If they wanted an uninterruptible memorial a website or message board (that they could remove any offensive posts) would be good. However they choose their game space. That’s fine however their choice had certain risks that include party crashers. On top of that the fact that their was plenty of ‘safe’ zones only compounds the oddness of their choice.
I’d say that a baseball game is very different you have two professional teams coming together at a particular time to play. A memorial would hardly interrupt play. This was a server where attacking the opposing side was the normal behavior. They wished to disrupt that with their private moment. If someone decided to have a prayer meeting on the PvP area should other gamers be forced to respect that? How about private parties? Simple fact is they had to know before hand they were having a private moment in a public place and had to rely on people agreeing not to play their game during that time in the manner they choose. Was it an unreasonable request? I’m about 50/50 on it. Were the people that attacked them jerks? They indeed were. Were the attackers wrong? No.
Well the fact was it was a game with a PvP toggle added to the fact that Eve (from what I understand I never played it) has ‘safe’ zones and highly dangerous ones.
It’s not horrible to ask people not to be assholes. It’s absurd to assume people will change the standard of behavior (ie attacking enemies on site in PvP areas) for your private moment just because you decide to have it.
I think Blizz aren’t going to do anything. No rules were broken, and we’ve already seen Blizz isn’t entirely bothered with gaining good publicity since their whole anti-gay-guild-advertising policy.
What the gatecrashers did was wrong, and as they themselves said, assholish. In a perfect world, those that participated would get their characters deleted. It may be a game, yes, but they gatecrashed a gathering for a real person.
On the other hand, the funeral-holding guild were pretty foolish, too. I’m not surprised they’d want to do something ingame rather than just on a message board - i’m sure if one of your close friends on this board died, you’d prefer to phone/meet others you knew, rather than just posting on here (if that was an option) - but holding it in a contested area after advertising it was pretty much asking for trouble. They should have known what they’d get; hell, if there was a “self-destruct the server” button in the game, there’d be crowds fighting to press the damn thing, because WoW players epitomise assholishness and self-image loving. Sure, there’s a contigent that are respectful, but that’s a minority.
The worst thing that’s going to come out of this? Copycats. You can bet if anyone else tries to hold a funeral such as this, even if it’s outside a contested zone, guilds are going to try their hardest to fuck it up, and video it. “We’re assholes too” is a caption that’ll haunt google videos for a while.
And after combing through the rest of the thread, I’m of the opinion this really belongs in the Pit. I’ll contact my guild and see if they’ll allow me to move it to that server.
I do agree that it would probably have been infinitely more intelligent to hold the service in the Valley of Spirits in Orgrimmar.
Wow. You’re actually calling hypocrite on this? Did you not just fucking say that it’s wrong, but legal to go through East Baltimore shouting racial epithets? And you’re using it as an analogy to the raid. So the raid is like something that is wrong but legal. Then you’re saying they should be punished not by the other players but by the authorities. Do you understand the difference between an official sanction and the actions of a private individual?
I was thinking about this a bit and decided that you probably don’t fully get how I view this incident. So I thought up an admittedly strained analogy
I see it as two boxers in a ring. Just before the third round Boxer A (creative name I know) announces that he’s going to spend the first 10 seconds of round three in peaceful reflection upon his recently deceased father who loved boxing more then anything and he’d appreciate it if Boxer B just waited in his corner.
At the bell Boxer B comes out and pops Boxer A in the mouth.
Who was wrong in this incident? Both were to some extent. There would have been little harm in Boxer B respecting the situation but he wasn’t bound to it.
Oh, I see this has been moved to the Pit… um… you goat felchers?
From what I understand, the specific location was a favorite of the player who “died” (if they really did… I’m always somewhat wary of internet deaths).
But, by the same token it seems to smack of entitlement to suppose that because you want to bring the real world into a game, that everybody else should stop playing the game so that you can indulge your desires.
Well, I’m not even really disagreeing with the emotional impact. I’m sure it could be quite sad. But the fact remains that they went into a game where a large portion of the whole point is players fighting players, and asked that players not fight players so that they could satisfy their emotional requirements. It just doesn’t seem to be the proper venue.
Heck, a little planning could have yielded a fine compromise. They could’ve emailed the admins and had PvP disabled for the duration of the funeral. Or, even better yet, they could have simply taken a screen cap of the location and made a memorial page with all the guild members adding a quote.
Definitely. But it still strikes me as fundamentally inapropriate. People pay money for the game, and log on to a PvP server in order to, among other things, fight other players. Someone bringing in non-game matters shouldn’t, IMO, be given the right to stop other people from enjoying the game.
Well… the situation is a bit nuanced, I suppose. It was a rather jerkish thing to do, to bumrush the memorial service… but still, I can’t find it in me to find fault with them. And the more I think about it, the more I think that the people who tried to stop the normal course of a game for selfish reasons are the ones who should’ve done something differently.
