Mops

"Members of the Public", a term of dread for anyone who's ever had to actually deal with the public. For us, this can mean anything from yesterday's level 5 hunter doing a guild re-roll to (more often) the guy on the largest mount he owns trying to strategically park himself in such a way that the new kids can't get at their questgivers.


This line of thought pops into my head every time I sneak a look at the official Blizzard forums during a break at my real job.

In theory, the forums represent lively discussion and debate between the players of the game about game issues, and represent a cross-section of what each server community is like and what you can expect if you park there.

Of course, in practice, most World of Warcraft players - despite the recent change in target audience - are people like me. That is, grown-ups with jobs who don't have infinite time to sit around and flood the forums with cries for attention. Pretty quickly, in the absence of any real moderation, the forums are overrun by Mother's Little Darlings who do and say whatever they please; a vocal, quasi-illiterate and nasty bunch who make the servers look like the West Bank on Free Gun Day. The upshot of this is that the tone of the forums bears little or no relation to the actual tone of the server it represents.

Oh, some communities try to "take back" their forums, but they run quickly up against the limitation of time: while the rest of us can only check in once or twice a day, they can be on almost continuously. They learn fast you can't win a battle under those conditions, and are snowed under.

Most servers that have not turned into Thunderdome have created their own, moderated, sites for conversation. This works out better in the long run.

Happily, today I only see the usual suspects on the two realms I now follow: guilds begging for new members, one girl who's skipped across three servers in the last 6 months (making the same posts each time, trying to "get something started"), and one girl who is really, really trying to get attention for being part of the LBGT community.

On the internet. Which is kind of like trying to get attention for being ginger in Ireland.

One girl on the test realm form suggests the /ignoreguild command, which would make my life soooo much easier some days. or at least quieter. But I know due to current policy it'll never happen.

I can dream.