Namaste, Bitches

Thanks to Blizzard's brilliant new RealID scheme, I have officially quit WoW. In fact, I will no longer buy or support Blizzard products or any of its games that run on Battle.net.

I know it doesn't matter to them one bit. Eventually, a company gets a few million subscribers and they no longer have to care about taking care of their customers.

In spite of the huge outcry against RealID, Blizzard/Activision has decided to push forward with this. Those who support or don't care about RealID's integration into Battle.net are saying, "But it only affects the forums".

Well, about a year ago or so, Blizzard decided to link all of their games - classic Diablo, Warcraft I/II/III, Starcraft & World of Warcraft - together with battle.net IDs. I was ok with that. I use my same id to log into WoW or to log into Battle.net. In fact, it made everything a little more accessible & easier to remember my password, since I no longer needed a different one for Diablo: LOD. At first, Battle.net was optional - if you opted in, you got a penguin pet. Fine by me, I'm usually down for free stuff. Then, it became mandatory to have to use battle.net. I saw that one coming & didn't mind being an 'early adopter'.

Now, though, they're doing the same thing with RealID. Right now, it's optional. It's also only for the forums. With the release of Cataclysm, it will be mandatory for the forums. I'm sure down the line, it will be mandatory to use RealID to play the game.

What is RealID? It's an online identity. It links your real name with your e-mail, and from that, it links your real name & e-mail to your forum account and characters. RealID will display your actual name to a questionable 'community' of 11.5 million players - and that's just in WoW. It allows people to track all of your alternate characters and to see when you are online.

I don't always want people to see when I'm online. I don't want people to bug me. I also have a rather unique name - googling me would be easy to determine which of the few people who share my name is the gamer. It's not that I don't have an online footprint - I do, and that's not a big deal. What is a big deal is being stalked by vindictive players. Being griefed in real life.

I quit. Rob quit. We deleted all of our characters, gave the guilds away to random lowbies. It's over.

I can't help but feel that if Blizzard sticks with their current concept for female Worgens, we will be overrun with furries.

Exhibit A:



Even though I'm not a roleplayer in WoW, I do occasionally prefer to play on role-playing servers. It cuts down on the general juvenile asshattery in trade chat. Most of the hardcore RPers only RP in 'say', which means only the folks standing nearby can see your conversations. Even though I don't get involved, I respect RPers and will banter when engaged. I've been sexually harassed a couple of times. I don't get into cyber, and some folks have proven themselves to be persistent and turn nasty when refused. I'm like, well, that's what the 'Ignore' button is for, and go on about my business.

In real life, as I've spent time in various forums and chat rooms, I've encountered role-players of various ilk. I've also gotten requests for cybering and what-not. I have encountered some furries, mainly because of screen names involving coyotes or bears. I've stopped using most of the 'bear' references in my screen names because I spent a lot of time being chatted up by people who thought I was into large, hairy gay men or who thought I was a large hairy gay man. But the coyote thing seemed to attract furries like it was the internet equivalent of fox urine or something.

I'm generally a tolerant and accepting person when it comes to sexual fetishes and weird ideas about one's origins. This is one of those lines where my tolerance & acceptance starts to wear thin. I have very little patience or understanding for furries or 'otherkin'. Personally, I think furries need to grow up. I find it hard to see them in a positive light, especially when their kinks bleed over into their daily life. To sit and chat with someone, believing them to be a fairly normal individual & then have them whip out 'yiff' is akin to having one's leg humped by a drunk fourteen-year-old in a dirty school mascot costume. It's really not fun or pleasurable, it's just embarrassing for everyone involved, especially when the fourteen-year-old is the only one who's not sober.

If I decided to roll a female Worgen, I can just imagine the inevitable result. I'd be standing in the Auction house some day, shopping for upgrades or recipes or what-not, and all of a sudden I'd get a tell of, "Yiffypop sniffs under your tail curiously". My response would be something akin to "Plaguedog rips Yiffy's freaking head off and stuffs it down his throat, and pisses on his twitching corpse!" I could foresee that scenario replaying itself in infinite variations, all the way from the starting area to lvl 80 raids. Rob doesn't see it happening, & he brings up the Tauren female, who are basically anthropomorphized cows, but they are the fat chicks of WoW. No one would admit to being attracted to that particular lumpy arrangement of pixels (except me, because I dig chicks with hooves & horns and hips).

I don't know why furries skeeve me out. The feeling I get from encounters with them is a lot like how I feel when I've met people who are into infantilism. They've got issues & are dealing with them in a very wrong way. If you want to have sex with animals, why not just find an accommodating pet of some kind? Why feel it necessary to take a perfectly good squirrel or something & give it human features? If I feel the urge to have sex with a dog, I'm going to go have sex with a dog, not pretend to have sex with some guy in a dog costume.

Rob scored me a bronze dragon mount today :D

Our guild message now reads: Dragons. She'll pretty much have to.




I also caught this beauty around 2:45am this morning:



I really need to do some homework, but... dayum. A bronze dragon and Arcturis?!

Zane is finally a level 80, bitches!

I just want to go around waving mah dick at people.