Tag Archives: scams

The School of Hard Knocks In Session

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Sometimes, I enjoy watching the optimism of youth. Y’know, when I’ll warn someone in game to watch him or herself (and their virtual money) around the server jagoff and youth will tell me that I “just don’t know the server jagoff, he really is a nice person and a good player.” Or, that “Server jagoff USED to be a jagoff but now he’s changed.”

Ya. I love optimism like that because it means they’re about to get a lesson from the school of hard knocks.

Like this lesson. Remember several months ago I told you about the World of Warcraft rogue that stole the bank from the Unguildables guild? (Parts I and II) Briefly, this rogue kept applying to join our guild and we kept denying him, so he formed his own guild out of the server’s unguildable players — those prone to drama or ninja’ing — then he did a late-night server transfer with the guild bank and told the Unguildables he had cut a deal with my guild for all of the them to join all of us in happy raid land.

I may have also told you (maybe I didn’t though), he returned to our server on a level one noobie rogue WITH THE SAME NAME as his thief character and was chatting it up with the crowd in Ironforge.

This is how that night went down. A few of us are sitting around in Ironforge after the night’s 40-man raid, marveling that our guild can kill anything with some of the “talent” we have, and I see in /say his noobie rogue chatting with a couple of our guild (ALLEGEDLY) female players. Let’s say his rogue is named Beneful.

Me: /officer wtf. is that fucking beneful?
Officer channel: He transferred. Remember?? He stole that guild bank.
Me: /officer Well I’m looking right at him in Ironforge. Who the fuck else would name their character with that dumass name?
Officer channel: Wow. That’s ballsy.
Me: (to one of the females chatting with him) Is that fucking beneful?
Her: teehee ya. He made a level 1 to chat with people. He’s lonely on his new server.
Me thinks: Musta run out of money.

Ordinarily, in this situation I’d be on high alert to carefully scour any rogue applicant to keep his thieving ass out of the guild, but as we hadn’t tagged a new rogue since 2005, high alert seemed unwarranted.

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Week of Fives: Five 2006 Assholes to Remember

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(Yanno. That title might end up in an interesting Google search too.)

Do enough multiplayer online gaming, say ten minutes or more, and you’re bound to run into assholes. These five, although entertaining in their own way, really went above and beyond the behavior of a typical jackass.

Five 2006 Assholes to Remember — so we can keep a close watch on them — three from me, two from Raster:

1. The Priest who would be queen. Of drama, that is. I haven’t told this story yet because it only wrapped up this week. (Months in the making, however.)

This woman was a long-time guildmember of ours — married, with small children, and a decent priest, truth be told. Over the past year, she’d been linked romantically with a few guildmembers — a couple several years her junior, and a couple around her age. (Not judging, just saying, how young before I step in and remind her that this might be approaching ILLEGAL? It was getting close to that point with a few of them.) At least one of these kids guys left the guild because she dumped him; the others just moped around as she frolicked with the new love interest. So far, not really any of my business … except for the possible legal ramifications of guild complicity.

Meanwhile, she’s denying a few priest applicants here and there, mostly for no reason at all. We’d ask the other priests, “what do you think?”, they’re all fine with the app’s she hated. But, what can ya do? Guildmember hates a new guy, that’s too bad for the new guy. I prefer the evil I know to the evil I don’t yet know.

Oh ya, did I mention she was an officer? Ummm yaaaa. That was another problem.

One week this summer she told the guild that she was sleeping with one of our mages who lived in a neighboring state. I didn’t really need quite that level of detail, “we’re in love”, “we’re a couple”, either of those would have been suitable, but there was no misunderstanding after her description of his particulars. They continued making the beast with two backs for about a month and then she announced that she had left her husband over the weekend, moved into an apartment and the happy couple would be living together soon, in paradise, as she sought a divorce.

Fucking great, cuz I knew that was doomed to fail. Eventually Mr. Mage is going to wake up and realize he signed on for a whole lot more than paradise and then there’s going to be trouble.

Another few weeks passed and she announced that she was stepping down from officership, and so was Mr. Mage. (Did I forget to mention that he was an officer too? Oops.) They were far too happy spending time together to retain their officer positions, or to raid or play Warcraft anymore.

No problem, our guildleader demoted her down to member and demoted her offline boyfriend to member also. We wished them well.

The next night, Mr. Mage logged on and All Emo broke loose when he saw he wasn’t an officer anymore. “YTF did we demote him???” “What were we thinking??” He was seriously ticked.

This was us: What. In. The. Fuck?

Someone explained that his girlfriend had told us they weren’t going to play anymore and please demote them. “WTF, she doesn’t speak for (him)!”

Ya, we should have known that. Somehow. I guess. All I knew was, there’s trouble in paradise. Maybe Mr. Mage had woken up and smelled the peanut butter on the Lil Tykes toys, I dunno.

