This is a wank that is going to require some backstory, but please trust me, it's worth it.

( Background: Welcome to EVE online )

Now, meet Night Beagle.

( 'Vote for yourself, choose direct democracy and Night Beagle!' )

But let's cut straight to the punchline. It's OK guys, he's not really the least qualified CSM candidate in the history of the game! It was just a social experiment for a research project!

Two Step gives the best possible response:

Jokes on you though, because all of my responses were for a PHD thesis I am writing about terrible political candidates in virtual worlds.

And then, to put icing on the whole thing, the entire Night Beagle debacle has annoyed the rest of the Wormhole community so much that they hunt down his corporation in their home system and destroy them. While it was too late to prevent his candidacy, it seems to have made everyone feel a little better about the whole thing.

It's not even out yet, and Star Wars: The Old Republic is already cutting it's teeth on it's first batch of spooge.


( Wow, that analogy got away from me there a little bit. )

Background: Kingdom of Loathing is a browser-based online RPG. Despite the general silly tone and black-and-white stick figure drawings, it's a fairly complicated game, perpetually in development. Player characters don't actually meet each other in the world like in MUDs, but there is limited interaction with other players, such as throwing bricks at them, TP'ing their house (or tent), and also using certain buffing skills. Unusually for an online game, botting is not frowned upon, and there are many buffbots. The most famous of them is - was - Kingdom of Buffing (henceforth KoB), notable for being widely used, completely free (and not just low-costing), and possessing a convenient Web interface.

The juicy stuff: it starts with a post in the forums, pointing out that KoB is not responding to requests for buffs, and hoping its maintainer, Kinks, will fix it soon. But as the silence stretches, someone wonders if the bot was taken down due to "the Wiki drama".

Links are posted to the "Buffbot" talk page on KoLWiki, as well to an archived version of Kinks' Talk page. The picture emerges of a spat between Wiki admins and Kinks, which may or may not have resulted in the latter taking his ball and going home.

Back on the forum, some accusations are thrown at the Wiki admins for "taking away the best buffbot ever", some people think taking down the bot may have been overreacting a bit, but in the end most posts are either thanks to Kinks for all his hard work, or attempts to organise a new buffbot to fill in the void. There are still some wanky nuggets to be found in the thread if you take the time to look.

A Loyala University professor does, and I'm not kidding, a soshul experiment on City of Heroes. Long story short (because long article is long), David Myers, in his persona of "Twixt", is a general asshat in the game and then gets a paper out of talking about how awesome his character was and how mean people were to him.

If that mess wasn't wanky enough, arguments have broken out in the comments. Some feel that since "Twixt" wasn't breaking any rules, nobody has a right to complain.
( Heroic cut! )

EDIT: Sorry, I went out before this made it through the queue. Cut is in place now.

Dearest, beloved, Fandom Wank.

I know you were looking forward to great excitement today. Some of you said words to me that indicated you anticipated fiery 'judgement' upon those who remained fresh and dewey white, those you call n00bs.

Anyway, you got today instead.

Stop anticipating things, we'll just break your hearts.

Sincerely,

Sepia P. Magpie, Esq.



PS: Use this post to reflect on how you could be better people. Or just fuck around in the comments.

So Arenanet, the company that makes Guild Wars (an MMORPG that is best-known for its non-subscription play), has said that they plan to release new campaigns every six months. Nightfall, the most recent chapter, hit stores in late October. Predictably, the community is getting antsy. Last week, Gaile Gray (the Anet employee who acts as a liason between the developers and the players) confirmed that exclusive Campaign Four information would be appearing in the next issue of PCGamer magazine. Everything was fine and dandy, and everybody was all "C4 squeee!" (except for the "ZOMG fix PVP/PVE/everything ever" camp).

Except today, the Inquirer posted an article on the future of GW. (Personally, I don't think any of it sounds especially plausible.) Cue the wank.

Guildwarsguru.com's thread is up to fifteen pages. Their thread appears to be mostly debating the validity of these claims, with quite a few "OMG GAILE!!!111" cries. Not incredibly wanky...yet. The mods there, from what I've seen, aren't too bad at deleting wank (though if you look around, there's loads of it...especially over minipets).

Lots of Gaile-stalking, from wondering why she hasn't replied yet (at something like 5 AM PST) to deciding that it's a conspiracy when someone checked and saw that she'd been logged in on both boards since the thread was posted. *gasp!* Others have suggested that she might be at the dentist, hungover, or even playing Guild Wars.

