First up I wish to apologize to anybody I offended with my strong, some would suggest over-the-top angry rant at gold buyers.
Don’t get me wrong, I still believe they are pretty much the scum of the WoW player base, but I encountered something worse, something that unbelievably has taken my desire to play WoW away from me.
They are the…
<Blackrock Exiles>
A bigger bunch of arseholes you will never have the displeasure to encounter in your life.
A shiteful way to end the week.
I had a hard weekend. I did a heap of repairs on my house before Winter comes and trashes it, leaving me without a roof, leaving my son without a roof.
At the end of a long emotionally charged weekend I sat down to play WoW.
Unfortunately, when I logged in Aman’Thul, in fact all the Oceanic servers, in fact all of the Bloodlust Battlegroup was out for emergency maintenance, with no ETA.
To say the least I was disappointed, but I had an option.. I could join the folks over at Single Abstract Noun for a bit of R&R&R.
Rest & Relaxation & Roleplaying
I had already rolled a character on Argent Dawn US.
Not surprisingly it was a Gnome
Neither will it surprise you that it was a Gnome Mage
Would it surprise you if this Gnome Mage was called Gnomeaggedon?
No, I thought not!
The 1st night I joined SAN, I madly ran about trying to complete quests while spouting off my already forming backstory.
I don’t profess to be a great roleplayer… Hell, I was a great D&D player, but often roleplaying was left in the dust when I could sense the Dungeon Master’s fear.
However I had a story… and I was sticking to it!
I realized during the week, that my time on Argent Dawn didn’t have to be a race to 80, it didn’t have to be anything other than what it was. I decided if Gnomeaggedon received incidental XP while trotting around looking for help to return him to his once great status, then so be it… however there would be no rush to 80, no leveling guides, no selecting quests unless they truly fit in the spirit of my backstory and absolutely, under no circumstances, would there be any contact with Goblins unless there were 3 or 4 people to hold me back from roasting them slowly over a level 1 fireball.
So, Gnomeaggedon, the level 3 Gnomeaggedon, logged on and was greeted with 2 things.
- The cheerful hellos of the SAN Army, and
- The news of an invasion of Gnomes.. A Gnome army marching through the streets.
A Gnome Army.. Hooray!
What Gnome wouldn’t be proud that there was a Gnome army doing a procession through the cities?
I raced to see this…
Argent Dawn is a Roleplaying Server – How awesome would this be????
Ohhh the HORROR!
10 minutes later, I realized that not all was well.
These weren’t Gnomes, they were Trolls wearing the scalps of Gnomes.
These Gnomes were more destructive than a plague of locusts.
To me they destroyed the peaceful place, my haven, that was Argent Dawn.
I logged off, never to return.
That was it for me, I was tired and angry, you have no idea how angry. I am so angry I can’t express it in words – which just shows you how rational I was over the last couple of days about the goldbuyers.. I found words for them!
I would love to grab those players from Blackrock by the balls (no, not the characters, the players), stick them in stocks and throw tomatoes at them until they were thoroughly humiliated. I would love to call their Mum’s and tell them that their nice little boys are actually the bullies.. maybe they get bullied at school, so they take it out here.
I’d love to, but to be honest, I think they would take it as a badge of honor. I dare say when they discover this post they will come and spit all over the blog and feel proud of themselves.
I was angry with them, but now I hate Blizzard!
I’m a bit of a Blizzard fan boy… nothing too extreme, but a part from the occasional rant about how I still don’t have my roflcopter I love their work.
That was until tonight when I went looking for some reference to these dickwads called <Blackrock Exiles>.
That was when I discovered that this wasn’t a one-off isolated incident.
Unlike human beings, these guys don’t jump on their alts on other servers… they don’t even roll level 1 trolls and raid Ironforge.