Fair enough… different analogy then: trying to hold a memorial service in a lasertag arena, during a match.
Well, as I’d wager you can guess, I’d be totally opposed to that.
I’d argue that one of the rules of society is that you don’t interrupt people playing a game and tell them to be quiet so you can mourn.
I mean, heck, we’re talking about a game with talking cow-like-creatures that scratch themselves, various werewolf lookin’ things jumping about, magic spells, and players fighting players. It just does not seem like the proper place to mourn.
Eh… I don’t think that one’s personal grief trumps others’ ability to play a game as it was intended to be played. There is a proper time and place for mourning.
They might… but I’d think that the people who expected others to stop playing and having fun were being jerks.
It wasn’t a pretend funeral in a pretend game for a pretend person. If it was some kind of memorial for some in game persona or character or something I’d be yucking it up with the rest of y’all. You forget tho that all those characters running around in WoW are controlled by real people. This was a real person who really actually died, you know, for real? His friends, both RL and from the game were having a memorial service for him. You may think that the form their memorial took was stupid. I may think that it was stupid. That doesn’t matter. When someone is having a funeral or a memorial service for a dead loved one or friend, common human decency demands that you bow your head respectfully and offer condolences. When Cristi died, were you shitting in her memorial thread? How about Poopa Chalupa? He fell off a freeway overpass, ha, ha, what a moron, right? What’s the difference? There is none, just as there is no difference between what these assholes did and what Fred Phelps does. Both are completely legal. Both are wrong.
I understand the difference perfectly well. It’s because it’s a private venue that I think Bliz should ban all of them and delete their characters. While I may personally wish that someone would shoot Fred Phelps right between the eyes, I’ll defend to the death his right to stand outside of funerals and be an asshole, and I do not think he should be arrested or confined by the authorities. That does not mean that if Fred wants to protest on private property that the owner shouldn’t kick him off. Blizzard is a private company, and as such, freedom of speech rules do not apply to them. They want (or should want) to foster an atmosphere for entertaining game play on their realms. These hemorrhoids hurt that goal. Because they are a private organization, they have no obligation to tolerate the online version of Phelps. They can and should ban them. As for those of you nattering on about the “ultimate punishment” nonsense, please. It’s a stupid game. If they want to be assholes they can go play D&D online or EQ or something else, just like when people get banned here they are free to post at any other message board they want. When someone shits in your online pea patch, you have every right to prevent them from coming back.
Could someone explain-what is a PVP and what is a contested area?
Argh 
. Big post all lost due to gremblins. Damnit! Serves me right for not saving it in notepad first. Oh well. :wally
I haven’t seen anyone yet saying that what these guys did was the right or even a decent thing to do. Hell, if I was in this guild and this was all being planned out, I’d decline politely to join in, and even look at leaving the guild and finding another. Because it is an asshole thing to do, and they really shouldn’t have done it at all.
But the fact of the matter still stands - real person who is dead or not, the Horde group did this thing in an area where they could not control the outcome. Not everyone reads the realm forums. I know most of my guild never did. If a group of Alliance had’ve gotten wind of this, but not known it was a funeral procession, and still come down on a raid would there be the same outcry over it? I agree with the idea that Blizz need to look into this, and perhaps look at creating some sort of ‘chapel’ or other gathering space that a guild can rent out to use for these sort of things. I’ll even agree that Blizz should look over the ToS and get a bit more specific on what actually defines ‘harassment’, and get a bit more serious about warning and enforcing that rule. But I certainly don’t agree that the people involved on the attacking side should have every toon and account deleted or slammed back to 0. As I said before, there’s a video here and that shows what happened. Fine. But if the rules are changed in that way, and people are deleted for this, what’s to stop any raid being played out this way… “Hey, we were mourning here you arseholes. Ban them Blizz!”
People have brought up Eve Online vs WoW in this argument. With good cause. They’re both PvP oriented games. You take your “life” into your hands every time you move outside protected areas. But there’s a subtle difference. I’ve played both games, and IMHO, Eve tends to attract an older, and more mature set of players. Sure there’s jerks here and there, but for the most part, the players take the game seriously and I believe would honour this kind of thing (though I still woudn’t do it in 0.0 space). WoW, on the other hand, is populated predominantly by younger players. On any server, you’re going to get a handful of serious, mature players who abide by fair play and make sure they’re doing their best to play within the spirit, not only the rules of the game. The rest of the population, however (excluding farmers), is full of teenage kids, full of fourteen-year-old superiority, who take great joy in fucking people up, for the sake of ruining their fun. I’m not making excuses for them, but you’ve got to know your population, and that’s just how it is.
Even before this became a public brouhaha, would I have held/joined a memorial service in a contested zone, after it had been announced on the realm forums/general chat? Hell, the fuck, no. Because even without knowing if anyone had planned a raid on this party, I would still be expecting it anyway. Why? Because people are jerks in this game. They’re going to fuck you up any way they can, and they’ll make a video doing it for shits and giggles. Again, it’s not right, and it’s not decent, but it’s the mindset of the people you’re playing with, and there’s nothing that will change that.
