Sorry, It Just Slipped Out

Sorry it just slipped out.

/sigh - points to self
/guilty

The guild I belong to is a G-rated guild. There are underage people that are part of us. Use of foul language is a no-no and we actually have a chat channel set aside for adults. (no holds barred in there, though it runs to the mild side and is usually used to express one’s self in innuendo filled speech. LOL.)

I’m old enough to have heard all the swearwords. I believe in freedom of speech be it typed or spoken, scrawled in sand or carved in a tree, yelled or whispered. I also believe there are certain arenas in which a person must curb their desire for the attention they believe foul language affords them. Believe me, when I TYPE certain words I totally mean it, it is not a slip. But I do not do it in guild chat nor do I speak in an unseemly manner in a family restaurant where youngsters can hear me.

For example, in a G-rated guild. There are youngsters in there. I know, I know, we all believe the youngsters have already heard and said every swear word ever invented – we might even be correct. You know who else is in there? Me. And sometimes, the parents of children are watching.

I am somewhat uncomfortable if there is foul language around children. Other peoples’ kids. There is a sense of responsibility that rears up in me – A desire to project a modicum of gentility – to the underage people who belong to our group. (Oh the trouble, if the youngsters parent happened to stop by and read the g-chat – I don’t want our nice guild to be a source of contention in a family.)

But what should be done if the offending party is in fact a minor? Well, simply enforce the rules of conduct set up for G-chat and remind him/her that we don’t use that kind of language out of courtesy for others.

A few weeks ago, someone typed a word that means the act of intercourse -- I believe they were expressing frustration about a pug – and when reminded about the rules of G-chat, they responded by typing, “I can’t help it, it just slips out.” The person went on to say that perhaps they need to quit the guild as they are tired of being told to “watch” their language in g-chat. I responded in whispers that they should do what they feel is best for themselves if they feel unwelcome because of the cursing rule.

Perhaps processing the word in the mind and moving it down the arms into the fingers and onto a keyboard can be a slip - /Shrug. Maybe. I contend though that the person that is cursing is a person who has learned to control himself in other arenas e.g. public defecation. The urge to defecate is usually a bit more urgent than the urge to curse, yet we pretty much all have learned to “help it.”

stinking mess – “Please don’t do that here. Okay?”
“Sorry, it just slipped out.”

No, Doctor, I Don't want to discuss this!

Remembering that first 5-man.
No, doctor, I DON’T want to talk about it!

Yes, I know I’m paying good money for your time. Doesn’t that mean I can decide what to disclose to you about my personality known as Esi? No? /sigh.
. . . . . . . . . . .

Esiwlil was a wee gnome mage at the time of the traumatic experience. She did not belong to a guild, or have a core group of friends running around with her. It was a dark day.

A stranger came close and whispered into her ear. (I know she should have run away from the stranger danger, but well, Esiwlil was innocent in the ways of the World.) The stranger asked her if she would like some candy from a place called Scarlet Monastery. What’s more innocent than candy? Esi bounced up and down in her excitement to be invited to go with four strangers (4??) to church. It all sounded so safe.

“What is this place you are speaking of? How do I get there? YES! I wanna come!” She was so proud and felt so excited to be singled out by these strangers (Yes, strangers!) to come help them in the Monastery. And off she went.

They didn’t talk to her. They didn’t tell her what they wanted her to do. She had no idea, she was just caught up in the excitement. She had a new wand she wanted to try out. /shrug. One of them said, just fight when we fight.

/nod. “Okay, I can do that! Wow, thank you soo much for asking me to come along!”

/eyeroll

The strangers and Esi fought their way deeper and deeper into the Monastery. Esi saw many books – she wanted to stop and look around, but everyone just pulled her along so fast, she stumbled trying to keep up. After all, she needed to do good to impress her new friends. (Friends?)

“Look at this! Look at this nice knife!” one of the strangers said. Then they handed Esiwlil a piece of paper that had choices on it. Make a mark, the paper read. About the knife. Do you want it? Three choices.

No one explained the paper to her. They just thrust it in front of her face and said, make a mark in one of the boxes for the knife.

Esi looked at the choices. She was so careful. She knew she did not want to check “pass” as the blade was a good blade. She read “greed” and “need” and knew that being greedy was a bad thing if you wanted to make and keep friends. She confidently picked need. The blade magically was in her hand!



Suddenly the group of strangers turned on her. One of then slapped her and another spit on her. She was kicked and pummeled. She cried out asking what was wrong.

“You are so stupid!!” “You are horrible!”

