Oh, no, I was just stereotyping. Certainly I don’t know what made them do that, for sure. But it’s very common, and I doubt you’d contend this, that there are a large number of internet tough guys - people who are emboldened by the internet because they’re not restricted to being the meek people they tend to be in real life. Most likely, that’s at work here, but there’s no way to know conclusively.
I think it’s pretty clear that the people messing with the funeral were jerks. Yes, it’s a game, but there are REAL people playing the game, with REAL grief about the REAL death of their REAL friend.
And screwing with these people during a funeral, even in a game-world, is a jerkish thing to do.
On the other hand, it might have been a piece of poor judgement to hold this funeral in a place where such things can happen, without taking any precautions against it. Doesn’t excuse the behavior of the funeral crashers though.
Then they should have held a REAL funeral in the REAL world outside of the UNREAL game world. So it was a jerkish thing to do. There’s still nothing in the rules that says that they can’t do something like that.
Yes it DOES excuse the behaviour of the funeral crashers. They were acting fully within the rules and accepted practices of the PvP game world.
You guys are still debating this? It fell off the WoW forums weeks ago and went the way of Leeroy Jenkins. Their 15 minutes of fame were up. Time to move on to the next drama.
Dead horses and treadmills and all that stuff you know, we have to keep flogging it just in case. 
No it doesn’t. Jerkish behavior in a game can ruin it. “Rules and accepted practices” or not.
Here is the problem: There are those of us who look at this in the game context. If the world which this game represents, if someone tried to hold a funeral of sorts in a disputed area that was well known, it would certainly be raidd. That is because in the WoW world is based on characters that are in constant combat, they are murderers jerks and the such. Or real world rules of decorum have no place in this game.
Then there is the other side of the coin, noting that this was about a person who really died and that folks, although as their charcters were really trying to mourn as their real selves, inthe only arena that makes sense - where they all knew each other. It is the best proxy they could come up with to a real world gathering, whhich wold clearly seem to dictate non-jerkish behaviour from others. So you would think that normal folks would respect those who are trying to remember their friend. It should be treated as if this was a real life gathering, It isn’t like they were mourning a "character’s death, whcih would put it fully in the context of the game. Therefore, the raiders are jerks.
I tend to go toward the first explanation. It quite simply is the game, and you cannot make arobitrary distinctions between what is normally apropriate behaviour in the game becoming changed because of the desires of a select few. I fyou wish to act, gather,mourn within the context of the game, then you must treat as such. Post sentries, have it somewhere less volatile, don’t announce it, or simply don’t have it. You simply cannot presume other players to change their game sensibilities to satisfy your desires.
I’m rather surprised that so many people seem to have absolutely no problem with the alleged memorial interruption. Yes, it is just a game, but that’s exactly why crashing a memorial is jerkish behaviour. There’s just no need for it.
The memorial, misguided as it was, appeared to be entirely harmless. It looked like it was being held in Moonglade, an extremely out-of-the-way and rarely-visited part of the game world if I recall correctly, and was very unlikely to have affected anyone who didn’t want to be involved in it. The people who interrupted it could have chosen to ignore the memorial and carry on with their usual business, and their own game would not have been impaired in the slightest if they’d taken that option; there were certainly hundreds of willing opponents left on the server with whom they could still have PvPed in a mutually enjoyable manner.
And so it sounds like they didn’t want to play the game as normal, they rather wanted to annoy people. That’s what jerks do.
While the rest of your points certainly are valid, the same sentiment here could be applied to the “mourners” as well as the crashers… They didn’t want to play the game as normal, they wanted to interrupt the game (and yes, it was a minor interruption but an interruption none the less) to bring their own real world problems into the shared game world.
I would have had a problem if i found out something like this went ahead uninterrupted. You don’t even know if this person is really dead, what if it had gone on unmolested and someone decided “well since that went so well why dont we hold church services in the middle of a pvp area every weekend”. Would people be justified in attacking them then? i mean only an asshole would disrupt a church service in real life, it must be the same in a game right? would it then become standard practice to hold a memorial for every wow customer that suposedly dies? At 6.5 million and rising thats gotta be one or two a day that kicks the bucket at least. Those people where wrong to hold their memorial there, and as someone who has played on a pvp server since launch i can tell you no one could possibly have thought it was going to go on unmolested. Posting the time and date and place to me seems nothing short of baiting.
Winterspring a 55+ contested zone on a PvP server… many quests for both sides run in theis area. A group of either side holding position could easily attract raids from the other side even with little planning.
Hmm, that was Winterspring? That would make quite a difference, as that’s often a very busy area. I apologise, then, for my error… and in that case I can’t help but wonder if the ‘mourners’ were perhaps cruising for a memorial mêlée rather than a quiet service. Indeed, it could well be that the whole thing has just become blown out of proportion due to chronic miscommunication.
They very probably were. As I posted earlier in the thread, they announced this memorial on their realm forums, called “illidrama”, which are known to be mostly populated by members of this Alliance guild. It was like they were asking for it to happen. You know, to create drama. Not that people ever do that on the internet. 
Good thing people don’t get too involved in these games. 250+ posts seems reasonable. :rolleyes:
Never played it in my life, and don’t particularly want to.
These people were clearly doing it for the sake of being jerks. The people attending the funeral were probably spread across continents, having a funeral in person isn’t reasonable.
Yippee fucking yeehah. Holding a fake funeral in a contested area on a PvP server and expecting to NOT get attacked isn’t reasonable either.
I love posts like these. Define “too involved.” I’ll have to check, but do people weigh in with snide comments like these when thread about “Buffy” or other pop culture type subjects go on for pages and pages? Or is just for stuff like WoW that certain folk feel free to be snottily superior about? It’s a pastime, a hobby, like anything else. The controversy that’s extending the thread is from people extrapolating upon people’s real-life character based their behavior in a video game. Cue hand-wringing about decline of civility in modern culture. wankwankwank
Sheesh I keep hoping this thread will die already. There seems to be four points of view.
- The memorial was a sacred event that should have been respected no matter the circumstance.
- The memorial may not have been the brightest idea but the people that crashed it were total assholes
- The memorial was a bad idea so while the crashers were assholes the mourners were just as much at fault they should have chosen either a non-pvp area or had a memorial website.
- The memorial was an inappropriate usage of game space and the crashers were right to fuck with it.
(and an optional number 5 the whole thing was a hoax)
I’m on number three myself but I think (mostly) everyone has good points for their side.
Dude… jerkish behavior in WoW is the order of the day. One day, one of my guildmates got ganked (group killed) by several horde. He called for backup because they were camping his corpse. We arrived, we killed the horde that ganked the guildmate, then proceded to kill every horde we came upon. All of my guild there were level 60’s. We killed everyone, and we were in a level 30 to 40 area (STV to you who know the game). We were jerks to a lot of players that were just trying to quest in peace. We were trying to get a big PvP thing going in the area, but alas… not enough horde showed up to make it a real challenge.
Guilds of both factions camp the entrance to Blackrock mountain. This is because there are a lot of quests to be done in the instances in the mountain and you can get a lot of easy kills on group members entering separately.
It’s a game. The object of the game is to level up, get fat loot (;)), and make life as hard as you can for the opposing faction.
I’m not saying that the Alliance guild weren’t being jerks… but it ruined nothing and the Horde guild should have known better.