Thursday, April 21, 2011

Meet GUILDoS, Your Synthetic Raid Leader

Hello, and welcome to your Tuesday-night raid.  We're going to have SO much fun together. With Warcraft!

We've got a new member tonight. He's a rogue.  I think his name is Stabbins, but it's hard to tell because he uses a lot of special characters in it.  He's a real person, though, with real feelings, unlike me.  Well, I wasn't programmed to have feelings, but thanks to my experiences with all of you, I've learned how to feel rage and disgust.

Anyway, welcome to the guild, Stabbins.

We're doing Blackwing Descent tonight.  Are you ready to raid?  Yes? Are you excited?  Well that's just super, because I've got a surprise for you.  Are you ready?

You're not going to Blackwing Descent, you green-dagger using idiot.  Not tonight. Not ever.  You're the worst player anyone has ever seen, and I hate you.  All of us hate you.

I just sent you a guild-invite because I couldn't believe that a real person could write such an incoherent guild application.  You also have a terrible armory profile.  The spec you've designed is a marvel of human ingenuity.  The talent-tree revamp was supposed to make it impossible for you to do it so aggressively wrong, but you found a way.  So we just wanted to bring you here so we could look at you.

And now we've seen you. And you're ugly.

Anyway, thanks for being hilarious, Stabbins.  We don't need you anymore.  Incoming /gkick!

[StàBBïñž has left the guild]

GOODBYE!

The funny thing about Stabbins is that I just kicked him a minute ago and now I already miss him.  Maybe I was a little harsh.  Let me run my calculations again.

[StàBBïñž has joined the guild]

Hello!  We were only giving you a little initiation, Stabbins.  Thanks for being such a good sport about it.  Are you ready to raid? Great!

JUST KIDDING!  EVERYBODY HATES YOU!

[StàBBïñž has left the guild]

Now I miss him again.  It's too bad that he's gone because we disenchanted all those daggers last week.  When we disenchant all the daggers again tonight, remind me to take a screenshot, so I can send it to him later.  He'll enjoy that.

Okay, let's get started.  RazerFaze, try to do better at running away from the sound waves on Atramedes tonight.  Your wife left you because you spend too much time playing games, so it really seems like you should not be so bad at them.

Pulling in 5...4...3...

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Secretly Disabled WoW Player (Hates You)

Want to know a secret? I haven't got any hands. A few of my guild's officers know about this, and they have been very open-minded and accepting. In general, though, I don't like to tell people about it because I don't want to be judged.

Specifically, I don't want to hear obnoxious, bigoted wisecracks about rolling my face against the keys, especially from all the jerks who have ten perfectly-functioning fingers and still can't manage to strafe out of the way of a slow-moving fireball.

For the record, I do not play with my face. I've got a special keyboard I can use with my wrist-stumps, and an elaborate set of keybinds and macros that I perfected over hundreds of hours of careful testing. So when you refuse to turn on Ventrilo during a progression raid because you are too busy watching Dane Cook DVDs to pay attention to the fights, I just want you to know how profoundly disgusted I am with you.

This is not a hard game. Do you want to know how I know this? Because I can play it. I approach pretty much everything with the attitude that I don't have limitations. I drive, I enjoy French cooking, and I logged a hundred hours last year in a Piper Cub aircraft. But, although I've tried every kind of prosthetic available, I have to accept the fact that I am never going to be scoring crazy headshots in Call of Duty or clearing God of War. There is simply no device on the market that can enable me to hold a console controller and press those little buttons.

I can play WoW, though. So the question is: why can't you?

How can you sit there, with your undamaged digits and grasping thumbs, and whine so much? Did you seriously come to the forums to talk about how heroics are hard? I'll tell you what's hard: going to a job interview where the people refuse to look you in the eye.

Did you seriously complain that it's unfair that you don't get a "Satchel of Exotic Mysteries" because you only play a hunter? It's unfair that you don't get a GOODY BAG for playing a VIDEO GAME with your UNDAMAGED HANDS? Do you want me to tell you about unfair? I'm not even going to rise to that bait.

Here's a tip: the reason you die to Magmaw isn't that Magmaw is too hard. You die to Magmaw because you keep standing in the Pillar of Flame. Maybe you should consider not doing that. The universe is not a hostile force aligned against you. You manage to fail despite countless luxuries and advantages that you take entirely for granted.

Guess how many corrupting crashes I stood in during the last Cho'Gall kill? Zero. Why do you always have a tentacle sticking out of your back after the second big minion? Don't you dare say you had bad luck with the worshipping. I know that's a lie, because that's what you said last time, after you wiped us by puking on the raid halfway through phase one. I set you to focus just to make sure you got immediate interrupts when you were hit with worship, and you only got it once.

What do you mean what is a focus? Are you serious? ARE YOU SERIOUS?