Esi was so hurt and confused, but her tears and wails went unheard by any. Suddenly she was alone. Running for her life! She could not see through the tears.
- - - - - - - -
Doctor, why do I have to talk about this? It still hurts. I don’t like remembering that Esi was sooo stupid, dumb!!! /cry.

“What did you do after that? Immediately after?”

Me? You mean Esi, right? She remembered the name of the stranger that had whispered into her ear and wrote a very heartfelt letter, apologizing for what she had no idea she did. She begged him to forgive her and tell her what happened. She admitted in her letter that she had only came to the big city a few days prior and was still trying to learn her way in the big world.

She went home, and lay down and sobbed the rest of the day. Her chance at having a friend and she had messed it up.

She never received an answer. Time passed. The stranger’s name forgotten. But Esiwlil learned that day that the word “need” was such a bad word in her world that using it would cause others to spit on her. She had been brought up to believe that “greed” was a bad word. The confusion caused her to be very frightened, especially of strangers. Which pretty much everyone was. Her growth was stunted.

She now knows that the stranger should have talked to her about the rules of their gang before she ran with them. It was his responsibility, not hers.

“How did that affect you?”
“Me? You mean Esi? She um still tried to make friends and go places and do things with ‘em but she stopped even looking at the treasures her friends found for fear of messing up again. You see to her, friendship is way more important than a knife.”

THEM

The other guys. You know THEM (not us).

Scenario . . .

Esiwlil, a little level 6 mage just running for her life from wolves, defias gang, and spiders in Elwin forest runs into the village of Goldshire. Whew! As she stands panting in front of the inn, she sees and hears a commotion. What is that? A huge Tauren warrior, so far ahead of her in levels she can’t even see his level. The Chuck Norris of Warriors! She watches in horror as he swings his axe and kills 4 toons in 2 seconds. Her hands clench a little stick of a staff, but she has just learned a couple of new spells. She positions herself in the doorway of the inn, takes a deep breath and casts a bolt of pain. As the bolt barely touches the Tauren Hordie, she becomes “marked” and the Tauren laughs at her pitiful attempt as he slices through her without even seeming to move. She falls. Dead. She can hear the Tauren laughing even from the graveyard. As a spirit now, she runs back into the doorway where her body is laying twisted in death. Horror!

She can see that she is still marked and remains a ghost for 5 minutes. The mark goes away. She bends and caresses her own dead face and re-enters life. She is shaking a little and needs time to regain a bit of health and Mana (the force that allows her to use magic), but she is safe because she waited until she were no longer marked PVP.

The Tauren is still there. He is dancing on the body of his latest victim. Furious and fearful at the same time, the little mage yells . . . “Where are all the heros of this land!? Don’t you care that we apprentices of warcraft are being dealt death from this brute?”

Someone yells back, “Leave him alone!” or “Ignore him.” But, the mage looks around and sees that all the NPCs are dead and so she cannot speak with them. She really needs to speak with someone about this last quest, right now. But they are all dead. Killed by the Hordie, by the “THEM”.

She yells, “They are killing us all! We need help!” “Please?” She remains hopeful that some high level will come to rescue the denizens of the town of Goldshire from this horrible fate. Hordies. “They are dancing and making chicken noises at us . . . Where are the he . . .” Her voice falters as she sees a group of her allies riding (They have horses? Wow!) down the street toward the Tauren. Her allies are all very big, wearing armor that glitters and shines and they carry huge weapons.

Big fight! Tauren dies! Finally! . . . most of the others new toons make their way to the newly spawned NPCs to continue their gameplay, but not Esi. She looks at her saviors and /bows and /claps and /cheers and /dances!! She is ecstatic!! “Thank you, Thank you!!”

Those allies on horseback (they have horses!) . . /nod to her, turn and saunter back to the big city of Stormwind.

---------------------------------------------


In World of Warcraft there are enemies or “bad guys.” For example I might walk up to a computer generated character and this character gives me a quest (a job) to go kill, lets say, a character named “Hogger”. Now Hogger is a computer generated character that when engaged will fight and give me the chance to kill and loot him, thus completing a particular quest. I then go back to the quest giver to let him know I completed the task he has set me, and he rewards me with goods, money, and/or experience. (He has killed me several times!)

Hogger is NOT the THEM .

To play World of Warcraft you create a character or a “toon”. For example you may be human, dwarf, gnome, nightelf, draenai, death knight on the Alliance Faction or troll, orc, tauren, undead, bloodelf, death knight on the Horde faction. Since my character, Cantique is a dwarf, I am Alliance. That means all Horde are THE OTHER GUYS.