No, they roll level 1 Gnomes and invade Ironforge, because then they are untouchable. No one in Ironforge can touch them because they are of the same faction, so they can grief to their hearts content, ruin a perfectly good night for other players without the fear of being oneshot by a level 3 Gnome Mage.
Blizzard could:
8. Account Suspension/Deletion.
BLIZZARD MAY SUSPEND, TERMINATE, MODIFY, OR DELETE ACCOUNTS AT ANY TIME FOR ANY REASON OR FOR NO REASON, WITH OR WITHOUT NOTICE TO YOU. For purposes of explanation and not limitation, most account suspensions, terminations and/or deletions are the result of violations of this Terms of Use or the EULA.
but they don’t!
They would certainly have the grounds for it…
9. Code of Conduct.
B. Rules Related to “Chat” and Interaction With Other Users. Communicating in-game with other Users and Blizzard representatives, whether by text, voice or any other method, is an integral part of the Game and the Service and is referred to here as “Chat.” When engaging in Chat, you may not:
(i) Transmit or post any content or language which, in the sole and absolute discretion of Blizzard, is deemed to be offensive, including without limitation content or language that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, hateful, sexually explicit, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable, nor may you use a misspelling or an alternative spelling to circumvent the content and language restrictions listed above;
(ii) Carry out any action with a disruptive effect, such as intentionally causing the Chat screen to scroll faster than other users are able to read, or setting up macros with large amounts of text that, when used, can have a disruptive effect on the normal flow of Chat;
(iii) Disrupt the normal flow of dialogue in Chat or otherwise act in a manner that negatively affects other users including without limitation posting commercial solicitations and/or advertisements for goods and services available outside of the World of Warcraft universe;
(iv) Sending repeated unsolicited or unwelcome messages to a single user or repeatedly posting similar messages in a Chat area, including without limitation continuous advertisements to sell goods or services;
Of course, they don’t believe in griefing… cause you know, the game is all about interaction…
C. Rules Related to Game Play. Game play is what World of Warcraft is all about, and Blizzard strictly enforces the rules that govern game play. Blizzard considers most conduct to be part of the Game, and not harassment, so player-killing the enemies of your race and/or alliance, including gravestone and/or corpse camping, is considered a part of the Game. Because the Game is a “player vs. player” game, you should always remember to protect yourself in areas where the members of hostile races can attack you, rather than contacting Blizzard’s in-game customer service representatives for help when you have been killed by an enemy of your race. Nonetheless, certain acts go beyond what is “fair” and are considered serious violations of these Terms of Use. Those acts include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following:
(iii) Anything that Blizzard considers contrary to the “essence” of the Game.
Ummm… isn’t this contrary to the “essence” of the game… being griefed by level 1 lowlives who have rolled the same faction as you purely because you can’t corpse camp them?
If only there were rules for RP servers…
Ohhh what the hell do you know… THERE ARE RULES SPECIFICALLY ABOUT RP SERVERS!
To be honest it isn’t worth my energy to go and copy and paste from the policy… if Blizzard doesn’t care, then why the hell should I?
What a harassment policy… be damned if the Blizzard staff have ever read that either!
I guess they never expected it would happen…
I guess they thought that just because the Blackrock servers were down, the sensible players from Blackrock wouldn’t come over and start harassing people… again… would they?
Blizzard you knew they were coming, yet you allowed your customers to suffer.
Quite simply, if you expect us to live by your terms of service, THEN BY FUCK YOU BETTER PROACTIVELY UPHOLD THEM!
Go buy gold folks.. hell, go hack accounts and sell it for all I care.
Blizzards inability to protect their customers from a known threat is inexcusable.
One GM right-clicking on the invading, spamming, harassing, Gnomes (come on if we can right-click report spam, you telling me they can’t right-click perma-ban?) would have stopped them in their tracks – if you took out the ringleaders the rest would have been left spamming “invite please”.
Pathetic!
