Well I must apologize for not posting in over 2 weeks. My life has been pretty hectic and I don’t see it slowing down anytime soon. I am planning to hit Gruul’s and Mags tomorrow with my guild and maybe getting back into raiding will inspire me to write something. Heck I may even live blog the two raids. You never know.. Until then.

After reading a news article today on FOX News, I got to thinking about how this affects WoW. The article states that a teenager from Missouri was using MySpace to ‘cyberbully” another teenager. Well I wanted to investigate and see if this does happen in the other parts of the interwebs.

Wikipedia - Cyberbullying

Cyber-bullying involves the use of information and communication technologies to support deliberate, repeated, and hostile behaviour by an individual or group, that is intended to harm others. Cyberbullying can be as simple as continuing to send e-mail to someone who has said they want no further contact with the sender, but it may also include threats, sexual remarks, pejorative labels (i.e., hate speech). Though the use of sexual remarks and threats are sometimes present in cyber-bullying, it is not the same as sexual harassment and does not involve sexual predators.

The only part of this statement that concerns me is “HOSTILE”. Who is the one defining this word, is it the service provider or the user?

Here are a few examples of how cyberbulling occurs in WoW.

• Repeatedly ruding the guy that just got your Adamantite mine can be considered bullying him.
• Bansidhe has a post about an ex-guildy using repeated sexual remarks in gchat, well that falls under cyberbullying.

So yes it does exist on WoW, and they have implemented a method to have this person dealt with. I think Blizz and their GMs are doing what they think is best, I have heard that someone who made remarks to Primula got a 3 hour suspension from game play. Is 3 hours really a suitable punishment? I can’t say, I don’t have any screenshots or transcripts from the conversation.

I do think that Blizz is using 3 hours as a standard. I don’t think it goes far enough sometimes. In this environment the all mighty dollar rules all. So if they banned someone for life then that is money they will lose. I don’t think banning someone for life because of corpse camping or letting a mage know that taking a tank trinket was a poor choice.

I do think if there are repeated issues with one player Blizz may need to step up their roles as responsible party. After all Blizz is “enabling” this player to continue their negative behavior.

Well it is a hard thing to do but I have too. With Hiyama working 12hr shifts to help prep his new store for opening we are putting WoW on the back burner. I really like playing the game but as a previous post states, “you need to balance RL and WoW“.

I don’t know really how long this will last but until his store is open I think this will be the case. It is a hard thing to grasp for some but for me my family comes first over a video game. That may sound very harsh but it is the truth. I also think it will make the time when I do come back to WoW alot more enjoyable.

I don’t even care if I don’t make raider status until later next month or so. I know I will get the rank one day and that is enough to keep me excited about what is still in store for my WoW play time. I will try to play if I have a little time while I wait on Hiyama to get home from work. I don’t know if this limited game play will give me anything substantial to blog about but I will try to keep you informed about how things are coming along during this semi-hiatus.

Until I am back in full force; safe travels, happy hunting and FOR THE HORDE!