You cannot have both factions in one guild. You cannot have the other guys as “friends” in your in-game friend list. In fact they even speak a different language. You cannot send mail (unless the other guy is one of your toons and you are sending a piece of equipment called heirlooms which are bound to your account with Blizzard.) You cannot group with the other side to go into a dungeon. You cannot trade with them.

You can “emote”. An emote is something like /dance or /rude or /laugh, wave, hug, kiss, poke and on and on. You can purchase items they have placed on neutral auction houses. You cannot go into one of their towns or cities without serious consequences from the computer generated characters or from actual players!

Upon entering the other guys’ cities you activate something called PVP. PVP stands for Player (real person) versus Player. Suddenly any of those OTHER GUYS can attack you whether you want to fight or not!! (NOTE: There are different servers where you are always tagged PVP as well.) I happen to belong to a RP (role play) server. So, unless I do something to cause myself to go PVP I am safe from THE OTHER GUY.
Gotta go for now, /wave /bow ….

Guilds

GUILD:

an organization of persons with related interests, goals, etc., esp. one formed for mutual aid or protection.

In the online game of World of Warcraft a person can join a guild. I have belonged to three types of guilds:

Personal – family – bank: This guild is created by getting ten signatures on a guild application (charter). You name your guild and kick everyone out except yourself or the peeps you wish to have access to the guild bank. This type of guild is usually only held for extra bank space in order to keep more in game stuff. You might be the only one in it. It is up to you. I belonged to one at the very beginning of my gameplay because when I first created my “toon” another character ran up to me and whispered “you wanna be in my guild?” (In the game a whisper is a form of communication that only the whisperer and the person whispered to can see.) The name of his guild had something to do with The Lord of The Rings and nothing to do with World of Warcraft. At the time I had no idea this was considered “un-cool”. Anyway I said “Sure!” and poof! He promoted me to guild leader and left. I was the only one there. LOL. I imagine him saying to his friends, “Yeah I dumped it on a noob in Northshire. (Noob is a word that means New to something … Newbie … thus noob – I think).

I had no idea what to do. I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the guild, so I invited family members to it and we used it for extra bank space. Eventually a GM in WOW made us change the name of the guild. It didn’t matter to us, we didn’t name it to begin with.

In the cities with banks and mailboxes you can always find characters around that are called “bank alts”. What that is, is a toon that created just to have extra places for holding stuff. Lots of times these bank alts create a guild just for the purpose of purchasing guild bank space. In order to do the bank alt guild thing, you find 10 people willing to sign your charter and then kick them out of the guild once you have it. (Please let people know this is your intention.) Some indication that a character you see standing in the bank, auction house, or at the mailbox is a bank alt with a guild is sometimes the name of the guild. “Stuff Box”, or “Bankie Doll” or other names like that. It makes sense that a lot of people dress their bank alt in tuxedos or pretty dresses. Those toons don’t usually ever leave the city to enter the grubby, dangerous world of quests and fights.

Role Play Guild: I remember very well the day I was running through the main square of the trade center in Stormwind and someone whispered me, “You want to join a role play guild?” I stopped and looked around for the character that sent me that “tell”. (When someone whispers to you, their name is attached at the beginning of the sentence so that you know who is speaking to you.) I saw a tall night elf druid standing there with a voodooish wooden type mask on. His name was Olwei. I whispered back, “What is Role Play?” He explained something I had already been doing without realizing it. Whenever I interacted with others on the game, I always tried to “be” the character I was. Not the real me, but the female dwarf (at that time Nanaive).

I joined the guild. It was amazing and fun! Within the hour one of the leaders of the guild (I believe it was Adrahan) found me and brought me some very nice big bags to replace the tiny ones I was using to hold my stuff. (He didn’t have to, he just did.) I was so grateful I almost cried. I was new, someone other than my family asked me to be part of them, and then amazingly they encouraged me immediately by introducing themselves and chatting.

When you join a guild, there is something called a Guild Chat Channel. You join the channel for your guild, and everyone in the guild that is online at the moment can “talk” to each other – no matter where they are in the huge world of WOW.

I learned a lot about role play. There was a guildmate named Alastyr and whenever I accidentally said something that didn’t fit into the rp category he would sort of tease me into doing it the right way. For example, I was running down the road and saw a character that had been killed (either by a wild animal or a mob (bad guy) or even by a Horde – ((oh boy, we’ll talk about the other faction later!))

I said in the role play channel, “Oh no! There is someone here named Sillyboy dead in the road. (I don’t really remember the name of the toon) -- Alastyr immediately typed OOCly – out of character – “Um, how did you know this dead persons name?”

Please note: If you are role playing, you actually aren’t supposed to know anyone’s name even though it is listed with his character when you look at him -- unless you are actually introduced or the character himself tells you his name.