GWOnline.net is a different story. There's prime wank material here, including a flamewar over the definition of "grinding" (starting on page 11 with the incredibly wanky Master Knightfall), "OMG don't turn GW into WoW!!111" vs. "OMG I wish GW was more like WoW!!!1", and "I'm quitting if I can't bring my GW1 character over to GW2!". And, you know, economic viability of staying free vs. subscription fees, but those aren't nearly as interesting. I'm on page 20 of 37, and it keeps growing astronomically.

There's a post on guildwars, but it's pretty tame right now.

Me, I'm just happy that I beat Nightfall yesterday (easiest endgame boss EVER). Time to tackle Factions.

Got a heads up on this little wank from a friend.

Over in girl_gamers, tiffyangel has issues.

And she makes sure the comm knows that talking about gender-related issues in relation to gaming is painful and offensive.

"I deal with gender issues every single day of my life because of my field of study and because of my own personal gender; I really don't want to see them in gaming or gaming communities. While I recognize that RL issues like that do come up in games (I recently had to deal with a case of sexual harrassment in WoW...that wasn't fun), I want the issues that don't have to come up to stay hidden."

What set her off, you might ask? It seems to be this post by chicknstu, who's noticed how, in his own experience, women approach and play Sims differently than men, and it turns into discussions on how people are raised and what's expected of them and how they're conditioned to think, as well as plenty of counterarguments and people who defy his own personal observations.

And she felt that should be placed behind an LJ cut so she's not assaulted by gender issues on the Intarwebs in a public comm basically geared toward a minority gender in a hobby.

To make it better, she spells women as "womyn". Yeah.

After getting smacked around by other girl gamers for more or less 52 comments, she's back for more, throwing a stamping, squealing, OMG UR SO MEEN I'M LEAVING post in disguise, complete with an adominishment on those who didn't feel the need to speak up:

"To those who were offended by the post I responded to but didn't say anything, don't let what happened to me scare you off from voicing your opinion. It gets ugly sometimes, but that's what happens when you're in the minority. Doesn't make your feelings any less valid."

EDIT: the OMGMEEN post has been bahleeted, but was saved via a screencap provided by the lovely dark_puck.

Small, but full of that creamy, self-righteous filling of fighting the good feminist fight against all things male. So has she ever seen a mass grave?

I'm not part of the fandom in question, but found this via another thread.

Purchasers of the exclusive Collector's Edition release of World of Warcraft received, in addition to other goodies, their choice of an exclusive in-game "pet" not available to other players. Some purchasers opted for the panda cub. Aww.

So, present day, and a Blizzard event in Korea (where the CE was never sold) is offering its attendees (who may be from North America) panda cubs for their WoW accounts.

Minor wank breaks loose. To be fair, some of these people reasonably feel that the CE was misrepresented as having content that would only be available to purchasers.

However, you've got those who view panda ownership as some kind of exclusive club...

( Pandas are a mark of devotion! )

And those who think this constitutes legal consumer fraud.

( Call the Better Business Bureau! )

Others have difficulty with the concept of ownership.

( If they have it, I won't! )

Quite a bit of difficulty.

( And again. )

And then there's this...

( No words )

I'm not sure whose side the next poster is on, but damn if he doesn't sum up my feelings.

( Grebinn makes a good point. )

Gaia Online, the online playing game/forum, fielded its very first trial of an Non-Playing Character with the users as jurors. The storyline, as it stands, has the oldest NPC in Gaia, Ian (the guy who mans the first shop in Barton Town), accused of a crime of arson so now I present the one steaming pile of wank that is "The Trial of Ian" Forum.

Some sample wanky threads:

• The main thread which became a banner fest of threats. "Ian is Innocent!!!OMG!111" and "I hate Ianz!11" are very prominent. Banners, breaking Godwin's Law several times as well as...well, is there a law against use of religion/religious references?
  
• You voted innocent, then you are a Noob!
  
• Vote guilty for the sake of the storyline. In which everyone is so serious in explaining their stances and people argue like Ian is a real person.
  
• IAN FOR PRESIDENT? (Caps not mine.) Buh? This isn't an election, it's a trial.

Whenever called for jackass-sery or logic, many posters would accuse the other party of Being Too Serious. Is there an Internet law that says that accusations of Being Too Serious would immediately lose the argument? If not, there should be.

EDIT: for grammar booboos.