Reflections From The Pond

Lately I have read quite a few posts where the author is telling his or her readers about the behaviour of other people in random PUG runs.

I have yet to see a post about the kindness and general decent behaviour of others, but then again I don’t expect to. Like a favourite blogger of mine said, how fun is it to read about this wonderful day that I had, when I met a bunch of lovely people and everything was just great. Not that fun, eh?

So writing posts about the bad behaviour of others is kind of expected from a blogger, and most of these posts I am talking about are both emotional and eloquent and quite entertaining. Nevertheless I find some of them a wee bit disturbing.

Not in the sense that I find getting upset or enraged over something that happened in a computer game silly or immature – quite the contrary, I often find myself getting rather emotional over what happens in the game, be it joyous happiness over the kindness of strangers or raging annoyance at obvious asshattery.

I can totally understand the need to pour your frustration and annoyance and rage through your keyboard to your blog and work it out of your system that way. That does not disturb me at all, I am well aware of the powerful cleansing of your mind you can achieve by putting your feelings to paper.

No, what I find slightly disturbing are all the screenshots provided in all these posts, screenshots with the names of the offending players and their realms clearly visible. Screenshots of characters, conversations and damage meters. Sometimes even a handy Armoury link is provided so the reader certainly will know which player is being discussed. And his gear. And his specs. And his achievements. And his guild.

But I never ever see an invitation to the player named and shamed to come defend himself, to explain his actions, to provide a reason for what he did or to perhaps even apologize or ask for forgiveness.

I do not doubt that bloggers found their experiences involving the player or players named truly abrasive, that they consider them to be pure and total asshats not worthy of being treated like humans but rather be squashed like cockroaches.

Maybe they are right in thinking so. Maybe they are not.

We see only one side of the story, we don’t see everything that lead up to the major showdown. We see only small snippets of screenshots and not the preceding conversations or which fights the damage meters actually are reporting.

I am not trying to downplay anyone’s bad experience and I am not trying to cast a doubt on anyone’s truthfulness, but the fact remains: My rage posts detail my experiences. They are not dealing with something written on a stone tablet handed down from above, they are not dealing with something determined by a jury beyond any reasonable doubt. They deal with my interpretation of what happened.

Sometimes it may be hard to interpret things differently, but sometimes there might be a plausible, however farfetched, alternative explanation.

You were kicked from a group without a word? Possible explanation: someone misclicked on Vote to Kick when they were going to inspect you and two more accidentally clicked Yes when it popped up in the middle of their screen in their hurry to get rid of the obstacle. Shit happens, and since you all were on different servers they could not re-invite you.

Someone Needed on everything that dropped? Possible explanation: new to the system and didn’t want to seem greedy, or perhaps they did need it, or perhaps they had a new minimalistic roll addon and had mistaken the Need icon for the Greed icon.

The tank ran through the entire instance without letting anyone stop for mana breaks and could not hold aggro for shit? Possible explanation: tank’s 8-year old son is playing without Dad/Mom realising, or perhaps the tank assumed that if anyone needed a mana break or help they would call out.

I know there are asshats out there, there are players who can wreck your dungeon runs and your entire game by treating you or other people badly. I have a few posts myself on this blog about such people, and there are more coming up.

In these posts of mine, I don’t give the offenders any slack, I don’t consider them worthy of the slightest respect, I pour my heart out with malice and sarcasm and biting sentences and I thrive on it. I even posts screenshots occasionally to prove that the conversation I am referring to took place.

But I never ever show the name of the player. I never ever give an Armoury link.

I may post screenshots with other players’ names when I tell about fun things, about weird runs or good runs or just plain hilarious runs. But never when I rage post. For me, rage-posting is enough of a catharsis in itself. I don’t need to name and shame someone to feel better, and I definitely don’t need to name and shame someone who doesn’t know about it, regardless of what I think they have been doing.

This is for two reasons:

1. It won’t make things better.

Trust me on this one, naming someone and getting a lot of commenters to agree that the player thusly named is, indeed, a filthy stain on the pristine white weave of humanity is not going to improve matters. Just look at yourself, how would you feel if someone you had encountered on a bad day suddenly plastered your usual haunts with clippings of you displaying your worst behaviour? Would you think, oh what I little rascal I was there, I’d better go mend the errors of my ways, especially since there seems to be so many nice and not at all prejudiced people agreeing that I am scum of the earth.

No? You would not think so?

And why would you think so? Someone is openly ridiculing you, maliciosuly calling your gear and choices and skills and possibly even your ancestry into question, and others are chiming in. Why would you feel anything but mad and upset and enraged?

So, one act of possible asshattery resulted in an act of asshattery, with the one crucial (to me) difference that there is no alternative explanation or mitigating circumstances for the second one, it is an act of not possible but certain asshattery.

Which leads me to the second reason:

2. What if it’s wrong?

If you felt that naming and shaming a real asshat was ok, maybe to warn people for the dude or because you actually truly believe that telling strangers they suck is actually going to make them nicer, how do you feel about naming and shaming people for something that turned out to be a truly honest mistake or caused by a bug of some kind.

Would you feel good the day Blizzard announces that there is a known bug that will in certain circumstances cause players to be randomly removed from groups, and you have just done your best to wreck the reputation of the players you were grouped with before that bug occured and removed you from your group? Would you feel comfortable knowing that the rage and hatred you spewed out on your blog against someone will be out there for ever, linked to various forum or copy-pasted on others? Would you feel comfortable knowing the assumptions you made were all wrong?

Because, you know, assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups. Shit happens. Conspicious circumstances may be just conspicious circumstances and nothing else. We are prone to see patterns where there are none, and for some weird reason most of us always jump to the worst conclusions straight away and cling to them. It usually takes a lot of mental effort to actually shake that and be prepared to believe that maybe it wasn’t so bad, maybe it was just bad luck, maybe it was Lady RNG at her best.

I am guilty of this myself, like I said before I often blow of steam here on my blog, but after that I always always try to see things from the bright side, to find another angle and an alternative explanation. None of these alternative explanations need to be probable, or even plausible. The fact that they are possible is enough for me to blur the names of the people I am talking about.

Because, you know, what if I am wrong?

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