Forum Madness.

Forum madness. Not to be confused with that most awesome of games for the Nintendo entertainment system circa 1984, Marble Madness. Any of you remember that game? I watched a video not too long ago of some guy beating the game in six minutes using controller-based moves I can't even imagine, and this is coming from a guy that's well-versed in 3-D chess. That's right, 3-D chess. You ever watch Star Trek: The Next Generation? Go hang around Ten-Forward, go talk to Guinan. She'll point you over to the tables. You'll find me there. Bring your game face because I've got moves even Data can't compute. I'm that good.

I digress, I was terrible at Marble Madness. Forum madness, though, I can hold my own. And that's exactly what happened this week.

Second week of ICC, nothing too special, right? Most decent guilds have seen the content, slogged through the new low-player dungeons on their alts, and are now turning their eyes to the achievements. I mean, it's what we're doing this week, and I consider us to be decent, though there are a few that don't, namely our favorite forum troll.

When we first made jump to Bladefist from The Scryers, it wasn't without a bit of...braying from the local masses. When we jumped ship we took who we wanted to, and we left a good number behind. While most within that good number managed to move on, there were a few...malcontents. These malcontents made themselves known on Bladefist stating that we were a grand old bunch of douchebags out to ruin it for everyone else. Now, I might be paraphrasing a bit, but that's essentially the message. We're bad players and bad people, stay away from us. While I can't jump right out and say who these malcontents are and/or were since they want to play the "I'm posting from a level two alt" game, I have my assumptions, and my gut is usually right.

Regardless, the trolls were laughed at by all and we moved on. Things were generally pretty quiet, a small flare-up when we moved Horde-side, but nothing major. At least, until earlier this week.

Oh lawd.

I honestly wish I could post a link to the thread here, but it has since been deleted and the original poster reported by a great many people. Once again, the bottom line of this thread was that we in Parabola are bad people that have no right to tell bad people that they are bad. This issue was then compounded by the fact that we simply can cut it in 25 man raiding, which is why we slum about in the 10 man scene exclusively.

These points were all refuted by a number of different respondents, both within Parabola, and outside of the guild. It was nice to see a few outsiders taking our side in the matter, though it didn't really matter. We all posted on our mains, the trolls didn't. It was your typical trolling war, except we used logic and a good deal of wit. It's a shame the thread got burned.

Some of the most important points that were made from our end defended our stance with 10 man raiding and why we do it, both our resident priest and Swiss Army knife shaman had responses here.

We raid 10 mans because we don't want to put up with 15 other people possibly screwing the pooch. We've all done 25 man raids before. We still do them in a non-serious manner, that's to say it's not required on our end, we just do/did it for the extra gear. We've been there, we've done the Dew, and we feel no real obligation or want to do it again.

For those of you that remember The Burning Crusade, specifically some of the Black Temple fights, you'll understand the point I'm trying to illustrate. There were two bosses in particular that were the epitome of why I can't stand 25 man raiding. They were Teron Gorefiend and Mother Shahraz. Now, I was a healer back in those days, and both bosses hit like trucks of the Mack variety. For the most part, both were a straight burn, but with a special mechanic involved: Gorefiend had the ghosts and Shahraz had the beams. These two fights still make my blood boil because people just don't get it.

Like I was saying, for those of you that remember these fights, you might have some sympathy. I approached these fights with trepidation, not because they were hard, but because I knew there were at least five or six people in the raid that if they got marked for a ghost on Teron, or three of them got beam-linked together on Shahraz, we were proper-boned. You know those people. Bets are made about them. No matter how many times they see the fight, they just fail at it. No matter how many times the ghost rotation is spammed in /raid, they fail at it. No matter how many times our raid leader would call out their name on ventrilo saying that they had the Mark of Death, they'd die in the raid and utterly wipe us with a ghost apocalypse. No matter how many times we'd say, "OMFG RUN TO THE FOUNTAIN" on vetrilo, they'd always run right into the raid group and kill us all. There were just those people that you pray they don't get beamed together, or marked for death early in the fight. Everyone in the raid knew it, and they knew who those people were, but they were tolerated; probability was in the raid's favor.

I don't do probability. I do culpability.

In the everlasting words of Nightystar, the Night Elf priest that was playing from Singapore on a DVD player and two pieces of tinfoil, after getting beam-linked with me on Mother Shahraz and literally putting me on follow for thirty seconds thus killing the both of us, "lOl i dont kno how to runn sry:("

Those words have been forever emblazoned upon my raiding experience as both a reminder of the past and hope for the future.

sry:(

It's a sad day.

A sad, sad day indeed. Apparently someone wasn't too amused with my character name. As is the case, it got reported and I was forced to change it. Now, I know, I was rolling the dice each time I logged on as it was. Hell, I had even gotten a three day suspension from our realm forums for bumping our recruiting thread under my name a few months ago. But you know...there are just times when you'd hope that people would laugh and keep moving--this wasn't one of those times.

While I could have tried to fight the name change, I doubt that a GM would take my sense of humor favorably and would instead just give me some terrible /random name. I've had to move on. Wombcrusher is still here in spirit. It's one of those things you just can't get away from once it's there. She's just...crushing wombs in a different dimension.

Live on, Reaganomics.