The Lurkers on Tich

[MongoJerry]

Four months solid on PvP servers wasn't trying it out?

Not when you kept restarting your characters, repeatedly ran through the "gauntlet," which at the time was the 20-40ish levels (now, it's the 50's), and when you mostly hung out in pseudo-alliance areas like Redridge, Duskwood, and the Wetlands, where of course most of your "PvP experience" would be ganking rather than real and fun PvP. You also stuck to your philosophy of getting every quest in an area rather than using flexibility and teamwork to avoid the gankers. I believe I likened your experience to walking into an area known to have a high crime rate late at night, getting mugged, and then shouting that the crime rate for the entire country was outrageous.

You don't get to choose whether or not other people are insulted by what you say.

Nope, but the reader can choose to be insulted or not. It's a matter of giving the writer the benefit of the doubt. I guess Mirajj has experienced the word "carebear" to be some gross insult and perhaps at one time, it was considered that way. But it's a commonly used every-day term that it's lost most of the stigma applied to it. One can choose to be insulted by the term "carebear" or one can read it as the common gamer shorthand term for "person who prefers PvE content and does not wish PvP content to interfere with one's gaming."

Regarding Bolty's alleged "insult," it was for words that I had neither written nor implied. I never said that Lurkers were "mindless zombies who will do anything [Bolty] says." If someone gets insulted by something I didn't write, that shows you're absolutely right that I can't choose whether someone else gets insulted.

Of course, the background to this discussion is that Bolty and I have had both public and private exchanges on this issue. I even begged Bolty to stop posting some of his more scathing commentaries, because I felt that it was interfering the in the creation of a possible vibrant Lurker PvP on-line guild on Tichondrius. This is an old argument. Bolty thinks he was just writing what he saw and that people just went to where they would have gone anyway. I think that there were several players who were on the fence but who were so burned by Diablo II's "PvP" that they chose to go to Stormrage when Bolty confirmed their worst fears. No amount of "Bolty's not telling you the whole story" reponses were going to overcome that, especially when Bolty kept going on-and-on and told in endless detail about that mage who terrorized him in Redridge. People make decisions like these based on emotion and gut-feeling, and the moment I and others came back with, "Well, yeah, that can happen, but..." the game was over, no matter how much we described how you can avoid the gankings, how you could use teamwork to help you, how much fun PvP in WoW is, how the PvP aspect adds an extra sense of thrill and excitement to what otherwise would be another collection quest or farming run, and how PvP creates a much stronger sence of community and comraderie among players in your faction.