I quickly joked, “Well, didn’t you know that people have begun engraving weapons with their names? – His sword is laying right here with him.” Anyway, point is there are rules to role play and belonging to a role play guild is a challenge. There are usually role play events scheduled and lots of fun in the chat channel.

Raiding Guild: After making a lot of friends and some enemies in the game, I found myself needing to leave the world of serious role play for a while. I wrote in an earlier post – Emo means emotional – part of the reason I found myself guildless one day.

As it happened, I had known the leaders of The Illuminati before there was a guild by that name. I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, but I asked Vowain for a home. I just needed to be somewhere safe, and have the comfort and joy of guildchat. I was very nervous to make the change – and at the time – I was very discouraged with the game. The Illuminati graciously allowed me to be a part of them. I am so blessed and as time passed I found that the guild fit me like a very good bra. Necessary and supportive without being restrictive. AND – They did stuff I hadn’t really done much of, something called “raiding.”

I had never had to think about my gear before, or my talents, or my enchants, or my glyphs, or my gems, or my base stats or . . . anything that had to do with being an asset to a group - fighting a good fight. Whew.

I have learned a lot. Some of the questions I asked seemed so basic now, but the patience of everyone in the guild came through. I had NO idea what I was doing. I wrote stuff down. I watched others, I listened.

“FLEX”….

GUILD: an organization of persons with related interests, goals, etc., esp. one formed for mutual aid or protection.

Gamers
Dorks
Nerds
Friends
Family

Get Screenshot or It Didn't Happen

Get Screenshot or it didn’t happen.

Really. Sometimes things happen in-game that are amazing. It might be a feat you’ve accomplished or something absolutely funny that someone said. If you want to brag a bit or remember what someone said . . . STOP and push the Print Screen Button. Mine is right there on top of my keyboard. These screen shots will automatically be saved in your World of Warcraft screenshots folder. (Mine are.)

There is a guildmate named Sophrosune – She has created an Illuminati member album of some funny screen shots of conversations in her chat window. It is funny stuff. When I look at those I laugh. Her album encourages me to use my screenshot button more!

Two things happened to me and I DID NOT GET MY SCREENSHOT…I was too excited, sigh, so basically they might as well have not happened.

1. I’ve been having more and more fun with the LFD (Looking for Dungeon) tool in the game. At first it was scary and sad but once I got over the “but they’re not peeps that I know” and the fear of being kicked out of the group – I actually started seeing the funny stuff and having amazing things pop up.

I am a shadow priest and have been struggling to get good DPS (damage per second) in fights. Typical for me in 5-man right now is around 2000 to 3000 dps. Well, I went in with a pug the other day to one of the Uptgard dungeons. The tank (Tanks are the characters whose job it is to stand toe to toe with the enemy and dish out a pounding and take the pounding because they have the armor and the skills to do so – thus they are called tanks) said, “Do not hit anything until I stop moving.”

In other words he wanted us to follow him into the room full of bad guys and not cast any spells, or use a knife or do any type of damage, because he wanted all the bad guys in the area to concentrate on him and leave the rest of us alone. That is so he could gather them all up and we could then help him take them down all at once -- sometimes this makes for a faster run (fight).

He gathered them up and stopped running. The rest of us began our fight. When it was over, someone in the group typed “Wow! Shadow priest what did you do?” I looked and saw that I had done 12,000 dps!! I was very excited, but I only said – AOE FTW!

(“Area of Effect for the win” – There are spells that can be cast that affect more than one target at a time and the damage done is applied to them all – for instance a hunter might rain a sky full of arrows down on them, a mage might rain fireballs or ice from the sky on the enemy and so on. That is called Area of Effect or AOE.)

I did NOT get a screen shot of that. I wish I had. I don’t usually brag, but that actually was a very exciting thing to happen for me.

2. Another time, I had a run with a 5-man group and one of the characters was named Robinwilliams. I didn’t think anything of it. Within a few minutes of the end of the run someone in guild chat mentioned that Robin Williams plays WOW. What a coincidence. Of course I said that I had just run with someone with the character name Robinwilliams (which could be anyone but who knows, right?) Because of the timing of the conversation and my run, it seemed a bit fishy I’m sure – but cross my heart … it happened. Again NO SCREENSHOT as the run was over a minute before I saw the guild chat.

Well, I now have a habit of getting screen shots at the beginning of each dungeon showing where I am and whom I am with.

And who knows? I might have brushed avatar shoulders with the famous Robin Williams. Maybe.

So remember -- Get Screenshot or it didn’t happen.