warlocks.  I don’t believe the fact that I am a girl, or that I am Australian, or that I am under 30 has gained me any more readers than I would have if I were a 50 year old American male.

My personal blog on the other hand… well, there I DO write under a pseudonym, I don’t have pictures posted of myself, and I don’t talk about any details that might allow people to guess who I am.

To the average person, that might not make sense.  Why hide behind another identity on a blog that is entirely about you, then allow people to know who you are on a blog where that isn’t at all relevant?

The important part is ‘What can people be allowed to know about my life?’  Here, well, you guys know my real name, vaguely where I live, what I do for a living, how old I am, what I look like, what I like to spend my spare time doing, and even what food I enjoy eating.  That sits pretty well with me, because you still don’t quite know enough to do anything too malicious (if you were so inclined) unless you felt like doing a bit of investigating, and the WoW community in general seems to be quite nice (unless you are BBB, and what the hell is up with that shit?)

My other blog, people know… very vaguely where I live (think state), my profession, and the fact that I have a boyfriend, a family and a cat.  They don’t know my name, what town I live in, or what I particularly enjoy doing.  There are no photos of me, and everyone in my life is given a pseudonym.  Why?  Why would I be less concerned about privacy on the busy blog than I am on the quiet, unpublicised one?

It’s what I write about, of course!  My personal blog is where I let out everything… my happiness, sadness, anger, and all that entails.  I talk about stuff that has happened to make me mad.  I talk about people I know.  I talk about the frustrations of my job, my family and my relationships.  I don’t want people I know or prospective employers finding that stuff and being able to associate it with me.  Is there a chance they will?  Sure there is, all it takes is a little bit of tech savvy to work out who owns the damn thing.  The thing is, they have to find it first.

Here, on the other hand, I don’t really talk in depth about my real life.  I don’t bitch about my job or my boyfriend dramas.  I write about a game, and the community associated with that game.  So why would I ever have to lie?

So, what has this got to do with Ferarro?

Admittedly, I first started paying attention to this when I noticed the uncanny similarities between the name of the character and the name of the producer of some of my favourite foods.  I’m generally not one for gossip or drama (I am a pretty boring soul, really), but the ethical dilemmas here intrigued me.  Does a blogger have a responsibility to tell the truth to their audience?  Is using someone’s identity for ‘harmless’ purposes really harmless?  How should we represent ourselves on the internet?

I honestly do not believe a blogger has to be 100% truthful with their audience, especially if they tell fibs in their posts which are not ‘relevant’ or ‘factual’.  So, if I wanted to write a post detailing the amazing time I had on the weekend on my ski trip, I could, and I wouldn’t see anything ethically wrong with that, even though it’s a fib.  That form of post would be purely for entertainment value, and, let’s face it, it would have to be more interesting to read than ‘I spent the weekend huddled in front of the heater*.

However, if I fluffed numbers, or distorted some fundamental part of the game to mislead you, or heck, even misrepresented some form of guild drama, that would be unethical of me.  That is what the core business of this blog is, and to misrepresent that would be as bad as a news site misrepresenting, well… anything they are reporting on (because that totally doesn’t happen, right?)  I wouldn’t trust anything that was written on this blog if it was discovered I lied about something in game.

A sustained lie about an ‘unrelated’ matter, on the other hand, is a little harder to swallow.  A sustained lie where you also steal aspects of another person’s personality?  Well, that’s crossing the boundaries a bit too much for my liking.  Sure, that other person may have put various aspects of their life up on the internet for all to see, however, it doesn’t make it right to take it and use it as your own.  There’s a hell of a lot of me on the internet, and I wouldn’t particularly like it if someone took my likeness and assigned it to their own work.  To be honest, I’d also be baffled as all get out, since I don’t look especially knowledgeable about anything, and spend most of my time looking bemused, confused or abused.

In one of my older posts, I say something about not reading your blog if I think you are an asshat.  You might be a well informed, literate, intelligent asshat, but an asshat you are nonetheless.  While I didn’t actually read Paladin Schmaladin, if I did, I would more than likely now veto the site.  The information is good, but I can not identify with the writer if they have so little that I can trust about them.  Many people say they would still read Ferarro’s work, and that is perfectly fine.  That’s why this is intriguing – it’s not cut and dried.

So, how do you feel about the issue?  How would you feel if I suddenly outed myself to be a 70 year old man from… Tallahassee? (is that even how it’s spelt?)

Edit: P.S:  Yes, I state that I write under a pseudonym on my other blog, and thus imply I don’t here (when in actual fact I DO)… but if you look over into that side bar, under where it says ‘”Buttons, Buttons and More Buttons", my real, honest to goodness, true name is sitting.  Ayup, that’s me.  Ditto with the ‘me’ that is associated with this blog on Facebook (yay for Networked Blogs!)

I was going to Totally Write Something Awesome May 30, 2009

… then I read this and realised that would be redundant.

Go forth, and read!  See my perspective on Mages justified!  They are such strange strange little creatures, those Mages.

Strange indeed.