So folks,
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
http://gnomeaggedon.net/2010/03/15/blackrock-stole-my-desire-to-play-wow/
I’m so sorry. Do you think anyone opened tickets, or are the folks of Argent Dawn just numb from these periodic invasions?
I was looking forward to meeting you in SAN sometime, too.
Being from AD and playing from 2006-2009 (eventually stopped playing a few months ago) it has been a problem as long as I can remember. We’ve all opened tickets at one time and gave up eventually. All you can do on patch days when the Blackrock server is down is just /report, /report, /report until trade chat is quiet, then go on with your day.
Oh, and don’t swap characters or you’ll have to report again.
I must be missing something – what were they doing?
Looked like they were marching around in circles, yelling something or other. But didn’t really pay attention to much to them after a while. Then again the only channel I had on was guild. So yeah what did we miss?
Yeah, they were (as Eversor explains for me in later comments), running about the cities spamming all channels.
The would post some inane (macro’d) comment.. 5, 10, 20 times in a row, in multiple channels.
I spent somewhere between 5-10 minutes reporting spam… assuming I could get the chat channel to stay still long enough to target a name… but it didn’t help.
I could have left the city, as people did during the Zombie invasion, to avoid the noise, but this wasn’t a Blizzard event, this was premeditated harassment on a grand scale.
In my case, my business was in the city, not in the wilds, so my game playing was shut down completely for the 20 minutes until I logged in despair.
I’m very sorry to hear of this. I really do wish there were times when you could fight characters of your own faction. Without this ability, it is impossible for the community to police its own. Having a bunch of 80′s come in an annihalate (sp?) and corpse camp these greifers would put an end to this type of activity in a hurry.
Blizzard certainly doesn’t want to suspend/terminate the accounts and lose the revenue, but they need to create a system that allows the players to correct the poor/nasty behavior of people like the ones you describe.
I’ve turned off trade chat on all my characters and general chat on some, depending on which server they are on. I can’t bear to see the garbage that is on of these channels most of the time. Obviously, I’m not on any RP servers and turning off these channels on an RP server would defeat the purpose of being on one.
Maybe I am just luck on Aman’Thul. Megan mentioned on her visit how tame city chat is.
However, I would expect that on a RP server, that chat channels are more important than on any other kind of server, thus deserve some extra attention from Blizzard.
I would have laughed if a Horde raid had appeared and all the RPers and NPCs stood back and clapped and cheered.. that would have been an even worth seeing.
You see to me, Blackrock being so “hardcore”, true fun would have been rolling level 80 Horde and destroying IF, not rolling level 1 Gnomes…
I am on At and I disturbed that our city chat is considered tame!
I have seen some amazing things on AT Chat – and learnt new words
Maybe I just miss peak [anal] trade chat time
most of the AD realm is numb by now. used to be worse than this.
I’m from Blackrock, and while I did go to AD once, I was throughly baned for it and have not returned. I no longer endorse those of BE.
That is sad to hear.. the normal course for people that are constantly harassed.. they become numb.
I’m glad to hear you were banned – purely from the PoV that action is taken.. also glad to hear you aren’t a part of the problem.
Yea, the bans still follow the volcano that they use, but it is usually a report spam ban, rather than another violation.
Wow. Gnomey I did the same when Barthilas went down. Logged into Argent Dawn and some Single Abstract Noun sympathy. Fortunately for me, I’m playing a Death Knight – starting at lvl 55 in my own sheltered environment.
Sure, I noticed when about 20 little Death Knight Gnomes sprouted around the Lich King and me. I thought it was kind of cute. Then I went on questing and didn’t see them again.
I was oblivious to what was happening elsewhere on the server.
I, too, have no idea what they did in order to harass you and other Argent Dawn players. I can’t imagine. It’s truly a shame that this is a known event (makes it into the top 4 paragraphs about the Blackrock server!) that has been pretty much ignored by Blizzard.
