![Yes, when you eat [Perciville's Popped Corn], you hold a stereotypical red and white box.](https://i0.wp.com/www.xpboostcomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/strip475.png?fit=980%2C331&ssl=1 "Yes, when you eat [Perciville's Popped Corn], you hold a stereotypical red and white box.")
The Big Show
So I wanna talk about trolls for a minute.
My first and to date favorite WoW guild was the Flowers of Happiness. It was a guild of trolls. It was founded by Blart, more famously known as Fansy the Famous Bard.
Real quick, I want to talk about the definition of trolling. Spewing racist, sexist shit and sending harassing messages to people is not trolling; it’s being a hateful little shit. Robert Brockway covers it pretty well here. We looked for creative ways to play the game that were not intended and often not condoned by the developers. Yeah, they were often annoying, but our basic goal was to GET those racist hateful comments from people who could not just walk away from the person trying to start a church worshiping that one druid that sits on a mailbox all day.
I once held an election for the President of the Barrens in Barrens Chat. (The winner promised to make Chuck Norris Day a zone-wide holiday, and was of the opinion that Thrall started the war in Arathi Gulch over resources, not Alliance WMDs.) We spent nearly three hours in the same Warsong Gulch match playing hide and seek with the flag. (A couple of weeks later they added the map marker for flag positions.) I also spent several Battleground matches roleplaying a janitor.
Some of my favorite memories from all of my considerable time playing MMOs come from those days. I recently visited the site to try and dig up some of my old picture stories, only to find the forums have been shut down. The guild had been in decline for a while, so I wasn’t really surprised. But I am sad to see it go.
When the guild was good, it was a source of endless entertainment. Blart wrote one of the first mass guild invite scripts in vanilla WoW, and ballooned FoH to the largest guild on the server. (A rumor started that he sold a modified version of the script to gold farmers and started the gold seller spam.) We didn’t tell people how to leave, and ended up having more members than the game could count. Then we passed guild lead to a gold farmer who didn’t speak much English, and did our best to follow his commands.
Castor is a love letter to the weird stories we made playing a game wrong.
And there’s castor. See he always wins in the end
Yeah, FoH died a while back I talked to Fancy/Blart like maybe 4 years ago about how to paladin. Last I ever heard from any of them.
It looks like Black Friday, only with less corpses.
Poor Thokk, he was just doing his job. Vedrana did not in any way shape or form do that out of spiteful vengeance, no.
nothing wrong with that. frankly on a pvp server they are lucky to go that long without a slaughterfest
That was an interesting way to gather enough people together to cause chaos – interesting way to get some sort of mass attack going on than just some minor backstabbings.
I’m not sure it counts as trolling versus building the dam higher for the inevitable flooding.
Well, I still think Castor’s an asshole. And taking in account Robin is basing Castor on her own youthful nincompoopery…
I’m just saying, I hate these kina trolls that tak pleasure in ruining the game for other people.
It’s not defamation, and while it’s playing the game in an unintended way, it’s playing it in a way designed to lessen others enjoyment of the game in a way not covered by the ruleset or intended and stated by the developers (such as ganking)
I like how Keran sticks out of the throng. I notice Vedrana is nowhere to be seen… running back to her corpse, perhaps? o.O
Vedrana’s right there in the first frame having clearly just blasted that poor orc.
I meant third panel 🙂
She may be the one that is behind rear passanger leg of the elephant? Given where Thokk is laying down on the job.
There’s trolling which is fun and only hurts those who deserve it (like the janitor thing — really, if the PVPer hadn’t been so intent on bullying Castor, he wouldn’t have gotten nailed) — but then there’s crap like above– deliberately interfering with folks who just want to get a holiday boss and play the game, and the troll’s using intimidation and threats (via opposing faction) to enforce the trolling.
And then enjoying the chaos when the frustration over the forced delay and intimidation finally breaks out, and folks like Keran are caught in it? Not. Cool. And not funny.
Taking advantage of newbies unfamiliar with the game commands and culture and how things work, and basically giving them a frustrating, irritating introduction to the game world (damn mass invites)? Not. Funny.
Yeah. Castor’s an asshole. While I enjoyed the cleaning of Garatol, this just makes me hate the character. Deliberately causing pain and hurt and frustration is never cool or funny. It’s just plain being a jerk.
The thing is, nobody had to agree to this line in the first place. It was agreed upon as a group and broke apart by the mob mentality. Castor and his guild only created a setup by which they could find entertainment. They didn’t force this outcome at all or make the other people play their way. This is social engineering. It doesn’t make them jerks because other people went along with it. They didn’t lie or break the rules.
And for trolling newbies with guild invites? Anybody with a computer with internet access could look up how to leave a guild. It may make the FOH jerks for not telling them, but their frustration could be alleviated with some common sense.
Unsurprisingly, given my post above, I’m going to have to disagree here. Castor is absolutely an asshole. But I think “pain and hurt” are a little melodramatic when referring to things that you can easily avoid or even turn off altogether (mass invites, etc).
