Posts with tag grief

We've talked a bit about character endings. Death is a fact of life and is thus a fact of roleplay. We're in a war story, after all, and it is somewhat inevitable that some characters will pass away. Someone may decide to end his character himself or he may have his character taken away from him. No matter exactly how it comes to the conclusion, many characters will experience death in their lives.

It therefore falls on us to roleplay out that grief. Your character is undergoing a significant experience. It may just be an acquaintance who's passed away peacefully or it could be as meaningful as a lover being cut down before their time. Your character will have emotions and thoughts, and you want the chance to express them.

There are tricks to it, of course. You want the chance to roleplay this life changing event without being obnoxious. Sure, you could fall on your knees in the middle of Ironforge and gnash your teeth and moan in misery. If you feel like beating your chest and back with a whip for everyone to see is the best expression of your character's angst, don't let me stop you. But at least a few other players will likely not respond with the gravitas and seriousness you'd like. Let's review some methods for getting your grief out for all to see, without being obnoxious about it.

Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women? Blood Sport investigates the entirety of all things arena for gladiators and challengers alike. C. Christian Moore, multiple rank 1 gladiator, examines the latest arena strategy, trends, compositions and more in WoW.com's arena column.

Listening music: Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams. An awesome '80s song -- who can dispute this claim?

Last week: We talked about some fun things to do in arena while Wrath of the Lich King and the old world are still with us.

This week: All of us have had that random guy in a battleground get under our skin. Maybe he's proclaiming how terrible he thinks you are over /battleground chat, or he's an annoying jerk in some other way. Griefers are a part of the game, and they're here to stay. Nothing excites them more than making others miserable. Maybe you are a far better person than I, but I tend to wish ill towards these individuals.

There are lots of ways to exact revenge upon griefers or rivals, particularly in arenas. Justice can be fun -- very fun. Some people, however, take it too far or make it menacing. Revenge is fine; trying to make someone quit the game or use RL money for a server transfer (for instance) is not.

I mention the latter because I knew a guy who recruited someone from the #2 arena team three days before season 7 ended. They never invited him to the team, thus assuring themselves #1 gladiator because they had no competition. That goes beyond creating a rivalry into the realm of downright douchebaggery.

While I suppose what he did is completely legal, I don't know a lot of people who want to transfer over to play with him after what he pulled. His ex-partners actually play with the guy that he recruited instead of him. Poetic justice, I suppose.

The Orange County Register's Blizzard Blog has posted a message from Micah Chatterton, father of Ezra "Epheonix" Chatterton, who, as we reported yesterday, passed away earlier this week. Micah's pain is tangible, but he says that Ezra loved his life, and the greatest tribute that he or anyone else can pay to Ephoenix is by trying to love life as much as he did. He also thanks the WoW community for their outpouring of support. There's no question that we can be a little silly and raucous at times (which is what makes, as Ezra certainly knew, being around this game so much fun), but when it comes down to it, we are a community, and when one member of the community suffers, we all do.

Once again, we pay our condolences, along with all of our readers who posted comments yesterday, to Micah and his family in this time of grief. Definitely give his statement a read -- it's extremely sad to hear about the suffering that Ezra went through, but Micah is exactly right: Ezra's life and the smile he had even when facing a tragedy like this should be an example for us all.

Micah also forwarded the message along to us, so we've posted it in full after the break.

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I apologize for the late article. Being finals week and all, things get pretty hectic for a lot of us. You will appreciate that I'm writing as my students are busily completing their final exam.

As in life sometimes in World of Warcraft we come across unpleasant or stubborn people that challenge us. Whether it's in Guilds, PUGs, or just the environment, at some point someone will get on your nerves. Thanks to the perceived anonymity of the internet, people feel they can be much more brazen and offensive then they ordinarily would. I'm not asking you to let violations slide, but try to be mature about the situation. Let's talk about how to deal with difficult situations.

Drysc responded strongly to some QQ over at the forums when a poster from Kil'jaeden -- a PvP realm -- ranted about being griefed by high level characters while leveling up. Drysc's uncompromising response? Get some friends and fight back. He reasons that if players roll on a PvP server, they should expect to be griefed as part of the leveling process. It's the same philosophy that has prevented Blizzard from allowing character transfers from PvE to PvP realms. It really only makes sense. If players roll on a PvP server, they shouldn't complain about players from the opposing faction taking advantage of the fact that they're flagged for PvP.

As Drysc explains, "the rules of war are based around attacking when the odds are in your favor". This could mean when opponents outnumber you, outlevel you, when you're low in health and/or if you're engaged with multiple mobs... the question isn't whether it's honorable or fair. It's war. In a PvP server, everything is fair game. There are no rules, and players certainly shouldn't bother sending tickets to GMs asking for any help (or sympathy). This should probably be common sense, but Drysc's somewhat provocative response is something of a surprise -- to many players a welcome one. While I'm all for etiquette (ganking a fisherman is just plain rude) and a personal sense of honor, players who roll on a PvP server know what they signed up for. Shape up or ship out -- character transfers, after all, are just a click away.

Patch 2.4, much like most other things in WoW, has managed to bring the worst out of some people. The mask of anonymity strikes again!

No, I don't mean the node-stealing, ninja-tapping, mob-training stupidery(which is a word as of right now) you see all over the Isle of Quel'Danas. I refer to the standing-on-NPCs-while-PvP-flagged griefing. If you're lucky and haven't seen this happen on your server, what most servers are seeing is a bunch of Blood Elf and Draenei players standing directly on top of Shattered Sun Offensive NPCs, so players accidentally, unknowingly, right click on them instead of the quest NPC. This results in inadvertently hitting the player, and then getting destroyed by the SSO guards.

I noticed this post on the EU forums regarding massive lost of Cenarion Circle reputation after accidentally attacking a flight master who had been mind controlled by the opposing faction.  You know how you right click on a flight master to talk to them and fly somewhere?  Well, right clicking will also enable auto-attack on a hostile target.  So if the mind control is timed just right, you may not even realize what happened - the flight path window never came up, and you just lost 15000 reputation.  (Note: in this case, the initial auto-attack tagged the flightmaster to the player, and opposing faction player killed it - thus the massive reputation loss.)
However, GM response simply stated that this was "designed this way" and a CM response states that this is a GM issue.  So is it really intentional for other players to be able to cause you to loose huge chunks of reputation like this (it's -15000 for killing a member of faction), through no fault of your own?  It seems rather wrong to me, but in the mean-time I'm going to be very careful when flying out of Cenarion Hold...