If I had stayed in my level 3 questing zone, it probably would have been cute too… “but when in Rome” so I foolishly went to town to see the big boys & girls RP… I just got children flexing their macros
Great post
It’s been my experience with MMORPGs that people never RP on RP servers and, if anything, they use it as an opportunity to “rebel” and break the social rules that are meant to be in place.
I hope you get your chance to roast them!
From what I understand AD is a great place to RP (certainly the stories coming from ADEU indicate this), so this invasion was intended to stop people doing what they love.
The roasting will be left in the hands of Blizzard.
I just hope next time the invade IF, there are 3 robed GMs waiting at the front door with their ban hammers in place… maybe levitating them into the air out the front 1st…
It would have almost been worth inviting a Horde 80 or two into the town just to kill and camp them.
The only trick would be getting the other Alli’s in town to leave the Hordie to the business of camping them.
I dare say the RP’ing players would have formed a circle around them and chanted:
“FIGHT, FIGHT!”
as I mentioned earlier… if the GM’s then got the NPC’s to stand back and cheer as well… that would have been magic.
I wonder if the Gnomes are hordeside Blackrock…
wow, i’ve never heard of these asshats before. why does argent dawn put up with it? do none of the alliance toons have horde alts who could come into IF and lay waste to these jerks?
come back to WoW, gnomeageddon – it’s not the same without you!
I fear as mentioned before, that the AD players are now just numb to it…
none of this thread really explains what they were doing. Spamming General & Trade Chat? That happens on every server. Bouncing around you? That’s all gnomes do in cities.
still lost on this rant.
On a server that’s primary purpose is “chatting”, spamming chat to the point where communication is impossible for a long stretch would be the equivalent to every time you zone into ICC25 finding 15 level 1 Gnomes in your raid, preventing you from raiding for the night, or entering a BG to find 75% of the players are AFK… yet you can’t kick them.
The unofficial motto of the server is “Blackrock is full, GTFO.”
That pretty well sums it up.
I was originally on Blackrock when we first rolled our Horde characters. It’s a very crowded and elitist server. Free transfers were offered just after the release of Wrath and we jumped ship.
Funny note, the population on Blackrock is very highly skewed towards Aussies. Might be some of your local mates that need a whoopin’.
Yes.. the irony that (considering the time of day 7.30pm Aussie time) the majority would have been Aussies, or our near neighbours.
Unfortunately we have our fair share of bullies downunder.
Oh my God, Gnomer, this sounds horrific – what an unbelievably shitty weekend. *hugs*
If it’s any consolation, I rolled a gnome warlock bank alt in honour of you (I know he ought to have been a mage but I really wanted an imp). He’s called Gnapolean, and he’s the cutest thing you’ve ever seen. He’s parked in Iron Forge at the moment selling his little heart out but he’s so cute I may have to level him. He has pink hair, by the way. And an enormous moustache.
lol.. I am honored… though a Warlock… with Pink hair… Me think it’s the anti-Gnomeaggedon
Well, I understand that, despite their being other hair colours *apparently* a gnome can only have pink or green hair…
Darn Gnome! You beat me to the punch. Now…what the hell am i gonna write about today. Well, let’s be honest, your post was so much better than my 2 paragraph rant was gonna be. Lemme just get my pencil out here….okay there we go…”Gnomeggedon and Eversor”….cool, thanks
You have my full permission to discuss a recipe involving 40 Blackrock Gnomes…
You know.. I logged off hating Gnomes…
I HATE GNOMES!
See what these people did to me!
Ah man. I am sorry to hear that. I have been enjoying my time in SAN. It has been a fun vacation away from my raiding guild. I was looking forward to meeting you in game.
You will still probably get the chance… I think I will take a break and play the other two games gathering dust on my PC…
I can catch up with my Aman’Thul mates any time… they are RL friends. My blogging friends are known to congregate in one location as well.. AD.
So there is a chance that I will still drop by to say hello… as long as the BR server is up.
