EXACTLY!

it appears so many posters are just accepting VT's words at face value and are ready to shower with sympathy, but I repeat my question i asked earlier: doesn't a claim of being ignored half a dozen times by nine other teammates to blindly wipe again and again and again smell like bs to you? not one player said 'hey hold up and let VT fix his vent, I am tired of dying.'?

The problem with human mind is that we tend to see patterns where there is none.

When the letter of VT is the only source of information, the only honest way to deal with it is to take it at face value, and then give advice on the considering every single word in it to be true. Assuming something that is not in the letter is intellectually dishonest.

@ Haro,

I don't agree. If we lived that way, we'd be fooled too often.

VT thought he was being accurate, but it is not likely that he's able to give an unbiased view. So we look to what wasn't said, to fill in the blanks.

Judge Marilyn Milan on the People's Court is really good at that!

I like your avatar, though. Oh Yeah!

Of course we can't live like that IRL... that's why we have trials with research, and we look for proofs and evidence, so as not to depend on whatever one side says. But in this case, we can't realisticly expect the other side to turn up, and we would have no reason to believe anyone who posted claiming to be the other side... so we really can't do anything but to trust what the letter says lol
And since this page is to give advice on what to do when certain situations happen, i think it's a good idea to take the letters at face value: even if the real case wasn't at all like Vent Problems say, it makes for a good hypothetical case, and we can get good advice on what to do if we ever find a similar situation. This is the main reason i don't care what "really" happened, because i wasn't involved. Instead, i want advice that can be applied to me, if i ever find myself in that situation.

I'm a fan of cheshire cat! XD

I'm sorry Haro, but your comments amuse me.

Lets say for random example, that I claimed that I am Ghostcrawler's ex wife, and that he let me creat the Palladin class, and the whole nerfing palladins 'to the ground' thing was my bad since I divorced him, making him nerf them out of spite for me. Ghostcrawler will probably never respond in these forums, and even if he did there'd be no way to know if it was really him, since anyone can create an email account and say 'derrrr, I is Ghostcrawler!'

You would, however, know that I was full of poop. Why would Ghostcrawler let someone outside of the blizzard design team make such a huge desicion? Why would Blizzard allow him? Why has he never mentioned me before? Even in this crazy realm we call the interwebs, we can read between the lines and determine when someone is lying to us. If we didn't, I would have lost alot of money to Nigerian princes by now.

Moreover, DM Lisa, is someone who reads letters from people with complaints and grievences about all sorts of fights and drama and other such sap stories. You can bet that after awhile her BS radar would get so fine tuned she can determine when a Toroes in Madrid is taking his last one before the big run from her office somewhere in the USA.

So, when a story like this comes along, of a poor soul who claimed that he was having vent problems but never bothered to fix them, and that he was an all star raider in wrath who no one liked half a year later (even the other raid members were cussing him out), its probably reasonable to conclude that it was picked up by her Radar.

To sum up: People on the internet lie, you can read between the lines to find out who, Lisa does this as part of her job, it's my fault Ghostcrawler hates Pallies.

Exceptionally weird and almost totally inapplicable example, Squig.

This is an advice column. If you wrote in claiming to be ghostcrawler's Wife and stating that you had made decisions about paladins, etc.- if The column's editors decided to accept your letter, they don't have ANYTHING to go on but YOUR letter. See?

When someone pipes up with something random, we can gauge the probability of the truth of their statements- from, "I'm a girl in real life," which is very possible, to "I am the sheikh of Morocco," which is rather unlikely, considering that as far as I know, Morocco has no sheikh. See? You're taking a completely off-the-wall scenario and saying, "I can see through these lies!" and attempting to draw parallels to a situation that absolutely could have happened- the situation Vent troubles describes is quite likely to happen many times each week, EXACTLY as Vent troubles describes it.

The Kirby poster is saying that attempting to 'see through' someone's claims in an advice column is most frequently hogwash- and why? Because when you try to see through someone's supposed lies, your advice applies to a DIFFERENT situation that one the the letter describes. If Vent Troubles was a real jerkface the whole time and actually only said, once, the whole time, "hey guys I think I have a little may vent trouble," and NOTHING else, then the WHOLE arc of the situation changes, and thus, different advice and judgment would be required- and given!

I want to add that as I've read and enjoyed Drama Mamas, the column has seemed to tilt STRONGLY towards believing and offering advice to the letter-writers as stated, rather than attempting to 'see through' to the real situation. At times where seeing through lies has been warranted, Robin and Lisa have usually been really exact and conscientious, saying things like, "However, if the situation is really THIS way, letter-writer..." You catch my drift? It didn't happen this time, and it's quite strange.