On Preview: Guinastasia, PvP means “Player vs Player”, as in you can kill anyone of the opposing faction. In WoW you’ve got two types of zones - faction specific, where you’re safe from being killed unless you’ve got your PvP tag active, or you attack someone from the opposing faction first, and contested, where anyone can kill anyone else, regardless of what they’re doing at the time.
Actually there are plenty of empty areas that have minimal if any traffic depending on how many were in attendance you could have easily done something like this in low traffic areas of major cities.
Examples on alliance side, Hall of Explorers in Ironforge, The Park in Stormwind, the Temple of the Moon in Darnassus. Most of these areas would see little if any traffic.
If it was less than 40 players they could have done a 40 man raid and had the memorial at the last room of the raid after the boss drops. No other people can get into the instance to mess with you even on a PVP server.
PvP means player versus player, and usually means player versus player combat is avaliable. In World of Warcraft, players are in one of two factions, and can attack players in the other faction if PvP is on for both of them.
Servers on WoW are either PvP or PvE (player versus environment, meaning monsters). In a PvE server, players can only attack an opposing player if that player has their PvP “flag” enabled, while attacking automatically turns on one’s own PvP flag So in a PvE server, you can only be attacked if you’ve turned your flag on (or you’re in the enemie’s capital city, where your flag is automatically on).
In a PvP server, your PvP flag is always on in “contested” areas. Most areas are contested, except a few “safe” zones. You can’t turn it off, so at any point in a contested server you can attack the enemy faction and they can attack you.
In this case, it means that the players involved must have been on a PvP server - because there are no contested areas on PvE apart from capital cities, plus on PvE the funeral goers would have just left their flags off, leaving them unable to be attacked.
EVE has safe-ish areas - areas where if you aggress someone you’re not at war with, the NPC cops will spawn on top of you and blow you up. But this does not happen instantaneously, and it is quite possible to gank people travelling through high sec space. It’s called suicide-ganking, because you’re guaranteed to be blown up by CONCORD regardless of how quickly you blow up your target, but it can and does happen. The only time you’re 100% safe in EVE is if you’re docked.
It’s a very different community, though. I would be astonished if any significant corporation or alliance would do something analogous, regardless of where the event were taking place - though given the differences in game structure, such an event in EVE would probably be just a chat channel. I suppose you could line up a formation of battleships and fire off a salute or something, but I’m not quite sure how a memorial service in space would go. Nevertheless, if something like this were announced, even in the midst of a major inter-alliance war, I wouldn’t expect the combatants to try to take advantage of it. There are a few minor corps that might conceivably be jerkish enough, but all of the big groups respect each other even when they’re fighting.
I for one, thought it was hilarious. Innapropriate, yes.
This all took place in an online MMP environment. Seems to me that no rules were broken.
I just keep picturing some gamer who is like 35th in line, going to get a Mountain Dew and some Doritos, coming back to his computer and screaming “Sweet Jesus of Nazareth!” as his charachter is beaten to a pulp.
Was an online funereal neccesary, no. Should it have been made public, no.
Were the Serenity Now players dicks, yes. Did the mourners get killed in a manner that follows the rules of the game, yes.
Uh, Inappropriate, character, and necessary.
WoW has 6.5 million subscribers, im sure more than a couple die every day. Should all of them get an in game memorial? should gameplay be brought to a halt each time someone decides to mix in real life with a game? should Blizzard actually make sure whoever that person was is actually dead and not just an attention whore (it has happened MANY times in online games) before banning everyone? and most important, why the fuck should they give a shit? Anyone with any common sense at all could have predicted what happened, pvp servers dont exactly attract the cream of the crop.
Theres already plenty of in game solutions for shit like this. You can kill the fuckers back, you can hold your damn memorial in one of the many beautifull places around norrath where you can’t get your ass kicked, you could not be a fucking retard and post the exact place and time on the server boards, or hell if you are the kind of pansy ass who is bothered by being killed in a video game you can simply play on a server where its not allowed.
But he was crushed, I tells ya! Crushed like a can of … ah, fuck it …
:wally
The difference is that that would have violated the Number 1 rule on the SDMB. What those other kids did was not a rule violation in their venue.
You are being a dipshit.
This is another attitude I don’t get. The only reason not to be a jerk is because it’s against the rules? So if SDMB didn’t have the don’t be a jerk, you’d turn into a flaming asshole, just because you could?
I myself don’t see any reason for Blizzard to get involved with this, but I frankly don’t see what the rules have to do with anything when determining what to say about this incident. They were a bunch of assholes who deserve to be slapped upside the head till they gain a tiny smidgen of respect for fellow human beings.