A power demonstration of a GM

I've never ever had a problem with any Blizzard GM. On the contrary: I've always found them helpful, sometimes more than that - cheerful, friendly, humorous in a way that goes beyond what you could expect.

Nowadays I have very little to do with them. There are two reasons for this: 1. They've made changes to the game so we have less reason to contact them, for instance the two hour span to trade soulbound loot. 2. They seem to talk to us less and less in chat form, preferring the in-game mail system as their main channel for communication. At least that's my impression. I suspect they have good reasons to do so. It probably is quicker and more efficient than to contact us in game. And you can just do your job without risking to take a lot of crap from dicks who seem to have their default setting on aggressive. I don't blame them at all for this, although I miss our silly little confersations.

Bear this in mind when I'm writing this post. I don't complain about GM:s in general - I love them - and I think that players have no right at all to be offensive and rude in their communication with them. However the other night something happened to a guild mate of mine that made me quite upset. An exception to my previous good experiences. My guildie wasn't free from guilt - far from that. He certainly deserved some kind of consequences. But what he got was more than that. It was nothing but a demonstration of who was in charge and I think it was childish.

I can't help seeing the irony in it all. First I write a post about how we recently got our Shadowmourne completed. Then I write a post about criticism. And now those two topics knit together into this one.

Because the victim - and originally offender - in this is no one less than our grumpy paladin who got the legendary axe. He's now risking to quit the game without using the axe in a single raid, unless Blizzard changes their decision and gives him an apology. Which I'm far from convinced that they'll do. It's a tragedy - not just to him, but to our guild, losing one of our absolute core players.

Here it begins
But I'll tell you the story from the beginning. Here we go:

Earlier this week there came a plea for help from Eräjorma in our forums. It turned out that when he logged into the game, he found that all of his macros - and he had loads of them after many years of playing, macros that had cost him a lot of time and effort to create and collect - suddenly were gone. Gone without any trace, just like that. It shouldn't happen since they're saved on the server side these days - and yet it did. The only connection he could make was that he had had a game crash with an error, just as he logged out of the game for the night.

For all the good advice we usually can give to guild members with technical problems we were unable to help out this time and Eräjorma wrote a GM-ticket. Three days went without any answer. And when he finally got one, it was an in-game-mail, which according to Eräjorma (I haven't seen it myself) was unsatisfactory, not answering his questions or helping out, just telling him to check out the support forums. Not useful at all. So he wrote a new ticket, was contacted by a GM and a heated conversation took place.

I'm afraid the resolution is to crappy for you to read it here, but I hope that this link might work if you want to follow it line by line.

Behaving like a dick
As you can see from it if you bother to read it, Eräjorma behaved like a dick as the conversation started. He was very angry, to say the least, and I can absolutely understand why the GM got pissed. I definitely would have too and I feel genuinely sorry for the Blizzard representative about this part.

Eräjorma is, as I said earlier, a bit grumpy in his nature. Sometimes he says more than he should and speaks before he thinks, which actually rendered him a guild kick once in our guild. He was let in again though, and he had learned his lesson after that and has a way better behavior nowadays. He bore his punishment with dignity, he learned his lesson. He's definitely not one of my closest friends, he barely would say hi to me, but all in all he is an OK person, a person I can live with, even if he'll never be good at sugarcoating anything. If he's pissed about something after a raid he'll let you know. He's the salt in our flesh and I think guilds need a bit of that too, although in very small dosis.

But how was the GM supposed to know that? All he saw was an overly angry customer, threatening him to call his superiors and being generally rude. Of course he got mad at him. However I don't think this justifies the measures he took against Eräjorma. He could have given him a warning (which he also did). And if he did want to do something more he could have given him a temporary ban for a few days as a marker, giving him time to cool down and think over his attitudes. Or maybe they could put Eräjorma in some sort of special category, heavily limiting his future GM service. Anything. But he did something else, and that's what upsets me.

Banning the name
From the middle part of the conversation and forward you can follow how Eräjorma's name suddenly, out of the blue, after 5,5 years of playing, is considered inappropriate and he's forbidden to use it anymore. The GM claims that according to another Finnish speaking GM, "Eräjorma" a body organ that shouldn't be mentioned. It doesn't matter how Eräjorma pleads that it really doesn't, that it means "Jorma (a Finnish name) from the wilderness" and nothing else. The GM won't listen and with a robot like manner he enforces his decision, wiping away Eräjorma's name forever, suggesting that he should call himself "Pirath" instead.

To Eräjorma this would mean the end of the game. He has called himself Eräjorma not only in this game but in others. Eräjorma is who he is. I can understand why he got so upset about it. So would I if someone suddenly banned Larísa.

Before deciding to write this post I asked Eräjorma: are you sure there isn't anything offensive about your name? Because it seemed strange if this idea came right out of the blue.

And Eräjorma replied:

"From wikipedia (Sorry in finnish, just stating it's a person's name)

Translated small section in middle:

"In some slang, jorma can mean also penis. Other place you can find 'jorma' other than as finnish male birth name is the word 'eräjorma' which refers to camping, wilderness, hunting, fishing."

Or like I've said it myself a few times "man of the woods" . In a sense a ranger.

The only way it can be remotely offensive would be that Jorma is also childish nickname for cock. Just like in America they say "johnsson". You know? That man had one huge 'johnsson'. But do we go banning everyone with the name johnsson? 99.999% of any decent adult will first and foremost think always it's a first name.

And my name isn't even Jorma, its Eräjorma, other is first name, other is a CONCEPT! As you said, basicly a man of the wilderness, hence why many Eräjormas in armory are either druids or hunters.

Should we start breaking up everyone's name, looking if there in somewhere middle of the word is another word and then ban them because of that. F.ex. micunten, innocent name, but hey lets ban it, there's CUNT, it's offensive! .."

Renaming 49 Eräjormas?
It will be interesting to see what happens. Eräjorma isn't the only one who wears this name on the EU servers. There are 49 of them, and even though I think that a few of them might be alts to our paladin, he's not the father of everyone of them. There are more Eräjormas out there. Will they too be asked to rename their "in-the-wilderness-name" to something less offensive?

It's not an easy case, I know that. Eräjorma was aggressive, behaving like a dick, and really asked for some sort of harsh response from Blizzard. But in my opinion this reaction was not appropriate. It wasn't related to the issue at all. It was nothing but a demonstration of power and that's why I think it was wrong.

We've advised Eräjorma to write to the e-mail address where you can complaint about GMs. I hope it won't be in vane, but I'm afraid that the night when we saw Shadowmourne forged in front of our eyes was the last time we saw the weapon as well as its wearer.

I just checked in the armory. Eräjorma as we know him doesn't exist anymore. He's already appearing as "Pirath". At the whims of an angry GM.

The whole story makes me very sad.

Edit: The story didn't end there. Finally a senior GM stepped in, admitted that the angry GM had been wrong in changing Eräjorma's name and acted against Blizzard's policy. Eräjorma got his name back and an apology. Here's a post about how it ended.