Had I read the other comments before I wrote mine I could have addressed the “what were they doing?” question. Basically they just came on and spammed chat with stupid useless stuff so the people who were actually playing were unable to do anything. They spammed gen, trade and lfg. They were also moderately offensive, not totally by my standards but certainly if someone under 13 or so were playing. And they were also mocking the rp’ers for roleplaying. Hey, if you don’t like rp, don’t rp. Otherwise, shut it. They were just being very rude, and irritating. Essentially ruining the experience for whoever was trying to play.
Yeah they were only moderately offensive and I think many were 1st timers as their spam was more along the lines of “do people here PvP” or… “where is the RP?”.
But the rest was macro’d spam with only one purpose, to disrupt the activities of the normal inhabitants.
They were there to grief.. I’m sure most of us have a toon or two we can play on another server/battlegroup when ours goes down. These guys weren’t there to play, just to disrupt.
I feel like if you were really wanting to RP and have these guys not bother you, you could have devised to Roleplay your way out of anger.
For example, you could have just witnessed a new mad-gnome disease which causes gnomes to spew irrational slurrs and atrocities— even convincing themselves of having a second existence— that of the horde! .
Perhaps this was Thermaplugg’s offensive move against the gnomes, to get the gnomes to turn on themselves before becoming a threat. He got wind of all the gnomes outside of Gnomeragen leveling up to 80, and feared for this life. He couldn’t level up in gnomer since his minions no longer granted experience, and this was his last act of desperation.
This could be the catalyst for High Tinker to step in and lead the gnomes to their long lost home!
lol yeah good point. I feel like heading down to Gnomeragan and smacking a few Gnomes…
Maybe Blizz can flag them as any faction PvP 1st… RPing the anger out would have only gone so far… Killing the little buggers would have sated my anger.
I have chars on Proudmoore,Blackrock, a couple of the oceanic servers and 5+ year old undead priest on AD and a 5+ year old gnome on AD.. If bloodlust goes down. I am reduced to AD and a Draenai priest I created at the start of TBC to do the draenai content when bloodlust was down.
How did that come about? Because on day 2 of wow as the server farm that would one day become bloodlust ground to a halt and the server farm that Malganis was on died, what was left? Argent Dawn. A couple of weeks later they brought in maintenance but initially they kept Argent dawn up when Bloodlust was down. That pattern often continued over that first year, AD is on totally different hardware to Bloodlust and shares no resources at all.
Since their was no realm status forums a AD gnome was the best place to get information, especially as the forums where also often down.
Now I am not excusing their behavior and i know for a fact that blizzard has disbanded their guilld and banned people in the past. But blackrock that first year was bad enough that first year that i eventually just abandoned my characters their as unplayable.
Now if blizzard bans(again) a bunch of then its no skin off my nose, but their are strong historical reasons for them to be their in the first place.
I don’t doubt there are historical reasons for the presence of BR people on AD, but there is no excuse, historical or otherwise for the behaviour exhibited.
I have had my fair share of server outages over the years, which is evident by the number of alts across a wide range of servers.
But those alts were never made to disrupt the game, they were made to play the game.
Those alts are guests on someone elses realm and I behave as a good guest would.
Arioch before wow went live the aussie gaming community had discussions to try and organise a community, earlier mmo’s had aussies but they tended to be fractured by ISP, ie people from one aussie ISP might play on one server or shard and others on another. A mmo isnt really a mmo when you have 26 people online in your play time.
Their where talks with blizard that never really went anywhere but eventually it came down to the first pvp server alphabetically and the last pve server alphabetically.
Right server names are up. Its blackrock and Proudmoore. 6 hours later blackrock was (full). But it was a successful endeavor.
That sounds terrible Gnomey
I had to admit I had a very different awakening to RP servers on that fateful Sunday night.