Then this week, which is a month-ish since the “demotion incident”, she left the guild, after saying her goodbyes to a select few. She didn’t say goodbye to me, cuz I never respected their love or some shit, I forget the exact second-hand explanation. Whatever.

Someone asked Loverboy what was up with that and turns out, they had broken up that week (shocking!) and the guild wasn’t big enough for the two of them (equally shocking!)

FOR ONCE, we got the best part of a deal! Hallelujah, it’s gonna be a good week.

Hey, maybe she can sell her priest like she did her other character that we equipped in Tier 2 armor. Oops, did I forget to mention that too? (Foton)

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Gaming CSI

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The exciting, and bizarre, conclusion (I think, because ya never know with some of these internet headcases) to the story I began last Thursday. (LINK!) Briefly: Rogue apps to our guild and is denied, he forms his own guild for the Unguildables. EbayRogue, former guild member, joins the Unguildables after I torched his app to a rival guild. IWannaBeTheRaidLeaderTank, guildmember, helps out the Unguildables on a run in Le Molten Core. He gets Le Boot from our guild for his trouble and joins the Unguildables. That’s three people in the Unguildables who we should not count among our admirers.

So, there we were off the coast of Theramore Isle, on some godforsaken island, killing some quest mob for, what I have named, That Stupid Sceptor Quest. Here’s my issue with the TSSQ: we always call these fights right before the loot raids, the fights are mostly in remote areas or, at the least, in some area I haven’t visited in over 30 levels, and we usually are doing this mob for one guild guy. I say, if I’m hauling my lazy ass all the way out to Theramore, let’s run the bitch a few times, for everyone with TSSQ, so I won’t be bothered EVER AGAIN. But that’s just me, some people may enjoy leisurely flights to remote areas for a five-minute fight.

We were clearing the surrounding trash while our current Emo Tank was breathlessly describing exactly how he wanted us to off this bad guy, when our Raid Leader interrupted the Vent spam with “this is fucking unbelievable”. Thought I, this should be good. He’s seen it all, if he thinks it fucking unbelievable, it’s GOT to be good.

He explained — seems that each member of the Unguildables, one by one, was /telling him for a guild invite into our guild. I used the stalking magic of the /who command, and noted that the Unguildables guild was no more. No members, former members are now guildless and the officers are nowhere to be found. A gen-u-ine mystery!

Some of our more “connected” guildmembers sent out /tells to see if anyone knew the deal with the Unguildables and their officers. Our guildleader started talking with the other guildleaders. Everywhere across Azeroth, in all the raid zones of the world, entire raids were momentarily halted while we performed a little CSI on this crime scene.

Our raidleader, still dealing with “pls invite to guild” tells, tried to add the Unguildables guildleader to his friends list and discovered an important clue: Invalid. Player. Name. (Warcraft noobs: no such player exists on our server … anymore.)

He asked a few of the Unguildables, directly, why in the world they would ask for (read: expect to ever get) a guild invite. Oh, the Unguildables leadership had told them they were disbanding, they had arranged a merger with us, and, all members should send a tell to our raidleader for a guild invite. (Err, say what? Come again?)

I know most of the Warcraft player base is new to online multiplayer gaming … gaming CSI rookies … so I’ll outline the relevant clues: a dead guild, a missing guildleader, a diversion made for the former membership. We’re not dealing with a simple guild murder here, or a kidnapping, this is grand theft. (Cmon, who do you think held the guild bank?)

Realizing he was talking to innocent victims, our raidleader explained that guild invites would not be forthcoming … they had been duped. (Although all healers would be welcome to apply to our guild! heh) The time to petition was now, but don’t expect any satisfaction. There is no court system in online gaming — there is no justice, there are no reparations, there is only revenge.

As the server pooled its information, the entire scheme came to light: the Unguildables leadership had planned this for a few days … they had applied for server transfers, told the membership the guild was being disbanded, thanks for stopping, they had arranged a merger with us (how nice of them), please contact *RaidLeader’sGameName* for the invite, then they took the money and ran to a different server.

Of all the guild thefts I’ve witnessed over the years, this was a pretty good one — well planned, well executed. Almost professional, in fact.

I camped our realm forums for a few days, hoping a huge flamefest would spawn. All that came out of it was one feeble thread, which was only interesting because one of the motherfuckers posted that there was almost no money or items in the guild bank (Hail, A_Lie!) and he only kept that as payment for services rendered (Hail, A_Rationalization!) and he wished his former members well (Hail, A_Douchebag!).

The Unguildables membership was picked over by the raiding guilds — most joined another Guild for the Unguildables, a few remain guildless to this day. Poorer, but wiser, one could say.

That’s not what I would say. I’d say: Know thy Guild Banker’s phone number and address. I think you know where I’m going with that.