Personally, the reason I play MMOs is for the shared world, the players, the often unexpected and weird interactions that can arise out of sharing a space with hundreds of other players. I usually play on PvP servers to maximize these sorts of experiences. If I may be perfectly honest, the attitude that any interruption to “normal” gameplay, intended or otherwise is somehow hurtful and should be avoided/removed by the devs irks me. It leads to the people that complain about events like the Scourge Invasion in the lead up to Wrath, or the Legion Invasions right before this latest expansion. These were amazing. It was different and disruptive and fun. I will remember the Legion Invasions much longer than I would ever remember having spent those same three weeks playing the game normally. But still people complained that their game was being ruined by the Invasions, which only happened in 2-6 zones at random, and the Dreadlord whispers in Stormwind and Orgrimmar, which could be avoided by simply going anywhere else in the game. Disruption, player interactions, and emergent gameplay are the hallmarks of an MMO to me. Without them, why not just play a single player RPG, or a co-op game without the expansive world and potential to play the game in unique ways afforded by games like WoW?
How would this situation with the Legion be different if Castor had not arranged it? A few Legion get together and start a fight around the holiday boss. Kind of a jerk move, but it’s a PvP server, it happens. There’s way more Vanguard, so they just fight them off. But Kyzwinn holds a clipboard, takes names, and says there’s a line. Suddenly the far greater number of Vanguard line up instead of fighting and easily winning. Now one group goes in at a time and gets their boss kill. One group can get credit for the boss at a time. That’s not something Castor and Kyzwinn constructed, it’s part of the game. Whether they’re standing in a line, or rushing to grab the tag against everyone else, they’re still waiting. So Castor decides to arrange a Black Friday-esque line and have fun creating holiday shopping inside a video game, and enjoys seeing where it goes, however it goes. Castor’s system is technically more fair, possibly even more efficient. And efficiency is what separates us from the animals.
The letter of the law remains unmolested.
Castor’s an arse, and he’s very, very far away from the moral high ground, from sacrificing the enjoyment of however many people just died for the enjoyment of two people. But he’s not technically in the wrong.
tldr;
Arugadh makes great points, Robin makes great points, I dont know who to back, so indecision.
And Keran notes that they’ve been waiting an awful long time — if you’re basing this on WoW, holiday bosses don’t take that long to kill — and knowing Castor, I doubt the line was even moving, or that he was allowing anyone to actually kill the boss. He was deliberately enforcing the frustration with threats and intimidation. You’re saying Castor had a more “efficient system”? Sorry, your own characterization and Verdrana’s and others reactions to this troll say it was not a system at all — there was no queue. It was blocking everyone from the boss until the intended fight broke out.
Just because one faction outnumbered another doesn’t mean all of that faction will join in.
There was a point in WoW where blocking invites was not possible, and newbies don’t know of all the options and controls right off the bat, nor do third-party websites necessarily tell you everything — and that’s one of the things I hate about WoW, is that it rarely explains its own mechanics in-game. Having to go to a third-party site for explanations of basic gameplay is ludicrous; there’s too many other games out there that DO explain things in-game. WoW is in the minority.
So someone says there’s a queue, and rather than fight and die, folks join the line to wait their turn — that’s reasonable and expected. But Castor’s ilk are taking advantage of it — I doubt there was any real queue. Judging from the smirk on Kazwynn’s face when Verdrana moused over him, I’d say I’m fully justified in that doubt. Judging from the glee Castor and Kaz exhibit when the fight breaks out, I’m fully damn-well justified in that doubt.
Castor is smart. He probably planned on this happening.
While i do hate trolls with a fiery passion i must admit to be a good one it takes skill. It takes planning. It’s easy to call someone a racial epithet or suggest you had sex with their parent. It takes some skill and planning to create pure unadulterated choas like that.
After all we all love The Joker, we just hate being the people on the ferry boats.
“We spent nearly three hours in the same Warsong Gulch match playing hide and seek with the flag. (A couple of weeks later they added the map marker for flag positions.)”
This seemed suspiciously familiar, so I doublechecked with my husband on one of his old Warcraft stories.
… if you remember a druid/rogue/priest team frantically trying to chase the flagbearer, the druid says hi.
(My husband recalls the one he was in as being about 2 1/2 hours, so it might have been a different incident, but really, close enough…)
Since we’re talking trolling, on a 1-10 scale,
1 being, “Hey, it’s legal.” and 10 being “Burn in hell scumbags!”
Where does Serenity Now bum rushing that girls funeral back in vanilla rank?
I love that Castor has troll-y friends. It’s wonderful to see him enjoying the game with others.
Though I am half-surprised he’s not the alt of already existing character. I honestly expected him to turn out to be Verdana or Orhan’s former second-in-command or something who discovered trolling on the side.
You know, I wasn’t sure how I felt about Castor up until this point, but I get it now.
I do think there’s probably a fine line between doing dumb stuff to get a laugh out of people and actually hampering other people’s time in the game, but I guess in an MMO setting where people can get uptight and where there’s For Real Video Game Jerks, there’s merit in having someone to knock those people off their fancy rare drop high horses.
Bamboleooooooooo, bamboleaaaaaaaaaaaa.
https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.notacult.com/messageboard.php ? Can you find anything there?