So Barth went down minutes before our raid start and a group of our guildies stayed on vent chatting. About 10 of them decided to create characters on Moon Guard which apparently has a “repuatation” for dodginess – they were ready for a giggle.
I got asked to create a level 1 toon to sign their guild charter and man lets just say I found out all about something called “ERP”…. apparently on every RP server the Goldshire Inn is where its at – I just sat at my computer desk blushing after being whispered for the 2nd time if I wanted a slave.
E for excellent…?
No.. no need for details…. please NO DETAILS!
Sadly, deliberate disruption is a common feature of RP servers (although it’s rarely this organised), which isn’t helped by Blizzard’s unwillingness to enforce their own rules.
I’d suggest you do report them, as at least it takes away the “nobody told” us excuse for inaction that’s normally trotted out. Don’t expect anything to be done, though. Roleplayers are simply too small a minority of the player base to count, it seems.
Oh, for an RP server where the rules are actually enforced!
[...] got around to it and I thought *hey yeah this will be a nice way to catch up*… but then he had a gnome nightmare experience… poor gnomer so I’ve yet to run into his toon (yup talking aboutcha like you will never [...]
I happened to be running around on a baby paladin at the time. I took one look at the flood-spam and just sighed and then shut down General, Trade, Local Defense, Looking for Guild, and anything else that wasn’t SAN.
I’ve had that type of thing happen on more servers than I can count. Unfortunately, I’ve also been playing long enough that only a few people understand my “I remember whens” anymore. Jackasses ruin the game for all of us. But luckily I knew that was only temporary. If I mute them before they can really annoy me… they miss their intended target completely… and I ended up having a cheerful night with my SAN guildmates anyway.
In fact… I haven’t turned on those channels since…. and I’ve actually enjoyed playing more!
[...] Exiles> claims another victory, at our expense. /LooksAtTwitter … well, maybe [...]
(I’m not a member of SAN, but am an AD resident who’s been intrigued following the progression of it on the blogs.)
Saddly, whenever Blackrock goes down it’s basically the same thing. You basically have two options when it happens (1) stay in trade / general and report all of them or (2) leave all of the public channels in the major cities. It normally isn’t horrible out in the questing areas.
I do saddly have to say that the whole thing has degraded to the point that there are some AD citizens who head over to Blackrock to retaliate when AD goes down.
Hopefully they haven’t totally scared you away from AD. Recently we’ve really only seen the BR invasion about once a month, so it hasn’t been too horrible. As for Goldshire RP, it’s kinda hit or miss as to how dodgy it is. Alot of the real AD RP takes place off the beaten path so you have to look a little more for it, though if you do some well placed asking, it can be found.
Not scared off, or more to the point encouraged by the SAN folk to return.
Have you seen their Single Abstract Gnoun rally posts?
“wow, i’ve never heard of these asshats before. why does argent dawn put up with it? do none of the alliance toons have horde alts who could come into IF and lay waste to these jerks?”
Hi I play Horde on Blackrock and there are a lot of elitists, but in the last 2 years there’s been an influx of “new” alliance players who’s only joy in life is spreading misery. I made an ally alt just to cuss out 3 level 80′s out for corpse camping me & my friend I had referred while leveling our new level 5 Taurens. Eventually I leveled up enough to go to Ironforge and Heard bragging of what had happened on AD this was Alliance, doing this. While I cannot say there are few to no Horde Jerks there is such a large population of us vs. Alliance that nuisance behavior isn’t well tolerated & even the most relaxed Horde guilds will banhammer you for doing such things. Even when playing alts on other servers if word of it gets back. Just thought I’d share that with you. There are a good # of Horde Blackrock players that still believe in respect & accountability in our gaming code of conduct.
Aurîanna Fem Belf Prot Paladin Blackrock.
[...] got around to it and I thought *hey yeah this will be a nice way to catch up*… but then he had a gnome nightmare experience… poor gnomer so I’ve yet to run into his toon (yup talking aboutcha like you will never [...]